Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  De Vere’s faded blue eyes blinked, in the pungent lantern light. “Which is?”

  “We should part company here,” Ash said. “You should sail east.”

  “East?”

  “Sail to Constantinople – and ask the Turks for help against the Visigoths.”

  “The Turks?”

  John de Vere began to laugh. It was a resonant deep bark that turned heads. He rested his arm across Dickon de Vere’s shoulders – avoiding his young brother’s bandaged head – and guffawed.

  “Go to the Turks, for help? Madam Captain!”

  “Maybe they’re not allied with the King-Caliph. I didn’t see them at the crowning. My lord, there’s what’s left of the Burgundian army, and that’s it. The Turks are going to try and take Christendom from the Visigoths anyway, you could persuade them to do it now—”

  “Madam, I would sooner try to go back and take Carthage!”

  Dark shapes occluded the waves. Ash stood, peering into the darkness. She did not need Rochester’s runner, bare moments later, to tell her that these were the fabled galleys.

  “Given the state their harbour’s in…” Ash shrugged. “And we have two ships: maybe we should go back, and try and blast House Leofric off the cliff-face! Get the Stone Golem that way. My lord, we could go back—”

  ‘BACK!’

  Faint, now, but piercing as distant horns: the voices of the Wild Machines yammer in her mind:

  ‘YOU WILL NOT TOUCH THE STONE GOLEM—!’

  ‘—NOT HARM—’

  ‘—NOT DESTROY—’

  ‘—YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE WILL LEAVE!’

  ‘YOU WILL ORDER THEM!’

  ‘IT IS NOT TO BE TOUCHED!’

  ‘IT IS PROTECTED!’

  ‘YOU WILL NOT HARM THE MACHINA REI MILITARIS’

  Ash, hands rammed tight over her ears in a useless attempt to block the voices in her head, looked up with her eyes brimming over with tears.

  “Oh, Christ—”

  “What is it?” Floria’s brusque voice, at odds with the gentle hands.

  “The same place.” Ash’s eyes screwed up in pain. “The same place in my soul. I said, I said to you, de Vere, they use it as a channel. It’s how they talk—”

  Now she sees it, plain.

  “They’re stone. Deaf, blind, and dumb. Until they had the machine they couldn’t talk to us … couldn’t communicate with anything, couldn’t do a thing!”

  Floria stared down at her. Over the noise of oars from the galley, and the breaking waves of the sea, she said, “It’s the only way they talk. Isn’t it? It’s their only channel to the outside world.”

  “It has to be…” Ash took her hands down.

  Men are boarding the galleys. The headland of Carthage is a black blob, ten miles to the east.

  “You’re not thinking of going back!”

  “And be killed? No. I’ve seen their fleet. No.”

  She rested her chin on her fist, staring at the black waves.

  “We turned Carthage upside down, but we failed. Two hundred men to strike at the capital of an empire, and we did it, and we failed. What we did, wasn’t enough.”

  There is no confusion on their faces: Antonio Angelotti, unaccustomedly dirty, black-powder burns pitting his padded jack; and Geraint kneeling and scratching at his cod. Only a grim, weary, anxious despair. John de Vere’s embrace around his brother’s shoulders tightened.

  “I don’t understand,” Floria said, her husky voice thinning and lightening. “How could all this not be enough?”

  “We failed,” Ash said crisply. “We could have broken the link. If we’d taken the Stone Golem, destroyed it – we could have broken the only link between the Wild Machines and the world.”

  Ash looked at Floria; at the Earl of Oxford.

  She said, “What we’ve done isn’t enough – and it’s worse than that. All we’ve done now is alert the enemy to what we know. We’re worse off than when we started.”

  Message: #139 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 02/12/00 at 12.09 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  There isn’t an easy way to say this. The editorial decision is that we are going to have to suspend publication of your work.

  I’m going to do what I can. Maybe I can find another publishing firm for you, one that would be interested in a book of mediaeval myths and legends?

  I know that wouldn’t be much consolation. You’ve spent so many years editing the ‘Ash’ texts under the impression that they were genuine historical documents. But it’s all I can think of, right now.

  When you do fly back to the UK, let’s meet. Have lunch. Something. Yes?

  Love, Anna-

  * * *

  Message: #204 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash Project

  Date: 02/12/00 at 04.28 p.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna, please–

  Anna, you have got to let me publish. I know that we’re close to deadline for spring publication. Don’t call a halt now. Please.

  – but why *should* you let me carry on? The Tunisian archaeological evidence has collapsed completely!

  Anna, I am pleading with Isobel to have the radio-carbon dating tests on the metal joints of the ‘messenger-golem’ repeated. The results we had through could be WRONG. I don’t believe these ‘golems’ are merely modern fakes that the expedition has dug out of the silt outside Tunis. I just don’t believe it. They are genuine remains from the period of the Visigoth settlement of Carthage: I *know* they are!!

  And yet how can I _not_ believe they’re fakes, when scientific evidence says the bronze metalwork was cast post-1945?

  Schliemann discovered Troy in 1871 by searching where Homer sited it in the ILIAD – but he didn’t discover, when he excavated it, that the Bronze Age city of Troy had been constructed in the 1870s! That is the equivalent of what we are facing here.

  I know what you’ll say. How could we ever have thought this was _history_? The texts I’m using seem to have been re-classified from Mediaeval History to Fiction. And my ‘Fraxinus’ document, my one great discovery, telling us about the woman Ash ‘hearing voices’ from a fifteenth-century ‘Stone Golem computer’? Legends and fabrications! Unbelievable lies and myth!

  I’m going to fly out with Isobel to the expedition’s ship, now that we FINALLY have official permission. Ironic. I suppose I have very little justification for doing so, but what *else* can I do? I feel bereaved. I know that Isobel is too tactful to point out that I should just fly back to the UK now. I suppose a few days watching the undersea cameras give us images of the seabed north of Tunis will at least take my mind off all this. We might even find a Roman shipwreck or two.

  I haven’t slept.

  Anna, I have finished translating the penultimate section of ‘Fraxinus me fecit’. I had an explanatory note that I intended to put with this part of the ASH manuscript

  But it’s all irrelevant now. The golems are fakes: the Angelotti manuscript is a mere fiction. The ambiguities of the ‘Fraxinus’ text are irrelevant.

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #140 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash

  Date: 02/12/00 at 11.01 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  I’m not even sure you have a ‘Visigothic Carthage’ land-site there now. What is Isobel Napier-Grant saying?

  What you’ve told me so far is that you expected the ‘Fraxinus’ text to prove the existence of a 15c Visigoth settlement in the area of Arab Carthage, powerful enough to mount a crusade into Southern Europe. I could have swallowed this (assuming that things like the burning of Venice are chronicler’s poetic licence), and I guess I could have believed that these Visigoths failed, went back to Carthage, and interest in them was lost when Burgundy collapsed later that year.

  I guess it’s even reasonable to think your ‘Visigothic’ Carthage was probably so-weakened by this
expedition that they were overrun by Moors fairly shortly afterwards and wiped out. Or maybe they returned to Spain and were lost in the confusion of the Reconquista. And any evidence has been ignored here on the grounds of race and class.

  But I don’t see _now_ – if your texts are Romances, and the ‘messenger golem’ a modern fake based on the texts – what *possible* reason you have for thinking your Doctor Isobel’s site is anything to do with any Visigoths!

  Pierce, it’s *over*. I know it’s not nice, but face it. There is no book. Ash isn’t history, she’s Robin Hood, Arthur, Lancelot – _legend_.

  We might still get a programme out of Dr Dr Napier-Grant’s dig and her problems with the Tunisian authorities; and I don’t see why you shouldn’t be a script adviser if that does come off.

  Give it a few days, then start thinking about it.

  Love,

  Anna

  * * *

  Message: #2 05 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash/Carthage

  Date: 03/12/00 at 11.42 p.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  Your last came through scrambled – machine code: did you attach a .jpg? It’s hopelessly corrupted! Try again, I’ll reply later, much later – Isobel needs this link for the next few few hours at least.

  I’m no longer at the land-site, I’m on the ship; that’s one reason the transmission might have failed. We flew out by helicopter this morning to the expedition’s ship, the HANNIBAL; we’re at sea five miles off the North African coast.

  You must not pass this on, any of it, not to Jonathan whatsisname, your MD, to nobody, don’t even talk about it in your sleep.

  Isobel just said get off the machine so here it is:

  She and her team have been out here since September primarily because of the discoveries made by the team from the Institute for Exploration, Connecticut, in July and August of 1997. If you remember it from the media coverage, that expedition found – among other things – five Roman shipwrecks, below the 1000 metre mark, in an area of the sea about twenty miles off Tunis. (They had a US Navy nuclear submarine helping them out with sonar. We are using low-frequency search equipment, the same as that used in oil-exploration.)

  The wrecks indicate that, far from skulking along the coastline to Sicily, merchant ships since 200 BC have been sailing *deep-water* routes across the Mediterranean. What they found was one of the reasons Isobel could get funding to come and investigate the land-site here, and get local government permission to do coastal exploration.

  Now OUR ROVs have been sending pictures back, also from below the 1000 metre mark. We thought this had to be a mis-reading, they’re going down in shallow coastal seas. But it isn’t an instrument malfunction, they ARE sending back from that depth – too deep for human divers, with the limited equipment here. What the ROVs have found is a marine trench in the shallow water, about 60 kilometres north-west of the ruins of old Carthage – I almost wrote, from the ruins of OUR Carthage. And it’s what I’ve hoped and prayed for, since the disastrous carbon-dating report.

  We have found a harbour with five headlands. It’s all there, under the silt, you can see the outlines clearly. I have been watching green night-vision enhanced pictures, from bulky machines diving in unclear waters, but I can tell you, it’s there

  Later –

  Anna, it’s unbelievable. Isobel is shaken. We have found Carthage, yes, I always thought we might find my ‘Visigoth settlement’ on this coast; and it’s the way it’s described in the ASH manuscript, in ‘Fraxinus’. Oh Anna. I’ve found her. I’ve found the IMPOSSIBLE.

  Isobel had me there to direct the ROV technicians. There I was in front of these banks of machines, slightly queasy (I don’t like the sea) and a rough pencil sketch of what I’d worked out from the manuscripts MUST be the geography of Ash’s Carthage. Great moments always happen when you’re wet, or hot, or slightly queasy; when you’re looking the other way, as it were. I was trying to pick out the inner wall, the ‘Citadel’ wall that the manuscripts mention.

  We found the wall, on one of the headlands, and we found what was plainly a structure. This IS Gothic Carthage, below the waves, this IS what the manuscripts describe, I have to keep reminding myself of this, because what happened next is so impossible, so shattering in its implications, that I feel I will never sleep again – I feel that my life from here is downhill, THIS is my discovery, THIS is what will get my (and Isobel’s) names into the history books, nothing will ever be quite this much of a pinnacle again.

  I had the ROV down in the broken walls, sending back pictures from its cameras of silt-covered roofs and rooms, all in a state that would accord very much with earthquake damage. And I turned the ROV to the right – what would have happened if I hadn’t? I suppose the same discovery, but later; people are going to be picking over these ruins for the next forty years: this is Howard Carter, this is Tutankhamen all over again.

  I turned the ROV to the right and it went into a building that still had some of its roof. This is something the technicians hate. There are all sorts of dangers of losing the ROV, I suppose. Into a building, and there it was: a courtyard, and a broken wall – a broken wall ABOVE WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE HARBOUR.

  Even Isobel agreed then, better to lose the ROV in the attempt than not make the attempt. I can see it all, in my mind, from the FRAXINUS manuscript, and there it was, Anna, there were the walls of the room, and the stairwell going down, and the great carved stone slabs that would have closed these rooms off from each other.

  I suppose it took six or eight hours, I know we had two shift changes of technicians, Isobel was with me all the time, I didn’t see her eat, I didn’t eat. You see, I knew where it had to be. It must have taken us four hours just to get orientated – among lumps of mud-covered, mud-coloured rocks, in nothing that looks ANYTHING like a city, trying to discover which direction might have been north-east, before the quake, and where, down in that sightless, electrically illuminated depth it might be. ‘House Leofric’, I mean. What the manuscript calls ‘House Leofric’ – and its ‘north-east quadrant’.

  No, I am not mad. I know I am not quite sane at the moment, but not mad.

  We have two ROVs, I was prepared to sacrifice this one. The technicians teased it down, in, under; all the time at the mercy of currents, thermals. I am dumbfounded by their expertise, now, at the time I didn’t even notice. The screens kept bringing us lurching pictures of steps, inside a stairwell. I think the moment that Isobel wept was when the stone steps stopped, and the well became just a smooth-sided masonry tube going down into darkness, and we managed to get a close-up of one wall. It had a socket in it, for taking a framework of wooden steps.

  All this time I wasn’t sure which floor of the House the ROV was exploring, there’s enough damage to make it uncertain – the upper floors are barely a house! And it powered infinitely slowly and cautiously through room after room – up a floor, down a floor, through a gap – the silt covers bones, and amphorae, and coins; woodbores have eaten all the furniture. Down, down, room on room, and no way to know where we were, in the pressure and the cold and the depth.

  When it came, it was just another broken room, quite suddenly, but Isobel swore out loud: she recognised the silhouette instantly from the description. It was a minute before I knew what it must be. The techs couldn’t understand Isobel’s excitement, one of them said ‘It’s just a fucking statue, for Christ’s sake, ’ and then it came into focus for me.

  Read the translation, Anna! See what FRAXINUS says. The second golem, the Stone Golem, is ‘the shape of a man above, and beneath, nothing but a dais on which the games of war may be played’.

  What I didn’t really appreciate was how BIG the Stone Golem is.

  The torso and head and arms are gargantuan, three times the size of a man. Twelve or fifteen feet high. It sits there, blindly, in the seas off Africa, and it gazes into the darkness with sightless, stone eyes. The features are Northern European, not Berber, or sub-Saharan African; and
every muscle, every ligament, every hair is defined in stone.

  I think that the Rabbi had a mordant sense of humour. I suspect that, whereas ‘Fraxinus’ tells us that the mobile golems resembled the Rabbi, the Stone Golem itself is a portrait of that noble Visigoth/amir/, Radonic.

  The silt hides colour, of course, makes everything a uniform brown-green in the million-candlepower lights. The stonework itself I think is granite, or red sandstone, by the colour. I cannot tell you the quality of the workmanship. What seems to have corroded are the metal joints of the arms, wrists, and hands.

  Below, it is part of a dais. As far as I can tell, the torso joins seamlessly to a surface of marble or sandstone. Pressured jets of water might clear some of the silt, to see if there are markings on the dais, but Isobel and the team are frantically taking film footage of this, they won’t touch it until everything has been recorded, recorded beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond all necessity for proof, no proof needed, because it is, it IS, the Stone Golem, Ash’s MACHINA REI MILITARIS.

  And I’ll tell you something, Anna. Even Isobel isn’t trying to come up with a method by which somebody can fake THIS.

  What I need to know – what I can’t know, because it has been non-functional and lost under the sea for five hundred years – is, is this the MACHINA REI MILITARIS that FRAXINUS says it is? Is it a temple statue, a religious icon – it can’t be anything else, can it, Anna? Anything else is because I haven’t slept for I can’t remember how long, and I haven’t eaten, and I’m light-headed but I can’t stop thinking it: IS it a mechanical chess-player? IS it a war-machine?

  Oh, suppose it was something more. Suppose it WAS the voice that spoke to her?

  Two-thirds of a mile down, in the deep trench that an earthquake might have left, in the cold and the dark, five hundred years under the sea that has seen enough wars since then – fighting ships, aircraft, mines; I can’t help wondering, would the MACHINA REI MILITARIS cope with combined ops warfare, if Ash were alive what would it tell her now, if it HAD a voice?