by Mary Gentle
Major Asche took the steel flask and drank from it. She wiped her mouth, her dark eyes still fixed on me. The wind moved her short hair against her scarred cheeks.
“I’m not history,” she pointed out mildly. “I’m here.”
“You are now.”
She continued to watch me. Somewhere back in the woods, shots cracked. She glanced back at Sergeant Anselm, who held up a reassuring hand. She nodded. Far out on the muddy plain, hover-tanks nosed into view.
I asked, “How long have you been here?”
Raised eyebrows. A slantwise look. “About two days. For the duration of this, I’m stuck in a military tent about two miles that way.”
“That isn’t what I mean. Or perhaps it is.” I called up data on my wristpad, and read through it, slowly. It was sparse. “I think you have a ‘ghost-history’, if I can put it that way. You’re very young to have achieved the rank of major. But war is a time of rapid promotions. You grew up in Afghanistan, under the Taliban. Their attitude to women is – mediaeval. You joined resistance forces, learned to fight; and when that was crushed, you joined the bushwars on the borders. There, all that was necessary was that you be able to lead. To command. By the time you were sixteen, they’d made you a captain. When the Eastern European forces united with the RRFU, you joined Unite.”
Net footage of the fighting along the Sino-Russian border is still clear in my mind.
“At the end of the Sino-Russian war, two years ago, you’d made major.” I looked up from the little wrist-screen and the scrolling data. “But I’m fully prepared to believe that you’ve only been here two days, in a military tent, in a field somewhere.”
Major Asche gave me a long look.
“Let’s walk.” She set off briskly. “Roberto! Where’s the fucking helicopters? Do they think we’re going to wait around here all day? We need to move up within the hour.”
As we passed him, Robert Anselm grinned at her. “Don’t fret, boss.”
The new grass was slippery underfoot. I was not wearing boots. Cold- and wet-footed, I quickened my stride to keep up with her. We passed a truck, unloading armed soldiers; and she stopped for a word with the corporal before moving on down the track.
“You get a mixed force in Unité,” she remarked. “That lot are mostly Welsh and English. I’ve got a gang of local Brussels lads; and a lot of East and West Germans. And a lot of Italians.”
She flicked a look at me out of the corner of her eye. There was still a quiet amusement in her expression. I looked back at the men, only to find – camouflaged; expert – that they had merged into the edge of the wood.
“What was that corporal’s name, that you were speaking to?”
“Rostovnaya.”
“Is the whole company here?” I said, without thinking, and then she was looking at me, shaking her head, her eyes bright.
“All but the dead,” she said. “All but the dead. Life and death are real, Professor Ratcliff. There are faces I miss.”
I began to see tents, up ahead, in a clearing at the side of the track. Green military tents. Armed men, and men in white overalls, ran from tent to tent.
“Angelotti. Rickard. Euen Huw.” She shook her head. “But we came so close to losing everybody.”
“I think I know what’s been happening,” I said. “Why you’re back. Burgundy’s – failed. I suppose.”
She stopped, boots in one of the ruts, the creamy brown mud halfway up her ankles, looking ahead at the tents.
I said, “Time moves differently closer to the probability wave. The moment in which you and the Wild Machines both calculated, powered, and willed human history to change – is ending. Has ended. You’ve managed to bypass the immediate danger. But the process by which that happened is withering away. Fragments of the true past are fitting in among the interstices of the past we know – it’s possible to foresee a time when the history that we know of Burgundy will be the history of ‘Ash’s Burgundy’.”
She smiled at that.
I went on, “But it’s over. Isn’t it? I believe that we have been in the process, over the last six or eight years, of reintegration with Lost Burgundy. Burgundy’s gone, hasn’t it?” I said. “We’re not protected any more.”
“Oh, we are.”
She gave me that grin, head cocked, eyes creasing and bright; and she was, for one moment, as I had seen her in my mind as I read the manuscripts: the woman in armour, dirty, pragmatic, unable to be crushed down.
“I don’t understand.”
A fair-haired woman in a white overall walked towards us down the track. The wind made her slit her eyes, but I could see that they were green. She had had her head shaven and stitched at some time in the recent past: the visible scars of removed stitches, and the fluff of her regrowing hairline were clearly visible under her cap.
“The amirs’ medicine was better than ours,” Asche said to me. “Why shouldn’t someone else’s be better than theirs?”
Death is a fuzzy-edged boundary, too.
The women glanced from me to Major Asche. “This is the boffin?”
“That’s right.”
The name tape on the breast of her overall read DEL GUIZ.
“You tell him where your sister is, yet?”
“Sure.”
The scarecrow-tall woman turned back to me. For all the pallor of her cheeks, she was smiling. “This one flew down to Dusseldorf, yesterday. On a military flight. She had to see them.”
“My sister has two children,” Asche said, gravely mischievous. “Violante, and Adelize.”
Asche smiled.
“Violante keeps rats. I’ll go down again soon. We’ve got stuff to say to each other.”
The woman who must be Floria del Guiz said briskly, as if I wasn’t present, “Ratcliff will want to interview all of us. Clerks always do. I’ll be in the med tent. Some other bloody fool decided to get out of a counter-gravity tank before it landed. That’s four. Christ! Nobody tell me soldiers are bright.”
Major Asche, with demure humility, said, “I wouldn’t dare.”
Floria del Guiz stomped back towards the tents, with a wave that might – if a senior officer had appeared – have become a salute.
“I would have given anything,” Asche said, and I saw that her fist was clenched at her side, “to have all of them here now. And Godfrey. And Godfrey. But death is real. It’s all real.”
“But for how long?”
“You haven’t got it yet, have you?” Asche looked amused.
“Got what?”
“We came back,” Asche said. “I thought we would. But they stayed.”
At the time, I merely stared at her. It is not until now that I have developed a theory: that organic matter and organic mind are inevitably ‘sucked back’, if you like, into the human species-mind, into the main part of reality, away from the ‘forward edge’. Because they are human, and organic And that she must – with all that computing power at her disposal – have realised this.
“‘They stayed’?”
“The Wild Machines,” Asche said, as if it were obvious enough for a child to have seen it.
And I saw it. The Wild Machines.
“Yes.” A wind rustled; spent rain fell from the pine trees and spattered my face. I stared at the woman in combat fatigues, with the grin on her face. “I suppose I assumed that— there’s no reason to assume it! No reason to suppose that the Wild Machine silicon-intelligences were destroyed when you – did what you did.”
What more likely than that Lost Burgundy contains them, as well as the nature of Burgundy, within itself? Contains the presence of immense, intelligent, calculating power. If Lost Burgundy exists in an eternal moment, without time, but with duration, this does not preclude the idea that the machine-intelligences might ‘still’ be functioning. Linear time is not relevant where they exist.
Immense natural machine intelligences, monitoring the probability wave, keeping all possibility of miracle-working out of the Real. Their perception mo
re vast than human; their power inorganic and endless, tapping into the fabric of the universe. Maintaining, unchanging.
“They couldn’t move there themselves,” Asche said. “We made a miracle and I moved all of us. All of us. Carthage too. And now they’re out there – wherever – doing what Burgundy did. The Wild Machines are Burgundy now.”
The wind rattled again in the trees, and became the noise of helicopter rotors. She reached for the RT set in her top pocket but didn’t respond. She squinted up above the tree-tops, into the clearing blue sky.
“They knew it would happen,” she said. “When I told them what I planned to do. They consented. They’re machines. Godfrey would say my hell – the eternal moment – is their heaven.”
The arc of her, and their, ‘moment’ covers five hundred years of intense scientific discovery. As a race, we have alleviated some of human suffering, while at the same time committing the grossest atrocities. Lost Burgundy, then, does not limit human choices; we are free to choose whatever we perceive of good and evil.
“Lost Carthage?” I suggested.
“A lost and golden moment,” the woman said.
Above our heads, a helicopter dipped towards the clearing; and all speech became impossible until it had landed. A young man in combat fatigues jumped down and began sprinting towards us through the mud.
“Boss, they need you over at grid— is the radio down?” he interrupted himself. Long-boned, hardly more than adolescent. “Major Rodiani wants you! So does Colonel Valzacchi.”
As I watched her, she gave a slow, amazed grin.
“‘Colonel’ Valzacchi? Hmm. I’ll be right there, Tydder.” As he ran back, she said, “This really isn’t the time. I’ll get the chopper to take you back to Brussels. I’ll talk to you there, soon.”
“What happens to you,” I said, “now?”
“Anything.” She smiles across at the idling rotors of the camouflage-painted helicopter, and shakes her head, with all the energy of youth; as if amazed that anybody could be so obtuse. “I live my life, that’s what happens. I’m not even twenty. I can do anything. You keep an eye open for me, Doctor Ratcliff. I’ll make five-star general yet! And I suppose I’ll have to do some of this bloody political stuff. After all – now, I know how.”
She gave me her hand to shake and I took it. Her flesh was warm. Any thought I might have had that she would retire – or be persuaded to join Project Carthage – was revealed as insubstantial, unreal. Cruelty and abuse do not die, although they may be overcome; she is now what she always will be, a woman who kills other people. Her loyalty, such as it is, is to her own. However many that may come to include.
As I left, she said, “I’m told we’re going back out to the Chinese border soon. As a peace-keeping force. In some ways, that’s worse than war! But on the whole—” A long, level look from that scarred face. “It’s probably better. Don’t you think?”
That was three months ago.
While I have been engaged in the collation of the Third Edition text with the chronological documentation of 2000 and 2001, and in the writing of this Afterword, Major Asche briefly visited the Project headquarters in California. On her way out, she suggested to me that we might require an alteration to our unofficial Latin motto.
It reads, now, Non delenda est Carthago.
Carthage must not be destroyed.
Pierce Ratcliff-Napier-Grant
Brussels, 2009
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Anna Monkton (nee Longman) for her guidance in presenting our editorial correspondence. At time of publication, she is about to present us with a first grandchild – or in my case, step-grandchild – which, however, she and my wife, Isobel, refuse to let me call after our ‘scruffy mercenary’, Ash.
But I have hopes of persuading them.
FootNotes
Introduction:
1 – [Not entirely, as we shall see.]
Prologue:
1 – [Psalms 57: 4]
2 – [A closed-face helmet.]
3 – [A wide-brimmed steel helmet, identical in shape to the British ‘Tommy’s’ helmet of the 1914-1918 World War.]
4 – [Armour pieces for the chin and lower face, made of either articulated or solid plate, and often lined with velvet or other cloth; therefore hot to wear.]
5 – [Internal evidence therefore suggests this is not one of the Company of the Griffin-in-Gold’s contracts with the Burgundian Dukes. Therefore, the battle can be neither Dinant (19-25 August 1466) nor Brustem (28 October 1467). I theorise that this takes place in Italy, that it is Molinella (1467), a battle in the war between Duke Francisco Sforza of Milan, and the Serenissima or Most Serene Republic of Venice under the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni. Colleoni has been falsely credited with the first use of field guns in battle.
The battle is obscure, noted only because of a cynical comment which Niccolò Machiavelli later wrote about the ‘bloodless wars’ of the Italian professional contract soldiers: that only one man died in the battle of Molinella, and that was from falling off his horse. Better sources suggest a more accurate assessment would be around six hundred dead.
The Winchester Codex was written around AD 1495, some twenty-eight years after this date, and nineteen years after the main body of the ‘Ash’ texts (which cover the years AD 1476-1477). Some details of the battle depicted here greatly resemble the last conflict in the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Stoke (1487). Possibly this biography was written by an English soldier who had become a monk at Winchester, and wrote about what he experienced in the English midlands, at Stoke, rather than about Molinella itself.]
Part One:
1 – [‘The goddess Fortune is the Empress of this world.’]
2 – [Open-faced helmet; in this case with a visor which can be raised or lowered, for visibility or protection.]
3 – [It is worth noting, that the Angelotti manuscript’s term for the company’s main battle standard – Or, a lion passant guardant azure (a blue lion; pacing to the viewer’s left and looking out, one paw raised) – is unusual. Traditionally in heraldry, the lion passant guardant is referred to not as a lion, but as a leopard.
I think it is clear that Ash chooses to refer to hers as a lion for religious reasons.
The standard reproduced in the Angelotti ms, a tapering, swallow-tailed banner perhaps six feet long, is charged with the commander’s badge, and one version of the company battle-cry – ‘Frango regna!’: ‘I shatter kingdoms!’ – as well as employers’ badges from their various German, Italian, English and Swiss campaigns.
Ash’s own personal (rectangular) banner, bearing her badge, is referred to as Or, a lion azure affronté, (a blue lion’s head, face-on, on a gold field); which seems to be a lion’s head cabossed (that is, with no neck or other part of the beast featured). The more correct term would be Or, a leopard’s face azure. It is clear here that the company livery is gold, and that her men wear, as the badge, the lion passant guardant azure. This combination of blue and gold is especially characteristic of eastern France and Lorraine, and more generally of France, England, Italy, and Scandinavia, in contrast to black and gold, which is more characteristic of the German lands. I can find no reference to ‘Or, a leopard’s face azure’ nor ‘Or, a leopard azure’ being associated with any well-known individual other than Ash.]
4 – [Cavalry lance pennants.]
5 – [A reference from ‘Fraxinus’, to an as-yet-unidentified mediaeval myth-cycle or legend. It is also mentioned in the del Guiz text, but absent from the Angelotti and ‘Pseudo-Godfrey’ manuscripts.]
6 – [A tourney is an organised killing affray. A tournament is an organised killing affray with blunt weapons.]
7 – [Rosbif or ‘roast-beef’: continental nickname at this time for an Englishman, since they were popularly supposed to eat nothing else.]
8 – [Uncertain: possibly glanders.]
9 – [Water was usually drunk at this period only when tiny amounts of alcohol were included
, to prevent water-borne infections.]
10 – [In the original, this is a completely untranslatable joke based on a pun between two words in German and an obscure, no longer extant, Flemish dialect. I have therefore substituted something to give the flavour of it. ‘Deus vult’ means ‘God willing’.]
11 – [This account is accurate, with one exception. The skirmish at the siege of Neuss took place, not in 1476, but on 16 June 1475. However, records often pick up an apparent error of a year either way. Under the Julian calendar, in different parts of Europe, the New Year is variously dated as beginning at Easter, on Lady Day (25 March), and Christmas Day (25 December); and post AD 1583, the Gregorian calendar backdates the beginning of those years to 1 January.
I can do no better than refer the reader to Charles Mallory Maximillian’s comment in the ‘Preface and Notes’ to the first edition (1890):
‘The Germanic Life of Ash narrates many startling and, one might think, implausible events. It is, however, verifiable that all these particular exploits of the woman Ash are well-attested to, by a great variety of other trustworthy historical sources.
‘One should forgive, therefore, this document’s mistake in the mere dating of the events contained therein.’]
12 – [Fifteenth-century man-portable matchlock firearm.]
13 – [Although it is a later translation, some 135 years after the ‘Ash’ texts, I have chosen the King James Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) as more accessible to the modern reader.]
14 – [These improbable vehicles bear some resemblance to the mobile horse-drawn ‘war-wagons’ used by the Hussites in the 1420s, some fifty years earlier than this. The Eastern European fighters appear to have used them as mobile gun-platforms. However, the del Guiz ‘iron-sided’ wagons are a mere impossibility – even if constructed, they would have been so heavy that no conceivable team of horses could have moved them.]
15 – [Padua in Italy was at this time a famous centre attended by medical students from all over Europe.]
