Free Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle Page B

“or an almighty bollocking. Look at ’em!”
    “They’re here to watch something, all right…”
    An unusually large crowd waited outside the Emperor’s four-chambered striped pavilion tent. Ash glanced around as she joined them. Noblemen. Young men in the V-fronted laced doublets of high fashion, with particoloured hose; bareheaded and with long curls. All wore breastplates at the least. The older men sweated in pleated full-length formal gowns and rolled hats. This square of grass in the camp centre was clear of horses, cattle, women, bare-arsed babies playing, and drunken soldiers. No one dared infringe the area around the yellow and black double-eagle standard. It smelled, nonetheless, pleasantly of war-horse droppings and sun-dried rushes.
    Her officers arrived.
    The sun dried her from her armour through to her arming doublet. Enclosed in form-fitting metal, she found the padded clothing underneath drank up all her sweat; left her not so much hot as unable to get air into her lungs. I would have had time to change. It’s always hurry-up-and-wait!
    A broad, squarish, bearded man in his thirties strode up, brown robe flapping about his bare feet. “Sorry, Captain.”
    “You’re late, Godfrey. You’re fired. I’m buying a better class of company clerk.”
    “Of course. We grow on Trees, my child.” The company priest adjusted his cross. He was deep-chested, substantial; the skin around his eyes creased from far too many years spent under open skies. You would never have guessed from his deadpan expression how long Godfrey Maximillian had known her, or how well.
    Ash caught his brown-eyed gaze, and tapped a bare fingernail on the helmet tucked under her arm. Metal clicked impatiently. “So what do your ‘contacts’ tell you – what’s Frederick thinking?”
    The priest chuckled. “Tell me someone in the last thirty-two years who’s ever known that!”
    “Okay, okay. Dumb question.” Ash planted her spurred and booted feet apart, surveying the Imperial nobles. A few of them greeted her. There was no movement from inside the tent.
    Godfrey Maximillian added, “I understand there are six or seven fairly influential Imperial knights in there now, griping to him about Ash always thinking she can attack without orders.”
    “If I hadn’t attacked, they’d be griping about contract soldiers who take the money but won’t risk their lives in a fight.” Ash added, under her breath, nodding to the only other contract commander outside the Emperor’s tent, the Italian Jacobo Rossano, “Who’d be a mercenary captain?”
    “You would, madonna,” her Italian master gunner, Antonio Angelotti, said. His startlingly fair curls and clear-skinned face made Angelotti stand out in any crowd, and not just for his proficiency with cannon.
    “That was a rhetorical question!” She glared at him. “You know what a mercenary company is, Angelotti?”
    Her master gunner was interrupted by the arrival of an only-slightly cleaner and better dressed Florian de Lacey, on the heels of Ash’s remark.
    “Mercenary company? Hmm.” Florian offered, “A troop of loyal but dim psychopaths with the ability to beat up every other thick psychopath in sight?”
    Ash raised her brows at him. “Five years, and you still haven’t got the hang of being a soldier!”
    The surgeon chuckled. “I doubt I ever will.”
    “I’ll tell you what a mercenary company is.” Ash jabbed her finger at Florian. “A mercenary company is an immense machine that takes in bread, milk, meat and wine, tentage, cordage and cloth at one end, and gives out shit, dirty washing, horse manure, trashed property, drunken vomit and broken kit at the other end. The fact that they sometimes do some fighting is entirely incidental!”
    She stopped for breath and to lower her voice. Her eyes gazed around the men there as she spoke, picking out liveries, identifying noble lords, potential friends, known enemies.
    Still nothing from the Emperor’s