by Mary Gentle
“Christ,” Ash grumbled, under her breath. “This lot aren’t joking. Fuck, Florian!”
“I’m not joking.”
Ash said, “Tell me.”
It was a tone of voice she had used often, over the years, requiring her surgeon to report to her, requiring her friend to tell her the thoughts of her heart; and she shivered, inside padding and armour, at the sudden thought Will I ever talk to Florian like this again?
Floria del Guiz looked down at her red-brown hands. She said, “What did you see? What were you hunting?”
“A hart.” Ash stared at the albino body on the mud. “A white hart, crowned with gold. Sometimes Hubert’s Hart.6 Not this, not until the end.”
“You hunted a myth. I made it real.” Floria lifted her hands to her face, and sniffed at the drying blood. She raised her eyes to Ash’s face. “It was a myth and I made it real enough for dogs to scent. I made it real enough to kill.”
“And that makes you Duchess?”
“It’s in the blood.” The woman surgeon snuffled a laugh back, wiped her brimming eyes with her hands, and left smears of blood across her cheeks. She edged closer to Ash as she stood staring down at the hart, which none of the huntsmen approached for butchering.
More and more of the hunt staggered uphill to the thorn-sided clearing below the crag.
“It’s Burgundy,” Floria said, at last. “The blood of the Dukes is in all of us. However much, however little. It doesn’t matter how far you travel. You can never escape it.”
“Oh yeah. You’re dead royal, you are.”
The sarcasm brought Floria back to something of herself. She grinned at Ash, shook her head, and rapped a knuckle on the Milanese breastplate. “I’m pure Burgundian. It seems that’s what counts.”
“The blood royal. So.” Ash laughed, weakly, from the same overwhelming relief, and pointed a steel-covered finger at the hart’s body. “That’s a pretty shabby-looking miracle, for a royal miracle.”
Floria’s face became drawn. She spared a glance for the growing throng, mutely waiting. The wind thrummed through the whitethorn. “No. You’ve got it wrong. The Burgundian Dukes and Duchesses don’t perform miracles. They prevent them being performed.”
“Prevent—”
“I know, Ash. I killed the hart, and now I know.”
Ash said sardonically, “Finding a hart, out of season, in a wood with no game; this isn’t a miracle?”
Olivier de la Marche came a few steps closer to the hart. His battle-raw voice said, “No, Demoiselle-Captain, not a miracle. The true Duke of Burgundy – or, as it now seems, the true Duchess – may find the myth of our Heraldic Beast, the crowned hart, and from it bring this. Not miraculous, but mundane. A true beast, flesh and blood, as you and I.”
“Leave me.” Floria’s voice was sharp. She gestured the Burgundian noble to go back, staring up at him with bright eyes. He momentarily bowed his head, and then stepped back to the edge of the crowd and waited.
Watching him go, colour caught Ash’s eye. Blue and gold. A banner bobbed over the heads of the crowd.
Shamefaced, Rochester’s sergeant plodded out to stand beside Ash with her personal banner. Willem Verhaecht and Adriaen Campin shouldered their way through to the front row, faces taking on identical expressions of relief as they saw her; and half the men at their backs were from Euen Huw’s lance, and Thomas Rochester’s.
In all her confusion, Ash was conscious of a searing relief. No assault on the Visigoth camp, then. They’re alive. Thank Christ.
“Tom – where are the fucking Visigoths! What are they doing?”
Rochester rattled off: “’Bout a bow-shot back. Messenger came up. Their officers are in a right panic over something, boss—”
He broke off, still staring at the company surgeon.
Floria del Guiz knelt down by the white hart. She touched the rip in its white coat.
“Blood. Meat.” She held her red hands up to Ash. “What the Dukes do… I do … isn’t a negative quality. It makes, it – preserves. It preserves what’s true, what’s real. Whether…” Floria hesitated, and her words came slowly: “Whether what’s real is the golden light of the Burgundian forest, or the splendour of the court, or the bitter wind that bites the peasant’s hands, feeding his pigs in winter. It is the rock upon which this world stands. What is real.”
Ash stripped off her gauntlet and knelt beside Floria. The coat of the hart was still warm under her fingers. No heartbeat; the flow of blood from the death-wound had stopped. Beyond the body, not flowers, but muddy earth. Above her, not roses, but winter thorn and rowan.
Making the miraculous mundane.
Ash said slowly, “You keep the world as it is.”
Looking up into Floria’s face, she surprised anguish.
“Burgundy has its bloodline, too. The machines bred Gundobad’s child,” Floria del Guiz said. “And this is an opposite. The Machines want a miracle to wipe out the world, and I – I make it remain sure, certain, and solid. I keep it what it is.”
Ash took Floria’s cold wet hand between her own hands. She felt an immediate withdrawal that was not physical: only Floria giving her a look that said, What happens now? Everything is different between us.
Sweet Christ. Duchess.
Slowly, her eyes on Floria’s face, Ash said, “They had to breed a Faris. So that they could attack Burgundy the only way it can be attacked: on the physical, military level. And when Burgundy is removed … then they can use the Faris. Burgundy is only the obstacle. Because ‘winter will not cover all the world’ – won’t cover us here, not while the Duke’s bloodline prevents the Faris making a miracle.”
“And now there’s no Duke, but there is a Duchess.”
Ash felt Floria’s hands trembling in hers. The hazy overcast cleared, the white autumn sun throwing the shadows of thorns sharp and clear on the mud. Five yards beyond the sprawled body of the white hart, rank upon rank of people waited patiently. The men of the Lion company watched their commander, and their surgeon.
Floria, her eyes slitted against the sudden brilliance of the sun, said, “I do what Duke Charles did. I preserve; keep us quotidian. There’ll be no Wild Machines’ ‘miracles’ – as long as I’m alive.”
Message: #350 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 03.23 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I know. It seems unbelievable. But it appears to be nothing less than the truth. No previous survey shows this sea trench. Not before we started looking here.
Isobel brought one of the tech people to the meeting I’ve just come out of, and showed us downloaded satellite surveys. Not that there are many, the Tunisian military being as sensitive as any other military – but what we have are unambiguous.
Shallow water here. No deep trenches below the 1000-metre mark.
And yet, our ROVs are down there now, as I’m typing this.
I don’t like this, Anna. The Middle East and the Mediterranean have been far too closely surveyed to say, now, that this could all be down to lost or misinterpreted evidence, distorted analysis, fake documents, or fraud.
I cannot genuinely deny this. According to recent satellite scans, and according to British Admiralty charts, the seabed where we found the trench used to be flat. Not silt, not a trench; nothing but rock. God knows, given the submarine warfare in the Mediterranean sixty years ago, the Admiralty charts are pretty substantive! It isn’t a geological feature anyone could have missed.
I have just suggested, in Isobel’s meeting, that we look for seismograph readings: there may have been a recent earthquake. She tells me that’s what she’s been doing over the last ten days: pulling in all the favours she has with various colleagues, to check the most up-to-date satellite reports and geological surveys.
No earthquake. Not so much as an undersea tremor.
I’ll post to you again when I have had some time to think this over – it’s only been a few hours since I
sobel called her meeting; she and her physicist colleagues are still at it, talking into the small hours of the morning.
I went up on deck. Looked into blackness, tasted wet air. Tried to come to terms with this idea – a hundred ideas going around in my own mind – no: I’m not making sense.
One line of Florian’s haunts me. Mediaeval Latin translation can be hell – is ‘dn’ an abbreviation for _dominus_ or _domina_: masculine or feminine? Or it is in fact ‘dm’, for _deum_? Context is all, handwriting is all; and even then a sentence may have two or three perfectly viable different translations, only *one* of which is what the author wrote!
I _know_ the ‘hand’ of Fraxinus/Sible Hedingham: I have for eight years. I can’t realistically make it read anything else.
What Floria says *is* “You hunted a myth. I made it real.”
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #199 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 05.14 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
_Physicists_?
Just checked back in your mailings, and yes, you did mention this before. I missed it. Why has an archaeologist like Dr Isobel got physicists with her? Is it purely a ‘social’ visit, Pierce? It doesn’t look like it.
I really don’t want to ask this, but I need her to mail me to confirm what you’re saying.
I wouldn’t take one person’s word for this. Not even my mother’s.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #365 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 06.05 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
The physicists? Tami Inoshishi and James Howlett: Isobel’s friends from artificial intelligence and theoretical physics. I suppose they’re here quasi-unofficially, at her request? They’ve been offering help to the expedition – they desperately want to get the Stone Golem up, and off-site, for examination – tests at CERN, the whole works.
I’ve been trying to talk to them, but they’re astonishingly dismissive. Or perhaps preoccupied. The strange thing is that Ms Inoshishi isn’t at all interested in the concept that the machina rei militaris may be a primitive ‘computer’ of some sort, and Howlett isn’t really interested in the golems that we found at the land-site.
What they *are* interested in are my chronicle texts, and the seabed surveys.
They seem very interested in the concept of evidence changing.
What I find disturbing, I suppose, is that when I speculate that the nature of the del Guiz and Angelotti documentary evidence may have undergone some kind of a _genuine_ change, they take me seriously.
Talk to me, Anna. You’re a person who’s not here, not caught up in the enthusiasm. Do I sound mad to you?
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #202 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 06.10 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
*Are* Ms Inoshishi and Mr Howlett there in an official capacity? It sounds as though they are colleagues of Dr Napier-Grant there in a private capacity. Is she going to report back to her university soon? What’s going to happen _officially_?
Pierce – what do _you_ think of all this? My head is spinning.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #372 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 08.12 p.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I don’t think. I have nothing like enough evidence as yet to allow me to think.
Anything else would be unfounded speculation.
I’m going to be busy with the people here; I will get back to you as soon as I can.
And I’m going to continue translating.
I have a further section of reasonably adequately translated material from the Sible Hedingham ms, I’ll attach the files with this message.
I need to resolve some of the apparent anomalies in the next part of the text. I feel that I cannot say anything definite until the whole of the Sible Hedingham ms has been translated.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #204 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 10.38 p.m.
From: Longman@
Enough shit, Pierce (pardon my French). Enough havering, enough sitting on the fence–
You’ve got Dr Isobel’s friends there on the ship, she obviously thought it was important enough to call scientists in; there are maps that don’t show the site you’ve found on the seabed; Pierce, _what do you believe is happening_?
Enough academic caution. Tell me. Now.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #376 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 15/12/00 at 11.13 p.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I am forced to believe a whole series of self-contradictory facts.
– That the Angelotti and del Guiz texts have been classified as ‘Fiction’ for the past fifty years – and yet, Anna, when I last consulted them a few months ago, they were shelved under normal Late Mediaeval History.
– That the ‘Fraxinus’ text is a genuine fifteenth-century biography of Ash, that has enabled us to find evidence of post-Roman technology in a ‘Visigoth’ settlement, and the ruins of a ‘Carthage’, on the Mediterranean seabed – and yet, that when we study the previous sixty years of surveys, there is no geological feature on that seabed that matches the one we have found. And there has been no recent seismic activity that could have produced it.
– That a ‘messenger-golem’ with wear-marks _on the soles of its feet_ can be classified, by a reputable department of metallurgy, as a fake made after 1945 – and now as a genuine artefact with its bronze cast between five and six centuries ago.
Because I’ve now actually seen the report, Anna. What they’re presenting isn’t an apology for a mistake.
It is two sets of readings, two weeks apart, that imply completely different conclusions.
The altered status of the ‘Ash’ documentation is one thing – I’ve been e-mailing curators: there are known artefacts no longer in display cases, the ‘Ash sallet’ has vanished from Rouen, both the helmet AND the catalogue entry.
What is missing is not half so disturbing as what is here.
You see, Anna, I had begun to have a theory. Simply, that there was *something* that needed explaining.
I’ll be honest. Anna, I KNOW the ‘Ash’ documents were authentic history when I first studied them. Whatever I may have said about errors of re-classification, you will remember that I found myself completely unable to explain it in any satisfactory way. I think that I _had_ almost come to believe in Vaughan Davies’s theory out of sheer desperation – that there actually has been a ‘first history’ of the world, which was wiped out in some fashion, and that we now inhabit a ‘second history’, into which bits of the first have somehow survived. That Ash’s history was first genuine, and has now been – fading, if you like – to Romance, to a cycle of legends.
So I had reached a conclusion, before the last ten days. I had thought that, since neither Ash’s Burgundy, nor the Visigoth Empire in North Africa, had any evidence that hadn’t been thoroughly discredited at that point – well, how could I say this to you? I had begun to think that perhaps they *were* from a ‘previous version’ of our past, growing less real by the decade. A previous past history in which the text’s ‘miracle’ *did* take place. In which the Faris and the ‘Wild Machines’ (or whatever it is those literary metaphors represent) triggered some kind of alteration in history. Or, to put it in scientific terms, a previous past history in which the possible subatomic states of the universe were (deliberately and consciously) collapsed into a different reality – the one we now inhabit.
Vaughan Davies’s theory is just that: a theory. And yet we have to f
ind truth somewhere. Remember that, whatever he is now, when he was a young man he _knew_ Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg; if the biographers are to be believed, he debated with them on equal terms. He did not know – and nor have I been much aware of, until I talked to James Howlett today – the work of the succeeding scientific generation on quantum theory and the various versions of the anthropic principle.
Perhaps I’ve taken on too much of the mediaeval world-view: to find a respected physicist listening to me seriously when I ask if ‘deep consciousness’ might change the universe – I find it unnerving! I try to follow James when he talks about the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds model … with rather less than the average numerate layman’s understanding, I fear.
Although even he, with all his many-branching multiverses from each collapsing quantum moment, can’t answer two questions.
The first is, why would there be only _one_ great ‘fracture of history’, as Davies called it? Mainstream quantum theory calls for continuous fracture, as you once wrote to me: a universe in which you simultaneously perform every action, moral and immoral. An endlessly branching tree of alternate universes, from every single second of time.
And, even if that point were adequately answered, even if we knew that only one great quantum restructuring of the universe had taken place, as some versions of the anthropic quantum model demand – that by observing our universe now, we have in a sense _created_ the Big Bang ‘back then’, and what we observe of the cosmos now… Anna, why would there be evidence _left over_ from before the fracture? A previous state of the universe has *no* existence, not even a theoretical one!
James Howlett has just looked over my shoulder, shaken his head, and gone off to fight with his software models of mathematical reality. No, I dare say I don’t give even an adequate layman’s explanation of what he’s been trying to tell me.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a historian: despite the fact that we experience only the present, I retain a superstitious conviction that the past exists – that it has been _real_. And yet we know nothing but this single present moment… What I had suggested to James Howlett was that the remaining contradictory evidence – the Angelotti and del Guiz manuscripts – would be anomalies from previous quantum states, becoming less and less ‘possible’ – less *real*. Turning from mediaeval history into legend, into fiction. Fading into impossibility.
