Ash: A Secret History (20 page)

Subject: Ash, theory

Date:    05/11/00 at 04.21 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Fine.

MAYBE.

How could something of this magnitude just VANISH out of history???

– Anna

  Message: #21 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    06/11/00 at 04.07 a.m.

From:    Ratcliff@

Anna –

Apologies for answerphone. I’d left this line switched over to fax. I want to reassure you, but

You see, the thing is, it’s EASY to vanish from history. BURGUNDY does it, for God’s sake. There it is, in 1476, the wealthiest, most cultured, most militarily organised nation in Europe – and in January 1477 their Duke gets killed, and Charles Mallory Maximillian was right, NOTHING EVER GETS WRITTEN ABOUT BURGUNDY AGAIN.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. But most educated people’s concept of European history is that north-west Europe consists of France and Germany, and has done from the fall of the Roman Empire. Burgundy is the name of a wine.

You see, what I’m trying to say is

It actually took Burgundy about a generation to vanish totally, Charles’s only child Mary married Maximilian of Austria, and they became the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs, which last until World War One, but the POINT I wanted to make is

The point is, if you didn’t know Burgundy was a major European power, and that we came THIS close to having five hundred years of Burgundy instead of France – well, if you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t learn it. It’s as if the whole country is FORGOTTEN the moment that Charles the Bold dies on the battlefield at Nancy.

No one has ever satisfactorily explained this! Some things just don’t get into history

I think something similar happens with the ‘Visigoth’ settlement

Here I am babbling away at the keyboard in the early hours, you’re going to think I’m an idiot

Excuse me, please. I’m exhausted. I’ve got a seat on a plane at Heathrow, I only have an hour to pack, the taxi’s due about now, and then I decided to check my phone, and found your last message.

Anna, the most amazing, wonderful thing has happened! My colleague Dr Isobel Napier-Grant telephoned me. She’s in charge of the diggings outside Tunis – the GUARDIAN’S been running stories on their latest discoveries, you may have seen – and she’s found something that may be one of the ‘clay walkers’ in the del Guiz text!

She thinks it *just might have been* an actual *mobile* piece of technology!!! – maybe mediaeval – post-Roman – or it may be complete nonsense, some weird Victorian invention or forgery that’s only been in the ground a hundred years

Tunis, of course, is near the historical ruins of Roman Carthage

Taxi’s here. If this damn thing works, I’ve sent you the next translated section Ash. Phone as soon as back from Tunisia.

anna – if the golem are true – what else is?

PART TWO

1 July–22 July AD 1476

Nam sub axe legismus, Hecuba regina
¹

I

Afloat on the Rhine river, the barge shifting underfoot, Ash lifted her chin and unbuckled her sallet. “What hour is it?”

Philibert took it from her. “Sunset.”

On my wedding night
.

The little page-boy, with the help of the older Rickard, unbuckled the straps of her brigandine, unlaced the mail standard around her throat, unbuckled her sword-belt, and took her weapons and armour off her body. She sighed, unconsciously, and stretched her arms out. Armour is not heavy when you put it on, weighs nothing ten minutes afterwards, and when you take it off is the weight of lead.

The Rhine river barges presented problems enough: two hundred men of the Lion company detailed off – at Fernando del Guiz’s perfectly legal insistence – as escort for the disgraced Visigoth ambassadors, travelling from Cologne to the Swiss cantons, over the pass and down to Genoa. Therefore two hundred men, their gear and horses, to be organised. And a deputy commander to be left behind with the rest of the company: in this case, her unilateral decision appointed Angelotti, with Geraint ab Morgan.

Outside, there was a solid grunt and the sound of weight slumping to the deck: her stewards, poleaxing the last of the bullocks to be brought on board. She heard footsteps, water sloshed from leather buckets to clean the barge’s deck, where basins do not catch all the blood: the rip of skin as the butcher’s knife is taken to the carcass.

“What will you eat, boss?” Rickard shifted from one foot to the other, obviously anxious to get out on deck with the rest of the company. Men gambling, drinking; whores enjoying the night on the slow-flowing river.

“Bread; wine.” Ash gestured abruptly. “Phili will get it for me. I’ll call for you if I need you.”

Philibert put a pottery plate into her hands, and she paced up and down the tiny cabin, cramming the crusts of bread into her mouth, chewing, spitting out a crumb and washing it all down with wine; all the time frowning, and moving – with a memory of Constanza, in her solar in Cologne – not like a woman, but like a long-legged boy.

“I called an officer meeting! Where the fuck are they?”

“My lord Fernando rescheduled it to the morning.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” Ash smiled grimly. Her smile faded. “He said ‘not tonight’, and made bad jokes about bridal nights – right?”

“No, boss.” Phili looked pained. “His friends did. Matthias and Otto. Boss, Matthias gave me sweetmeats. Then he asked me what the whore-captain does. I don’t tell him. Can I lie to him, next time?”

“Lie yourself blue in the face if you like.” Ash grinned conspiratorially, to an answering pleased wicked grin from the boy. “That goes for Fernando’s squire Otto, too. You keep ’em guessing, kid.”

What the whore-captain does…
? Well, what
do
I do?

Be a widow. Confess, do penance. People do.

“Fucking Christ!” Ash threw herself down on the cabin’s box-bed.

The wood of the Rhine barge creaked, gently. Night air breathed off the unseen water, making the canvas-roofed cabin pleasantly cool. A part of her mind registered the creak of ropes, horses shifting their hooves, a man praising wine, another man devoutly praying to St Catherine, other barges; all the night noises of two hundred men of the company travelling south upriver, as the long train of barges pulled away from Cologne.

“Fuck!”

“Boss?” Philibert looked up from sanding a rust-spotted breastplate.

“This is bad enough without—!”
Without everybody confused about who they’re supposed to be taking orders from, me – or him.
“Never mind.”

Slowly, unaware of the boy’s fingers undoing her points, she dragged off doublet and hose together, and sprawled back in her shirt. A burst of laughter on deck shattered the comparative quiet. She was not aware that she flinched. One hand unconsciously tugged the hem of her long gathered shirt down over her bare knees.

“Boss, you want the lanterns lit?” Phili rubbed his knuckle into his eye-socket.

“Yeah.” Ash watched without seeing as the scruffy-haired page hung the lanterns on their hooks. A buttery yellow light illuminated the opulent quarters, the silk pillows, the furs, the box-sided bed, the canvas canopy with the green and gold colours of del Guiz quartered with the Hapsburg yellow and black.

All of Fernando’s travelling chests were thrown carelessly open, crowding the small cabin; his doublets spilling out, every surface covered with his possessions. She inventoried them automatically in her head – a purse, a shoeing horn, a bodkin; a cake of red wax, shoemaker’s thread; a bag, a silk-lined hood, a gilded leather halter; sheaves of parchment; an eating-knife with an ivory handle…

“I could sing for you, boss.”

She reached out with her free hand and patted Philibert on the hip. “Yeah.”

The little boy pulled his caped hood off over his head, and stood in the lamplight with his shaggy hair sticking up. He squeezed his eyes shut and began to sing unaccompanied:

“The thrush she sings from the fire,

‘The Queen, the Queen’s my bane—’”

“Not that one.” Ash swung her legs over and sat on the edge of the box-bed. “And that’s not the beginning of that song. That comes near the end. It’s okay, you’re tired. Go sleep.”

The boy looked at her with stubborn dark eyes. “Rickard and I want to sleep in here like always.”

She has not slept alone since she was thirteen.

“No. Go sleep with the squires.”

He ran out. The heavy tapestry curtain let in a burst of sound as it opened, cut it off as it swung to. A far more graphic and biologically descriptive song than Philibert’s old country tragedy was being sung out on deck. He probably knows the words to this one too, she thought; but he’s been walking around me today like I was Venetian glass. Since this morning, and the cathedral.

Footsteps sounded outside on the deck. She recognised the sound: all her skin shivered. She lay back down on the mattress.

Fernando del Guiz pushed the curtain open, bawling something over his shoulder that made Matthias – a not-very-noble young male friend, Ash thought – howl with laughter. He let the curtain drop behind him, closing his eyes and swaying with the ship.

Ash stayed where she lay.

The curtain stayed undisturbed. No squire, no page; none of his court friends, young boisterous German knights. No very public aristocratic bridal customs? she wondered.

No – no, you won’t will you? Drag the sheets out of here and show there’s no virgin bloodstains? You won’t want to listen to people saying
his wife’s a whore.

“Fernando—”

His large hands unbuttoned the front of his puff-sleeved satin doublet, and he shrugged it back off his shoulders. Fernando smiled a particularly knowing smile. “That’s ‘husband’ to you.”

Sweat stuck his yellow hair to his forehead. He struggled with the points at his waist, abandoned them halfway – cloth ripped as he tore his arm out of his shirt. Even rangy in build, with his body not yet filled out to his adult weight, Ash found him just plain
big:
male chest, male torso, the hard muscles of male thighs when the man is a knight and rides every day.

He didn’t bother to unlace his cod-flap, he reached in and hitched his stiffening cock out over the top of the fabric, clutching it in his hand; and clambered one-handed on to the tiny truckle-bed towards her. The yellow lantern light turned his skin into oiled gold. She inhaled. He smelled male, smelled also how linen shirts smell, when they are left to dry in the open air.

With her own hands she pulled up her shirt, under which she was naked.

He reached down and wrapped his hand around his thickening purple cock, lifted her hips with his other hand, guided his thrust with an inexpert shove.

More than ready – ready since the realisation that it was his footsteps outside – she received the whole thick length of him thrust into her; shivered, hot as fever. Impaled, she enclosed his solidity.

His face lowered, inches from hers. She saw, in his eyes, his realisation of her wetness. He murmured, “Whore…”

His thumb stroked her scarred cheekbones, an old scar at the base of her neck, a curve of black bruises where a blow at Neuss had driven her breastplate in under her arm. His slurred young voice mumbled, “You got a
man’s
body.”

The points of his hose at his waist, and at his cod-flap, pulled tight. The fine wool ripped down the inner seam, exposing the hard flesh of his thigh. His torso fell across her. His weight made her struggle to breathe. She dug her fingers into the big muscles of his upper arms, hard. His skin under her hand was velvet over hardness; silk over iron. Her head fell back on the silk pillows. She moaned in her throat.

The man thrust, two or three times. Her wet, pulsing cunt held him; a shiver of pre-sensation began to loosen her muscles; she felt herself opening, flesh unfolding.

He jerked twice, like a poacher’s rabbit from the killing blow; and his hot seed flooded her, copious, slicking down her thighs. His heavy body sprawled over her.

She smelled – almost tasted – thin German beer on his breath.

His cock slid out of her, limp.

“You’re
drunk!
” Ash said.

“No. You wish I was. I wish I was.” He looked down at her from a blurred face. “This is my duty and it’s done. And that’s it, madam wife. You’re mine now, sealed by blood—”

Ash said drily, “I don’t think so.”

His expression changed: she could not read it. Arrogance? Revulsion? Confusion? A simple, selfish desire not to be here, not to be on this barge, in this bed, with this problematical she-male?