by Mary Gentle
I know I’m not supposed to say this, but it’s hot and smelly and the only time it’s bearable is when we’re actually out at the digs – which I’m *not* going to mention the location of, obviously!!! Suffice it to say that we are very near the northern coast of this region of Tunisia. (There are mountains on the southern skyline, they make me think of ice and coldness and somewhere you don’t have to stay under shelter between one and five in the afternoon!) Look, you don’t want to hear all this, but I can’t tell you what I’d like to, and I’m just bursting to.
Isobel says that since you’re on the verge of ditching the book, I *can* tell you some things. Isobel’s a wonderful woman. I’ve known her since Oxford. She’s the last person I can think of who’d get excited unnecessarily. You only have to look at her short hair and sensible shoes. (No, we never did. I wanted to. Isobel isn’t keen that way.) And this last twenty-four hours since I got here, she’s been skipping about like a schoolgirl! This *could* still turn out to be another Hitler Diaries, but I don’t think so.
What have we found? (Not ‘we’, of course. Isobel and her wonderful team.)
We’ve found golems.
Exactly as the text describes them. ‘Messenger-golems’. One complete, and some pieces of another. You remember me telling you that Arabic mediaeval engineering was quite up to building singing fountains, and mechanical birds that flap their wings, and all that sort of post-Roman trivia? Very well:
The ASH manuscripts always refer to the ‘clay walkers’ or ‘robots’ or ‘golems’ as *moving* mechanical models of men. This is complete nonsense of course. Imagine building a robot in the fifteenth century! Ornamental devices of some kind, possibly. *Just* possibly. I mean, if you can build metal singing birds – they worked pneumatically or hydraulically, as all the Roman treatises indicate; don’t ask me the details, I’m not an engineer! – Then, I suppose, you could build metal models of men, too, like Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head, but complete. I don’t see why anyone would want to.
That’s what I thought, up to twenty-four hours ago. Then there was all the rush of getting a plane out to Tunis, and being driven in some god-awful jeep out to the archaeologists’ camp, and then Isobel taking me all the way out here on foot. There are soldiers guarding the camp, all Jeeps and Kalashnikovs, but they don’t seem very alert – just a gift from the local government to keep petty pilfering down, I think. Isobel would like to keep it that way. The last thing we want is the military sent into this site. You could destroy the survivals that are five hundred odd years old –
Yes. Isobel’s dated them, she’s pretty sure they’ve been in the silt for upwards of four hundred years, and five hundred seems likely; they’re not the Victorian curiosities I was afraid I was going to find. These are the messenger-golems of the ASH texts – man-shaped, life-sized carved stone bodies (the complete one is Italian marble), with articulated metal joints at the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and hands. The stonework on the second one has shattered, but the bronze and brass gears and cogs are complete. *They are golems*!
I confess I don’t understand all the professional arguments that are going on between Isobel’s team, or rather, I don’t understand the technological details. There is a *huge* row breaking out about whether these finds belong to a mediaeval Arab or mediaeval European culture – the Italian marble, you see, although of course Carrara marble was exported across the whole of Christendom at the time, as I’ve tried to point out. I’ve given Isobel my copy of the existing ASH translations, indicating that (as I was going to e-mail you to point out) the ‘Visigoth’ culture of the texts is *not* purely Iberian Gothic, but rather a mixture of Visigothic, Spanish and Arab culture.
I’ve got this far and I haven’t told you the most important discovery so far. You’re sitting there in London reading this, and you’re thinking, so? So they had mechanical men, as well as mechanical birds, what does this matter?
Isobel has let me examine the surviving golem extremely carefully. This is something that must not get out before she is ready to publish her findings. There are patterns of wear in the metal joints. That isn’t all.
There are patterns of wear on the marble surfaces *under* the feet!
The stone is worn away on the carved soles of the feet and under the heels exactly as though this golem has been walking. And I mean walking. Like a man, like you and me, a stone and brass mechanical man, *walking*.
What I have touched – touched, Anna! – is exactly what the ASH texts describe as the Visigoth clay walkers.
They are *real*.
I have to get off this machine, Isobel urgently needs to use it. I’ll contact you again as soon as I can. The translations of the documents in section three are in the file I’m sending with this. Don’t ditch my book!!! We might have something here that’s bigger than anyone ever thought.
*What* Visigoths? HA!
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #28 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, media-related projects
Date: 07/11/00 at 06.17 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I want you to talk to Dr Napier-Grant, and persuade her that you two should work together, starting NOW. My MD Jonathan Stanley is *very* much in favour of the idea of doing some kind of a tie-in between yourself and Doctor Napier-Grant. She sounds like one of those great British eccentrics who come across brilliantly on the small screen. I can see a possible, tv series for her, and there’s your original translation of ‘Ash’; and then there is what you could do together – a book-of-the-expedition? Do you think you could write a script for a documentary on the expedition? This has *terrific* possibilities!
I’m certain a deal could be arranged. I don’t usually say this to my academic authors, but *get yourself an agent*! You need one who handles film and tv rights, as well as non-fiction book translation rights.
It’s true we’ve still got a text that’s half mediaeval legend, half historical fact (eclipses!) – and I’m gobsmacked that something like an invasion could be left out of the history books – and how DID these golems MOVE? – but I don’t see any of this as a barrier to successful publication. Talk to Dr Napier-Grant about the idea for a joint project and get back to me as soon as you can!
Love, Anna
PART THREE
22 July–10 August AD 1476
‘How a Man Schall be Armyd at His Ease’1
I
Forty pitch-torches flared in the wind, under an ink-black daytime sky.
A great lane of people opened in front of Ash as she galloped into the centre of the camp outside Cologne. She halted astride Godluc, in full armour, the company banner cracking in the wind above her; the noise loud in the silence. Yellow light blazed across her strained white face. “Geraint! Euen! Thomas!”
Her lance-leader lieutenants ran to stand either side, ready to repeat her words the instant that she spoke, feed them out to the hundreds of her archers and billmen and knights gathering in front of her. Voices began shouting, chaotic in the unnatural dark.
“Listen to me. There is,” Ash spoke perfectly steadily, “nothing for you to be afraid of.”
Above, what should have been a July midday blue sky showed only black, empty darkness.
There is no sun.
“I’m here. Godfrey’s here, and he’s a priest. You’re not damned and you’re not in danger – if we were, I’d be the first one out of here!”
No response from any of the hundreds of fearful faces. The torchlight wavers across their shining silver helmets, loses itself in darkness between their crowded, armed bodies.
“Maybe we’re going to be like the lands Under the Penance now,” Ash continued, “—but – Angelotti’s been to Carthage, and the Eternal Twilight, and they manage well enough, and you’re not going to let a bunch of shabby rag-heads outdo the Lion!”
Nothing like a cheer, but they made the first responsive noise she’d heard out of them: a subdued mutter, full of fuck! and shit
! and nobody quite saying the word desertion.
“Right,” she said briskly. “We’re moving. The company’s going to strike camp. We’ve done a night dismount before, you all know how to do this. I want us loaded and ready to go at Vespers.”2
A hand went up, just visible in the streaming sooty light of the makeshift torches. Ash leaned forward in the saddle, peering. She realised it was her steward Henri Brant, his body still banded with bloodstained cloths, leaning on the shoulder of her page Rickard. “Henri?”
“Why are we moving? Where are we going?” His voice sounded so weak, the young black-haired boy beside him shouted his questions up to Ash.
“I’ll tell you,” Ash said grimly. She sat back in her saddle, surveying the mass of people, keenly watching for those slipping away, those already carrying their packs, those familiar faces she couldn’t see present.
“You all know my husband. Fernando del Guiz. Well, he’s gone over to the enemy.”
“Is that true?” one of the men-at-arms yelled.
Ash, remembering Constanza, rescued from the tourney field’s riot; the tiny woman’s absolute distress; her unwillingness to confess to Fernando’s peasant wife that the court nobility knew exactly where her son was – remembering this, she pitched her voice to carry further into the dark day:
“Yes, it’s true.”
Over noise, she continued: “For whatever reason, it seems that Fernando del Guiz has sworn fealty to the Visigoth Caliph.”
She let them take it in, then said measuredly, “His estates are south of here, in Bavaria, at a place called Guizburg. I’m told Fernando’s occupying the castle there. Well – they’re not his estates. The Emperor’s put him under attainder. But they’re still my estates. Ours. And that’s where we’re going. We’re going to go south, take what’s ours, and then we’ll face this darkness when we’re safe behind our own castle walls!”
The next ten minutes was all shouted arguments, questions, a few ongoing personal quarrels dragged into the discussion, and Ash bellowing at the highest, most carrying pitch of her voice; ramrodding her authority home.
Robert Anselm leaned from his saddle and murmured in her ear. “Christ, girl! If we move this camp, we’ll have everybody all over the place.”
“It’ll be chaos,” she agreed hoarsely. “But it’s this or they panic, run off as refugees, and we’re not a company any more. Fernando’s neither here nor there – I’m giving them something we can do. Something – anything. It really doesn’t matter what it is!”
The void above pulls, sucks at her. The darkness doesn’t fade, doesn’t give way to dusk or twilight or dawn; hour upon hour upon hour is going by.
“Doing anything,” Ash said, “is better than doing nothing. Even if this is the end of the world… I’m keeping my people together.”
II
The striking of the Guizburg town clock reached Ash over the intermittent sound of cannon. Four bell-chimes. Four hours after what would have been midday.
“It’s not an eclipse.” Antonio Angelotti, where he sat at the end of the trestle table, observed without raising his head: “There’s no eclipse due. In any case, madonna, an eclipse lasts hours at most. Not twelve days.”
Sheets of ephemerides and his own calculations lay in front of him. Ash put her elbow on Angelotti’s table and rested her chin on her hand. Inside this room, boards creaked as Godfrey Maximillian paced up and down. Candlelight shifted. She looked at the shattered frames of the small windows, wishing for lightening air, for the damp cold of dawn, the interminable singing of birds, above all for the sense of freshness, of beginning, that sunrise has outdoors. Nothing. Nothing but darkness.
Joscelyn van Mander put his head around the door of the room, between the guards. “Captain, they won’t hear our herald, and they’re still shooting at us! The garrison doesn’t even admit your husband’s inside the keep.”
Antonio Angelotti leaned back in his chair. “They’ve heard the proverb, madonna – ‘a castle which speaks, and a woman who listens; both will be taken in the end’.”
“They’re flying his livery and a Visigoth standard – he’s here,” Ash observed. “Send a herald every hour. Keep shooting back! Joscelyn, let’s get inside there fast.”
As van Mander left, she added, “We’re still better off here – as long as we’re containing del Guiz, who’s a traitor, the Emperor’s happy; and we get a chance to stay out of the way and see how hot this Visigoth army really is…”
She got up and strode to the window. Cannon fire had exposed the lath and plaster of the wall by the sill, but it would be easy to patch up, she thought, touching the raw dry material. “Angeli, could your eclipse calculations be wrong?”
“No, because nothing that happened accords with the descriptions.” Angelotti scratched at the gathered neck of his shirt. Plainly, he had forgotten the ink stone and the sharpened quill: ink liberally dotted his white linen. He looked at his stained fingers in annoyance. “No penumbra, no gradual eating-away of the disc of the sun, no uneasiness of the beasts of the field. Just instant, icy lightlessness.”
He had bone-framed single-rivet spectacles clamped to his nose for reading. As he squinted through the lenses, in the candlelight, Ash noted the lines at the corners of his eyes, the squinching of flesh between his brows. This is how that face will look in ten years, she thought, when the skin is no longer taut, and the shine is off his gold hair.
He finished, “And Jan tells me the horses weren’t bothered beforehand.”
Robert Anselm, clumping up stairs and entering the room on the tail of this remark, pulled off his hood and said, “The sun darkened – weakened – once when I was in Italy. We must have had four hours’ warning from the horse lines.”
Ash spread her hands. “If no eclipse, then what?”
“The heavens are out of order…” Godfrey Maximillian did not stop pacing. There was a book in his hands, illuminated in red and blue; Ash might have made the text out with enough time to spell it letter by letter. He paused by one of the candles and flicked from page to page with a rapidity that both impressed her and filled her with contempt for a man who had no better use for his time than to learn to read. He did not even read aloud. He read quickly, and silently.
“So? Edward Earl of March saw three suns on the morning of the field of Mortimer’s Cross. For the Trinity.” Robert Anselm hesitated, as ever, mentioning the current English Yorkist king; then muttered aggressively, “Everyone knows the south exists in an eternal twilight, this is nothing to get worked up about. We’ve got a war to fight!”
Angelotti took off his spectacles. The white bone frames left a red dint across the bridge of his nose. “I can take down the keep walls here in half a day.” On the word day, his voice lost impetus.
Ash leaned out of the broken window frame. The town outside was mostly invisible in darkness. She sensed a kind of straining in the air, in the odd warm dusk – cooling, now, perhaps – that wanted to be afternoon. The Drown beams and pale plaster of the house’s façade were dappled with red, reflections from the huge bonfires burning in the market square below. Lanterns shone at every occupied window. She did not look up at the crown of the sky, where no sun shone, only a deep impenetrable blackness.
She looked up at the keep.
Bonfire-light illuminated only the bottom of the sheer walls, shadows flickering on flints and masonry. Slot-windows were eyelets of darkness. The keep rose into darkness above the town, from steep bare slopes of rock; and the road to the gate ran along one wall, from which the defenders had already shot and dropped more killing objects than she thought they had. A slab-sided building like a block of stone.
That’s where he is. In some room behind those walls.
She can envisage the round arches, the wooden floors crammed with bedrolls of men-at-arms, the knights up in the solar on the fourth floor; Fernando perhaps in the great hall, with his dogs and his merchant friends and his handguns…
No more than a furlong from whe
re I am now. He could be looking at me.
Why? Why have you done this? What is the truth of it?
Ash said, “I don’t want the castle damaged so much that we can’t defend it when we’re in there.”
All the armed men she could see in the streets near the keep wore livery jackets with the pewter Lion badge fastened to the shoulder; most of those company people who went unarmed – women selling goods, whores, children – had taken up some kind of strips of blue cloth sewn to their garments. Of the town’s citizens, she could see nothing, but she could hear them singing mass in the churches. The clock struck the quarter on the far side of this market square.
She longed for light with a physical desire, like thirst.
“I thought it might end with dawn,” she said. “A dawn. Any dawn. It still might.”
Angelotti stirred his sheets of calculations, scribbled over with the signs of Mercury, Mars; estimations of ballistics. “This is new.”
Something leonine in the way he stretched his arm reminded Ash of the physical strength he possessed, as well as his male beauty. Points were coming undone at the shoulder of his padded white jack. All the cloth over his chest and arms was pitted with tiny black holes, burned through the linen by sparks from cannon.
Robert Anselm leaned over the master gunner’s shoulder, studying the scribbled sheets of paper, and they began to talk in rapid low tones. Anselm thumped the trestle table with his fist several times.
Ash, watching Robert, was assailed by a paradoxical feeling of fragility: he and Angelotti were physically large men, their voices booming now in this room simply because they were used to conversing out of doors. Some part of her, faced by them, was always fourteen, in her first decent breastplate (the rest of her harness munition-quality tat), seeking out Anselm by his campfire after Tewkesbury and saying, out of the flame-ridden darkness, Raise men for me, I’m fielding a company of my own now. Asking in the dark because she could not bear a refusal in cold daylight. And then hours spent sleepless and wondering if his curt nod of agreement had been because he was drunk or joking, until he turned up an hour after sunrise with fifty frowsty, cold, unfed, well-equipped men carrying bows and bills, whose names she had immediately had Godfrey write on to a muster-roll. And silenced their uncertainty, their jocular complaints and unspoken hope, with food from the cauldrons she had had Wat Rodway at since midnight. The strands of authority between commander and commanded are spider-webs.
