Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  Isn’t this exciting? I’m so happy to be involved, even if it is only long-distance!

  Love,

  Anna

  * * *

  Message: #187 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 13/12/00 at 06.59 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  I NEED THE REST OF THE TRANSLATION.

  Theories are all very well, Pierce, but

  No. It doesn’t matter. Something did happen, IS happening. Isn’t it? I’ll tell you why I know –

  I came home tonight, about half an hour ago, and flaked out in front of the TV, which happened to be on local news. I get London local, or East Anglian. By sheer chance I was on East Anglian news. The lead story was a human interest piece on a war veteran reunited with his long-lost brother after sixty years.

  I heard half of it – no names – sat up and stared – picked up the phone, thought who can I call, and realised: there was a message waiting for me.

  I’ve just played it. It’s William Davies. Such a kind, formal voice, speaking to the empty air of an answering machine. He wants to know if I would like to speak to his brother, Vaughan. Vaughan has ‘been away’. Now he’s back.

  No, I don’t want to, I want YOU to fly back to England and talk to him, Pierce. This isn’t me, this isn’t what I do. I’m an editor, not a journalist or historian, and I don’t think I even want to go near him. He’s YOUR baby. YOU do it.

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #188 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 13/12/00 at 07.29 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  Answer my message!

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #189 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 13/12/00 at 09.20 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  Read your bloody mail!!!

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #192 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 14/12/00 at 10.31 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  Where the hell are you?

  Well, I did it. I drove out to the old people’s home this evening, and I saw William Davies and his brother Vaughan. Two very elderly gentlemen, with nothing much to say to each other. That’s sad, don’t you think?

  Vaughan Davies isn’t frightening. Just elderly. And senile. He’s lost his memory – as the result of a wartime trauma, bombed in the Blitz. He’s not a distinguished academic any more.

  It seems the amnesia is genuine. William is a surgeon, and of course he has all his old medical contacts, even though he is retired, so Vaughan has been checked up in the best hospital in England, by the best neurosurgeons. Amnesia after traumatic shock. Basically, he got blown up, got picked out of the rubble, didn’t know who he was, was put in a home after the Second World War, forgotten, and then chucked out on the streets a few years back for ‘care in the community’.

  The police eventually picked him up when he appeared in Sible Hedingham and tried to get into his old house. He’s pretty gaga, and no one would have known who he was, except one of the family who own Hedingham Castle was there the third or fourth time he tried this, and finally recognised him.

  This is a dead end, Pierce. He doesn’t remember editing the second edition of ASH. He doesn’t remember being an academic. When he talks to William, he thinks they are still fifteen and living with their parents in Wiltshire. He doesn’t understand why William is ‘old’. His own face in a mirror distresses him. William just pats his brother’s hand, and tells him he’ll be all right now. It made me cry to listen to him.

  Sometimes I don’t like myself much. I don’t like myself because he’s a real person, who has suffered appallingly; and his brother is a sweet old man who I’m fond of.

  FFS, Pierce, why aren’t you checking your mail!

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #322 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 14/12/00 at 10.51 p.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  I can’t leave here now. I can’t take the time away from this translation! You will see why. Am sending the next section.

  Talk to Vaughan Davies again, for me. _Please._ If he is *at all* coherent, ask him: what was his theory about a ‘connection’ between the ASH documents and the history – our history – that superseded it? Ask him what it was that he was going to publish after his second edition!

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #196 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 14/12/00 at 11.03 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  ARE YOU MAD?

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #333(Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 14/12/00 at 11.32 p.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  No, I’m not mad.

  It’s late, here. Too late to do any more translation tonight, and besides, I am too tired to think in English, never mind in dog-Latin. I’m sending you what I have complete. Dawn tomorrow I’ll carry on, but for now, I owe you an explanation of why I’m not flying back to Gatwick, and here it is.

  I have at last been shown the Admiralty charts of this area of the Mediterranean. As you might expect, given the sheer amount of submarine activity during the last war, their charts of the seabed are extensively detailed, and accurate.

  None of them show any kind of a ‘trench’ on the sea-floor in this location.

  – Pierce

  PART TWELVE

  16 November AD 1476

  The Hunting of the Hart1

  I

  “There’s a fucking army outside the walls,” Ash yelled, “and you think you’re just going to go out and hunt some animal?”

  Olivier de la Marche brought his big chestnut stallion around, avoiding rubble, and answered her question between orders to the throng of huntsmen. “Demoiselle-Captain, we ride now. We must have a Duke.”

  Ash, looking at his weather-beaten features under his visor, recognised a capable man with much to organise, and also something else; some quality of abstraction that she realised to be present now everywhere in these ravaged streets.

  The blitzed great square behind Dijon’s north wall must have three thousand people in it now, to her quick calculation: and more coming in every minute. Knights mounted on horseback, archers running with messages, huntsmen and their varlets, and couple upon couple of running-hounds. But most – she squinted her eyes against the morning sun falling between the burnt-out timbers of buildings – wet, and blackened from fire – mostly women and men in drab clothes. Shopkeepers. Apprentices. Farming families: peasants taking refuge from the devastated countryside. Wine-makers and cheese-sellers, shepherds and small girl-children. All of them bundled up in their layers of neatly mended, muddy woollen tunics, gowns, and cloaks; faces bitten red and white by the wind. Most of them solemn, or abstracted. For the first time in months, not flinching in anticipation of falling stone or iron.

  And quiet. The noise of her own men walking and riding back in was the loudest noise, audible over the whining of the hounds. Her rough voice, and the single passing-bell, were all else that broke the almost complete silence.

  “If there are Burgundians among your mercenaries,” Olivier de la Marche concluded, “they may hunt with us.”

  Ash shook her head. The pale bay gelding, abruptly alert to her movement, skittered a step sideways in the mud and broken cobbles. She brought him under control. “But who inherits the Dukedom?”

  “One of the royal ducal bloodline.”

  “Which one?”

  “We will not know, until they are chosen by means of the hunting of the Hart. Demoiselle-Captain, come if you will; if not, keep the walls and watch the
truce!”

  Ash exchanged glances with Antonio Angelotti as the Duke’s deputy rode off towards the houndsmen. “‘The hunting of the hart’… Am I crazy, or are they?”

  Before Angelotti could answer, a tall scarecrow figure approached, pushing its hood back. Floria del Guiz beat her sheepskin mittens together against the bitter wind.

  “Ash!” she called cheerfully. “Robert has a dozen men who need to speak to you about the hunt. Should he bring them from the tower, or will you go to him?”

  “Here.” Ash dismounted, the steel and leather war saddle creaking. The tension of the Faris’s camp released itself, momentarily, in aching muscles, under her armour.

  Down at ground-level, she became more aware of the men and women packing into the square. They walked quietly, most not speaking; a few with expressions of grief. Where they were forced by the devastation of the narrow winding streets to crowd together, she saw how they courteously stepped aside, or gave a nod of apology. The Burgundian men-at-arms, that she expected to see using their bills to hold the crowd back under control, were standing in small clusters watching the flood of humanity go past them. Some of them exchanged brief comments with the peasants.

  Many of the women held lit tapers carefully between their cupped hands.

  “This silence… I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  There were two women behind Floria, Ash now saw; one in the green robes of a soeur, and one in a stained, grubby white hennin. As the press lessened around her and the bay gelding, she could see their faces. Soeur-Maîtresse Simeon, and Jeanne Châlon.

  “Florian…” Bewildered, she turned back to her surgeon.

  Floria looked up from sending a baggage-train child back with a message. “Robert says the dozen or so Flemings who stayed with us after the split, they want permission to ride in the hunt. I’m riding too.”

  Ash said sceptically, “And when was the last time you thought of yourself as Burgundian?”

  “This does not matter.” The Soeur-Maîtresse’s fat white face did not look disapprovingly at Ash; rather, sadly, and with no condemnation. “Your doctor has been ill-treated by her homeland; but this draws all of us together.”

  Ash caught Jeanne Châlon looking at her without bitterness. Tears had reddened the rims of her eyes. That or the cold wind kept her sniffling. Amazingly, she had her arm linked in Floria’s.

  “I can’t believe he’s dying,” she croaked. Ash felt her throat tighten in involuntary sympathy with the woman’s plain grief. Jeanne Châlon added, “He was our heart. God lays His sternest burdens on His most faithful servant… God in His mercy knows how we shall miss him!”

  Apart from the Soeur-Maîtresse, Ash suddenly realised, she was seeing no priests out on the streets. The single bell continued to toll. Every ordained priest must be in the palace, with the dying Charles; and she felt a curious impulse to ride there, and wait for the news of his final passing.

  “I was born here,” Floria said. “Yes, I’ve lived away. Yes, I’m outcast. All the same, Ash, I want to see the new Duke chosen. I wasn’t in Burgundy; I was abroad when Philip died and Charles hunted. I’m going to do it now, whether—” and her eyes became small with the constriction of reckless, bitter humour on her face: “—whether I think it’s rubbish, or not. I’m still going!”

  Ash felt the cold wind redden her nose. A drop of clear liquid ran down. She unbuckled her purse to take out her kerchief, and, having given herself time to think – time to look at the hunters, the archers in the liveries of Hainault and Picardy mounting up; even the refugee French knight Armand de Lannoy standing ready with grooms and a group of Burgundian nobles – Ash wiped her nose vigorously and said, “I’m coming with you. Robert and Geraint can look after the shop.”

  Antonio Angelotti spoke down from the saddle of his scraggy grey. “But if the Visigoths don’t keep the truce, madonna!”

  “The Faris has her own reasons for keeping this truce. I’ll brief you after this.” Her tone lightened. “Come on, Angeli. The lads are getting bored. I’m going to show them we don’t have to sit inside Dijon like we’re terrified. Good for morale!”

  “Not if they stick your head on a spear, madonna.”

  “I don’t suppose that would improve my morale, no…” Ash turned as the child messenger threaded her way back through the polite crowd, Robert Anselm and a number of men-at-arms behind her. “What’s the request here?”

  Pieter Tyrrell stood behind Anselm, his maimed hand in its specially sewn leather glove tucked behind his belt. His face under his archer’s sallet looked white. With him, Willem Verhaecht and his lance second, Adriaen Campin, seemed equally stunned.

  “We didn’t think he was going to die, boss,” Tyrrell said, not needing to explain who he referred to. “We’d like to ride the hunt in memory. I know it’s a siege, but…”

  The older Willem Verhaecht said, “A dozen of my men are Burgundian by birth, boss. It’s respect.”

  “He was a good employer,” the lance second added.

  Ash surveyed the men. A pragmatic part of her mind said, A dozen men either way won’t save us if the Visigoths turn treacherous, and the rest of her responded, in the weak morning sunlight, to the effect of the immense press of people and the almost total silence.

  “If you put it that way,” she said, “yes, it’s respect. He knew what he was doing. Which is more than you can say for most of the sad bastards who pay us. Okay: permission granted. Captain Anselm, you and Morgan and Angelotti will hold the tower. If there’s treachery, stand ready to have the city gates open – we’ll be coming back in a hurry!”

  A quiet appreciative chuckle went round the group. Willem Verhaecht turned to organising his men. Robert Anselm’s mouth shut in a firm line. Ash caught his eye.

  “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Yes, you do. You hear grief.” Instinctively, Ash kept her voice at a low conversational tone. She pointed to where, among the huntsmen and hounds, Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance stood with Olivier de la Marche; all of them surrounded by their men; all of them bareheaded now in the autumn day. “If this city’s going to stand, they need a successor to Charles. If he dies and there’s no one – then this is over: Dijon will fall tomorrow.”

  Over the slight susurrus of the crowd, the noise of the single bell came clearly. Ash glanced up at the peaked roofs. She could not see the twin spires of the abbey. They’ll be anointing him, giving him the last sacrament.

  The back of her neck prickled with anticipation, waiting for the second and final peal to begin. Dead before midday, the huntsman thinks. And it’s got to be past the fourth hour of the morning now…

  “What about the Faris?” Robert Anselm rumbled.

  “Oh. She’s sending an escort with the hunt,” Ash said wryly.

  “An escort?” Anselm’s bullish, stubbled face looked bewildered. He shook his head dismissively. “That’s not what I meant. When he dies – is she Gundobad’s child? Can she do a miracle?”

  “I don’t think even she knows.”

  “And do you know, girl?”

  The pale gelding butted Ash’s pauldron. She reached up absently and firmly stroked its muzzle. It lipped at her gauntlet.

  “Roberto… I don’t know. She hears the Wild Machines. They speak to her. And if they speak to her—” She switched her gaze to Robert Anselm’s brown gaze, under pinched, frowning brows. “If they made me turn around and walk to them – then, whatever she’s capable of, they can make her do that, too.”

  There were no last hedgerow flowers in this ravaged autumn, but she could smell evergreen branches, and pine-sap: half the men and women in the crowd were wearing home-made green garlands. Ash stands where she has stood so often before: among a group of her officers, familiar faces; horses being held by the company’s grooms; men-at-arms in Lion livery sorting themselves out and swapping kit between them.

  Everything’s different now.

  They watch her with
more seriousness than they would give to the morning of battle.

  “The Faris is frightened. I may have frightened her all the way back to Carthage – but I don’t know,” Ash said thoughtfully. “She’s heard the Wild Machines say winter will not cover all the world, unless Burgundy falls. But what she’s lived under is the Eternal Twilight – I don’t know if she really understands that they want everything black and freezing and dead.”

  Her gaze went above the silent crowd and the ruined roofs, towards the sun, for reassurance.

  “I’ve been forced by them. She hasn’t. She thinks it can’t happen to her. So I don’t know if she can bring herself to harm the Stone Golem. Even now that she knows it’s the only way the Wild Machines can get at her.”

  Robert Anselm completed her thought: “It’s what she’s depended on, in the field, for ten years.”

  “It’s her life.” Ash’s scarred face twisted in a grin. “And it isn’t mine. I’d blow the Golem sky-high – but I’m not there. So that doesn’t leave me much of an option.”

  Her mind recovering itself, she found herself with a plan rapidly falling together under the stimulus of that demand. “Robert, Angeli, Florian. I said to the Faris, one Duke’s as good as another. But I can be wrong. If the Wild Machines only need Charles dead – then we’re about to find out what that means.”

  Ash made an effort, ignored the silent crowd.

  “Let’s hope the Visigoths have got all their attention on this hunt. Damn us riding with it – I’m going to lead a snatch-squad. Once we’re outside the area, we’re going to slip away from the hunt, come back to the Goth camp, and make an attempt to kill the Faris.”

  “We’re dead,” Anselm said brutally. “If you took the whole company, you wouldn’t get through thousands of men!”

  Ash, not at all contradicting him, said authoritatively, “Okay: we’ll take the whole company – all those with mounts, anyway. Roberto, the Faris can declare a truce, but there could be an armed mutiny going on out there before midday. The hunt could turn into a slaughter. If we want to kill the Faris – this is going to be the only chance to get outside the walls and try.”