Ash: A Secret History (27 page)
Subject: Ash
Date: 06/11/00 at 10.10 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
THE *SUN* GOES OUT?????
And you’re WHERE?
– Anna
Message: #19 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 06/11/00 at 06.30 p.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
I am stuck in a hotel room in Tunis. One of Isobel Napier-Grant’s young assistants is instructing me on how to download and send e-mails through the telephone system here – not as easy a task as you might imagine. The truck doesn’t go out to the site until tonight, under cover of darkness. Archaeological teams can be fanatical about security. I don’t blame Isobel one bit, if she’s got what she says she has.
I’d hoped, when she said she was coming out here, that she might find confirming evidence – so unlikely anyway, even for a potsherd, with the hundreds of square miles of territory to be searched – but THIS!
‘The sun goes out’. Yes, of course. As far as I can discover, there was no actual eclipse visible in Europe in 1475 or 147 6 – the very best I can manage is one on 25 February 1476, in Pskov, but that’s in Russia! – however, later chroniclers obviously found it an irresistible piece of dramatic licence. I must say that I do, too.
– Pierce
Message: #20 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, historical background
Date: 06/11/00 at 06.44 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
BUT!!! I’ve been looking this up, Pierce. All the wars I can find, for the whole of 1476-1477, are Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy’s attempts to conquer Lorraine, and link up his ‘Middle Kingdom’ across Europe. Then there’s his defeat by the Swiss at Nancy; and the indecent haste with which his enemies divided up Burgundy between them on his death. There are the usual wars between the Italian city states, but that’s it; there’s *nothing* about North Africa!
Don’t tell me this is Euro-centric historicism! Isn’t an invasion of Italy and Switzerland a bit BIG to miss?
*I repeat, Pierce, WHAT VISIGOTH INVASION???!!!*
– Anna
Message: #23 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 06/11/00 at 07.07 p.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
I told you that FRAXINUS would cause you to reassess history.
Very well:
It is my intention to prove that the North African Visigoth settlement, at one point between approximately AD 1475 and AD 1477, DID mount a military invasion of southern Europe.
I will be stating that contemporary interest in this raid was lost in the flurry of panic when Charles the Bold was killed in battle in 1477. That was perhaps only to be expected.
That later historians continue to ignore the episode is due – dare I say – to the preponderance of white, male middle-class academics unwilling to believe that Western Europe might be challenged from Africa? And that a mixed-race culture might prove militarily superior to Caucasian Western Christendom?
– Pierce
Message: #21 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, historical background
Date: 06/11/00 at 07.36 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
The problem with this is still that the text gives us an invasion of Western Europe in 1476 and even the Turks NEVER ACTUALLY SUCCEEDED IN INVADING!!! I know you will say that, according to your present theory, Ash is fighting your North African mediaeval ‘Visigoths’. Then WHY IS THERE NO MENTION OF THIS IN MY HISTORY BOOKS?
– Anna
Message: #24 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Visigoths
Date: 07/11/00 at 05.23 p.m.
From: Ngrant@
Anna –
I’m at the site!
Dr Napier-Grant is kindly allowing me to use her satellite notebook PC. There’s so much to say that I couldn’t wait to try and get a phone call through, the lines here are terrible. Isobel (sorry, that’s Dr N-G, in case you forget) Isobel says I can tell you a bit but she doesn’t want it leaking out, because if someone else reads the message then she’ll have every archaeologist between here and the North Pole arriving on our doorstep. Those that aren’t here already.
I know I’m not supposed to say this, but it’s hot and smelly and the only time it’s bearable is when we’re actually out at the digs – which I’m *not* going to mention the location of, obviously!!! Suffice it to say that we are very near the northern coast of this region of Tunisia. (There are mountains on the southern skyline, they make me think of ice and coldness and somewhere you don’t have to stay under shelter between one and five in the afternoon!) Look, you don’t want to hear all this, but I can’t tell you what I’d like to, and I’m just bursting to.
Isobel says that since you’re on the verge of ditching the book, I *can* tell you some things. Isobel’s a wonderful woman. I’ve known her since Oxford. She’s the last person I can think of who’d get excited unnecessarily. You only have to look at her short hair and sensible shoes. (No, we never did. I wanted to. Isobel isn’t keen that way.) And this last twenty-four hours since I got here, she’s been skipping about like a schoolgirl! This *could* still turn out to be another Hitler Diaries, but I don’t think so.
What have we found? (Not ‘we’, of course. Isobel and her wonderful team.)
We’ve found golems.
Exactly as the text describes them. ‘Messenger-golems’. One complete, and some pieces of another. You remember me telling you that Arabic mediaeval engineering was quite up to building singing fountains, and mechanical birds that flap their wings, and all that sort of post-Roman trivia? Very well:
The ASH manuscripts always refer to the ‘clay walkers’ or ‘robots’ or ‘golems’ as *moving* mechanical models of men. This is complete nonsense of course. Imagine building a robot in the fifteenth century! Ornamental devices of some kind, possibly. *Just* possibly. I mean, if you can build metal singing birds – they worked pneumatically or hydraulically, as all the Roman treatises indicate; don’t ask me the details, I’m not an engineer! – Then, I suppose, you could build metal models of men, too, like Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head, but complete. I don’t see why anyone would want to.
That’s what I thought, up to twenty-four hours ago. Then there was all the rush of getting a plane out to Tunis, and being driven in some god-awful jeep out to the archaeologists’ camp, and then Isobel taking me all the way out here on foot. There are soldiers guarding the camp, all Jeeps and Kalashnikovs, but they don’t seem very alert – just a gift from the local government to keep petty pilfering down, I think. Isobel would like to keep it that way. The last thing we want is the military sent into this site. You could destroy the survivals that are five hundred odd years old –
Yes. Isobel’s dated them, she’s pretty sure they’ve been in the silt for upwards of four hundred years, and five hundred seems likely; they’re not the Victorian curiosities I was afraid I was going to find. These are the messenger-golems of the ASH texts – man-shaped, life-sized carved stone bodies (the complete one is Italian marble), with articulated metal joints at the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and hands. The stonework on the second one has shattered, but the bronze and brass gears and cogs are complete. *They are golems*!
I confess I don’t understand all the professional arguments that are going on between Isobel’s team, or rather, I don’t understand the technological details. There is a *huge* row breaking out about whether these finds belong to a mediaeval Arab or mediaeval European culture – the Italian marble, you see, although of course Carrara marble was exported across the whole of Christendom at the time, as I’ve tried to point out. I’ve given Isobel my copy of the existing ASH translations, indicating that (as I was going to e-mail you to point out) the ‘Visigoth’ culture of the texts is *not* purely Iberian Gothic, but rather a mixture of Visigothic, Spanish and Arab culture.
I’ve got this far and I haven’t told you the most important discovery so far. You’re sitting there in London reading this, and you’re thinking, so? So they had mechanical men, as well as mechanical birds, what does this matter?
Isobel has let me examine the surviving golem extremely carefully. This is something that must not get out before she is ready to publish her findings. There are patterns of wear in the metal joints. That isn’t all.
There are patterns of wear on the marble surfaces *under* the feet!
The stone is worn away on the carved soles of the feet and under the heels exactly as though this golem has been walking. And I mean walking. Like a man, like you and me, a stone and brass mechanical man, *walking*.