Ash: A Secret History (107 page)

‘
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 brimming 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:    Longman@

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 publishing 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 documents. 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:    Ngrant@

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-classified from Mediaeval History to Fiction. And my ‘Fraxinus’ document,
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 ship, 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 shipwreck 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 manuscript

But it’s all irrelevant now. The golems are fakes: the Angelotti manuscript 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:    Longman@

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 (assuming 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 class.

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:    Ngrant@

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.