Ash: A Secret History Read Online Free PDF Page A

head up. She stared down a couple of idlers standing under the hanging bush that marked one hut as a tavern.
    “If I didn’t have this God-rotted barren animal,” she yelped at the gunner walking in front of her, “I’d look like a proper contract soldier!”
    Guillaume Arnisout laughed briefly. He walked on. He didn’t look back.
    She worried the complacent cow as far as the abattoir gates before it got its belly full of the smell. The stink of excrement and blood was strong enough to be tangible. Ash’s eyes streamed. Something stuck in the back of her throat. She handed the cow’s bridle over to a slaughterman at the gate, coughing.
    A voice bawled, “Ash! Over here!”
    Ash turned. Something warm and heavy hit her in the face and chest.
    Surprise made her gasp, intake a breath. Immediately she choked on hot liquid. A solid mass of stuff slid from her shoulders, down her chest. She ground the heels of her hands into her burning eyes. She coughed, choked again, began to cry. The tears cleared her vision.
    Blood soaked the front of her doublet and hose. Hot, steaming blood. Blood stuck her white hair together in crimson tendrils, dripping spatters into the dust. Blood covered her hands. Yellow matter crusted the creases of her clothes. She put her hand up and scooped a mass of matter out of the neck of her doublet. A lump of meat flecked with blood clots the size of her small fist.
    The solid mass slid and flopped over her bare feet. It was hot. Warm. Cooling fast. Cold. Pink tubes and red tubes slid to the ground. She moved her foot out from under a kidney-shaped lump that she could not have held in her two hands.
    Ash stopped crying.
    She did something. It was not new, or she would not have known how to do it now. It might have been something she did just before or after she fired the crossbow point-blank at her rapist and his body exploded in front of her.
    She wiped the back of her hand across her chin. Blood tightened on her skin as it dried there. She got rid of the constriction in her throat and the tears pricking behind her eyes.
    She stared at Guillaume and the slaughterman, now carrying empty wooden pails.
    “That was stupid, ” she raged. “Blood’s unclean!”
    “Come here.” Guillaume pointed to a spot in front of himself.
    The gunner was standing at a skinning rack. Timbers as stout as those that made up a siege machine held a chain on a pulley. Hooks hung from the chain, over a gutter dug in the earth. Ash lifted her feet out of pig’s guts and walked towards Guillaume. Her clothes stuck to her. Her nose was ceasing to smell the reek of the slaughterhouse.
    “Take out your sword,” he said.
    She had no gloves. The hilt of her weapon was bound with leather, and slippery in her palm.
    “Cut,” Guillaume said calmly, pointing at the cow that now hung head-down beside him, still alive, hooves trussed. “Slit her belly.”
    Ash had not been in a church but she knew enough to scowl at that.
    “Do it,” he said.
    Ash’s long dagger was heavy in her hand. The weight of the metal pulled on her wrist.
    The cow’s long-lashed eyes rolled. She groaned frantically. Her thrashing did no more than roll her from side to side on the hook. A stream of shit ran down her warm, breathing flanks.
    “I can’t do this,” Ash protested. “I can do it. I know how. I just can’t do it. It’s not like she’s going to do me any harm!”
    “ Do it! ”
    Ash flicked the blade clumsily and punched it forward. She leaned all her weight into the point, as she had been taught, and the sharp metal punctured the cow’s brown and white pelt. The cow opened her mouth and screamed.
    Blood sprayed. Sweat made the dagger grip slide in Ash’s hand. The dagger slid out of the shallow wound. She stared up at the animal that was eight times her size. She got a double-handed grip on the blade and cut forward. The edge skimmed the cow’s flank.
    “You’d be dead by now,” Guillaume rasped.
    Tears began to leak out of