Ash: A Secret History (155 page)

It is two sets of readings, two weeks apart, that imply completely different conclusions.

The altered status of the ‘Ash’ documentation is one thing – I’ve been e-mailing curators: there are known artefacts no longer in display cases, the ‘Ash sallet’ has vanished from Rouen, both the helmet AND the catalogue entry.

What is missing is not half so disturbing as what is here.

You see, Anna, I had begun to have a theory. Simply, that there was *something* that needed explaining.

I’ll be honest. Anna, I KNOW the ‘Ash’ documents were authentic history when I first studied them. Whatever I may have said about errors of re-classification, you will remember that I found myself completely unable to explain it in any satisfactory way. I think that I _had_ almost come to believe in Vaughan Davies’s theory out of sheer desperation – that there actually has been a ‘first history’ of the world, which was wiped out in some fashion, and that we now inhabit a ‘second history’, into which bits of the first have somehow survived. That Ash’s history was first genuine, and has now been – fading, if you like – to Romance, to a cycle of legends.

So I had reached a conclusion, before the last ten days. I had thought that, since neither Ash’s Burgundy, nor the Visigoth Empire in North Africa, had any evidence that hadn’t been thoroughly discredited at that point – well, how could I say this to you? I had begun to think that perhaps they *were* from a ‘previous version’ of our past, growing less real by the decade. A previous past history in which the text’s ‘miracle’ *did* take place. In which the Faris and the ‘Wild Machines’ (or whatever it is those literary metaphors represent) triggered some kind of alteration in history. Or, to put it in scientific terms, a previous past history in which the possible subatomic states of the universe were (deliberately and consciously) collapsed into a different reality – the one we now inhabit.

Vaughan Davies’s theory is just that: a theory. And yet we have to find truth somewhere. Remember that, whatever he is now, when he was a young man he _knew_ Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg; if the biographers are to be believed, he debated with them on equal terms. He did not know – and nor have I been much aware of, until I talked to James Howlett today – the work of the succeeding scientific generation on quantum theory and the various versions of the anthropic principle.

Perhaps I’ve taken on too much of the mediaeval world-view: to find a respected physicist listening to me seriously when I ask if ‘deep consciousness’ might change the universe – I find it unnerving! I try to follow James when he talks about the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds model … with rather less than the average numerate layman’s understanding, I fear.

Although even he, with all his many-branching multiverses from each collapsing quantum moment, can’t answer two questions.

The first is, why would there be only _one_ great ‘fracture of history’, as Davies called it? Mainstream quantum theory calls for continuous fracture, as you once wrote to me: a universe in which you simultaneously perform every action, moral and immoral. An endlessly branching tree of alternate universes, from every single second of time.

And, even if that point were adequately answered, even if we knew that only one great quantum restructuring of the universe had taken place, as some versions of the anthropic quantum model demand – that by observing our universe now, we have in a sense _created_ the Big Bang ‘back then’, and what we observe of the cosmos now… Anna, why would there be evidence _left over_ from before the fracture? A previous state of the universe has *no* existence, not even a theoretical one!

James Howlett has just looked over my shoulder, shaken his head, and gone off to fight with his software models of mathematical reality. No, I dare say I don’t give even an adequate layman’s explanation of what he’s been trying to tell me.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a historian: despite the fact that we experience only the present, I retain a superstitious conviction that the past exists – that it has been _real_. And yet we know nothing but this single present moment… What I had suggested to James Howlett was that the remaining contradictory evidence – the Angelotti and del Guiz manuscripts – would be anomalies from previous quantum states, becoming less and less ‘possible’ – less *real*. Turning from mediaeval history into legend, into fiction. Fading into impossibility.

Then, you found the Sible Hedingham manuscript, and Isobel’s team found the ruins of Carthage.

I’ve been so deep in translation work – when I haven’t been glued to the images the ROVs are transmitting – that it didn’t occur to me to think

No, I didn’t want to think.

It wasn’t until today, just now; until James Howlett said to me – ‘I think the important question is, why are these discoveries appearing?’

And I immediately, without thinking, corrected him: ‘*Re*-appearing.’

If there has been a ‘previous state’ of the universe, if we are a ‘second history’ – if any of this is even possible, and not utter nonsense – then that ‘fading of a first history’ cannot be the whole story. What we’ve found – the ruins of Carthage on the floor of the Mediterranean sea, and the machina rei militaris: the Stone Golem – were they actually *here* before this December?

You see, Vaughan Davies notwithstanding, I can’t begin to formulate a theory that accounts for why some of the evidence should appear to be *coming back*.

Anna, if this is true, then things are still changing.

And if things are still changing, then this isn’t ‘dead history’ – _it isn’t over_.

– Pierce

PART THIRTEEN

16 November–23 November AD 1476

The Empty Chair
¹

I

Sleet began to blind her the moment they rode out of the forest and galloped for Dijon’s north-west gate.

Wet ice whipped into Ash’s face as she spurred the pale bay, under a sky clouding up from grey to black, mixed rain and sleet slashing down.

“Get her into the city!” Ash bawled over the gathering storm, throat hoarse. “
Now!
Get her through those fucking gates:
go!
”

She crowded in, riding knee-to-knee with Florian – Christus Viridianus!
Duchess
Florian – and the rest of the mounted Lion men-at-arms, the soaked swallow-tail banner cracking overhead.

Sudden hooves thudded, cutting up the sodden earth behind her on the road down to the bridge over the moat. A stream of war-horses and riders went past and around her, in Burgundian blue and red and draggled plumes –
de la Marche’s men!
she realised, a hand on her sword-hilt.

Come out to escort us in.

Enclosed in that armed safety, they thundered back between the paths, trenches, barricades and buildings of the Visigoth camp – between the chaos of Visigoth troops running in all directions – new, wet mud spraying up from iron-shod hooves.

Just before the narrow bridge, the horses slowed, milled about; and she hit the pommel of her saddle in frustration. Two hundred mounted men. She stared at their backs, swore out loud, turning the pale bay with her spurs, gazing back into the slashing sleet and rain that now hid the Visigoth camp, hid everything more than fifty yards away. No more than ten minutes to get through this choke-point, over the bridge, through the gate; but an aching wait, fretting itself into half an hour in her mind.

Visigoth mounted archers! she anticipated. As soon as they sort themselves out— No, not in this weather.

The skin at the nape of her neck shivered.

It’ll be golems, with Greek Fire flame-throwers, like at Auxonne – we’re bunched up here, we’ll fry like wasps in a fire!

The stress of the wait made the pit of her stomach hurt. Moving again, at last – men shouting, horses’ hooves: all echoed under the arched stonework of the city gate. The breath of the animals went up white into the wet air. She swung her mount around, following Florian’s winded and limping grey gelding, was briefly aware of the darkness in the tunnel of the gate; and then burst out into drenched daylight, and Antonio Angelotti grabbing at her bridle.

“The Duke’s dead!” he yelled up at her, face streaming with rain. “Time to change sides
now!
Madonna, shall I send a messenger out to the Carthaginians?”

“Stop panicking, Angeli!”

The high steel-and-leather saddle creaked as she sat back, shifting her weight to stop the bay dancing sideways across shattered, flooded cobbles.

“There’s a new Duke –
Duchess!
” she corrected herself. “It’s Florian.
Our
Florian!”

“
Florian?
”

From behind Angelotti, Robert Anselm growled, “Fuck!”

Ash wheeled the lathered gelding, bringing it under her control. Every instinct swore at her to muster her men now, abandon all baggage but the essential, and leave this city to the natural consequences of a bungled transfer of power.

How can I?
Her fist hit the saddle pommel.
How can I!

“Demoiselle-Captain!” Olivier de la Marche rode in close, leaning across from his war-horse to clasp her arm: gauntlet against vambrace. “See to the defences of this gate! I give you authority over Jonvelle, Jussey, and Lacombe; take up your place from the gate here, north along the wall to the White Tower! Then I must speak with you!”

“Sieur—!” She did not get it out in time: his chestnut stallion was already clopping away into the downpour, in with his men-at-arms.

The crossbowman Jan-Jacob Clovet, taking the bay’s reins from Angelotti, shrugged and spat. “Son of a bitch!”

“Now is that putting the mercenaries up the sharp end, as usual? Or is that giving us the place of honour, because it’s going to be hit hardest when they come?”

“God spare us from ducal favour, boss,” Jan-Jacob Clovet said fervently. “
Any
fucking Duke.
Or
Duchess. Are you
sure
about the doc? She can’t be, can she?”

“Oh, she can! Florian!” Ash bawled.

De la Marche’s sub-captain and his men brought steaming, caparisoned war-horses between her and Florian, shouldering the woman surgeon and her broken-down mount out and across the devastated zone of the city behind the walls, heading at the trot for the ducal palace.

“
Florian!
”

She caught one glimpse of Floria del Guiz’s white face, between the pauldrons of the armoured knights surrounding her. Then the household of Olivier de la Marche closed in.

Shit! No time!

Ash spun the uncooperative bay on its heels, facing the gate again.

“Angeli! Thomas! Get ’em up on the walls! Rickard, warn Captain Jonvelle – the Visigoths are gonna come right over those fucking walls behind us!”

II

“
Why
don’t they come!”

Ash stood at a slit window in the Byward Tower, squinting out into slanting water. Rain splintered down on to the walls of Dijon. The tower’s flint and masonry breathed off cold.

Rain beat in: solid, intense storm-rain. Rivulets ran down off her steel sallet and visor. Her breath and body warmth made the safety of armour stickily humid, despite the biting cold wind.

“‘Nother couple of hours, it’ll be dark.” Robert Anselm shouldered into the window embrasure, his rust-starred armour scraping against hers. “Fuck, I thought the whole fucking rag-’ead army was coming in after you!”

“They should be! If I was them – there’s never been a better chance—!”

The thunder of the city gate shutting behind them still tingles in her bones.

“Maybe they’re having a mutiny out there! Maybe the Faris is dead.
I
don’t know!”

“Wouldn’t you … know?”

Carefully, she probes in that part of her soul that she shares.

Almost beyond hearing, there are voices – the
machina rei militaris,
Godfrey, the Wild Machines? For the first time in her life she can’t tell. And there is an echo of that intense pressure, subliminally sensed, felt in the bones, that racked her when the hart was hunted and the sun dimmed in the autumn sky. Voices as weak, or weaker, than at that moment of the unmaking.

“There’s been some … damage, I think. I don’t know what or to who. Temporary, permanent – I can’t tell.” In fear and frustration, Ash added, “Just when we could do with hearing Godfrey, right, Roberto? Hey, maybe the Faris
has
died! Maybe her
qa’ids
are running around like headless chickens trying to sort out the command structure:
that’s
why they haven’t attacked…”

“Won’t take ’em long.” Anselm put his face to the stone aperture, his hard armoured body shifting, trying to make out anything beyond the misty walls of the city. “I’ve had the muster roll called. There’s two of our officers still missing. John Price. Euen Huw.”

“Shit…”

Ash peered out of the gap between tightly mortared stones. Her breath made grey plumes in front of her face. The intensity of the lashing water came in bursts, slapping the stone rim of the window. She did not flinch back.

“Price isn’t even a fucking cavalryman… Nobody’s to go out after them.” Her voice sounded curt in her own ears.

Anselm protested, “Girl—”

Ash cut him off. “I don’t like it any more than you. Nothing happens until we can see what’s going on. The Duke’s
dead.
This city could fall apart from the
inside,
any second! I want a command meeting with de la Marche; I want to see Florian! After that, maybe we’ll send a man out through one of the postern gates.”

Anselm, grimly sardonic, said, “We got no idea what the fucking rag-heads are doing.
Or
the Burgundians. You don’t like it. Nor do I.”