Ash: The Lost History Part 81

You must not pa.s.s this on, any of it, not to Jonathan whatsisname, your MD, to n.o.body, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 s.h.i.+pwrecks, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 ma.n.u.script 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 f.u.c.king 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 n.o.ble 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 workmans.h.i.+p. 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 nonfunctional 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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?

Isobel needs this computer now. Anna, please, you said to me once, if the golem are true, what else is? This is. The ruins of Visigoth Carthage: an archaeological site on the bed of the sea. _There_are_no_50_billion_dollar_frauds,_ and that is what this would have to be .

Anna, this supports everything that's in the FRAXINUS ma.n.u.script!

But how could the carbon-dating on the messenger golem be wrong? Tell me what to think, I'm so exhausted I don't know.

- Pierce * * *

Message: #143 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash Date: 03/12/00 at 11. 53 p.m.

From: Longman Pierce - Jesus Christ!

I won't breathe a word, I promise. Not until the expedition's ready. Oh, Pierce, this is SO BIG! I'm so sorry I doubted you!

Pierce, you have _got_ to send me the next part you have of /Fraxinus/ that's translated. Send me the text. If _two_ of us are looking at it, there's more chance we might pick up clues, things you need to tell Dr Napier-Grant about. I won't even keep it in the office, I'll take it home with me - I'll keep it in my brief case all the time, it won't get more than arm's-length away from me!

And you _have_ to finish the translation! !

Love, Anna * * *

Message: #237 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash/Carthage Date: 04/12/00 at 01.36 a.m.

From: Anna - I know. I know! Now we need 'Fraxinus' more than ever! But there are nonetheless _problems_ in the later part of 'Fraxinus' that we cannot afford to be blind to!

I had always planned to send you an explanatory note with the penultimate part of 'Fraxinus' , 'Knight of the Wasteland' . Even without the problems of golems, C14 dating, and inauthentic ma.n.u.scripts, 'Fraxinus me fecit' still ends on a cliff-hanger in November 1476: it doesn't tell us what happened *afterwards*!

I have skipped over the final pages of the Angelotti ms. Ash's s.h.i.+ps sail from the North African coast on or around 12 September 1476. I omit a short pa.s.sage which deals with the expedition's return to mainland Europe. (I would like to include this in the final text of the book. The details of daily life on board a Venetian galley are fascinating! ) Their retreat to Ma.r.s.eilles occupies around three weeks. I calculate that the s.h.i.+ps left Carthage on the night of the 10th September 1476, and - with storms, and bad navigation, and a stop at Malta to take on food and put off the sick who would otherwise have died - the voyage took until 30 September. The s.h.i.+ps then landed (during the moon's last quarter) at Ma.r.s.eilles .

It seems, from the Angelotti ma.n.u.script, to have taken between three and four days for the company to have regrouped, acquired mules and supplies, and set out for the north. Antonio Angelotti devotes a large part of his text to regretting his lost cannon, which he describes in great technical detail. He spends rather less time - a bare two lines - on the direction in which the exiled Earl of Oxford decided to take s.h.i.+p again and to sail away with his own men.

It is at this point that the Angelotti ms cuts off (a few final pages are missing from the Missaglia treatise). 'Fraxinus me fecit' adds only a few bald sentences: that the country was, by this time, in a state of emergency, with famine, cold and hysteria emptying the towns and devastating the countryside.

Evidently, from the little we can glean from Angelotti, the company disembarked at Ma.r.s.eilles in conditions that we would now think of as resembling a nuclear winter. With Ash leading them, they proceeded on a forced march up the valley of the Rhone river, from Ma.r.s.eilles north to Avignon, and further north towards Lyons. It says something for Ash as a commander that she could have groups of armed men travel several hundred miles under very loose control, during unprecedentedly terrible weather conditions - a force with less effective leaders.h.i.+p would surely have been far more likely to hole up in a local hamlet or village outside Ma.r.s.eilles, and hope to wait out the 'sunless' winter.

Given their lack of horses, and the fact that a starving peasantry had eaten the countryside bare of crops and draught animals, stealing river s.h.i.+ps was probably their easiest option. Moreover, in a countryside that is pitch-dark twenty-four hours a day, without reliable maps or guides, following the Rhone valley at least ensured that the company would not get hopelessly lost. A fragmentary reference indicates that they gave up river-travel itself just south of Lyons when the Rhone froze over completely, and marched towards the Burgundian border, following the Saone north.

It is not recorded that any of the French ducs reacted to this incursion on their territory. They may have had too much to cope with themselves, with famine, insurrection, and war likely. More probably, in the winter and night conditions, they simply didn't notice.

Given the logistics of getting two hundred and fifty men across Europe in darkness, together with all the baggage they could carry on their backs, and the number of starving survivors who began to attach themselves to the company (either to give s.e.xual favours for food, or to attempt to rob them) - given the sheer work involved in keeping her men on the road, keeping them fed, keeping them from mutiny or plain desertion, it is perhaps not surprising that 'Fraxinus' details almost no interaction on a personal level between Ash and anyone else in the company until the hiatus immediately following their arrival outside Dijon.

We do know, from the beginning of the 'Fraxinus' ma.n.u.script, that the company gained a position very close to Dijon itself without being seen by Visigoth scouts. The company moved along the cultivated edges of the true wildwood - the virgin forested areas that still, at this point, covered a great deal of Europe. Travel would be slow, especially if weapons and baggage were to be transported, but it would be sure. It would be almost the only certain way of reaching Dijon without being wiped out by a detachment of one of the Visigoth armies.

'Fraxinus' states that the journey occupied almost seven weeks (the period from 4 October to 14 November) . By 14 November 1476, then, Ash and between two and three hundred of her armed men, with mules and baggage train, but without horses or guns, are five miles west of Dijon, just south-west of the main road to Auxonne.

Anna, I *did* think the 'Fraxinus' ma.n.u.script was either written or dictated by Ash herself; I was certain it was a reliable primary source. Now - with Carthage 1000 metres below me! - I'm even MORE certain!

BUT - there was always going to be *a* problem. You see, I had always hoped that the discovery of the Fraxinus doc.u.ment would allow me my niche in academic history as the person who solved the 'missing summer' problem. Although, in fact, given the problem with dates - some of Ash's exploits fit far better into what we know of the events of 1475; others can only have taken place in 1476; and the texts treat them all as one continuous series of events -it may be a 'missing year and a half' problem!

Records appear to doc.u.ment Ash fighting against Charles the Hold's forces in June 1475/6. She is unaccounted for over what appears to be the summer of 1476; turns up again in winter; and dies fighting at Nancy (5 January 1476/7). There are some missing weeks between the end of 'Fraxinus' (mid-November 1476) , and the point where conventional history picks Ash up again. (Some mysteries must be left for other scholars, after all! ) 'Fraxinus' breaks off abruptly, evidently incomplete.

If 'Fraxinus' does not mesh seamlessly with recorded history, that is not a problem.

The *problem* is, that in the autumn of 1476, Charles the Bold is involved in his campaign against Lorraine, besieging Nancy on 22 October. He stays at that siege all though November and December; and dies there in January, fighting against Duke Rene's reinforcements (an army of Lorrainers and volunteer Swiss).

I had initially expected this latter part of 'Fraxinus' to indicate that Ash returns to a Europe in which the Visigoth raid has failed and is in retreat.

It does not. 'Fraxinus' has the Visigoths _still_ *present* in Europe in force as late as the November of 1476.

It has France and the Duchy of Savoy at peace, by treaty, with the Carthaginian Empire; it has the ex-Emperor Frederick III of the Holy Roman Empire - now controlled from Carthage - making inroads into ruling the Swiss cantons as a Visigoth satrap, hand in hand with Daniel de Quesada. It has, in fact, everything you would expect to see if the Visigoth invasion had _succeeded_.

If this is 1476, where is Charles's war against Lorraine? Conversely, if this is 1475, then my theory that the incursion of the Visigoths was forgotten in the collapse of Burgundy falls apart, since that won't occur for another twelve months!

I can only a.s.sume that something in the dates within this text is deeply misleading, and that I have not yet understood it completely.

Whatever we have not yet understood, I do understand this much: 'Fraxinus' has given us Carthage. Isobel says being able to identify a site this early is amazing!

I will send you my final version of the last section as soon as I can - but how- can I stay away from the ROV cameras ! ! !

I am looking at *Carthage*.

I keep thinking about FRAXINUS's 'wild machines'.

- Pierce.

PART NINE.

14 November-15 November ad 1476.

Knight of the Wasteland.

Chapter One.

Rain streamed off the raised visor of her helmet, streamed off the sodden demi-gown and brigandine that she wore, and soaked her hose inside her high boots. Ash could feel it, but not see it - the sound of falling water and the un.o.bstructed blisteringly cold air told her she must be close to the tree-line, but she could see nothing in the pitch-darkness of the forest.

Someone - Rickard? - blundered into her shoulder, throwing her forward into the slick, hard bark of a tree trunk. It grazed her mittened hand. An unseen spray of soaked autumn leaves slapped her across the face, das.h.i.+ng cold water into her eyes and mouth.

"s.h.i.+t!"

"Sorry, boss."

Ash waved the boy Rickard to silence, realised he couldn't see her, and groped until she caught his sodden wool shoulder, and pulled his ear down level with her mouth: "There are umpteen thousand Visigoths out there: would you mind keeping quiet!"

Cold rain soaked through her belted demi-gown, and through the velvet and steel plates of the brigandine, making her arming doublet against her warm flesh uncomfortably cold and damp. The constant rattle of rain in the darkness, and the whispering creak of trees swaying in the night wind, prevented her hearing anything more than a few paces away. She took another cautious step, arms outstretched, and simultaneously hooked her scabbard into a low-hanging branch, and skidded her heel into a mud-rut six inches deep.

"s.h.i.+t on a f.u.c.king stick! Where's John Price? Where are the f.u.c.king scouts?"

She heard something suspiciously like a chuckle, under the noise of the falling rain. Rickard's shoulder, against hers, juddered.

"Madonna," a quiet voice said, to her left and below her, "light the lamp. There's a great deal of forest between here and Dijon; how much of it would you like us to cover?"

"Ah, s.h.i.+t - okay. Rickard ..."

Several minutes pa.s.sed. Occasionally the boy's arm or elbow jogged her, as he wrestled with a pierced iron lantern, a candle, and presumably the lit slow-match he had brought with him. Ash smelled smouldering powder. The velvet blackness pressed against her face. Cold drops of rain spattered her head as she turned her face up, letting her night vision attempt to distinguish between the crowns of trees and the invisible sky.

Nothing.

She flinched, repeatedly, as rain struck her on the cheeks and eyes and mouth. Sheltering her face with one soaked sheepskin mitten, she thought she distinguished a faint alteration of darkness and blackness.

"Angelotti? You think this rain's stopping?"

"No!"

Rickard's dark lantern finally glimmered, a weak yellow light in the surrounding pitch-darkness. Ash caught a glimpse of another figure shrouded in heavy woollen hood and cloak, seemingly kneeling down at her side - a sucking sound made her startle. The kneeling figure stood up.

"f.u.c.king mud," Master Gunner Angelotti said.

The light from the lantern failed, serving only to illuminate the silver streaks of falling water droplets. Before that, Ash had one glimpse of Angelotti, his cloak torn and his boots clotted with mud to his upper thighs. She grinned briefly to herself.

"Look on the bright side," she said. "This is a whole lot better than the conditions we've just come through to get here - it's warmer! And, any rag-head patrols are going to stay really close to home in this murk."

"But we won't see anything!" Rickard's face above the lantern, in his hood, was a chiaroscuro demon-mask. "Boss, maybe we should go back to the camp."

"John Price said he saw broken cloud. I'm betting the rain's going to ease up before long. Green Christ! does anybody know where we are?"

"In a dark wood," her Italian master gunner said, with sardonic satisfaction. "Madonna, the guide from Price's lance is lost, I think."

"Don't go yelling for him ..."

Ash faced away from the lantern's tiny glow. She let the dark into her eyes again, gazing blindly into blackness and rain. The sleeting drops found the gap between sleeve and mitten at her wrist; eased cold rivulets of water down between sallet-tail and gown collar. The cold water made her hot flesh shudder and begin to chill.

"This way," she decided.

Reaching out a hand, she grasped Rickard's arm, and Angelotti's gloved hand. Stumbling and lurching through the mud and thick leaf-mould underfoot, she banged against branches, shook down water from trees, unwilling to take her eyes from the faintest of silhouettes in front of her: the waving twigs of hornbeam trees against the open night sky beyond the wood.

"Maybe around-whuff." Her numbed, cold hand slid off Rickard's arm. Angelotti's strong fingers gripped, tightly; she slid down on to one knee and hung from his grasp, momentarily unable to get her feet under her. Boot soles skidded in the mud. Her leg went out from under her, and she sat down heavily and unguardedly in a ma.s.s of wet leaves, sharp twigs, and cold mud.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" She hauled her twisted sword-belt back round, feeling sightlessly down the hilt to the scabbard - trapped under her leg - for breaks in the thin wood. "s.h.i.+t!"

"Keep that f.u.c.king noise down!" a voice whispered. "Put that f.u.c.king lantern out! Do you want an entire f.u.c.king Visigoth legion up here? The old battle-axe will have your f.u.c.king a.r.s.e!"

Ash, in English, said, "Too d.a.m.n right she will, Master Price."

"Boss?"