Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  He’s dead, you’re in danger here, go!

  You wouldn’t think twice, on the battlefield.

  Still she knelt beside Godfrey, her hand against his face. His cold, soft skin chilled her to the heart. The line of his brows and his jutting nose, and the fine hairs of his beard, caught the last light from the flames. Water ran off his robes and pooled on the brickwork: he stank, of sewerage.

  “It isn’t right.” She stroked his cheek. “You deserve better.”

  The utter stillness of all dead bodies possessed him. She made an automatic check with her eye – does he have weapons? Shoes? Money? – as she would have done on a stricken field, and suddenly realised what she was doing, and closed her eyes in pain and breathed in, sharply.

  “Sweet Christ…!”

  She rose up on to her haunches, crouching on her toes, staring around in the water-rushing darkness. She could just make out the white glimmer of his flesh.

  I would leave any dead man upon the field, if there was still fighting going on; would – I know – abandon Robert Anselm, or Angelotti, or Euen Huw; any of them, because I would have to.

  She knows this because she has, in the past, abandoned men she loved as well as she loves them. War has no pity. Time for sorrow and burial afterwards.

  Ash suddenly knelt again, thrusting her face close to Godfrey Maximillian, trying to fix every line of his face in her mind: the wood-brown colour of his eyes, the old white scar below his lip, the weathered skin of his cheeks. Useless. His expression, his spirit, gone, it might have been any dead man lying there.

  Black clots of blood rested in the splintered bone of his forehead.

  “That’s enough, Godfrey. Joke’s over. Come on, sweetheart, greatheart; come on.”

  She knew, as she spoke, the reality of his death.

  “Godfrey; Godfrey. Let’s go home…”

  Sudden pain constricted her chest. Hot tears rimmed her eyes.

  “I can’t even bury you. Oh, sweet Jesus, I can’t even bury you.”

  She tugged at his sleeve. His body did not move. Dead weight is dead weight; she would not be able to lift him, here, never mind carry him with her. And into what?

  The water rushed and things rustled in the darkness around her. The rift above was a pale, rosy gap. No noise came down from the ruined halls above, now.

  Under her feet, the earthquake shuddered again.

  “You killed him!”

  She was on her feet before she knew it, shrieking up into the darkness, spittle spraying from her mouth in fury:

  “You killed him, you killed Godfrey, you killed him!”

  She had time to think, When they spoke to me before, there was an earthquake. And time to think, ‘They’ didn’t kill him. I did. No one is responsible for his death except me. Ah, Godfrey, Godfrey!

  The old brickwork shook under her feet.

  I’ve been a soldier for five or six summers, I must be responsible for the deaths of at least fifty men, why is this different? It’s Godfrey—

  Voices spoke, so loud in her mind that she clamped her hands over her ears:

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU?’

  ‘ARE YOU ENEMY?’

  ‘ARE YOU BURGUNDY?’

  Nothing physical could block it. Her lip bled where she bit it. She felt a great vibration, the ancient bricks grinding together beneath her feet, mortar leaking out in dust and powder.

  “Not my voice!” she gasped, lungs hurting. “You’re not my voice!”

  Not a voice, but voices.

  As if something else spoke through the same place in her – not the Stone Golem, not that enemy: but an enemy somehow behind the Visigoth enemy, something huge, multiple, demonic, vast.

  ‘IF YOU ARE BURGUNDY, YOU WILL DIE—’

  ‘—AS IF YOU HAD NEVER BEEN—’

  ‘—SOON, SOON DIE—’

  “Fuck off!” Ash roared.

  She dropped to her knees. She wrapped her fists in the soaking wet cloth of Godfrey’s robes, pulling his body to her. Her face turned up sightless to the dark, she bellowed, “What the fuck do you know about it? What does it matter? He’s dead, I can’t even have a mass said for him, if I ever had a father it was Godfrey, don’t you understand?”

  As if she could justify herself to unknown, invisible voices, she shouted:

  “Don’t you understand that I have to leave him here?”

  She leapt up and ran. One outstretched hand thumped the curved wall of the tunnel, grazing her palm.

  She ran, the touch of the wall guiding her, through the darkness and the stone, through after-shocks of earthquake; into the vast and stinking network of sewers under the city, Godfrey Maximillian left behind her, tears blinding her, grief blinding her mind, no voice sounding in her ears or her head; running into darkness and broken ground, until at last she stumbled and came down on her knees, and the world was cold and quiet around her.

  “I need to know!” She shouts aloud, in the darkness. “Why is it that Burgundy matters so much?”

  Neither voice nor voices reply.

  Message: #177 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 26/11/00 at 11.20 a.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  We can’t GET to the offshore site. The Mediterranean is stiff with naval helicopters over the area, as well as surface ships. Isobel is off again talking to Minister ██████: I don’t know what, influence she can bring to bear, but she *must* do something!

  Forgive me, I haven’t even had time to tell you that your scanned-in text of the Vaughan Davies ‘Introduction’ came through as machine-code. Could you possibly try again in a different format? Did you talk to your bookseller friend, Nadia? Does she have any more information about this house clearance in East Anglia? As far as I am aware, Vaughan Davies died during the last war – this is a son or daughter of his, perhaps?

  The way I’ve been moving around, it’s no wonder that you couldn’t get the file through to me. I’m back on Isobel’s machine now, working on the transferred FRAXINUS files, on the on-going translation, while we wait. I’ve been slowed down, obviously – you’ve nearly caught up with what I’ve completed.

  As far as I can discover, no one has cracked Isobel’s encryption, so I feel free to tell you that the last two days have been absolutely *bloody*.

  While Isobel’s team are perfectly amenable people, they’re under considerable stress; we spend our time sitting around in the tents – with them running analysis on what data they have been able to collect, and playing around with image-enhancers for the underwater details – Roman shipwrecks, mostly.

  Anna, this isn’t the MARY ROSE, there may be a whole new level of mediaeval technology down there on the seabed, that we haven’t previously suspected the existence of!

  Sorry: when I come to splitting infinitives, I know I’m distressed.

  But there may be ANYTHING down there. Even – dare I say it – even, perhaps, a fifteenth-century GOLEM-POWERED ship?

  Is there anything *you* can do, Anna? Have you any media contacts which could put pressure on the government? We are losing a priceless archaeological opportunity here!

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #118 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash, media

  Date: 26/11/00 at 05.24 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  I think I got the text file through to you this time. Please confirm.

  I can’t promise anything, but I’m going to a social do tonight, at which will be an old boyfriend who now works for BBC current affairs. I’ll do what I can to suggest more notice should be taken of this affair.

  This interference is INTOLERABLE. Surely it’s got to become a cause celebre?

  Hang in there!

  – Anna

  * * *

  Message: #117 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Vaughan Davies

  Date: 26/11/00 at 05.03 p.m.

  From: Longman@

&nbs
p; indeed I believe it to be founded on the most scientific and rational grounds.

  I think that it would be fair to say that no man without a thorough knowledge of the sciences might have conceived of it; and it would be wise for another historian, if he would seek to discount my theory, to have a wide knowledge of both the historian’s and the physicist’s fields of enquiry.

  Let us begin, then, with a theory of history and time.

  Conceive, if you will, of a great mountain range, an Alps almost beyond the imagination of man; and let this represent the history of our world. The vast main part of it is nothing but bare rock, for here our history is that of geological aeons, as the planet cools and takes its orbit around the sun. At the most recent edge of the mountains, a little fringe of life appears – the millions of years of prehistoric vegetation, animalcules, amoebae; developing in a final rapid rush into animals, birds, and at last, man.

  We, as we traverse these ‘mountains’, that here represent our physical existence in the universe, experience our passage as ‘time’. Those of my readers familiar with the works of Planck, Einstein, and J. W. Dunne (but I hardly hope for such erudition among my lay readers, the split between science and art being what it is in English culture) will not need me to inform them that time is a human perception of a vastly more complicated process of actual creation.

  The world, as it comes about, is shaped by what has gone before. Those mountains behind us prefigure what is to come; the shape of the paths across them determines the paths that we ourselves will take, in what we see as our ‘future’. The actions of men in mediaeval times have set us here, on the brink of what may prove to be the world’s most destructive conflagration, no less surely than the more recent acts of (let us say) Mr. Chamberlain and Herr Hitler. We are what we follow.

  My own theory is, now that I have studied the real evidence implicit in the history of Ash, that the ‘mountains’ are not as immovable as one might suppose. I hold, in effect, that it is possible that from time to time an earthquake shakes the landscape. It obliterates some things, alters some; rearranges the rock under some of that little fringe of life which inhabits its crevices.

  On some occasions, this will be no more than a minor disturbance – a name different here, a girl born in place of a boy, a document lost, a man dead before he otherwise would have been. This is merely a tremor in the great landscape that is time.

  However, on at least one occasion a great fracture, as it were, has taken place in what we perceive as our ‘past’. Imagine the hands of God reaching down to shake the mountains, as a man might shake a blanket – and then, afterwards, the bedrock remains, but all the shape of the landscape is changed.

  This fracture, I believe, takes place for us in the first week of January, 1477.

  Burgundy, in our mundane historical records, is a magnificent mediaeval kingdom. Yet it is no more than that. Culturally rich, and militarily powerful, its Dukes spend their time in peregrinatory pilgrimages, building sideshow castles after the manner of Hesdin, and warring against the decaying monarchy of France, and the dukedoms that lie between the north and south of this most disunited of lands, trying to unite a ‘Middle Kingdom’ stretching from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea. Charles, most aggressive and last Duke, dies fighting the Swiss in a foolhardy, freezing bloodbath at Nancy; and the waves of history roll over him, closing over Burgundy. Its territories are divided among those who can get them. There is nothing in the least remarkable about it.

  Most historians do not write of it at all, perceiving it perhaps as a backwater, of little importance now. Yet a common thread runs through the small amount of historical writing which there is upon Burgundy. One finds it plainly in Charles Mallory Maximillian, when he writes of a ‘lost and golden country’. While for most, Burgundy has been swept from memory, for a few it is a symbol, a sense of loss: a forgotten phoenix.

  I have come to see, through my researches, that when we remember this, it is Ash’s Burgundy that we remember.

  As I have written elsewhere, it is my contention now that the Burgundy of which the ‘Ash’ biographers tell us did not vanish. It became transformed. The mountainous landscape of the past shifted, and when the earthquake was over, the nameless fragments of her story had alighted in other, different places – in the story of Joan of Arc; of Bosworth Field; the legends of Arthurian chivalry, and the travail of the Chapel Perilous. She has become myth, and Burgundy with her; and yet, these faint traces remain.

  It can be clearly seen from this that what was created on 5 January 1477 was not merely a new future. If current thinking is correct, different futures may spring into existence at every moment, and these ‘alternate’ histories continue in parallel with our own. We will, one day, detect this; upon whatever molecular level such a detection can take place.

  No, the vanishing of Burgundy – Ash’s Burgundy – shattered the landscape entire. Such a change would bring about a new future, yes, but also a new past.

  Thus, Burgundy vanishes. Thus, the tales which we have left – as myth, as legend – remind us that once they were themselves true. They serve to remind us that we ourselves may have begun, only, in 1477. This past that we in the twentieth century excavate is in some senses a lie – it did not exist until after 5 January 1477.

  It is my contention, therefore, that these documents which I have translated are authentic; that the various recountings of the life of Ash are genuine. This is history. It is just not our history. Not now.

  What we might have been, if not for this temporal fracture, one can only speculate. More tenuous still must be speculation of what we may now become. History is vast, massive, as impervious to alteration as the adamantine bedrock of the Alpine peaks. As I believe it says somewhere in the King James Bible, nations have bowels of brass. Yet, it seems plain to me, the landscape of our past shows clear evidence of this change.

  Ash, and her world, are what our world used to be. They are no more. The surging forward edge of time is left to us to inherit, and the future, make what we will of it.

  I leave to others the task of determining the exact nature of this temporal change; and whether or not there is a likelihood of another such fracture in the orderly processes of the universe occurring.

  I am presently in the process of preparing an addendum to this second edition, in which I plan to detail the vitally important connection between this lost history and our own, present, history. If I am spared from what, it seems in this month of September 1939, will be a conflagration to shake the whole world, then I will publish my findings.

  Vaughan Davies

  Sible Hedingham, 1939

  * * *

  Message: #180 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash/Vaughan Davies

  Date: 27/11/00 at 02.19 p.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna-

  History plays us some small tricks of coincidence. The end of the Introduction names the place where Vaughan Davies was writing at the time. I KNOW Sible Hedingham.

  It’s a small East Anglian village, close to Castle Hedingham, which itself is the village attached to Hedingham Castle. Hedingham Castle was owned for centuries by the de Vere family – although John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, did not spend much of his time there.

  Perhaps this coincidence appealed to Vaughan Davies? Or perhaps (always look for the simplest explanation) his historical researches took him there and he liked it enough to settle down. When you follow up this house clearance, you might have a go at finding out whether the Davies were incomers, or a family that’s been in Sible Hedingham since the Domesday Book.

  I am unspeakably grateful for this chance to see Vaughan Davies’s complete theory. Anna, thank you. I hardly dare ask more of you, but I would give anything to go to the family house and see if there are surviving family; if – more importantly – there are any surviving, unpublished, papers.

  That is, I would give anything except the chance of seeing something *concrete* from Visigothic Cart
hage being gradually uncovered from beneath the decay of centuries – perhaps more relics; perhaps, even, dare I speculate, a ship?

  Please, go in my place?

  What surprises me most, now that I have read what you scanned in and sent to me, is that I RECOGNISE Vaughan Davies’s theory. Although he has couched it as a metaphor, this is plainly a mid-century attempt to describe one of the most up-to-date tenets of particle physics – the anthropic principle that, on the sub-atomic level, it is human consciousness that maintains reality.

  I am already contacting the colleagues I have on the net who are knowledgeable about this. Let me give you what I have from experts in the field – bearing in mind it’s only my understanding!

  It is we, theorists of the anthropic principle state, who collapse the infinite number of possible states in which the basic particles of the universe exist, and make them momentarily concrete – make them real, if you like, instead of probable. Not at the level of individual consciousness, or even the individual subconscious, but by a consciousness down at the level of the species-mind.

  That ‘deep consciousness’ of the human race maintains the present, the past, and the future. However solid the material world appears, it is we who make it so. It is Mind, collapsing the wavefront of Possibility into Reality.

  We are not talking about the normal human mind, however – myself,. you; the man in the street. You or I could not alter reality! Theoretical physics is talking about something far more like the ‘racial unconscious’ of Jung. Something buried deep in the autonomic limbic system, something so primitive it is not even individual, a leftover from the prehistoric proto-human primates who lived a group-mind consciousness. No more accessible or controllable by us than the process of photosynthesis is to a plant.