A Secret History: The Book Of Ash, #1 [Mass Market Paperback]

Mary Gentle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999 | Series: Book of Ash (Book 1)

Chapter One"Gentlemen, Said Ash, "shut your faces!"The clatter of helmet visors shutting sounded all along the line of horsemen.Beside her, Robert Anselm paused with his hand to his throat, about to thrust the laminated plate of his steel bevor up into its locking position over his mouth and chin. "Boss, our lord hasn't told us we can attack them . . ."Ash pointed. "Who gives a fuck? That's a chance down there and we're taking it!"Ash's sub-captain Anselm was the only rider apart from herself in full armor. The rest of the eighty-one mounted knights wore helmets, bevors, good leg armor -- the legs of a man on horseback being very vulnerable -- and cheap body armor, the small overlapping metal plates sewn into a jacket called a brigandine.""Form up!"Ash's voice sounded muffled in her own ears by the silver hair she wore braided up as an arming-cap, padding the inside of her steel sallet. Her voice was not as deep as Anselm's. It came resonant from her small, deep chest cavity; piercing; it sounds an octave above any noise of battle except cannon. Ash's men can always hear Ash.Ash pushed her own bevor up and locked, protecting mouth and chin. For the moment, she left the visor of her sallet up so that she could see better. The horsemen jostled around her in a packed mass on the churned earth of the slope. Her men, in her company's livery: on geldings of mostly medium to good quality.Down the slope in front of her, a vast makeshift town littered the river valley. Bright under noon sunlight, walled with wagons chained together, and crammed with pennon-flying pavilions and thirty thousand men, women and baggage animals inside it -- the Burgundian army. Their camp big enough (confirmed rumorhad it) to have "two of its own markets ...You could hardly see the little battered walled town of Neuss inside the enclosing army.Neuss: a tenth the size of the attacking forces camped around it. The besieged town rested precariously within its gates -- rubble, now -- and behind its moats and the wide protecting Rhine river. Beyond the Rhine valley, pine-knotted German hills glowed gray-green in the June heat.Ash tilted her visor down to shade her eyes from the sunlight. A group of about fifty riders moved on the open ground between the Burgundian camp that besieged Neuss and her own Imperial camp that (theoretically) was here to relieve the town. Even at this distance Ash could see the men's Burgundian livery: two red criss-cross slashes, the Cross of St. Andrew.Robert Anselm brought his bay around in a neat circle. His free hand gripped the company's standard: the azure Lion Passant Guardant on a field Or. "They could be trying to sucker us down, boss."Deep in the pit of her stomach, expectation and fear churned. The big iron-gray gelding, Godluc, shifted under her, responding. As always in chance ambushes, the suddenness, the sense of moments slipping away and a decision to be made --"No. Not a trick. They're overconfident. Fifty mounted men -- that's someone out with just an escort. He thinks he's safe. They think we're not going to attack them, because we haven't struck a blow since us and Emperor-bleeding-Frederick got here three weeks ago." She hit the high front of the war saddle with the heel of her gauntleted hand, turned to Anselm, grinning. "Robert, tell me what you "don't see.""Fifty mounted men, most in full harness, don't see any infantry, no crossbowmen, don't see anyhackbutters, don't see any archers -- "don't see any archers!"Ash couldn't stop grinning; she thought her teeth might be all that was visible under the shadow of her visor, and you could probably see them all the way across the occupied plain to Neuss. ""Now you get it. When do we "ever get to do the pure knightly cavalry-against-cavalry charge in real war?""-- Without being shot out of the saddle." His brows, visible under his visor, furrowed. "You sure?""If we don't sit here with our thumbs up our arses, we can catch them out on the field -- they can't get back to their camp in time. Now let's shift!"Anselm nodded decisive compliance.She squinted up at the dark blue sky. Her armor, and the padded arming doublet and hose under it, burned as if she stood in front of an armorer's furnace. Godluc's foam soaked his blue caparisons. The world smelled of horse, dung, oil on metal, and the downwind stench of Neuss where they had been eating rats and cats for six weeks now."I'm going to boil if I don't get out of this lot soon, so let's "go!" She raised her plate-covered arm and jerked it down.Robert Anselm's thick-necked horse clipped its hind-quarters and then sprang forward. The company standard lifted, gripped high in Anselm's armored gauntlet. Ash spurred Godluc into the thicket of raised lances and through, ahead of her men, Anselm at her shoulder now, half a pace behind her trotting mount. She tapped the long spurs back again. Godluc went from trot to canter The jolting shook her teeth to her bones and rattled the plates of her Milanese armor, and the wind whipped into her sallet and snatched the breath out of her nostrils.Percussive concussion shook the world. The hundreds of steelhorseshoes striking hard earth threw up showers of clods. The noise went unheard, felt in her chest and bones rather than heard with her ears; and the line of riders -- "her line, "her men, sweet Christ dont let me get this wrong! -- gathered speed down the slope and out onto clear ground.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mary Gentle first came to prominence with the lovingly conceived and beautifully written SF novel Golden Witchbreed. Its sequel, Ancient Light, then took the world and premise built into the first novel and deconstructed it thoroughly. Gentle's latest plays some of the same tricks with reader expectations.

In a typical fantasy milieu, the mud and blood of a military camp in 15th-century Europe, a scarred and beautiful 8-year-old girl kills her two adult rapists. She is Ash. In unflinching prose, Gentle describes the child's treatment in a men's camp, then the teenager's hard lessons in the art and craft of war, and finally the young woman's rise to command a mercenary army. Ash, it seems, is not only strong and fast but has the advantage of hearing a voice that instructs her on troop deployment. To the well-versed SF reader, the voice begins to sound suspiciously like a tactical computer.

Just as the reader gets ready to reassign the book to time travel SF, Gentle inserts--in what are purported to be excerpts from a 21st-century scholar's e-mail conversation with his publisher--hints that perhaps the novel belongs in the alternate history category. By now Ash and her army are embroiled in war and politics up to their fluted breastplates (armor, like all the historical detail, is minutely and accurately described), and if swords and poleaxes were not enough, she now faces golems and the Carthaginian army. Amazingly, Gentle makes this impossible mix believable, and by the end of the novel it is apparent that this is the beginning of a most interesting series. --Luc Duplessis

Review

" One of the best fantasies I've read in the past 15 years, bar none." -- -- S.M. Stirling, author of Against the Tide of Years

" One of the best fantasies I've read in the past 15 years, bar none." -- S.M. Stirling, author of Against the Tide of Years

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Eos (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380788691
• ISBN-13: 978-0380788699
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing Alternate History/Fantasy, April 25, 2000

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Secret History: The Book Of Ash, #1 (Mass Market Paperback)

This is the first installment of an impressive new novel (or novel series) by Mary Gentle. In brief, it's the story of a female mercenary captain, Ash, in the 1470s, at the time of the fall of the Duchy of Burgundy. (By coincidence, these events occur at about the same time as yet another unusual alternate history/fantasy, John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting.)

The Book of Ash purports to be a straight-forward translation of a few contemporary manuscripts about Ash's life, and indeed there is a frame story consisting of letters and email between the translator and his editor. As such, they start out seeming to be "normal" historical fiction, with a very realistic and believable portrayal of Ash's childhood as a mercenary camp follower, then jumping to portrayal of her role as the Captain of some 800 mercenaries at the age of 19 or 20. All this is presented starkly: Ash's rape at the age of 8, and her subsequent killing of her attackers; the filthy conditions in her camp; the blood, pain, and discomfort of battle. Throughout, we get very nice details of such things as what sort of armour was worn. But slowly we realize that the world described doesn't seem to be part of our own history.

At first, we notice little details, such as the voices Ash hears, or the references to a different-seeming variety of Christianity, involving the "Green Christ", or the odd mention of Carthage and the Eternal Twilight. As the book goes on, we learn that somehow Carthage has survived into the 15th century, or has been re-established, and, more strangely, that the Sun never shines in the area of Carthage. Before long, we are encountering robots (Stone Golems) used as weapons of war, unusual speculation about parallel worlds, long-term breeding projects, and other decidedly fantastical (or perhaps even science-fictional) devices. But the centre of the story remains Ash, a charismatic character, wholly believable as a leader of her men, wholly sympathetic but thoroughly a professional killer, harrowed by bitter personal questions about her identity, her lust for a man she cannot abide, her affection for a man whose love she cannot return, her loyalties to all her company. I found this book terrifically exciting, with well-described battle scenes, fascinating weird background concepts, and a compelling overarching story-line.

Besides the exciting adventure plot, the characters in these books are very well done: their motivations are real, they face difficult decisions and don't always choose rightly, they seem reasonably true to their time. Even the villains are believable, and by no means thoroughly evil. The 15th-century milieu is realistically presented. And the revelations of the secrets behind the scenes are made with great cleverness and subtlety. Here the frame story, as well as footnotes, are used to very good effect. I am eagerly awaiting the final three installments.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very unusual alternate history, October 26, 2000

By 

Kathleen Cobcroft (Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Secret History: The Book Of Ash, #1 (Mass Market Paperback)

Ash is a compelling dual story about a (fictional) female warrior/general in medieval times and the academic who studies her life in the near future. The book we read is a combination of book that the academic *nearly* published about Ash, and the e-mails that pass between him and his editor (this works better than it sounds).

The Ash story is compiled from the academic's translation of medieval latin texts (rendered into modern English, so Ash's soldier cursing has been translated into modern strong cursing), and is written as an entertaining novel with some pseudo-academic footnotes.

At first, the story would appeal to any historical novel reader (as long as they're OK with strong language and violence), but later in the series it gets into fantasy and also explores the possible nature of time and space quite a bit.

The long chapter-less parts make for late night reading (while you wait for a good place to stop), but I had no regrets for the dark rings around my eyes in the morning.

If you can't wait for the final volume, the whole work is published as a huge trade paperback in Britain (although reading it like that in one go can send you around the bend!), available at Amazon UK.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical fiction? Fantasy? Alternate History? Sci-Fi?, October 8, 2002

By 

Maddi Hausmann Sojourner "madhaus" (Silicon Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Secret History: The Book Of Ash, #1 (Mass Market Paperback)

A Secret History, the first of the four "Books of Ash", is difficult to categorize. While the book itself is stamped "Fantasy" on the spine, all the topics above apply at one time or another. And that, perhaps, is why several of the reviewers got annoyed with this book, because it refuses to stick to one category and stay there. This is not a failure on the book's part, but a success; this work is a tour de force.

The tale starts off as a translation of a 15th century manuscript, with notes from the (purported) author to his editor, and then we are absorbed into the story of Ash, Renaissance Battle Babe (well, mercenary company leader). Mary Gentle has done her homework on this period, and you will experience almost everything to make it real by dwelling on the discomforts. You will march through muck, mud, and mire, don and doff heavy armor more times than you will care to, while overhearing political calculations in where the next mercenary contract should come from. And the more you take in, the more twists are in store.

The breezy correspondence between the translator, Pierce Ratcliff, and his editor, Anna Longman, at first seems jarring compared to the long, complex, and thorough descriptions and adventures of Ash and her company. But do follow them, because they hint from the beginning that this book is not a mere swords without sorcery tale. The editor mentions that she studied Ash in college, yet we know Ash is fictional. And then all of Pierce's source materials either disappear or get reclassified as fiction. Not only do we wonder what will happen to Ash, trying to own land to keep a mercenary company in a land where women cannot own land; we wonder where Pierce's book will ever see the light of day. And why would his sources... change?

There are enough similarities to the Late Middle Ages to seem familiar, but here and there some differences catch you up. Europe is Christian, but the worship is different. There are temples to Mithras. There are Visigoths still around... and they're in Carthage, and not the Carthage sacked by Rome.

At the end of this book, the mostly-solid reality of life in 1486 is starting to unravel, and this will be further explained (and complicated) in the next book. History becomes fantasy, which becomes alternate history, and on to the science fictional parts. Do stay with it, for it is indeed worth the trip. My only complaint is that the book so pulled me into Ash's world and wouldn't let me out because there are very few stopping places!

Note: This work is not a "series" in the true sense, because Gentle conceived and wrote it as one novel. In the US it was published and released as four books, but in the UK, where she lives, it was published as one tremendous novel.