Ash: A Secret History (108 page)

I’m no longer at the land-site, I’m on the ship; that’s one reason the transmission might have failed. We flew out by helicopter this morning to the expedition’s ship, the HANNIBAL; we’re at sea five miles off the North African coast.

You must not pass this on, any of it, not to Jonathan whatsisname, your MD, to nobody, 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 Institute 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 shipwrecks, 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 ships 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 manuscript, 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 manuscripts 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 manuscripts 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 manuscripts 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 manuscript, 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 shift 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 manuscript 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 fucking 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 noble 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 workmanship. 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 non-functional 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 ships, 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 manuscript!

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:    Ngrant@

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 manuscripts, ‘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 ships sail from the North African coast on or around 12 September 1476. I omit a short passage 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 Marseilles occupies around three weeks. I calculate that the ships 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 ships then landed (during the moon’s last quarter) at Marseilles.

It seems, from the Angelotti manuscript, 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 ship again and to sail away with his own men.