by Mary Gentle
Her first clear thought came perhaps days later. This is a ship and it is sailing for North Africa.
Message: #155 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries
Date: 18/11/00 at 10.00 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I think that you may just have tried to mail me and failed.
To answer points I anticipate you may be asking about the last section: no, I can find no other historical mention of a battle at Auxonne on or around 21 August 1476 – although Ash’s narrative does bear some resemblance to what we know of a battle fought on 22 August 1485. That date, of course, refers to Bosworth field, which put an end to the Plantagenet Kings in England. And something very like the remarkable occurrence with the arrows is documented earlier, on 29 March 1461, at Towton in England, with the Lancastrians ‘not perfectly viewing the distance between them and their enemies’ by reason of driving snow and wind; therefore losing that ‘Palmsunday field’ (and England) to the Yorkists.
Again, Charles Mallory Maximillian footnotes this, in his 1890s edition, as being one more case where the ‘Ash’ documents have been fleshed out by her contemporaries (especially Del Guiz, writing in the early 1500s) with details of their own famous battles.
I feel that this no longer answers the case.
I cannot reconcile what we have here – two opposing sets of evidence. Manuscripts which are apparently (now) fictional; archaeological relics which are evidently, physically, real. I am advising Isobel on fifteenth-century Europe, I am working on my translation, but all I can do, really, is think. How do I explain this? What theory would account for this?
I don’t have one. Perhaps when Ash referred to the sun going out as a ‘black miracle’, I should have listened to her! I am starting to think that only a miracle is going to give me the explanation we need.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #95 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 18/11/00 at 11.09 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I have no idea why we’ve got a conflict of evidence, either; and I have to talk to my MD about it. It isn’t just my job and your career. We can’t publish a book that we know to be academically fraudulent – no, wait, don’t panic! – and we can’t NOT publish one with something as mind-boggling as a fifteenth-century Carthaginian golem backing it up.
Reading your last mailing, I start wondering what your Vaughan Davies would say – maybe not that the resemblance of Auxonne to Bosworth Field is a case of historical Chinese whispers, but that it’s an echo of his idealised alternate-history ‘Lost Burgundy’. That’s poetic, and it got me thinking, because he was a scientist as well as a writer. Maybe it’s NOT a poetic thought, maybe it’s a scientific one.
A friend of mine, Nadia, said something very interesting to me. I’ve been reading up on this: we were talking about the theory you mentioned – that there are an infinite number of parallel universes created every second, in which every possible different choice or decision at any given moment gives rise to another different ‘branch’, etc. (I really only know it from novels, and popular-science books.)
What Nadia says is, it isn’t the lost chances she regrets – whether you drove down a different road and avoided an accident, and so on – but the fact that, if this infinite-number-of-universes theory is true, she can never lead a moral existence.
She says, if she chooses not to knock down and rob an old lady in the street, then the very act of refusing to do this gives rise to a parallel universe in which she DOES do it. It is not possible NOT to do things.
I’m not suggesting you’ve accessed a parallel universe or alternate history – I’m not THAT desperate – but it does make Davies sound less of a mental case if his theory was based in scientific speculation. I was thinking, if we COULD find the rest of his Introduction, maybe it has a perfectly sensible SCIENTIFIC explanation, which would help us now? Even science circa 1939 would be SOMETHING.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #156 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 18/11/00 at 11.20 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Your Nadia’s point is philosophically interesting, but not the case, according to what I understand of our physicists. (Which is purely a layman’s understanding, I assure you.)
If what the current evidence seems to point to is correct, then we are not faced with an infinite number of possible universes, but only an infinite number of possible FUTURES, which collapse into one concrete and real present moment: the NOW. Which then becomes one concrete and single PAST.
So your friend chooses not to knock down her old lady, and that state of NOT having done it is what becomes the unchangeable past. It is only in the moment of transition from potential to actual that a choice is made. So it is possible not to do things.
Sorry: raise a philosophical hare with an academic and he will always chase it! To change animals and mix metaphors: let us return to our sheep –
I would take help from ANYONE at the moment, including a scientific theory of the Thirties about parallel universes! I’ve tried extensively to find Vaughan Davies’s book, though, and failed; and I don’t think I can do much about that sitting in a tent outside Tunis.
I want to try these last few weeks out on my colleagues, in detail, and on Isobel’s scientist friends, and see if they can come up with any theories. I don’t dare do it now. It would bring unwanted attention to the site, here; it would cause Isobel a great deal of distress – and, to be honest, it would finish my chances of being the first man to translate FRAXINUS. I know this is venal, but chances of spectacular success come only rarely; something you will discover as you get older.
Maybe we could do it in a month or so? Start asking around, among experts, getting some REAL answers? That would still be before publication date.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #96 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 18/11/00 at 11.37 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
But not before copy-editing, and printing! Pierce, what are you trying to do to me!
Suppose we say Christmas? If this problem hasn’t resolved itself, or we haven’t at least found out what it is, by then – then I’ll have to go to Jonathan.
First week of January at the LATEST.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #157 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, texts
Date: 18/11/00 at 04 18 p.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Very well. I agree. We raise no alarm before the first week in January. Although, if we haven’t arrived at an answer before then – it’s all of seven weeks away! – I will most probably have gone mad. But then I’ll hardly have to worry about anything if I’m mad, will I!
John Monkham just came by. The photos of the golem-are splendid, beyond belief. I’m sorry you won’t be able to copy or keep them; Isobel becomes more security conscious with every hour that passes. I think if John wasn’t her son, she wouldn’t be letting HIM take them off-site.
I’ve had a morning to polish my translation. Here it is at last, Anna. ‘Fraxinus’, as promised. Or at least, the first section of it. Sorry I have only had time to do the bare minimum of footnotes.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #163 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 19/11/00 at 09.51 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I’ve GOT it.
I’ve got the ANSWER.
I was right, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. We’ve been being too complicated, that’s all; complicating things unnecessarily! It’s so simple. No need to concern ourselves with Davies’s theory, whatever it may have been; no need to worry about what the British
Library catalogue says!
What I’ve only this minute realised is, just because a document is CLASSIFIED as fiction or myth or legend, THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT TRUE.
That simple!
It was something Isobel just said to me – I HAD to tell her I was having problems, I was talking about Vaughan Davies’s theory: she just said, ‘Pierce, what’s all this RUBBISH?’ And then she reminded me –
The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (although his methods left much to be desired) found the site of the city of Troy in 1871, by digging EXACTLY WHERE HOMER SAID IT WAS in the ILIAD.
And the ILIAD isn’t a ‘historical document’, it’s a POEM! With gods and goddesses and all the artistic licence of fiction!
It was a thunderstroke! – I still don’t know how I came to miss the re-classification of the Ash documents, but in a very real sense, it doesn’t matter. What matters is, we have physical evidence here at the site that means – WHATEVER some expert has thought about it – the chronicles of Ash’s fifteenth-century actually contain truth. When they mention post-Roman technological ‘golems’, we FIND them. You can’t argue with the evidence.
Truth can be carried down to us through STORY.
It’s all right, Anna. What’s going to happen is, the libraries and the universities will just have to classify the Ash documents BACK to being Non-Fiction.
And Isobel’s expedition and my book will give the incontrovertible evidence of why they must do this.
– Pierce
PART SIX
6 September–7 September AD 1476
‘Fraxinus me fecit’
I
She missed the weight of her hair.
Never having cut it, she had not been aware before that it had a weight: all the hundreds of fine, silver, yard-long strands.
The winds grew colder as they sailed south.
This isn’t right. This isn’t what Angelotti used to tell me about, when he was under the Eternal Twilight; not this cold. It should be getting hotter—
Momentarily, she doesn’t see this ship: sees instead Angelotti, sitting with his back up against the carriage of an organ-gun outside Pisa; hears him say Women in thin, transparent silk robes – not that I care! – and roof-gardens where the heat is reflected in by mirrors; the rich grow vines; one long endless night of wine; and always fireflies. Hotter than this! And she had breathed the sultry, sweating Italian air, watched the blue-green dots of fireflies swell and die, and dreamed of the hot south.
Freezing spray hit her face.
She had not realised, before, how the weight of her hair was with her every day, in every movement, or how it had kept her warm. Now she felt lightheaded, cold about the neck, and bereft. The soldiers of the King-Caliph had left her no more hair than would cover her ears. The whole silver carpet of it had strewn the dock at – where? Genoa? Marseilles? – cut, and trodden into the mud as she was carried aboard, semi-conscious.
Ash flexed her left knee, secretly. A stab of pain went through the joint. She nipped her lip between her teeth, not crying out, and continued the exercise.
The prow of the boat dipped, thudding into the cold waves of the Mediterranean Sea. Salt crusted her lips, stiffened her cropped hair. Ash gripped the stern-rail, rocking with the motion, and stared back, north, away from the lands of the Caliph. A diminishing wake of silver marked their passage on the sea: the reflection of a crescent moon, cleft by their passing.
Two sailors pushed past her, going to the heads. Ash shifted her body. Her left leg would almost support her full weight now.
What happened?
Her nails dug into the wood of the ship’s rail.
What’s happened – to Robert, and Geraint, and Angelotti? What’s happened to Florian, and Godfrey in Dijon? Is Dijon even standing? Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Frustrated, she slammed her hand down on the grained wood. Wind whucked the sails above her head. Nausea threatened to overcome her again. I am tired of feeling sick every damn day!
Stomach empty, light-headed since the wound to her head had been freshly broken open, she still knew from experience that – despite in the past breaking her ribs, her shinbone, and almost all the fingers on her left hand at one time or another – the most dangerous injury she ever had received had been the nazir’s tap with a mace to her knee. The most dangerous because the most likely to disable. Knee joints don’t move that way.
Better, now, than it had been some days ago?
Yes, she concluded tentatively. Yes…
Ash turned her head, gazing down the well of the ship, past the rowers. The nazir who had given the blow, one Theudibert, grinned back at her. A sharp word from the commander of the prisoners‘ escort squad, ’Arif Alderic, recalled him to his duties; which as far as she could see only involved Theudibert in seeing that she did not throw herself overboard, or get herself raped and killed by the ship’s crew – ‘raped’ is probably permissible, she thought, ‘killed’ will get Theudibert into trouble – and otherwise entertain himself until the ship made landfall.
As well, the Visigoth soldier kept her away from the other prisoners aboard. Ash had barely got a word with one or two of them – four women and sixteen men, most of whom were Auxonne merchants by their dress, except for a man who was obviously a soldier, and two old women who looked like swine-herds or chaff-gatherers; no one who could be worth the cost of bringing across the Mediterranean, even as slave labour.
Carthage. It has to be Carthage.1
I never heard any voice. I don’t know what you mean. I never heard any voice!
She glimpsed something ahead, between the lateen sail and the prow, but could not make out enough in the darkness to know if it were land or clouds again. Above, constellations still indicated they sailed south-east.
Ten days? No, fourteen, fifteen, maybe more. Christ, Green Christ, de profundis, what’s happened since they took me? Who won the field?
A tread on the deck alerted her. She looked up. ’Arif-commander Alderic and one of his men approached, the man carrying a bowl of something viscous, white and gruel-like.
“Eat,” the bearded dark Visigoth ’arif ordered. He appeared to be forty or so: a large man.
It had been five days after the battle before her raw, ragged voice came back, and she was able to whisper. Now she could speak normally, apart from her chattering teeth in the cold.
“Not until you tell me where we’re bound. And what’s happened to my troops.”
It was no great effort to decide on a hunger strike, Ash thought, when it was impossible to keep food down. But I shall have to eat, or I’ll be too weak to escape.
Alderic frowned, more in puzzlement than anger. “I was particularly instructed on that point, not to tell you. Come: eat.”
She visualised herself through his eyes – a thin lanky woman with the broad shoulders of a swimmer.2 Cropped silver-fair hair: scalp still clotted bloody where her head had bled ten or fifteen days ago. A woman, but a woman in nothing more than a linen shirt and braies; shivering, dirty, and stinking; and red with lice- and flea-bites. Bandaged at the knee and shoulder. Easy to underestimate?
“Did you serve with the Faris?” Ash asked.
The ’arif took the bowl that his foot-soldier held, motioning the man away with a jerk of one hand. He remained silent. He held it out, with an expression of determination.
Ash took the wooden bowl and scooped up crushed-barley gruel in her filthy fingers. She took a mouthful, swallowed, and waited. Her stomach lurched, but kept it. She licked her fingers, revolted by the bland lack of taste. “Well?”
“Yes, I served with our Faris.” ’Arif Alderic watched her eat. An expression of amusement crossed his face at the speed of it, now she was able to eat without throwing up. “In your lands, and in Iberia, these past six years, where she fought in the Reconquista – taking Iberia back from the Bretons and Navarrese.”3
“She good?”
“Yes.” Alderic’s amusement deepened. “Praise God, and praise her
Stone Golem, she is very good indeed.”
“She win, at Auxonne?”
Alderic began to speak. Got him! she thought. But within a fraction of a second the commander recalled himself and shook his head.
“My instructions are strict. You are to be told nothing. It was no inconvenience, while you were ill. Now you have recovered, somewhat, I feel it…” ’Arif Alderic appeared to be searching for a word. “Discourteous.”
“They want me softened up, before they talk to me. I’d do exactly the same thing.”
Ash watched him carefully not ask her who they might be.
“Okay.” She sighed. “I give up. You’re not going to tell me anything. I can wait. How long before we dock at Carthage?”
The man’s brows rose up, with perfect timing. The ’arif Alderic inclined his head, politely, and said nothing.
Her stomach churned. Ash, with deliberation, leaned out over the leeward rail, and threw up what she had just eaten. It was not policy. Dread and pity mixed in her gut, fearful that she might hear of Dijon fallen, Charles dead – but who cares about a bloody Duke of Burgundy? – and worse, the Lion Azure in the front line, rolled up, broken, burned, crushed; all the faces she knows cold and white and dead on the earth in some southern corner of the Duchy. She gagged, threw up nothing but bile, and leaned back, holding on to the rail to keep herself upright.
“Is your general dead?” she asked suddenly.
Alderic started. “The Faris? No.”
“Then the Burgundians lost the field. Didn’t they?” Ash fixed her gaze on him, stating speculation as certainty: “She wouldn’t be alive if we’d won. It’s two weeks, what can it matter if you tell me? What happened to my people?”
“I’m sorry.” Alderic gripped her arm and lowered her down on to the deck, out of the way of sailors’ running feet. The deck heaved up under her: she swallowed. Alderic gazed back at the steersman and the stern, where the ship’s captain stood. Ash heard something called, but could not distinguish what.
