Free Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle

over the place down there. Take company roll-call. Find me back at the command tent. Move it!”
    Ash rode on through the young men in armour flinging themselves down from their war saddles, shouting at each other, shouting at her, their pages grabbing their war-horses’ reins, the babble of after-battle stories. She banged one hard on the backplate, said something obscene to another of her sub-captains, the Savoyard soldier Paul di Conti; grinned at their yells of approval, dismounted, and clattered up the slope, her steel tassets banging on the cuisses that covered her thighs, towards the surgeon’s tent.
    “Philibert, get me fresh clothes!” she yelled at her bob-haired page-boy, who darted away towards her pavilion; “and send Rickard, I need to get unarmed. Florian! ”
    A boy threw down more rushes as Ash ducked in through the flap of the surgeon’s pavilion. The round tent smelled of old blood and vomit, and of spices and herbs from the curtained-off area that was the surgeon’s own quarters. Thick sawdust clotted the floor. The sunlight through the white canvas gleamed gold.
    It was not crowded. It was all but empty.
    “What? Oh, it’s you.” A tall man, of slight build, with blond badly cut hair flopping over his eyes, looked up and grinned from a dirty face. “Look at this. Shoulder popped right out of its socket. Fascinating.”
    “How are you, Ned?” Ash ignored the surgeon Florian de Lacey for the moment in favour of the wounded man.
    She has his name to hand: Edward Aston, an older knight, initially a refugee of the rosbifs ’ 7 royal wars, a confirmed mercenary now. The armour stripped off him and scattered on the straw was composite, bought new at different times and in different lands: Milanese breastplate, Gothic German arm defences. He sat with the wheat-coloured light on his balding head and fringe of white hair, doublet off his shoulders, bruises blacker by the minute, his features screwed up in intense pain and greater disgust. The joint of his shoulder looked completely wrong.
    “Bloody warhammer, weren’t it? Bloody little Burgundian tyke come up behind me when I were finishing his mate. Hurt my horse, too.”
    Ash ran over Sir Edward Aston’s English lance in her mind. He had raised for her service one crossbowman, one fairly well-equipped longbow archer, two competent men-at-arms, a bloody good sergeant and a drunken page. “Your sergeant, Wrattan, will look after your mount. I’ll put him in command of the rest of the lance. You rest up.”
    “Get my share, though, won’t I?”
    “Bloody right.” Ash watched as Florian de Lacey wrapped both hands around the older man’s wrist.
    “Now say ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad’,” Florian directed.
    “Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad,” the man growled, his outdoor voice too loud in the confines of the tent. “Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.”
    “Hold on.” Florian planted a knee in Edward Aston’s ribs, yanked at full strength—
    “ Fuck! ”
    —and let go. “There. Back in its socket.”
    “Why di’nt you tell me that was going to hurt, you stupid bugger?”
    “You mean you didn’t know? Shut up and let me finish the charm.” The blond man frowned, thought for a second, and bent to murmur in the knight’s ear: “ Mala, magubula, mala, magubula! ”
    The older knight grunted, and raised thick white eyebrows. He gave a sharp nod. Ash watched Florian’s long strong fingers firmly bind the shoulder into temporarily immobility.
    “Don’t worry about it, Ned,” Ash said, “you’re not going to miss much fighting. It took Frederick-our-glorious-leader seventeen days to march the twenty-four miles from Cologne to here, he’s not exactly raring for glory.”
    “Sooner have my pay for not fighting! I’m an old man. You’ll see me in my fucking grave yet.”
    “Fucking won’t,” Ash said. “I’ll see you back on your horse. About—”
    “About a week.”