by Mary Gentle
Ash blinked, realising almost immediately that the new man spoke in the Visigoth language, that his tone was sweetly pleasant, and that her own mercenaries were the only people present who had understood him. She glared at Isobel, Blanche, Euen Huw and Paul di Conti. They subsided. As she turned back to him, Asturio Lebrija bowed a flamboyant farewell, and moved to join what must have been the senior ambassador in the Visigoth delegation at the Emperor Frederick’s side. The golem followed, with heavy soft tread.
“Their heavy cataphracts29 aren’t bad,” Robert Anselm said in her ear. “Never mind all their fucking ships! And they’ve had a military build-up going on there these last ten years.”
“I know. It’s all going to turn into another Visigoths-fighting-Turks war for control of the Mediterranean, with undisciplined serfs and light cavalry knocking hell out of each other for no result. Mind you,” – a sudden hope – “there might be some business down there for us.”
“Not ‘us’.” Anselm’s features twisted with disgust. “Fernando del Guiz.”
“Not for long.”
On the heels of that, another voice echoed through the huge spaces of the cathedral, echoing from crypt to barrel-vaults. “Out!”
Frederick of Hapsburg – shouting.
Conversation drained swiftly into silence. Ash went forward through the crowd. A foot trod on her trailing train, bringing her up short. Ludmilla muttered something as she picked the cloth up off the flagstones and flung the whole weight of it over her arm. Ash grinned back at Big Isobel, and caught up with Anselm, edging her way between him and Godfrey to the front of the crowd.
Two men had Asturio Lebrija with his arms twisted up behind his back, forcing the man in the mail shirt to kneel. Also down on the stone floor, the older Visigoth ambassador had a bill-shaft held across his throat and Sigismund of the Tyrol’s knee in his back. The golem stood as still as the carved saints in their niches.
Frederick’s sibilant voice echoed among the soaring pillars, still shaking with the re-imposition of a control Ash had not heard him lose before. “Daniel de Quesada, I may hear you say your people have given mine medicine, masonry and mathematics; I will not stand here in this most ancient cathedral and hear my people maligned as barbarians—”
“Lebrija did not say—”
Frederick of Hapsburg overrode the older ambassador: “—my fellow sovereign Louis of France called ‘a spider’, or be told to my face I am ‘old and covetous’!”
Ash glanced from Frederick and his bristling nobles to the Visigoth ambassadors. Far more likely that Asturio Lebrija had momentarily and catastrophically forgotten which language he was speaking, than that the older man – bearded, with the look of a battle veteran – would deliberately allow him to insult the Holy Roman Emperor.
She murmured to Godfrey, “Someone’s picking a fight here. Deliberately. Who?”
The bearded priest frowned. “I think, Frederick. He doesn’t want to be asked to lend military aid in Visigothic North Africa.30 But he won’t want to be heard refusing the ambassadors’ request, in case it’s supposed he’s refusing because he hasn’t got the troops to send, and is therefore weak. Easier to buy himself time like this, given this excuse, with false anger over an ‘insult’.”
Ash wanted to say something on behalf of Asturio Lebrija, whose face reddened as he strained to get out of the grip of two German knights; nothing immediately useful came to mind.
The Emperor snapped peevishly, “I will leave you both your heads! You are returned home. Tell the Citadel to send me civil ambassadors in future!”
Ash flicked a glance sideways, not realising that her whole stance changed: alert, balanced, and not usual for someone in bridal robes. The golem stood silent and motionless behind the two ambassadors. If that should move— Her fingers closed automatically, seeking a sword-hilt.
Fernando del Guiz straightened up from leaning on a cathedral pillar. Caught by the movement, Ash watched him helplessly. No different from a hundred other young German knights here, she protested to herself; and then, But he’s golden!
Gold light from the windows catches his face as he turns, laughing at something one of the squires clustered around him has said. She sees a snapshot image of light limning the edge of sun-browned masculine brow, nose, lip; warm in the cold cathedral dimness. And his eyes, which are merry. She sees him young, strong, wearing fluted armour with complete naturalness; thinks of how he knows the outdoor months of campaigning as well as she does, the sunny ease of camp-life and the blood-teasing exultation of battle.
Why despise me, when we’re the same? You could understand me better than any other woman you could have married—
Fernando del Guiz’s voice said, “Let me be the escort for the ambassadors, Your Imperial Majesty. I have some new troops I need to knock into shape. Entrust me with this favour.”
It was ten heartbeats at least before Ash replayed “new troops” in her mind.
He means my company! She exchanged glances with Robert Anselm and Godfrey Maximillian; both men frowning.
“It shall be your bridal gift, del Guiz,” Frederick of Hapsburg agreed; something sardonic in his expression. “And a honeymoon for you and your bride.” He gathered his nine-yard velvet gown about himself, with the aid of two small boy pages, and without looking over his shoulder, said, “Bishop Stephen.”
“Your Imperial Majesty?”
“Exorcise that.” A twig-thin finger flicked towards the Visigoth golem. “And when you have done it, command stonemasons with hammers, and have it broken into gravel!”
“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty!”
“Barbarian!” The older Visigoth ambassador, Daniel de Quesada, spluttered incredulously. “Barbarian!”
Asturio Lebrija looked up with difficulty from where he was pinned, on his knees. “I spoke no lie, Daniel: these damned Franks31 are children playing in ruins, destroying whatever comes to their hands! Hapsburg, you have no idea of the value of—”
Frederick’s knights slammed Lebrija face-down on the tiles. The sound of blows echoed through the vaulting heights of the cathedral. Ash took a half-step forward, only to be nearer, and caught her foot in the brocade hem and stumbled, grabbing Godfrey’s arm.
“My lord del Guiz,” the Emperor Frederick said mildly, “you will escort these men to our nearest port, in chains, and ensure they are deported by ship to Carthage. I wish them to live to carry their disgrace home with them.”
“Your Majesty.” Fernando bowed, still something coltish about him for all the breadth of his shoulders.
“You will need to take command of your new troops. Not all, not all. These men—” Frederick of Hapsburg lifted his fingers very slightly, in the direction of Ash’s lance-leaders and men-at-arms, crowding in at the rear of the cathedral. “—are now by feudal right yours, my lord. And as your liege lord, they are also ours. You shall take some of them upon this duty, and we shall retain the remainder: we have tasks that they can do, order not yet being secure in Neuss.”
Ash opened her mouth.
Robert Anselm, without moving his rigid eyes-front gaze, rammed his elbow into her ribs.
“He can’t do this!” Ash hissed.
“Yes. He can. Now shut up, girl.”
Ash stood between Godfrey and Anselm, her heavy brocade gown stifling her. Sweat dampened her armpits. The knights, lords, merchants, bishops and priests of the Imperial court began to move off in Frederick’s wake, talking between themselves; a great throng of richly dressed men, their voices travelling up into the silence of the fan-vaulting and the saints in their niches.
“They can’t just split us up like this!”
Godfrey’s hand closed painfully tightly around her elbow. “If you can’t do anything, don’t do anything. Child, listen to me! If you protest now, everyone will see that you lack the power to alter this. Wait. Wait. Until you can do something.”
The departing Imperial court took as little notice of one woman and a cluster of soldiers as they did
of the stone saints above.
“I can’t leave it!” Ash spoke so that only the priest and Anselm could hear. “I built this company up from nothing. If I wait, now, either they’re going to start deserting, or they’re going to get used to del Guiz in command!”
“You could let them go. It is their right,” Godfrey said mildly. “Perhaps, if they no longer wish to be men of war—”
Both Ash and Robert Anselm shook their heads.
“These are men I know.” Ash wiped her hand across her scarred cheek. “These are men hundreds of leagues from whatever poxy farm or town they were born in, and fighting’s the only trade they’ve got. Godfrey, they’re my people.”
“Now they are del Guiz men-at-arms. Have you considered, child, that this may be better for them?”
This time it was Robert Anselm who snorted.
“I know young knights with their arses on their first war-horse! That young streak of piss and wind couldn’t restrain himself in battle, never mind his men! He’s a heroic disaster looking for a place to happen. Captain, we’ve got time. If we’re leaving Cologne, that’s good.” Anselm stared after Fernando del Guiz, walking down the nave with Joscelyn van Mander; never a glance back for his bride. “See how you like it out on the road, city boy.”
Ash thought, Shit.
They’re splitting up my company. My company isn’t mine any more. I’m married to someone who owns me – and there’s no way I can play court politics to change the Emperor’s mind, because I’m not going to be here! I’m going to be dragged off with disgraced Visigoth ambassadors to Christ alone knows where—
Ash glanced out of the cathedral’s open doors, under the unfinished west front,32 out at the sunlight. “Which is the nearest southern port from here, on Empire territory?”
Godfrey Maximillian said, “Genoa.”
Message: #5 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, historical documents
Date: 02/11/00 at 08.55 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Sorry to contact you out of office hours, but I *must* talk to you about the translation of these documents.
I have very fond memories of ‘doing’ Ash at school. One of the things I like about her, which comes through strongly in your translations of these texts, is that she’s a jock. Basically. She doesn’t read, she can’t write, but boy can she hit things. And she has a complex character despite that. I love this woman! I still think that a modern translation of ASH, with your new document discovery, is one of the best and most commercial ideas that’s come my way in a long time. You know I’m supporting you here, in the editorial discussions, despite not being fully briefed yet.
However. These sources –
I can cope with the odd mistake in dating, and with mediaeval legends. This is, after all, how those people *perceived* their experiences. And what we have here, with your prospective new theory of European history, is brilliant stuff! – But it’s for this very reason that each deviation from history must be carefully documented. Provided the legends are clearly noted as such, we have a cracking good history book for the marketing department to sell.
*But* –
*GOLEMS*???!!!
In mediaeval Europe?!
What next – zombies and the undead?!! This is fantasy!
HELP!
– Anna
* * *
Message: #1 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, historical documents
Date: 03/11/00 at 06.30 p.m.
From: Ratcliffe@
Anna –
This is what comes of getting connected to e-mail, one then forgets to check it! I am *so* sorry not to have answered you yesterday.
About ‘golems’. I am following Charles Mallory Maximillian’s translation here (with a little FRAXINUS). He refers to them in 1890 as ‘clay walkers’, very much the legendary Cabalistic magical servant as featured in the legend of the Rabbi of Prague. (We should remember that when Maximillian did his translation, the Victorian era was gripped by the fin-de-siècle occult revival craze.)
Vaughan Davies, in his later translation, rather unfortunately calls them ‘robots’, a reference which in the late 1930s was not as hackneyed as it now appears.
I intend to use the term ‘golem’, in this third edition, unless you think it too unscholarly. I am aware that you would like this book to have a wide readership.
As regards what these ‘golems’ or ‘walkers’ may, historically, have actually been, I think they are a mediaeval confabulation of something undoubtedly real with something legendary. The historical reality is mediaeval Arabic engineering.
You will no doubt be aware that, as well as their civil engineering, the Arabic civilisations practised a kind of fine engineering, making fountains, clocks, automata, and many other devices. It is quite certain that, by the time of al-Jazari, complex gear trains existed, also segmental and epicycle gears, weight drives, escapements and pumps. The Arabs’ celestial and biological models were largely water-powered, and invariably – obviously – stationary. However, the European mediaeval traveller often reported the models to be *mobile* figures of men, horses, singing birds, etc.
My research indicates that the del Guiz LIFE has conflated these travellers’ tales with mediaeval Jewish stories of the golem, the man of clay. This was a magical being with, of course, no basis in fact.
If there *had* been a ‘walker’ or ‘servant’ of some sort, I imagine it could conceivably have been a *vehicle*, wind-powered like the sophisticated pole-mills of the period – but then, it would require wheels, sophisticated road-surfaces, and a human driver, to function as any kind of message-carrying device, and could perform no indoor tasks at all. And you may say, rightly, that this is stretching historical speculation unjustifiably far. No such device has ever been discovered. It is chroniclers’ licence.
As a legendary part of the Ash cycle, I like my golems, and I hope you will let me keep them. However, if too much emphasis on the ‘legendary’ aspect of the texts is going to weaken the historical *evidence* which I am drawing from the del Guiz text, then let’s by all means cut the golems out of the finished version!
– Pierce Ratcliff
* * *
Message: #6 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, historical documents
Date: 03/11/00 at 11.55 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I wouldn’t know a segmental gear if it bit me! But I’m prepared to credit that these ‘golems’ are a mediaeval legend based on some kind of reality. Any study of women’s history, black history, or working class history soon makes you see how much gets dropped from conventional histories, so why should engineering history be any different?
But I guess it’s safer to leave them out. Let’s not confuse mediaeval legend with mediaeval fact.
One of my assistants has raised a further query about the ‘Visigoths’ today. She’s concerned that, since they were a Germanic tribe who died out after the Roman Empire, how can they still be around in 1476?
Another query, from me – I’m not a Classicist, it’s not my period, but don’t I remember Carthage being *wiped out* in Roman times? Your manuscript speaks as if it still exists. But it makes no mention of the ARAB cultures of North Africa.
Is all this going to be made clear? Soon? PLEASE?!
– Anna
* * *
Message: #3 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, historical documents
Date: 04/11/00 at 09.02 a.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
I didn’t realise that publisher’s editors worked such unnatural hours. I hope you aren’t working too hard. : )
You ask me for a statement of my theory – very well. We probably can’t proceed in our working relationship without one. Bear with me for a moment, and I’ll give you some necessary background:
The arrival of what the LIFE calls the ‘Gothic’ ambassadors DOES present an apparent pro
blem. I believe that I have solved this problem, however; and, as you imply, it is a key factor in my reassessment of European history.
While the ambassadors’ presence at Frederick’s court is verified by references in both the CHRONIQUE DE BOURGOGNE and the correspondence between Philip de Commines and Louis XI of France, I at first found it difficult to see where these ‘Goths’ (or, as I prefer Charles Mallory Maximillian’s more precise translation, ‘Visigoths’: the ‘noble Goths’) might originate.
The Germanic Gothic barbarian tribes did not so much ‘die out’, as your assistant suggests, as become absorbed into the ethnic mix of the lands they moved into after Rome fell. The Ostrogoths in Italy, for example; the Burgundians in the Rhone Valley, and the Visigoths in Iberia (Spain). They continued to rule these territories, in some cases for centuries.
Maximillian thus suggests these ‘Visigoth’ ambassadors are Spanish. I was not completely happy with that. CMM’s rationale is that, from the eighth century on, Spain is divided between a Christian Visigoth knightly aristocracy, and the Arabic dynasties that follow their own invasion in AD 711. Both the numerically inferior Muslim and Visigoth aristocratic classes ruled over a great mass of Iberian and Moorish peasantry. Therefore, Maximillian says, since there were ‘Visigoths’ of this kind left until well into the late fifteenth century, there might also have been mediaeval rumours that either these Christian Visigoths or the ‘heathen Saracen’ (Muslims) retained some ‘engines and devices’ of Roman technology.
It is actually not until fifteen years after Ash’s death that the last Arab Muslims are finally driven out of the Iberian peninsula in the ‘Reconquista’ (1488-1492). The Visigoth ambassadors to the court of the Emperor Frederick *could* therefore be supposed to come from Iberia.
However, I personally then found it very puzzling that the ASH texts directly state that they come from a settlement which must have been on the coast of North Africa. (Even more puzzling since they are plainly not Arab!)
The author of the 1939 second edition of the ASH documents, Vaughan Davies, basing HIS theory on not much more than the text referring to Northern Europeans as ‘Franks’, treats the Visigoths as the standard Saracen knights of the Arthurian legends – the ‘Saracens’ are mediaeval Europe’s idea of the Arab cultures, mixed with folk-memories of the crusades to the Holy Land. I don’t think Davies does anything at all scholarly to address this problem.
