Ash: A Secret History Read Free Page A

wealth on one’s back… Ash ran, dazzled.
    The sky above yellowed. A few flakes of snow drifted down to lie on top of her untidy hair (less purely white than it) but she took no notice. Her nose and ears shone bright red, and her fingers and toes were blue and purple. This was nothing unusual for her in winter: she thought nothing of it. She did not even pull her doublet tighter over her filthy linen shirt.
    The four men – Captain, clerk, two young lieutenants – walked ahead in unusual silence. They passed the camp pickets. Ash sneaked past behind while the Captain exchanged a word with them.
    She wondered why the men did not ride. They walked up a steep slope to the surrounding woodland. At the wood’s border, confronting the thick bowed branches, the brambles and thorn bushes, the deadwood brushfalls built up over more than a man’s lifetime, she understood. You couldn’t take a horse into this. Even a war-horse.
    Now three of the men stopped and put on their armets. The unarmoured clerk fell back a step. Each man kept his visor pinned up, his face visible. The taller of the two lieutenants took his sword out of his scabbard. The bearded Captain shook his head.
    The sliding sound of metal on wood echoed in the quiet, as the lieutenant resheathed his blade.
    The wood held silence.
    All three of the armoured men turned to the company clerk. This thin man wore a velvet-covered brigandine and a war-hat 3 , and his uncovered face was pinched in the cold air. Ash sneaked closer as the snow fell.
    The clerk stepped confidently forward, into the wood.
    Ash had not paid much attention to the hills surrounding the valley. The valley had a clean river, and the lone farmhouse and its buildings. It was good for wintering out of campaign season. What else should she know? The leafless woods on the surrounding high hills had been bare of game. If not hunting, what other reason could take her here, away from the fire-pits?
    What reason could take them?
    There was a path, she decided after some minutes. None of the brambles and thorn bushes on it were more than her own height. Not disused for more than a few seasons.
    The armoured men pushed unharmed through the briars. The shorter lieutenant swore, “God’s blood!” and fell silent, as the other three turned and stared at him. Ash snuck under briar stems as thick as her wrist. Little and quick, she could have out-distanced them, protective armour or not, if she had known where the path went.
    With that thought she cast out to the side, wriggled on her belly along the bed of a frozen streamlet, and came out a hundred paces ahead of the leading man.
    No snow fell here under the tree canopy. Everything was brown. Dead leaves, dead briars, dead rushes on the streamlet’s edge. Brown bracken ahead. Ash, seeing the bracken, looked up, and – as she had expected – the tree cover over it was broken, as it must be to allow its growth.
    In the forest glade stood a disused stone chapel, shrouded in snow.
    Ash had no familiarity with the outside or inside of chapels. Even so, she would have needed to be very familiar indeed with architecture to recognise the style in which this one had been built. It was ruined now. Two walls remained standing. Grey moss and brown thorns covered them, old ice scabbing the vegetation. Two snow-plastered window frames showed grey, full of winter emptiness. Heaps of snow-rounded rubble cluttered the ground.
    Green colour took Ash’s eye. Under the thin covering of snow, all the rubble was grown over with ivy.
    Green flowered also at the foot of the chapel walls. Two fat white-moulded holly bushes rooted where the stone slab of the altar stood against the wall. They stood either side of the cracked slab. Under the snow, their red berries weighed their branches down.
    Ash heard clattering metal behind her. A robin and a wren took fright and flew out of the holly and away. The men behind her in the wood began to sing. They were fifteen feet behind her back,