Ash: A Secret History (78 page)

Nameless rocks. We know almost nothing. It wasn’t even until a decade ago that the site of Carthage was identified; prior to that there was this ten-mile stretch of coast, with nothing – two thousand years later – to indicate just where it might have been. Even what seems certain, we don’t know. Bosworth field has its own tourist centre, but the field on which the battle was fought may not be that field at all (there is a theory it was closer to Dadlington than Market Bosworth). But I digress.

No, not really. I walked back through the site, in the chill fresh air – everything was under blue polyurethane covers. The grey boxes with notebook PCs plugged in had been removed back to the caravans. There were no men and woman in anoraks, flicking away earth with tiny paintbrushes, with their rear ends in the air. And what I thought was, Isobel is the one with the temperament for this. She wants to DISCOVER things. I want to EXPLAIN them. I need to have a rational explanation for the universe.

I even need a rational explanation for the ‘miraculous’ construction of these golems. The cold marble is uninformative. Andrew, our archaeometallurgist, is studying the metal joints; he has no answers yet. How did it get those marks of wear that prove it walked? HOW DID IT MOVE?

And what can I give these people, from the ‘Fraxinus’ text? A story of a wonder-working Rabbi and the sexual congress of a woman and a statue!

I know I said truth can be conveyed down through history in a story. Well, sometimes it proves impenetrably obscure!

There were men with guns on the site perimeter as I walked in. I was thinking, as I passed them, that the military mind itself has a rational explanation for the way the universe works – it’s just an explanation at 90 degrees to the real one

Isobel’s just told me there is ‘stuff’ going on behind the scenes, in local politics; we must be ‘patient’.

So far we have various household implements, a dagger-hilt, and a piece of metal that might be a hair-fillet. I sit in on the discussions – arguments would, one supposes, be a better term – and put the case for a Germanic rather than an Arab culture here. The team agrees with me.

I need these diggings to start again.

I need more back-up for ‘ Fraxinus’.

If they don’t let the team on-site soon, the army can move in and clear out archaeological tents full of dead bodies: I myself will be found battered to death with my own laptop computer! We are going stir-crazy out here. And it’s HOT.

– Pierce

  Message: #169 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash mss. breeding of Rattus Norvegicus

Date:    21/11/00 at 10.47 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Ms Longman –

While we wait, I am mailing you at the suggestion of my colleague, Dr Ratcliff, who has been kind enough to show me the Latin manuscripts he is at present translating for you. He suggests I do this since I have some amateur (if specialised) knowledge of rat genetics and breeding.

Although Pierce and I spent some time discussing this yesterday, and he is now as well-informed as myself, he suggested that I e-mail you personally since I have the time now.

You may be aware that in the last forty-eight hours we have had problems on-site, and at the moment there is little I can do except watch the military representatives of the local government treading on five hundred years of history. Fortunately most of the findings at this site are under silt, which prevents too great an amount of damage being done. The sole advantage I can see to this delay is that the government are forbidding access to the airspace above the coast, and this avoids saturation media coverage. Apart from a few blurred satellite photos, the recording of the expedition will be in the hands of my own capable videocam team.

Assuming that matters return to normal in the next twenty-four hours, as Minister ███████ promises, I shall then be too busy to be of any assistance to Pierce or yourself.

I really have very little to contribute; perhaps a footnote’s worth of knowledge – some years ago, being in search of a relaxing hobby, I took up breeding specialist varieties of Rattus Norvegicus, the Brown Rat. Such varieties are known as Fancy rats; and I have been a member of both British and American Rat Fancy societies.

In point of fact, my then-husband Peter Monkham was a biologist; we never did quite see eye to eye on this matter, although his reasons for having a vivisectionist’s licence were no doubt good and sufficient to him. Peter’s jeremiads on the state of animals in unrestrained nature (their lives being nasty, brutish, and shortly terminated by something one step further up the food chain) only served to convince me that my captive animals were in fact rather better off than they would have otherwise been.

I was therefore intrigued to discover, while reading Pierce’s translation from the ‘Fraxinus’ manuscript for clues to our technological findings, that several of our current genetic mutations of Rattus Norvegicus seem to have been known in fifteenth-century Africa. In fact, I had no knowledge of anything other than Rattus Rattus, the Black Rat, being present in mediaeval times anywhere outside Asia. (Rattus Rattus is, of course, the rodent popularly associated with spreading the Black Death.) I had believed that Rattus Norvegicus only spread here from Asia in or about the eighteenth century. What ‘Fraxinus’ describes, however, is undoubtedly the Brown Rat. If Pierce allows, I may use his findings for a brief paper on the subject of rat migration.

It seems possible, from ‘Fraxinus’, that these varieties were imported by North African traders. The Latin is sufficiently explicit that I actually RECOGNISE several varieties! I should explain that the brown or ‘agouti’ coat of the wild rat is in fact coloured in bands, each brown hair being striped blue-grey at the base; the coat scattered with additional guard-hairs, which are black. Selective breeding of initially spontaneous mutations can give different coloured coats which will then (with great effort) breed true. Patterned coats can also be bred true, although to give you some idea of the difficulty, the H locus which controls pattern can be modified to give at least six patterns: the Hooded rat; the Berkshire, the Irish, etc. And then there are polygenes to consider!

The difficulty is not in breeding a rat with a patterned coat, but in getting one that then breeds true to the same pattern. Two rats may be physically identical in their appearance while carrying completely different genetic histories in their alleles. Rat-breeding consists of trying to isolate certain genetic characteristics – without losing the proper bodily conformation of bold eye, well-set ears, good head, high rump, etc. – and creating a specific line of rats who will pass on that desired characteristic. Without keeping minutely detailed records of what bucks I bred to which does, it would have been impossible for me to select which of their offspring to use to continue the line.

Taking, for example, what ‘Fraxinus’ describes as a ‘blue’ rat – this is a rat bred to have the base blue colouring continued evenly through the fur coat. These are pretty, exotic little creatures, although (as this text in fact mentions!) early attempts proved difficult to get right, as the blue does suffered birthing problems. Whatever allele carried the gene for ‘bleaching out’ the agouti coat also stood a substantial chance of carrying a gene for deformed birth-canals, and bad temper. Blue rats used to bite, whereas the normal temperament of Rattus Norvegicus is inquisitive and friendly. The blue rat proper is then produced by breeding only from those examples which do not suffer from breeding difficulties, or difficulties of temperament.

‘Fraxinus’ also mentions the yellow/brown rat. This is known as a ‘Siamese’, and is the same gene that gives us Siamese cats (and, in fact, Siamese-coloured rabbits and mice); the coat is pale yellow except for the rump, nose, and paws, where the ‘points’ are dark brown. The description in ‘Fraxinus’ is excellent.

I can also account for the rat with different coloured eyes: the black eye being natural, the red eye a consequence of albinism. (The grey and white is referred to as ‘lynx-marked’ in the American Fancy.) The specimen referred to in this text appears to me to be a mosaic – genetically speaking, the opposite of a twin. Whereas with a twin an egg divides in the uterus, with a mosaic two different eggs fuse. This can produce a rat with the two halves of its body having different colour fur, or different colour eyes, or in some cases, being of different sexes. Since they are produced by random fusion, it is impossible for them to breed true, and they are of no use in fancy rat breeding.

Judging by the further description, the coat of the mosaic rat was either rexed – this is when the stiffer guard-hairs are bred out, giving a soft curly coat – or velvet (short and plush).

I once bred a line of rexes myself – being a rex, naturally each one was named after one of the Plantagenets (my favourite kings); although a particularly fluffy rat of mine called ‘John’ gave me an excellent illustration, by his temperament, of why we have only ever had one king of that name.

Fraxinus’s rat is particularly interesting if it is *not* a rex, since no one in the Fancy has yet successfully bred a velvet coat on a rat, although the Mouse Fancy had achieved both velvet and satin pelts. In this respect, fifteenth-century North Africa seems to have out-done us!

This is conceivably because our Rat Fancy is primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon (although young Victorian ladies were known to keep pet rats in birdcages). Perhaps because of the rat’s undeserved bad reputation far fewer years this century have been spent on its specialist breeding than, say, has been the case with the Mouse Fancy, or with different breeds of dog or cat. However, there are, even now, dedicated amateur geneticists at work on the Brown Rat, and it seems encouraging to me – if wonderfully strange – to learn that we are REdiscovering the many possible varieties of this delightful, playful, intelligent little animal.

I have gone into this in some detail simply because it shows the sheer SOPHISTICATION of the mediaeval mind. Pierce’s manuscripts are proving fascinating now that we have these technological survivals to study, but I am almost MORE interested in what this says about the living minds of those people, who could note, conceive of genetic heritage, and EXPERIMENT in that respect, long before the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Of course, one sees the beginning of it in horse- and hound-breeding of the same period, as one sees a similar mediaeval ‘industrial revolution’ in mills and military technology; but to produce, for example, the Siamese-marked rat, shows a mind-beggaring attention to scientific detail in what it is easy to see as a superstition-ridden, theologically constrained and inhumanely brutal society.

If I can be of any further assistance to you, please mail me at the above address. I look forward to your publication of Pierce’s work. It may interest you to know that, in view of the help he is giving me on site, I am more than willing for him to publish any details of our discoveries here in so far as they relate to the ‘Ash’ histories, provided I and the university are credited.

– Sincerely I. Napier-Grant

Message: #99 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash, media-related projects

Date:    21/11/00 at 11.59 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I just had mail from your Doctor Isobel. Most of it’s *way* over my head. And *rats*, eurrggh!

John showed me the golem-photos. They are WONDERFUL! My MD Jonathan Stanley came over and saw them. He is equally impressed. He’s contacting an independent television producer that he knows – well, who’s the godfather of his son, actually.

Now I’m going to have media people to talk to. And explain that this Schliemann found Troy by following up a poem. I can do it, I suppose, but it would carry more weight coming from you or Dr Napier-Grant.