Ash: The Lost History Part 80

"You reckon?" Ash took it, crammed it in her mouth as her stomach groaned with hunger, and pa.s.sed two more handfuls on to Huw and Morgan. Saliva filled her mouth. She chewed raggedly, swallowed, licked her fingers, and exclaimed, "Wat, where'd you get my old boots from!"

"Best beef," Rodway lisped, his tone aggrieved.

Euen Huw, under his breath, said, "It was, before you cooked it."

Ash spluttered into a giggle. "Where's Oxford?"

"Here, madam."

He still wore his full harness, and did not look as if he had taken his armour off since Carthage. Ground-in dirt made the lines around his eyes plainly visible.

"Are you well?"

"I have things I must tell you." She saw her officers in de Vere's wake and beckoned them up; and Floria joined the group, out of the darkness, carrying a lantern that showed her dirty, pale about the eyes, and with a fierce frown.

"Are you losing your mind?" Floria said without preliminary.

Both Angelotti and Geraint looked shocked.

Ash gestures them around her with the familiar movement, so that they squat, the lantern showing them each other's faces, in a circle on the wave-beaten beach ten miles west of Carthage.

The voices in her mind are - not fainter, but less powerful. As winter sunlight is no less light than the summer sun, but is thinner, weaker, without the same heavy fire and warmth. So the whispers in her mind nag at her, but do not force her body out of her own control.

"Too much to tell you . . . but I will. First, I have orders, and a suggestion,"' Ash said. "I plan now to go back to Dijon. To Robert Anselm, and the rest of the company. Most of my men will come with me, my lord Oxford - if only because they're dead if they stay in North Africa. We may have desertions once we're back in the north, but I think I can get most of them to Dijon."

She hesitated, her eyes screwed up, as if against remembered light.

"The sun's still s.h.i.+ning in Burgundy. Dear G.o.d, I want to see- daylight!"

"And then what?" de Vere said. "What will you have us do, madam?"

"I can't command you. I wish I could." Ash smiled, very slightly, at the English Earl's expression. "We are facing an enemy behind the enemy, my lord."

De Vere knelt, listening gravely.

She said, "We are facing something that doesn't care what happens, so long as Burgundy is taken - I don't think they care about the Visigoth Empire at all."

The Earl of Oxford continued to regard her, with a contained deliberation.

"You hold an ancient t.i.tle," Ash said, "and whether in exile or not, you are one of the foremost soldiers of the age. My lord Oxford, I go back to Dijon, but you should not. You should go elsewhere."

Over protests, John de Vere said, "Explain, madam."

"Something demonic is our enemy . . ." And, when his expression changed, and he crossed himself, Ash leaned forward and said, "If you'll listen to me, this is what you should do. Christendom is subject, now. The Visigoth Empire either has treaties, or it has conquered, almost everything except Burgundy -and England, but England is in little danger."

"You think not?"

Ash took a breath. "There is an enemy behind the enemy . . . The Stone Golem processes military problems, it tells Leofric and through him the King-Caliph how they should attack - and for the last twenty years it's said attack Christendom. But what speaks through the Stone Golem, that doesn't care about Christendom. Just Burgundy."

John de Vere repeated, "An enemy behind our enemy."

"Who wants Burgundy, not England; it's all Burgundy. The Visigoths will take every other city, and then they'll take Dijon, and the Faris will lay the countryside waste - I don't know why the Wild Machines hate Burgundy, but they do." The echo of voices s.h.i.+vering her spine. "They do . . ."

Oxford said briskly, "And you think that one mercenary company, reunited in Dijon, will prevent this?"

"Stranger things have happened in war, but I don't much care about the destruction of Burgundy." Ash caught Floria's eyes fixed on her. She ignored the woman's gaze. "I plan to go to Dijon - and then break out, take s.h.i.+p for England, be four hundred miles away, and see what happens to the crusade when the Burgundian Dukes are defeated and dead. The further away I am, the better ..."

Voices in her mind: faint still.

"... But if they don't stop at Burgundy, my lord of Oxford, then I can think of only one thing that might stop the conquest." 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 d.i.c.kon 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 s.h.i.+ps: 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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: [email protected] 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 doc.u.ments. 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: [email protected] 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-cla.s.sified from Mediaeval History to Fiction. And my 'Fraxinus' doc.u.ment, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+pwreck 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 ma.n.u.script But it's all irrelevant now. The golems are fakes: the Angelotti ma.n.u.script 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: [email protected] 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 (a.s.suming 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 cla.s.s.

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: 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'mon the s.h.i.+p; that's one reason the transmission might have failed. We flew out by helicopter this morning to the expedition's s.h.i.+p, the HANNIBAL; we're at sea five miles off the North African coast.