Ash: A Secret History Read Online Free PDF Page B

river valley began to emerge from darkness.
    The air heated up fast. Ash wore a stolen shirt and nothing else. It was a man’s linen shirt and still smelled of him, and it came down past her knees. She had belted it with her sword-belt. The linen protected the nape of her neck, and her arms, and most of her legs. She rubbed her goose-fleshed skin. Soon the day would be burning hot.
    Light crept from the east. Shadows fell to the west. Ash caught a pinprick of light two miles away.
    One. Fifty. A thousand? The sun glinted back from helmets and breastplates, from poleaxes and warhammers and the bodkin points of clothyard arrows.
    “They’re arrayed and moving! They’ve got the sun at their backs!” She hopped from one bare foot to the other. “ Why won’t the Captain let us fight?”
    “I don’t want to!” The black-haired boy, Richard, now her particular friend, whimpered beside her.
    Ash looked at him in complete bewilderment. “Are you afraid?” She darted to the other side of the tower, leaning over and looking down at the company’s wagon-fort. Washerwomen and whores and cooks were fixing the chains that bound the carts together. Most of them carried twelve-foot pikes, razor-edged bills. She leaned out further. She couldn’t see Guillaume.
    Day brightened quickly. Ash craned to look down the slope towards the river’s edge. A few horses galloping, their riders in bright colours. A flag: the company ensign. Then men of the company walking, weapons in hand.
    “Ash, why are we so slow? ” Richard quavered. “They’ll be here before we’re ready!”
    Ash had started to be strong in the last half-year or so, in the way that terriers and mountain ponies are strong, but she still did not look older than eight. Malnutrition had a lot to do with it.
    She put her arm around him. “There’s trouble. We can’t get through. Look.”
    All down by the river showed red in the rising sun. Vast cornfields, so thick with poppies that she couldn’t see the grain. Corn and poppies together – the crops so thick and tangled that they slowed down the mercenaries walking with bills and swords and halberds. The armoured men on horseback drew ahead, into the scarlet distance, under the banner.
    Richard bundled his arms around Ash, pale enough for his birthmark to stand out like a banner on his face. “Will they all die?”
    “No. Not everybody. Not if some of the other lot come over to us when the fighting starts. The Captain buys them if he can. Oh.” Ash’s guts contracted. She reached down and put her hand between her legs and took her fingers out bloody.
    “Sweet Green Christ!” Ash wiped her hand on her linen shirt, with a glance around the bell tower to see if anyone had overheard her swear. They were alone.
    “Are you wounded?” Richard stepped back.
    “ Oh. No.” Far more bewildered than she sounded, Ash said, “I’m a woman. They told me, in the wagons, it could happen.”
    Richard forgot the armed men moving. His smile was sweet. “It’s the first time, isn’t it? I’m so happy for you, Ashy! Will you have a baby?”
    “Not right now…”
    She made him laugh, his fear gone. That done, she turned back to the red river fields that stretched away from the tower. Dew burned off in bright mist. Not dawn, now, but full early morning.
    “Oh, look …”
    Half a mile away now, the enemy.
    The Bride of the Sea’s men moving over a slope, small and glittering. Banners of red and blue and gold and yellow gleamed above the packed mass of their helmets. Too far away to see faces, even the inverted V that disclosed mouth and chin when, in the heat, they left off falling-buffs and bevors. 4
    “Ashy, there are so many —!” Richard whined.
    The Serene Bride of the Sea’s host drew up into three. The vaward or advance unit was big enough on its own. Behind it, offset to one side, was the mainward, with the Bride of the Sea’s banners and their commander’s own standard. Offset again, the rearward was only