by Mary Gentle
“They want me in Carthage? – I’ll go to Carthage!”
Message: #135 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, mss.
Date: 15/11/00 at 07.16 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna-
Excuse this, I haven’t slept, I have been on-line most of the night to universities around the world.
You’re right. It IS all the manuscripts. The Cartulary of St Herlaine is lost completely. There is one copy of Pseudo-Godfrey in the fakes gallery at the V&A. The Angelotti text and the Del Guiz LIFE are mediaeval romance and legend. I cannot find them documented as mediaeval history at any time after the 1930s!
From what I can download, the manuscripts they have on-line are the same TEXTS which I have been translating. All that’s changed is the CLASSIFICATION from history to fiction.
I can only ask you to believe that I am not a fraud.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #80 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, documentation
Date: 15/11/00 at 09.14 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I do believe you. Or I trust you, which may be the same thing.
It isn’t as if we didn’t check out your academic record before we signed the contract. We did. You’re good, Pierce. I know you can be good and still be mistaken, but you’re good.
Doctor Napier-Grant’s discoveries. Send me something. Download me images, something, I need something to show the MD, or this is all going to hell!
– Anna
* * *
Message: #136 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries
Date: 15/11/00 at 10.17 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Isobel doesn’t have the slightest intention of letting photo images of the site, or of golems, on to the Internet. She says they would be global inside half an hour.
Her son, John Monkham, is flying back from Tunisia early next week. I have at last persuaded Isobel to let him act as a courier. He will bring you copies of the expedition’s photos of the golem; but they will be in his possession at all times. Isobel is willing to authorise you to show them to your MD, before John brings them back to the site.
This is the best I can do.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #81 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, archaeology
Date: 15/11/00 at 10.30 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Give John Monkham my phone number, I’ll meet him at the airport.
I can’t wait to see Ash’s golem for myself. But I guess I’ll have to. While I’m waiting – have you thought of ANYTHING that can account for what’s happening?
– Anna
* * *
Message: #139 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, texts
Date: 16/11/00 at 11.49 a.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
Frankly, no. I have NO idea why these manuscripts are now classified under ‘Fiction’. I’m at my wit’s end.
I HAD an idea. I thought, be philosophic. Occam’s Razor – if the simplest explanation for any event is the more likely to be true, could it not be that it is the RECLASSIFICATION of the ‘Ash’ manuscripts that is the mistake? You know how it can be, with databases on line; if one university decides a document is a fake, that will cause a ‘cascade effect’ through all the universities on the net. And documents DO become mislaid, and lost.
That thought consoled me through last night, when sleep was impossible. I saw myself verified. Sadly, this morning – to the mundane sound of lorries arriving on site – I realised it is a mere fantasy. A cascade error would not affect all databases. It would not affect those libraries that aren’t computer-literate, either! No. I have no idea what’s going on. When I gained access to the British Library manuscripts they were classified as ‘Mediaeval History’, plain and simple!
And I have no explanation for the apparent fact that these documents were reclassified in the 193 0s.
I don’t know what is going on, but I do know we are in danger of Ash vanishing into thin air, into a fantasy of history; of her proving to be no more (or no less) historical than a King Arthur, or a Lancelot. But I was – and I remain – utterly convinced that we are dealing with a genuine human being here, beneath the accretions of time.
What is truly perplexing to me, also, is that what we have found on this site authenticates not just my theory of a Visigoth culture in North Africa, but the STRANGEST aspects of that culture – the post-Roman technology, nine centuries on. While I assumed that my Visigoths were factual, the technology is something I had thought to be mythical! And yet, here it is.
Still inexplicable as regards how it functioned.
It’s enough to make me think kindly of Vaughan Davies. You may not know quite how strange his Introduction to ASH: A BIOGRAPHY is – it’s something one tends to ignore, because of the sheer quality of his scholarship and the excellence of his translations.
He suggested, on the subject of the ‘accretions’ to the various texts, that the difficulties arise not because Ash has accreted myths, but because she has disseminated them.
Let me copy in what I have with me:-
(…) The hypothesis which I {Vaughan Davies} find myself compelled to accept is that, in the supposed history of ‘Ash’, this historian finds himself confronted with – among other things – the prototype of the legend of La Pucelle, Jehanne of Domremy, more popularly known to history as Joan of Arc.
This theory may appear to defy reason. The ‘Ash’ narratives are set in what is clearly the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Certainly the manuscripts cannot be dated to any time before 1470. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. To accept Ash as the prefigurement of Joan as the archetypal warrior-woman is surely lunacy, for Joan comes first.
It is my belief, however, that it is the legends of Ash, redeemer of her country, that we have transferred to the meteoric career of the young Frenchwoman who was, it must be remembered, a soldier at seventeen and dead at nineteen, having driven the English out of France; and not the history of Joan which becomes the ‘Ash’ cycle of tales. The reader will ask himself, how can this be?
A simplistic explanation could be offered. If the legends of Ash were in fact not late, but early mediaeval stories, then their reproduction again in the 1480s could be put down to popularity. With the invention of printing, the authors merely re-wrote her narratives in contemporary terms. It was common practice, for example in the illuminated manuscripts of the era, to reproduce scenes from Biblical and Classical history in fifteenth-century costume, accoutrements and locale.
In this case, one would still have to account for the complete absence of any hand-written manuscript evidence of the ‘Ash’ cycle before 1470.
What explanation remains?
It is my belief that the ‘Ash’ stories are not fiction, that they are history – they are just not our history.
It is my belief that Burgundy did, indeed, ‘vanish’; not in the apparent sense that it lost popular interest but can be discovered by a diligent historian, but in a far more final sense. What we have in our history books is only a shadow, remaining.
With Burgundy’s disappearance, such a history of facts and events had to attach itself to something in the collective European subconscious: one of the things they sought out was an obscure French peasant woman.
I am well aware that this requires the spontaneous creation of the historical documentation of Jeanne D’Arc.
Accept this, and one begins to have a mental image of real events flying out, in fragments, from the dissolution of Ash’s Burgundy. Fragments that impel themselves backwards and forwards, impaled along the timeline of history, taking on such ‘local colour’ as they require for survival. Thus Ash is Joan, and is Ashputtel/Cinderella, and is a dozen other legends. The history of this first Burgundy remains,
all around us.
My hypothesis may be dismissed completely, of course, but I consider it provable on rational grounds; (…)
I have always had a fondness for this extravagantly eccentric, theory – the idea that Burgundy genuinely faded out of history after 1477, as it were, but that we can find the events of it in the mouths of other historical characters; their actions in the actions of other women and men throughout our history. Burgundy’s portrait, as it were, cut up and sprinkled like a jigsaw through history: still visible for those who take the trouble to look.
Of course, it isn’t a theory, as such. Plainly, although he says it is his ‘belief’, this is merely a distinguished academic amusing himself with speculations, and following Charles Mallory Maximillian’s conceit of ‘lost Burgundy’ to its logical conclusion.
The problem is that this is only *half* of his ‘Introduction’ to ASH: A BIOGRAPHY. The theory is incomplete – what are his ‘rational grounds’ for what he calls a ‘first’ Burgundy? We have no idea now what Vaughan Davies’s theory might have been in its entirety. I consulted a cheap wartime hardcover edition in the British Library and, as you know, there appears to be no other copy in existence of this second edition of ASH. (I presume that stocks were destroyed when the publishers’ warehouse was bombed during the Blitz in 1940.) As far as I can discover through six years of diligent research, no complete copy now exists anywhere.
If you were to take the evidence of this partial theory, you might well say that Vaughan Davies was an eccentric. You may think he was a complete *crank*. However, don’t dismiss him out of hand. It is not that many people in the 1930s who have doctorates in History *and* Physics, and a Professorship at Cambridge. He was obviously much taken with the high-physics theory of parallel worlds coming into existence. In a way, I can see why; history – like the physical universe, if the scientists are to be believed – is anything but concrete.
History is so *little* known. I myself, and other historians, make a story out of it. We teach in universities that people married at such-and-such an age, that so many died in childbirth, that so many served out their apprenticeships, that watermills and pole-lathes were the beginning of the ‘mediaeval industrial revolution’ – but if you ask a historian to say precisely what happened to one given person, on one given day, then we do not know. We *guess*.
There is room for so many things, in the gaps between known history.
I would throw up my hands and abandon this project (I don’t need my academic reputation or my chances of getting published ruined) if I hadn’t *touched* her golem.
I suppose that, also, I’m saying this by way of a warning. At Isobel’s strict insistence, I am continuing the final translation of the centrepiece of this book – the document to which someone has (much later) added the punning heading ‘Fraxinus me fecit’: ‘Ash made me’. Given Ash’s lack of literacy, it seems likely that this is a document dictated to a monk, or to a scribe, with what omissions and additions and alterations we cannot know. That said, I am convinced that this document is genuine. It fills in the gap between her presence at the Neuss siege, and her later presence with the Burgundians in late 147 6, and her death at the battle of Nancy on 5 January 1477. The ‘missing summer’ problem, as we have always known it.
I have reached the part which throws additional light on the Del Guiz and Angelotti chronicles of Ash’s time in Dijon. Translating now, with the golem only a few tents away from me – mere yards; the other side of a canvas wall – I start to ask myself a question. A serious question, although when I asked it before, it was a joke.
If the messenger-golems are true, what else is?
– Pierce
* * *
Message: (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, documentation
Date: 16/11/00 at 12.08 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
If ‘Angelotti’ and the rest of the manuscripts aren’t true, what else ISN’T?
– Anna
PART FIVE
17 August–21 August AD 1476
The Field of Battle
I
Dijon resounds to the thundering of watermills.
Afternoon’s white sunlight blazed on distant yellow mustard-flowers. Rows of trimmed green grape-vines hugged the ground between brown strips of earth. Peasants thronged the strip-fields. The town clock struck a quarter to five as Ash eased Godluc between a tailback of ox-wains, and on to the main bridge into Dijon.
Bertrand stuffed her German fingered gauntlets into her hand, and fell back breathless beside Rickard, in the dust lifted up by the horses. Ash rode away from members of the company who had gone off scouting and now clutched at her stirrups, breathlessly reporting back, to take her place between John de Vere and her own escort.
“My lord Oxford.” Ash raised her voice, and lifted up her head as they came in over the bridge to the town gate. Scents raised the hairs on the back of her neck: chaff, overheated stone, algae, horse-dung. She shoved her visor up, and bevor plate down, to get the benefit of the cool air over the river that served as a moat.
“I have the latest estimate of the Visigoth forces outside Auxonne,” the Earl said, “they number nearly twelve thousand.”
Ash nodded a confirmation. “They were twelve thousand when I was outside Basle. I don’t know the exact number of their two other main forces. The same size, or larger. One’s in Venetian territory, scaring the Turks from moving; the other one’s in Navarre. Neither can get here within a month, even with a forced march.”
A burning smell of hard-spinning mill-wheels filled the air, together with a faint golden haze. The mail shirts of the guards on the gate, and the linen pourpoints, hose, and kittles of the men and women bustling through it, were tinted with the finest chaff. The taste of it settled on her tongue. Dijon is golden! she thought; and tried to let the heat and smells relax the cold, hard fear in her gut.
“Here is our escort.” John de Vere reined in, letting his brother George go ahead to speak with the nine or ten fully armoured Burgundian knights waiting to take them to the palace.
De Vere’s weathered, pale-eyed face turned to her. “Has it occurred to you, madam Captain, that his Grace the Duke of Burgundy may offer you a contract with him, now. I cannot finance this raid on Carthage.”
“But we have a contract.” Ash spoke quietly, her voice just audible under the grinding of mill-wheels. “Are you telling me to find some pretext for breaking my word – which I didn’t give – to an exiled, attainted English Earl, because the reigning, extremely rich, Duke of Burgundy wants my company…?”
John de Vere looked down from his saddle. What she could see of his face, with his close-helm’s visor pinned up, was a mouth set in a firm line.
“Burgundy is wealthy,” he said flatly. “I am Lancaster. Or Lancaster’s only chance. But, madam, I am at the moment the leader of three brothers and forty-seven men, with enough money to feed them for six weeks. This, weighed against the employment of the Burgundian Duke, who could buy England if he chose…”
Ash, deadpan, said, “You’re right, my lord, I won’t consider Burgundy for a minute.”
“Madam Captain, as a captain of mercenaries, the most precious goods you have to sell are your reputation, and your word.”
Ash snorted. “Just don’t tell my lads. I’ve got to sell them on the idea of Carthage…”
Ahead, George de Vere and the Burgundian knights seemed to be exchanging deferential greetings and arguments about precedence of riding order, in about equal measure. Dijon’s cobbles felt heat-slick under Godluc’s hooves. She reached forward and put a reassuring hand on his neck, where his iron-grey dapples faded to silver. He threw up his head, whickering with what, Ash realised, was a desire to show off in front of the people of Dijon. Around her, the city’s whitewashed walls and blue slates roofs glittered.
Ash spoke over the louder noise of grinding mills. “This place looks like something out of a Book of Hours, my lord.”
/> “Would that you and I did, madam!”
“Damn. I knew I was going to miss my armour…”
George de Vere turned in his saddle, beckoning the party forward. Ash rode beside the now smiling Earl of Oxford, into the centre of the group of Burgundian knights. They moved off, their horses making slow time through the cobbled streets despite the escort in Charles’s red-crossed livery; winding between throngs of apprentices outside workshops, women in tall headdresses buying from stalls in the market square, and ox-carts grinding their continual way to the mills. Ash pushed her visor up, grinning back at the cheerful waves and the comments called by the subjects of Duke Charles.
“Thomas!” she hissed.
Thomas Rochester dug his heel into his bay gelding, and rapidly rejoined the party. A young woman with bright eyes watched him go, from where she leaned out of an overhanging second-storey window.
“Put her down, boy.”
“Yes, boss!” A pause. “Any time off for R&R?”
“Not for you…” A touch to Godluc brought her back to the Earl of Oxford’s left flank.
“I think you would never break a condotta, madam. And yet you consider it, now.”
“No, I—”
“You do. Why?”
It was not the tone, or the man, to let her get away without an answer. Ash snarled in a whisper, glancing covertly at the Burgundian knights:
“Yes, I say we should raid Carthage, but that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of it! If I remember right from Neuss, Charles of Burgundy could have upwards of twenty thousand trained men here; and supplies, and weapons, and guns, and, if I had a choice, I’d like all twenty thousand of them between me and the King-Caliph! Not just forty-seven men and your brothers! Is that a surprise?”
“Only a fool is not afraid, madam.”
The rhythmic pounding of mill-wheels drowned speech for a minute. Dijon sits between two rivers, the Suzon and the Ouche, in the arrow-head spit of land where they join. Ash rode along the river path. The walls here enclosed the river within the town. She watched the slats of watermill wheels rise up into the sun, dripping diamonds. The water under the wheels was black, thick as glass, and she could feel the pull of it from where she rode among the knights of the Duke’s court.