Ash: A Secret History Read Online Free PDF

Ash’s eyes. She stepped up close to the breathing warm body. She raised the big dagger over her head and brought it down overarm with both hands.
    The point of the blade punched through tough skin and the thin muscle wall and into the abdominal cavity. Ash wrenched and pulled the blade down. It felt like hacking cloth. Jerking, snagging. A mess of pink ropes fell down around her in the dawn yard, and smoked in the early chill. Ash hacked doggedly down. The blade cut into bone and stuck. A rib. She yanked. Pulled. The cow’s flesh sucked shut on her blade.
    “Twist. Use your foot if you have to!” Guillaume’s voice directed over her harsh, effortful breathing.
    Ash leaned her knee on the cow’s wet neck, pressing it back against the wood frame with her tiny weight. She twisted her wrists hard right and the blade turned, breaking the vacuum that held it in the wound, and coming free of the bone. The cow’s screams drowned every other sound.
    “ Hhaaaaah! ” Both her hands on the dagger-grip, Ash swiped the blade across the stretched skin of the cow’s throat. The rib bone must have nicked her blade. She felt the steel’s irregularity catch on flesh. A wide gash opened. For a fraction of a second it showed a cross-section of skin, muscle sheath, muscle and artery wall. Then blood welled up and gushed out and hit her in the face. Hot. Blood heat, she thought, and giggled.
    “Now cry!” Guillaume spun her around and cracked his hand across her face. The blow would have hurt another adult.
    Astonished, Ash burst into loud sobs. She stood for perhaps a minute, crying. Then she wept, “I’m not old enough to go into a line-fight!”
    “Not this year.”
    “I’m too little!”
    “Crocodile tears, now.” Guillaume sighed. “I thank you,” he added gravely; “kill the beast now.” And when she looked, he was handing the slaughterman a copper piece. “Come on, missy. Back to camp.”
    “My sword’s dirty,” she said. Suddenly she folded her legs and sat down on the earth, in animal blood and shit, and howled. She coughed, fighting to breathe. Great shuddering gasps wracked her chest. Her reddened hair hung down and streaked her wet, scarred cheeks. Snot trailed from her nostrils.
    “Ah.” Guillaume’s hand caught her doublet collar and lifted her up into the air, and dropped her down on her bare feet. Hard. “Better. Enough. There.”
    He pointed at a trough on the far side of the yard.
    Ash ripped her front lacing undone. She stripped off her doublet and hose in one, not bothering to undo the points that tied them together at her waist. She plunged the blood-soaked wool into the cold water, and used it to wash herself down. The morning sun felt hot on her bare cold skin. Guillaume stood with folded arms and watched her.
    All through it she had her discarded sword-belt under her foot and her eyes on the slaughterhouse men.
    The last thing she did was wash her blade clean, dry it, and beg some grease to oil the metal so that it should not rust. By then her clothing was only damp, if not dry. Her hair hung down in wet white rats’ tails.
    “Back to camp,” the gunner said.
    Ash walked out of the village gate beside Guillaume. It did not even occur to her to ask to be taken in by one of the village families.
    Guillaume looked down at her with bright, bloodshot eyes. Dirt lodged in the creases of his skin, clearly apparent in the brightening sun. He said, “If that was easy, think of this. She was a beast, not a man. She had no voice to threaten. She had no voice to beg mercy. And she wasn’t trying to kill you. ”
    “I know,” Ash said. “I’ve killed a man who was.”
    When she was ten, she nearly died, but not on the field of battle.

 
    IV
    First light came. Ash leaned out over the stone parapet of the bell tower. Too dark to see the ground, fifty feet of empty air below. A horse whinnied. A hundred others answered it, all down the battle-lines. A lark sang in the arch of the sky. The flat