Ash: The Lost History Part 50

"Yeah!" Anselm grinned fiercely at Ash. "Pet.i.tion the Emperor to award him another heraldic beast - the Lying Hound!"

She has a second to think I am ashamed of Fernando, why am I ashamed of him, why should I care? and then the bad light and confusion of men slas.h.i.+ng away at each other hides banner, standard, the glint of weapons, and men's backs as they run away.

"Captain As.h.!.+" a rider in red X livery bellowed, "the Duke wants you!"

Ash waved acknowledgement, bellowed, "You're in command, get off this f.u.c.king skyline!" to Anselm, and spurred G.o.dluc - weary, hooves b.l.o.o.d.y, flanks heaving - across the back of the hill. Back of the lines, and down, into a tiny red streamlet, tributary of the river; splas.h.i.+ng across it. She galloped into a paddock between hedges, trampled down by the pa.s.sing of a thousand men.

A throng of men and riders packed the paddock. Appalled, she thought, This is the back-of-the-lines HQ, have we been driven back this far, this fast? She shoved up her visor, stared frantically at coloured cloth, and picked out the draggled Blue Boar, with Charles's White Hart. She rode in between the ranks of armed knights. Liveries were useless now, blood and brains and mud soaking their bright colours.

One man made to block her way.

"For the Duke, motherf.u.c.ker!" Ash shrieked.

He recognised a woman's voice and let her through.

Charles of Burgundy, in full gilded armour, stood as the centre of the command group of n.o.bles. Pages held their horses. One roan gelding delicately lipped at the verge of the stream, not willing to drink through mud and body fluids. Ash dismounted. The ground hit her heels, jarring her; she was instantly weary to the bone. She shook it off.

A man, his armet crowned by a blue boar, faceless in steel, turned at her voice. Oxford.

"My lord!" Ash elbowed between four armed knights in b.l.o.o.d.y yellow and scarlet livery. "We got to re-group. Take out the catapults and the Fire. What does the Duke want me to do?"

He thumbed his visor up, giving her a sight of red-rimmed pale blue eyes, fiercely keen. "The Duke's mercenaries on your left flank are holding back. They won't push an advance. He wants you to go in there."

"He wants what?" Ash stared. "Didn't anyone ever tell him, don't reinforce failure?"

She realised she was breathing hard, and shouting too loud, despite the battle fifty yards away.

More quietly and hoa.r.s.ely, she said, "If we ma.s.s the cannon and the hackbuts, we can blast the stone men off the face of this field-"

Her hands move, describing shapes in the air which she knows approximate not to actual men, slicing at each other in this black morning's random confusion, but to their force, their will, their ability to make someone else go back: an ability not really dependent on weapons.

"-but we won't do it piecemeal. The Duke's got to give the orders!"

"He won't do it," John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, said. "The Duke is ordering a heavy cavalry charge."

"Oh, f.u.c.k chivalry! This is his chance to do something, we're getting chewed up here-" There is no time to argue on the field of battle. "Yes, my lord. What-"

Ash glimpsed something black and whirring and brought up her arm by instinct.

A bodkin arrow-head clicked off her upraised shoulder and glanced into the dirt.

The shock through the brigandine's plates momentarily numbed her right arm. She grabbed left-handed for G.o.dluc's reins - a page in red doublet and white hose knelt before G.o.dluc, slumped forward under her horse's hooves, two shafts protruding from his throat.

Not a red doublet, a white doublet soaked red.

"Oxford! " She had her four-foot short axe off the saddle, gripping it between two hands. When the commanders have to draw weapons, it's trouble. The scream and shout and sudden battering of hooves broke over the hedge in front of her, new riders piling into the enclosed paddock: ten, fifty, two or three hundred men in robes and mail on desert horses- A spurt of flame leaped out in front of her.

Ash never saw the hand-gunner, or heard the bang and crack! of the gun; she was deaf before she knew it.

Another gun spoke. Not a hand-gun but an organ-gun. Between grey smoke, she saw a Burgundian cannon crew sponge, load, ram and fire, in less time than seemed possible. She swung round and the paddock was full of mounted Visigoth knights - and men in white mullet liveries, John de Vere bellowing an attack - and G.o.dluc trampling someone a dangerous two yards from her right hand - and she brought her axe up and over and drove through the impact of flesh, of bone. The axe took off a Visigoth rider's arm, clean, with a spray of blood that reddened her armour from sallet to sabatons.

The impact of horses' hooves pounded up through the soles of her boots. She felt the bang! of another gun in the hollow of her chest. She took a grip, braced her feet, yelled as well as she could for G.o.dluc; and turned a lance-shaft aside with a well-timed cut. Coming up on the backswing for the Visigoth knight's leg, she made no connection, almost falling- "No! I won't ask!" She sobbed it aloud. "No voices!"

No riders in front of her.

The paddock was nothing but horses in red and yellow and blue caparisons: galloping Burgundian knights. Ash took three seconds to swing up into the saddle, loop her axe to it, and draw her sword: within that time, there was no longer a man in Visigoth mail and livery alive, wounded horses screamed, butchered; and the great ma.s.s of the Burgundian Duke's escort closed up around them - around what had been, she realised, a flying wedge attack.

At her horse's feet, the Visigoth standard-bearer lay face down on his flag, a red rent in his mail s.h.i.+rt, and a broken sword blade jammed through his eye-socket.

"The Duke!" John de Vere was in the mud, staring up at her. He knelt, cradling a man in gilded armour and Hart livery - Charles, Duke of Burgundy. The gilt articulated steel was leaking thick, red arterial blood. "Get surgeons! Now! "

A flying wedge of men from the land of stone and twilight, willing to be chopped apart if it meant one of them could find, under his standard, Duke Charles of Burgundy. She shook her ringing head, trying to make out what the Earl of Oxford was saying.

"SURGEONS!" His voice reached her faintly.

"My lord!" Ash wheeled G.o.dluc. The arch of the sky above her was black, with that lightlessness that she treated now as if it were just another natural phenomenon. North, the morning was distantly bright. Chill wind still blew in her face. She slammed her visor shut, jammed spurs home, and thundered across the slippery slope, her banner-bearer and escort hard put to keep up with her.

The light in the north began to die.

G.o.dluc's gallop slowed instantly to a walk as her attention s.h.i.+fted. His head drooped. His barrel chest shuddered, white with foam. Thomas Rochester's little Welsh mare caught up, with the Lion banner behind him. She pointed, wordless.

Back towards Dijon, over the Burgundian border, the sunlight was beginning to dim.

"Surgeons for the Duke!" Ash ordered. "Ride!"

The slope of the hill rose up in front of her, wet, muddy, slippery with wreckage. The Surgeon-General's tents were fifty yards off, just below the crest. G.o.dluc, doing his best, could not surmount it; she turned and rode with her group hard towards the west, along the contour of the hill, to where the slope would shallow out and allow her to get back, along the crest, to the rear and the surgeons' wagons.

Rochester and the escort outdistanced her, on horses that had done less in the past two hours. She found herself struggling in the rear, behind her banner, behind her escort.

She had no warning.

A crossbow bolt struck the flank of the horse in front: Rochester's mare. Wet meat exploded across her face and body.

G.o.dluc reared.

A mailed hand from nowhere jerked her reins down, b.l.o.o.d.ying G.o.dluc's mouth. The gelding screamed. A sword-slash cut one stirrup leather: she jerked in the high-backed saddle, grabbing with her free hand for the pommel, and balance.

Sixty Visigoth knights in mail and coat-of-plates rode past and over and through her escort, streaming out across the hill.

A spear thrust home from behind into G.o.dluc's quarters. His hind hooves lifted, his head dipped, and she went straight over his head.

The mud was soft, or she would have died with a broken neck.

The impact was too hard to feel. Ash felt nothing but an absence, realised that she lay, staring up at the black sky, stunned, hurt, chest an acid void; that her hand gripped her sword and the blade had snapped off six inches from the hilt, that something was wrong with her left leg, and her left arm.

A man in the s.n.a.t.c.h-squad leaned down from his mount. She saw his pale face, behind the helmet bar, satisfying itself about her livery. He hefted a mace in his left hand. He dismounted, and struck twice: once to her left knee, the poleyn locking down, pain blazing through the joint; and once to the side of her head.

She knew nothing clearly after that.

She felt herself lifted, thought for a time that it might be Burgundians or her own men; recognised, at last, that the language they spoke was Visigothic, and that it was dark, the sun was nowhere in the sky, and that what rocked and shook unsteadily beneath her was not a field or road or hay-cart, but the deck of a s.h.i.+p.

Her first clear thought came perhaps days later. This is a s.h.i.+p and it is sailing for North Africa.

Message: #155 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries Date: 18/11/00 at 10 . 00 a.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - I think that you may just have tried to mail me and failed.

To answer points I antic.i.p.ate you may be asking about the last section: no, I can find no other historical mention of a battle at Auxonne on or around 21 August 1476 - although Ash's narrative does bear some resemblance to what we know of a battle fought on 22 August 1485. That date, of course, refers to Bosworth field, which put an end to the Plantagenet Kings in England. And something very like the remarkable occurrence with the arrows is doc.u.mented earlier, on 29 March 1461, at Towton in England, with the Lancastrians 'not perfectly viewing the distance between them and their enemies' by reason of driving snow and wind; therefore losing that 'Palmsunday field' (and England) to the Yorkists.

Again, Charles Mallory Maximillian footnotes this, in his 1890s edition, as being one more case where the 'Ash' doc.u.ments have been fleshed out by her contemporaries (especially Del Guiz, writing in the early 1500s) with details of their own famous battles.

I feel that this no longer answers the case.

I cannot reconcile what we have here - two opposing sets of evidence. Ma.n.u.scripts which are apparently (now) fictional; archaeological relics which are evidently, physically, real. I am advising Isobel on fifteenth-century Europe, I am working on my translation, but all I can do, really, is think. How do I explain this? What theory would account for this?

I don't have one. Perhaps when Ash referred to the sun going out as a 'black miracle' , I should have listened to her! I am starting to think that only a miracle is going to give me the explanation we need.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #95 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 18/11/00 at 11.09 a.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - I have no idea why we've got a conflict of evidence, either; and I have to talk to my MD about it. It isn't just my job and your career. We can't publish a book that we know to be academically fraudulent - no, wait, don't panic! - and we can't NOT publish one with something as mind-boggling as a fifteenth-century Carthaginian golem backing it up.

Reading your last mailing, I start wondering what your Vaughan Davies would say - maybe not that the resemblance of Auxonne to Bosworth Field is a case of historical Chinese whispers, but that it's an echo of his idealised alternate-history 'Lost Burgundy' . That's poetic, and it got me thinking, because he was a scientist as well as a writer. Maybe it's NOT a poetic thought, maybe it's a scientific one.

A friend of mine, Nadia, said something very interesting to me. I've been reading up on this: we were talking about the theory you mentioned - that there are an infinite number of parallel universes created every second, in which every possible different choice or decision at any given moment gives rise to another different 'branch' , etc. (I really only know it from novels, and popular-science books.) What Nadia says is, it isn't the lost chances she regrets - whether you drove down a different road and avoided an accident, and so on - but the fact that, if this infinite-number-of-universes theory is true, she can never lead a moral existence.

She says, if she chooses not to knock down and rob an old lady in the street, then the very act of refusing to do this gives rise to a parallel universe in which she DOES do it. It is not possible NOT to do things.

I'm not suggesting you've accessed a parallel universe or alternate history - I'm not THAT desperate - but it does make Davies sound less of a mental case if his theory was based in scientific speculation. I was thinking, if we COULD find the rest of his Introduction, maybe it has a perfectly sensible SCIENTIFIC explanation, which would help us now? Even science circa 1939 would be SOMETHING.

- Anna * * *

Message: #156 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash Date: 18/11/00 at 11.20 a.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - Your Nadia's point is philosophically interesting, but not the case, according to what I understand of our physicists. (Which is purely a layman's understanding, I a.s.sure you. ) If what the current evidence seems to point to is correct, then we are not faced with an infinite number of possible universes, but only an infinite number of possible FUTURES, which collapse into one concrete and real present moment: the NOW. Which then becomes one concrete and single PAST.

So your friend chooses not to knock down her old lady, and that state of NOT having done it is what becomes the unchangeable past. It is only in the moment of transition from potential to actual that a choice is made. So it is possible not to do things.

Sorry: raise a philosophical hare with an academic and he will always chase it! To change animals and mix metaphors: let us return to our sheep- I would take help from ANYONE at the moment, including a scientific theory of the Thirties about parallel universes! I've tried extensively to find Vaughan Davies's book, though, and failed; and I don't think I can do much about that sitting in a tent outside Tunis.

I want to try these last few weeks out on my colleagues, in detail, and on Isobel's scientist friends, and see if they can come up with any theories. I don't dare do it now. It would bring unwanted attention to the site, here; it would cause Isobel a great deal of distress - and, to be honest, it would finish my chances of being the first man to translate FRAXINUS. I know this is venal, but chances of spectacular success come only rarely; something you will discover as you get older.

Maybe we could do it in a month or so? Start asking around, among experts, getting some REAL answers? That would still be before publication date.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #96 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 18/11/00 at 11. 37 a.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - But not before copy-editing, and printing! Pierce, what are you trying to do to me!

Suppose we say Christmas? If this problem hasn't resolved itself, or we haven't at least found out what it is, by then - then I'll have to go to Jonathan.

First week of January at the LATEST.

- Anna * * *

Message: #157 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash, texts Date: 18/11/00 at 04 .18 p.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - Very well. I agree. We raise no alarm before the first week in January. Although, if we haven't arrived at an answer before then - it's all of seven weeks away! - I will most probably have gone mad. But then I'll hardly have to worry about anything if I'm mad, will I!

John Monkham just came by. The photos of the golem-are splendid, beyond belief. I'm sorry you won't be able to copy or keep them; Isobel becomes more security conscious with every hour that pa.s.ses. I think if John wasn't her son, she wouldn't be letting HIM take them off-site.

I 've had a morning to polish my translation. Here it is at last, Anna. 'Fraxinus' , as promised. Or at least, the first section of it. Sorry I have only had time to do the bare minimum of footnotes.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #163 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash Date: 19/11/00 at 09.51 a.m.

From: Anna - I've GOT it.

I've got the ANSWER.

I was right, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. We've been being too complicated, that's all; complicating things unnecessarily! It's so simple. No need to concern ourselves with Davies's theory, whatever it may have been; no need to worry about what the British Library catalogue says!

What I've only this minute realised is, just because a doc.u.ment is CLa.s.sIFIED as fiction or myth or legend, THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT TRUE.

That simple!

It was something Isobel just said to me - I HAD to tell her I was having problems, I was talking about Vaughan Davies's theory: she just said, 'Pierce, what's all this RUBBISH?' And then she reminded me - The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (although his methods left much to be desired) found the site of the city of Troy in 1871, by digging EXACTLY WHERE HOMER SAID IT WAS in the ILIAD.

And the ILIAD isn't a 'historical doc.u.ment' , it's a POEM! With G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses and all the artistic licence of fiction!

It was a thunderstroke! - I still don't know how I came to miss the re-cla.s.sification of the Ash doc.u.ments, but in a very real sense, it doesn't matter. What matters is, we have physical evidence here at the site that means - WHATEVER some expert has thought about it - the chronicles of Ash's fifteenth-century actually contain truth. When they mention post-Roman technological 'golems', we FIND them. You can't argue with the evidence.

Truth can be carried down to us through STORY.

It's all right, Anna. What's going to happen is, the libraries and the universities will just have to cla.s.sify the Ash doc.u.ments BACK to being Non-Fiction.

And Isobel's expedition and my book will give the incontrovertible evidence of why they must do this.

- Pierce.

PART SIX.