by Mary Gentle
Vaughan Davies said, ‘No. The month is July, and the year, nineteen forty.’
William leaned over and took the paper away from him. He said, ‘Rubbish. You never were unintelligent. Look around you. You have been in a traumatised state, conceivably since July nineteen forty, but it is now over sixty years from that date. ’
‘Yes,’ Vaughan says, ‘evidently. I was not in a state of trauma, however. Young woman, you should warn your employer. If he continues to pursue his researches, he will end where my researches brought me, and I would not wish that upon my worst enemy – had I one yet alive. ’
He was looking mildly pleased at this point. It took William to point out to me, in a whisper, that Vaughan had just realised that he’d probably outlived all his academic rivals.
William then said, ‘If you weren’t in a state of trauma, where have you been? Where is it that you suspect Doctor Ratcliff will end up? ’
As you know, the paperwork following Vaughan Davies around the asylums is intact. He _is_ William’s brother. The family resemblance is too close for anything else. I mean, we _know_ where he’s been. I wondered where he _thought_ he’d been. California? Australia? The moon? To be honest, if Vaughan had said he’d stepped out of a time machine – or even walked back into our ‘second history’ after visiting your ‘first history’, I don’t think I’d have been surprised!
But time travel isn’t an option. The past is not a country we can visit. And the ‘first history’ doesn’t exist anymore, as you say. It was overwritten; wiped out in the process.
If I’ve understood it, the truth is much less exciting, much more sad.
‘I have been nowhere, ’ Vaughan said. ‘And I have been nothing. ’
He didn’t look sharp anymore, the acidic expression was gone. He just looked like a thin old man in a hospital bed. Then he said impatiently, ‘I have not been real. ’
Something about it, I can’t explain what, it was utterly chilling. William just stared at him. Then Vaughan looked at me.
He said, ‘You seem to have some apprehension of what I mean. Can it be that this Doctor Ratcliff of yours has replicated my work to that degree?’
All I could do was say, ‘Not real?’ For some reason, I thought he meant that he’d been dead. I don’t know why. When I said that, he just glared at me.
‘Nothing so simple,’ he said. ‘Between the summer of nineteen forty and what you claim to be the latter part of the year two thousand, I have been – merely potential. ’
I can’t remember his exact words, but I remember that. Merely potential. Then he said something like:
‘What is unreal may be made real, instant by instant. The universe creates a present out of the unaligned future, produces a past as solid as granite. And yet, young lady, that is not all. What is real may be made unreal, potential, merely possible. I have not been in a state of trauma. I have been in a state of unreality. ’
All I could do was point at him in the bed. ‘And then be made real again?’
He said, ‘Mind your manners, young woman. It is impolite to point.’
That took my breath away, but he didn’t stay vinegary for long. His colour got bad. William rang the bell for the nurse. I stepped back and put my hands behind me, to try and stop aggravating him.
He was grey as a worn bed-sheet, but he still carried on talking. ‘Can you imagine what it might be like, to perceive not only the infinite possible realities that might take shape out of universal probability, but to perceive that you, yourself, the mind that thinks these thoughts – that you are unreal? Only probable, not actual. Can you imagine such a sensation of your own unreality? To know that you are not mad, but trapped in something from which you cannot escape? You say sixty years. For me, it has been one infinite moment of eternal damnation.’
Pierce, the trouble is, I CAN imagine it. I know you need to get Isobel’s theoretical physicists over here to talk to Vaughan Davies, because I don’t have a scientific understanding. But I can imagine it enough to know what made him go grey.
I just stood there, staring at him, trying to stop a hysterical giggle or a shudder, or both; and all I could think was, No one ever asked Schrodinger’s Cat what it felt like while it was in the box.
‘But you’re real _now_, ’ I said. ‘You’re real _again_. ’
He leaned back on the pillow. William was fussing, so I bent down to try and soothe him, and Vaughan’s forearm hit me across the mouth. I’ve never been so shocked. I stood up, about to rip off a mouthful at him, and he hadn’t hit me, his eyes had rolled up in his head, and he was fitting, his arms and legs jerking all over the place.
I ran for a nurse and all but fell over the one coming in the door.
That must have been a couple of hours ago now. I wanted to get it down while it was clear in my memory. I may be out by a few words, but I think it’s as close to the truth as I can get.
You can say it’s senile dementia, or you can say he might have been a boozy old dosser for years and rotted his brain, but I don’t think so. I don’t know if there are words for what happened to him, but if there are, he’s got doctorates in history and the sciences, and he’s the person best qualified to know. If he says he’s existed in a state of probability for the past sixty years, I believe him.
It’s all part of what you said, isn’t it? The Angelotti manuscript vanishing, being classified as history, then Romance, then fiction. And Carthage coming back, where there was no seabed site before.
I wish Vaughan had stayed with it long enough to tell me why he thinks he’s ‘come back’ now. Why NOW?
I’ve been thinking, sitting here. If Vaughan was going to ‘come back’, it’s _possible_ for him to have had amnesia. The same way that it’s _possible_ for him to have vanished without trace. So this is just a different possible state of the universe. This is what he is, now, here – but before ‘now’ was made concrete, it was possible for other things to have happened to him. His disappearance could have meant anything.
It’s one thing to talk about lumps of rock and physical artefacts coming back, Pierce. It’s another thing when it’s a person.
I feel as if nothing under my feet is solid. As if I could wake up tomorrow and the world might be something else, my job would be different, I might not be ‘Anna’, or an editor; I might have married Simon at Oxford, or I might have been born in America, or India, or anywhere. It’s all _possible_. It didn’t happen that way, it isn’t real, but it _might_ have happened.
Like ice breaking up under my feet.
I am frightened.
Vaughan’s old, Pierce. If people are going to talk to him, it ought to be as soon as possible. If he becomes conscious again, and he’s alert, I will ask him about his theory that you mentioned. I’ll have to go by the medical advice. I’ll ask him how he got the Sible Hedingham manuscript. Maybe tomorrow – no, it’s holiday season.
Contact me. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO ABOUT THIS?
– Anna
* * *
Message: #248 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 25/12/00 at 02.37 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Did you get my last message?
Could you get in contact with me, just to reassure me?
– Anna
* * *
Message: #249 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 25/12/00 at 03.01 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Are you downloading your mail? Are you reading your mail? Is anybody reading this?
– Anna
* * *
Message: #250 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 25/12/00 at 07.16 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
These messages must be stacking up. For God’s sake answer.
– Anna
* * *
Message: #251 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 25/12/00 at 09.00 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I have been phoning the British Embassy. I _finally_ got through. No one there is prepared to give me any information. The university switchboard is closed, I can’t get a contact number for Isobel Napier-Grant. I can’t get through to you. No news station wants to know: it’s the holiday. Please ANSWER ME.
– Anna
PART SIXTEEN
26 December AD 1476–5 January AD 1477
Lost Burgundy1
I
“And now,” Ash said, “you need to order my execution.”
Light leaked through the unshuttered windows into the ducal chambers – the feast of Stephen dawning late, to a blistering cold. Freezing damp infested the air, penetrating any bare skin; draughts blew in around the shutters and hangings.
“Are you sure you hear them?” Florian persisted.
‘IT REQUIRES NOTHING BUT TIME NOW: OUR TIME FAST APPROACHES—’
“Yes, I’m sure!” Ash banged her sheepskin mittens together, hoping for feeling in her numb fingers.
“Have you told anyone else yet? That the end of the machina rei militaris means nothing?”
“No. I didn’t want to spoil their party.”
“Ah.” Florian attempted a smile. “That’s what it was. I thought it was a night attack by the Visigoths…”
Her colour altered, and she leaned one arm up against the wall for support, the thin grey light of the dawn illuminating her. The velvet hem of her gown trailed across bare flagstones – no rushes, now. She did not wear the hart’s-horn crown, but the carved Briar Cross hung at her breast, half-lost in her unpointed doublet and the yellow linen of her shirt. Over everything, she wore a great robe made from wolf-pelts, heavy enough to weigh down a man.
“You look rough,” Ash said.
With the growing light, Ash saw that the wall against which the surgeon leaned was painted – richly, as becomes a royal Duke – with figures of men and women and tiny towns on hilltops. Each of the figures danced hand in hand with another: cardinal, carpenter, knight, merchant; peasant, tottering old man, pregnant girl, arid crowned king. Bony hand in their hands, white skeletons led them off, all equal, into death. Florian del Guiz leaned her forehead against the cold stone, oblivious, and rubbed at her stomach under her furs.
“I spent half the night in the garderobe.” An obvious recollection of the slaughter that had made her drink went across the tall woman’s features. “We have to send my brother back to Gelimer today. With an answer that won’t have us attacked before evening. Now this…”
Ash watched Florian pace down the chamber, further from the hearth around which – since it held the palace’s remaining substantial fire – the Duchess was allowing her servants to huddle and sleep.
She forced her mind not to listen to the yammering triumphant whispers of the Wild Machines; followed.
“No—” Florian put up a hand. “No. Your execution would be as irrelevant as the Faris’s.” Her thin face relaxed into a smile. “Stupid woman. You spent time telling me why she shouldn’t die. What about you? What’s different?”
“Because it isn’t her, it’s me.”
“Yes, I think I have realised that,” the scarecrow-thin woman said ironically, and looked at Ash with warm eyes. “After an hour and a half of you going on at me.”
“But—”
“Boss, shut up.”
“It isn’t her, it’s me, and I don’t need the Stone Golem—” Ash’s voice changed.
“If I order your death, I’ve lost the Pucelle, ‘the She-Lion of Burgundy’, the Maid of Dijon—”
“Oh, fucking hell!”
“Don’t blame me for your public image,” Florian snapped, with asperity. “As I was saying. We need you. You told me the Faris was irrelevant; because Burgundy’s bloodline has to survive way beyond her death. Now it has to survive beyond yours! I’m sorry that destroying the machina rei militaris didn’t make a difference.” Her expression altered. “God knows, I’m sorry about Godfrey. But. I need you in the field more than I need you dead.”
“And this makes no difference?”
“I’m not going to order your death.” Florian del Guiz looked away. “And don’t get any stupid ideas about going out on to the field and getting the enemy to do it for you.”
For all its high vaulted roof and pale stone, the ducal chamber pressed in on Ash with acute claustrophobia. She walked to the window and looked at the ice on the inside of it.
“You’re running too great a risk,” Ash said. “This city is on the verge of being overrun. If you’re killed— You needed my sister for what she knows. There’s a dozen commanders here as good as me!”
“But they’re not the Pucelle. Ash, it doesn’t matter what you think you are. Or if it’s justified.”
Florian came to stand beside her at the stone embrasure.
“You didn’t come here expecting me to have you marched off and executed. You know I won’t. You didn’t come here for me to tell you to kill yourself.” Her eyes slitted against the southern glare. “You came here for me to talk you out of it. For me to order you to live.”
“I did not!”
“How long have I known you?” Florian said. “Five years, now? Come on, boss. Just because I love you doesn’t mean I think you’re bright. You want someone else to take responsibility for telling you to stay alive. And you think I’m dumb enough not to notice that.”
Wind from the ill-fitting edges of the window bit into her. The sheepskin huke belted over armour and gown barely warmed her, no more than the coif over her shorn head, under her hood. Ash said, “Maybe it’s just as well I can’t love you the way you want. You’re too smart.”
Florian threw her head back and guffawed loudly enough to make the servants around the hearth stare down the chamber at them.
“What?” Ash demanded. “What?”
“Oh, gallant!” Florian spluttered. “Chivalrous! Oh – fuck it. I’ll take it as a compliment. I’m beginning to feel sorry for my brother.”
Bewildered, Ash repeated, “What?”
“Never mind.” Florian, eyes glowing, touched Ash’s scarred cheek with fingers as cold as frost-bitten stone.
No sensuality was transmitted by that cold touch. What Ash felt answering it, in herself – what stopped her speaking, except for a confused mutter – was a wrenching non-physical desire for closeness. She realised suddenly, Agape.2 Agape, Godfrey would call it: love of a companion. I want to give her trust.
I trusted Godfrey, and look what happened to him.
“You’d better call people up here,” Ash said, “and we’d better talk to them.”
As Florian sent messengers, she scratched with mittened fingers at the ice on the inside of the glass, clearing a patch on the ducal window and peering out. Lemon-yellow, actinic: the sun just cleared the horizon, casting blue-white shadows on the peaked roofs of Dijon below. The valley beyond the walls lay thick with frost.
Long shadows fell away from the sunrise, into the west. Every turf hut, tent, and legion eagle put a blue-black silhouette across the frost. Out on the white brittle ground, men of the III Caralis were beginning to move around: foot units marching sluggishly towards the siege trenches, a squad of cavalry galloping across towards the eastern river and the bridge behind Visigoth lines.
Is that a deployment? Or are they just harassing us?
You could not see, from here, what lay in the dead ground between Dijon’s north gate and the Visigoth siege-lines.
But I doubt they’ve cleared up yesterday’s bodies. Why would they? Far worse for our morale to leave them there to look at.
With no particular hurry, the red granite façades of golem-machinery creaked towards the walls.
“Not an assault yet,” Ash guessed. “He’s just trying to provoke you into complaining they’re breaking the truce.”
Ash snapped her fingers for a page. A boy brought a white ash bowl, steaming wi
th the mulled cider presented, by Dijon’s vintners, in lieu of the wine they no longer had. When he had served the surgeon-Duchess, Ash took a bowl, welcoming the heat of it. She turned back to the window, nodding towards the distant encampment.
“We’ve got their commander. There’s not much we don’t know about them, at the moment,” Ash said dispassionately. “Like, we know they can afford to gallop their cavalry. The Faris tells me they’ve got fodder to spare. Not that I’d do it on that ground, myself – must be rock-hard.” She paused.
“If I were Gelimer, and my army commander had gone over to the enemy, I’d be running around now like a bull with its tail on fire, trying to remove any weaknesses in my deployment before I attacked. So we’ve got a window of opportunity, before he can.”
“Christ,” Florian said behind her. “I have six thousand civilians in this city alone. I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the country. I’m their Duchess. I’m supposed to protect them.”
Ash looked away from the window. Florian was not drinking, only cupping her cold hands around the bowl. The scent of spices made her stomach growl, and Ash lifted her own bowl, and drank. She felt the warmth of it flood her body.
She wanted to put her arm around Florian’s shoulders. Instead, Ash lifted her bowl in salute, giving her a grin that was an embrace.
“I know exactly what we do next,” Ash said. “We surrender.”
The wind took her breath away; so cold that her teeth hurt behind firmly closed lips. A north wind. Her eyes leaked water that froze on her scarred cheeks. Ash moved down off the north wall, into the faint shelter afforded by the walls of the Byward Tower.
“You’re right.” Florian spoke in clipped words. “No one’s going – to overhear us. Not out there.”
“The Wild Machines might hear me…” Ash’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a grin. “But who are they going to tell? ”
