Ash: A Secret History Read Free

little later in her ninth year, rumours went through the camp that there had been a Lion born of a Virgin.

 
    II
    The child Ash sat with her back to a bare tree, cheering the mummers. Furs kept some of the ground’s ice from her backside.
    Her scars were not healing well. They stood out red against the extreme pallor of her skin. Visible breath huffed out of her mouth as she screamed, shoulder to shoulder with all the camp strays and bastards. The Great Wyrm (a man with a tanned horse’s skin flung over his back, and a horse’s skull fitted by ties to his head) ramped across the stage. The horse skin still had mane and tail attached. They nailed the freezing afternoon air. The Knight of the Wasteland (played by a company sergeant in better armour than Ash had thought he owned) aimed skilful lance blows very wide.
    “Oh, kill it,” a girl called Crow called scornfully.
    “Stick it up his arse!” Ash yelled. The children huddling around her tree screamed laughter and disdain.
    Richard, a little black-haired boy with a port-wine stain across his face, whispered, “It’ll have to die. The Lion’s born. I heard the Lord Captain say.”
    Ash’s scorn faded with the last sentence. “When? Where? When, Richard? When did you hear him?”
    “Midday. I took water into the tent.” The small boy’s voice sounded proud.
    Ash ignored his implied unofficial status as page. She rested her nose on her clenched fists and huffed warm breath on her frozen fingers. The Wyrm and the sergeant were having at each other with more vigour. That was because of the cold. She stood up and rubbed hard at her numb buttocks through her woollen hose.
    “Where’s you going, Ashy?” the boy asked.
    “I’m going to make water,” she announced loftily. “You can’t come with me.”
    “Don’t wanna. ”
    “You’re not big enough.” With that parting shaft, Ash picked her way out of the crowd of children, goats and hounds.
    The sky was low, cold, and the same colour as pewter plates. A white mist came up from the river. If it would snow, it would be warmer than this. Ash padded on feet bound with strips of cloth towards the abandoned buildings (probably agricultural) that the company officers had commandeered for winter quarters. A sorry rabble of tents had gone up all around. Armed men were clustered around fire-pits with their fronts to the heat and their arses in the cold. She went on past their backs.
    Round to the rear of the farm, she heard them coming out of the building in time to duck behind a barrel, in which the frozen cylindrical block of rainwater protruded up a full handspan.
    “And go on foot,” the Captain finished speaking. A group of men clattered with him out into the yard. The thin company clerk. Two of the Captain’s closest lieutenants. The very few, Ash knew, with pretensions (once) to noble birth.
    The Captain wore a close-fitting steel shell that covered all his body. Full harness: from the pauldrons and breastplate enclosing his shoulders and body, the vambraces on his arms, his gauntlets, his tassets and cuisses and greaves that armoured his legs, down to the metal sabatons that covered his spurred boots. He carried his armet 2 under his arm. Winter light dulled the mirrored metal. He stood in the filthy farmyard wearing armour that reflected the sky as white: she had not thought before that this might be why it was called white harness. The only colour shone from his red beard and the red leather of his scabbard.
    Ash knelt back on her knees and toes. Her frozen fingers rested against the cold barrel, too numb to feel the wood staves. The strapped and tied metal plates rattled as the man walked. When his two lieutenants thumped down into the yard, also in full armour, it sounded like muffled pans. Like a cook’s wagon overturning.
    Ash wanted such armour. It was that desire, more than curiosity, that made her follow them away from the farm buildings. To walk with that invulnerability. With that amount of