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sky crashing down. Ash touched the sides of her head. A thin, high whine filled her ears. Richard’s face streamed tears and his mouth was an open square. She could just hear him bawling.
    The corner of the parapet wall fell soundlessly away. Open air gaped in front of her. Dust hung hazy. She got to her hands and knees. A violent whirring whicked past her head, loud enough for her, half-deaf, to hear.
    The boy stood with his hands loose at his sides. He stared over Ash’s head, out from the broken bell tower. She saw his particoloured legs tremble. The front of his cod-flap wetted with urine. With a ripe, wet sound, he shat in his hose. Ash looked up at Richard without condemnation. There are times when losing control of your bowels is the only realistic response to a situation.
    “That’s mortars! Get down! ” She hoped she was shouting. She got Richard by the wrist and pulled him towards the steps.
    The sharp edge of the stone barked her knees. Her sun-blasted vision saw nothing but darkness. She fell down inside the bell tower, cracking her head against the wall of the stairwell. Richard’s foot kicked her in the mouth. She bled and yelled and tumbled down to ground-level and ran.
    She heard no more gunfire, but when she looked back from the wagon-fort, her chest raw inside and burning, the monastery tower was gone, only rubble and dust blackening the sky.
    Forty-five minutes later the baggage train were declared prisoners.
    Ash ran away, out of their sight, down to the river.
    Searching.
    Bodies lay so thick on the ground that the air swam with the smell. She clamped her linen sleeve over her mouth and nose. She tried not to step on the faces of the dead men and boys.
    Scavengers came by to strip the bodies. She hid in the wet, red corn. Their peasant voices were rapid, inflected music.
    She felt the skin across her cheeks and nose crisping in the high summer heat. The sun burned at her calves below the linen shirt, turning her fair skin pink. Her toes burned. She stood and put her wide-brimmed straw hat back on. The whole world smelled of shit and spoiling meat. She kept spitting without being able to get the taste of vomit out of her mouth. Heat made the air waver.
    One of the dying men wept “Bartolomeo! Bartolomeo!” and then pleaded with the surgeon’s cart, long-handled, dragged on two wheels by a man who grunted and shook his head.
    No Richard. No one. The crops were burned black for a mile or more. Ravens dragged bits of two armoured horse carcasses apart. If there had been anything else – bombards, bodies, salvageable armour – it had been cleared up or looted.
    Ash ran, breathless, back to the company cooking fires. She saw Richard sitting with the washerwomen. He looked up, saw her, and ran away.
    Her steps slowed.
    Abruptly, Ash turned and tugged the sleeve of a gunner’s doublet. Not realising how deaf she was, she shouted, “Where’s Guillaume? Guillaume Arnisout?”
    “Buried down in the lime pit.”
    “ What? ”
    The unarmed man shrugged and faced her. She followed his lips as much as the whisper of sound. “Dead and buried in the lime pits.”
    “Uhh.” Air left her lungs.
    “No,” another man called from beside the fire, “they took him prisoner. The bloody Brides of the Sea have got him.”
    “No,” a third man held his hands apart, “he had a hole in his stomach this big. But it wasn’t the Most Serene, it was our side, the Great Duke’s men, it was someone he owed money to.”
    Ash left them.
    No matter what turf the camp was set up on, the camp was always the same. She made her way into the middle of the camp, where she did not often go. Now it was full of armed strangers. At last she found a manicured, blond man with a harassed expression, who wore a gold-edged green surcoat over his armour. He was one of the Lord Captain’s aides and she knew him by sight, not by name; the gunners referred to him derisively as tabard-lifter. She already understood why.
    “Guillaume