Ash: A Secret History (2 page)

This earliest Latin fragment of the Winchester Codex, a monastic document written around
AD
1495, deals with her early experiences as a child, and it is here presented in my own translation, as are subsequent texts.

Any historical personage inevitably acquires a baggage train of tales, anecdotes and romantic stories over and above their actual historical career. These are an entertaining part of the Ash material, but not to be taken seriously as history. I have therefore foot-noted such episodes in the Ash cycle as they occur: the serious reader is free to disregard them.

At the beginning of our millennium, with sophisticated methods of research, it is far easier for me to strip away the false ‘legends’ around Ash than it would have been for either Charles Maximillian or Vaughan Davies. I have here uncovered the historical woman behind the stories – her real self as, if not more, amazing than her myth.

Pierce Ratcliff, Ph.D. (War Studies), 2001

NOTE: Addendum to copy found in British Library: pencilled note on loose papers:

DR PlERCE RATCLIFF Ph.D.
(War Studies)

Flat I, Rowan Court, 112 Olvera Street, London
WI4 OAB
, United Kingdom

Fax: ██████████

E-mail: ██████████

Tel: ██████████

Editor

█████ University Press

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█████

███████

29 September 2000

Dear Ms Longman,

I am returning, with pleasure, the contract for our book. I have signed it as requested.

I enclose a rough draft of the translation of Ash’s early life: the Winchester Codex. As you will see, as further documents are translated, the seed of everything that happens to her is here.

This is a remarkable occasion for me! Every historian, I suppose, believes that one day he or she will make the discovery, the one that makes their names. And I believe that I have made it here, uncovering the details of the career of this remarkable woman, Ash, and thus uncovering a little-known – no, a
forgotten
– deeply significant episode in European history.

My theory is one that I first began to piece together as I studied the existing ‘Ash’ documents for my doctoral thesis. I was able to confirm it with the discovery of the ‘Fraxinus’ document – originally from the collection at Snowshill Manor, in Gloucestershire. A cousin of the late owner, Charles Wade, had been given a sixteenth century German chest before his death and the take-over of Snowshill Manor by the National Trust in 1952. When it was finally opened, the manuscript was inside. I think it must have sat in there (there is a steel locking mechanism that takes up the entire inside of the chest’s lid!), all but unread
since
the fifteenth century. Charles Wade may not even have known it existed.

Being in mediaeval French and Latin, it had never been translated by Wade, even if he was aware of it – he was one of those ‘collectors’ who, born in the Victorian age, had far more interest in acquiring than deciphering. The Manor is a wonderful heap of clocks, Japanese armour, mediaeval German swords, porcelain, etc.! But that at least one other eye besides mine has seen it, I am certain: some hand has scribbled a rough Latin pun on the outer sheet –
fraxinus me fecit
: ‘Ash made me’. (You may or may not know that the Latin name for the ash tree is
fraxinus.)
I would guess that this annotation is eighteenth century.

As I first read it, it became clear to me that this was, indeed, an entirely new, previously undiscovered document. A memoir written, or more likely dictated,
by the woman Ash herself,
at some point before her death in
AD
1477(?). It did not take me long to realise that it fits, as it were, in the gaps between recorded history – and there are many, many such gaps. (And, one supposes, it is my discovery of ‘Fraxinus’ which encouraged your firm to wish to publish this new edition of the Ash
Life.)

What ‘Fraxinus’ describes is florid, perhaps, but one must remember that exaggeration, legend, myth, and the chronicler’s own prejudices and patriotism, all form a normal part of the average mediaeval manuscript. Under the dross, there is gold. As you will see.

History is a large net, with a wide mesh, and many things slip through it into oblivion. With the new material I have uncovered, I hope to bring to light, once again, those facts which do not accord with our idea of the past, but which, nonetheless,
are
factual.

That this will then involve considerable reassessment of our views of Northern European history is inevitable, and the historians will just have to get used to it!

I look forward to hearing from you,

Pierce Ratcliff

PROLOGUE

c.
AD 1465-1467[?]

‘
My soul is among lions
’
¹

I

It was her scars that made her beautiful.

No one bothered to give her a name until she was two years old. Up until then, as she toddled between the mercenaries‘ campfires scrounging food, suckling bitch-hounds’ teats, and sitting in the dirt, she had been called Mucky-pup, Grubby-face, and Ashy-arse. When her hair fined up from a nondescript light brown to a white blonde it was ‘Ashy’ that stuck. As soon as she could talk, she called herself Ash.

When Ash was eight years old, two of the mercenaries raped her.

She was not a virgin. All the stray children played snuggling games under the smelly sheepskin sleeping rugs, and she had her particular friends. These two mercenaries were not other eight-year-olds, they were grown men. One of them had the grace to be drunk.

Because she cried afterwards, the one who was not drunk heated his dagger in the campfire and drew the knife-tip from below her eye, up her cheekbone in a slant, up to her ear almost.

Because she still cried, he made another petulant slash that opened her cheek parallel under the first cut.

Squalling, she pulled free. Blood ran down the side of her face in sheets. She was not physically big enough to use a sword or an axe, although she had already begun training. She was big enough to pick up his cocked crossbow (carelessly left ready on the wagon for perimeter defence) and shoot a bolt through the first man at close quarters.

The third scar neatly opened her other cheekbone, but it came honestly, no sadism involved. The second man’s dagger was genuinely trying to kill her.

She could not cock the crossbow again on her own. She would not run. She groped among the burst ruins of the first mercenary’s body and buried his eating-knife in the upper thigh of the second man, piercing his femoral artery. He bled to death in minutes. Remember that she had already begun to train as a fighter.

Death is nothing strange in mercenary soldier camps. Even so, for an eight-year-old to kill two of their own was something to give them pause.

Ash’s first really clear memory came with the day of her trial. It had rained in the night. The sun brought steam rising from field and distant forest, and slanted gold light across tents, rough bashas, cauldrons, carts, goats, washerwomen, whores, captains, stallions and flags. It made the company’s colours glow. She gazed up at the big swallow-tailed flag with the cross and beast on it, smelling the cool air on her face.

A bearded man squatted down in front of her to talk to her. She was small, for eight. He wore a breastplate. She saw her face reflected in the curving mirror-shiny metal.

Her face, with her big eyes and ragged long silver hair, and three unhealed scars; two up her cheek under her left eye and one under her right eye. Like the tribal marks of the horse-barbarians of the East.

She smelled grass-fires and horse dung, and the sweat of the armed man. The cool wind raised the hairs on her arms. She saw herself suddenly as if she were outside of it all – the big kneeling man in armour, and in front of him this small child with spilling white curls, in patched hose and bundled into a ragged doublet far too big for her. Barefoot, wide-eyed, scarred; carrying a broken hunting knife re-ground as a dagger.

It was the first time she saw that she was beautiful.

Blood thundered in her ears with frustration. She could think of no
use
for that beauty.

The bearded man, the Captain of the company, said, “Have you father or mother living?”

“I don’t know. One of them might be my father.” She pointed at random at men re-fletching bolts, polishing helmets. “Nobody says they’re my mother.”

A much thinner man leaned down beside the Captain and said quietly, “One of the dead men was stupid enough to leave a crossbow spanned with a bolt in it. That’s an offence. As to the child, the washerwomen say she’s no maid, but no one knows her to be a whore either.”

“If she is old enough to kill,” the Captain scowled through wiry copper-coloured hair, “she is old enough to take the penalty. Which is to be whipped at the cart-tail around the camp.”

“My name is Ash,” she said in a small, clear, carrying voice. “They hurt me and I killed them. If anyone else hurts me, I’ll kill them too. I’ll kill
you.
”

She got the whipping she might have expected, with something added for insolence and discipline’s sake. She did not cry. Afterwards, one of the crossbowmen gave her a cut-down jack, a padded cloth jerkin, for armour, and she exercised devotedly in it at weapons practice. For a month or two she pretended the crossbowman was her father, until it became clear that his kindness had been a momentary impulse.

A little later in her ninth year, rumours went through the camp that there had been a Lion born of a Virgin.

II

The child Ash sat with her back to a bare tree, cheering the mummers. Furs kept some of the ground’s ice from her backside.

Her scars were not healing well. They stood out red against the extreme pallor of her skin. Visible breath huffed out of her mouth as she screamed, shoulder to shoulder with all the camp strays and bastards. The Great Wyrm (a man with a tanned horse’s skin flung over his back, and a horse’s skull fitted by ties to his head) ramped across the stage. The horse skin still had mane and tail attached. They nailed the freezing afternoon air. The Knight of the Wasteland (played by a company sergeant in better armour than Ash had thought he owned) aimed skilful lance blows very wide.

“Oh,
kill
it,” a girl called Crow called scornfully.

“Stick it up his arse!” Ash yelled. The children huddling around her tree screamed laughter and disdain.

Richard, a little black-haired boy with a port-wine stain across his face, whispered, “It’ll
have
to die. The Lion’s born. I heard the Lord Captain say.”

Ash’s scorn faded with the last sentence. “When? Where? When, Richard? When did you hear him?”

“Midday. I took water into the tent.” The small boy’s voice sounded proud.

Ash ignored his implied unofficial status as page. She rested her nose on her clenched fists and huffed warm breath on her frozen fingers. The Wyrm and the sergeant were having at each other with more vigour. That was because of the cold. She stood up and rubbed hard at her numb buttocks through her woollen hose.

“Where’s you going, Ashy?” the boy asked.

“I’m going to make water,” she announced loftily. “You can’t come with me.”

“Don’t
wanna.
”

“You’re not big enough.” With that parting shaft, Ash picked her way out of the crowd of children, goats and hounds.

The sky was low, cold, and the same colour as pewter plates. A white mist came up from the river. If it would snow, it would be warmer than this. Ash padded on feet bound with strips of cloth towards the abandoned buildings (probably agricultural) that the company officers had commandeered for winter quarters. A sorry rabble of tents had gone up all around. Armed men were clustered around fire-pits with their fronts to the heat and their arses in the cold. She went on past their backs.

Round to the rear of the farm, she heard them coming out of the building in time to duck behind a barrel, in which the frozen cylindrical block of rainwater protruded up a full handspan.

“And go on foot,” the Captain finished speaking. A group of men clattered with him out into the yard. The thin company clerk. Two of the Captain’s closest lieutenants. The very few, Ash knew, with pretensions (once) to noble birth.

The Captain wore a close-fitting steel shell that covered all his body. Full harness: from the pauldrons and breastplate enclosing his shoulders and body, the vambraces on his arms, his gauntlets, his tassets and cuisses and greaves that armoured his legs, down to the metal sabatons that covered his spurred boots. He carried his armet
²
under his arm. Winter light dulled the mirrored metal. He stood in the filthy farmyard wearing armour that reflected the sky as white: she had not thought before that this might be why it was called
white harness.
The only colour shone from his red beard and the red leather of his scabbard.