The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders Read online

  The Alchemy Press Book Of

  Ancient Wonders

  Edited by

  Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber

  Published by

  The Alchemy Press

  The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders

  Copyright © Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber 2012

  Cover painting © Dominic Harman

  eBook edition 2013

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by The Alchemy Press by arrangement with the editors and authors.

  All rights reserved.

  The Alchemy Press

  Cheadle, Staffordshire, UK

  www.alchemypress.co.uk

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction by Kari Sperring

  If Street by James Brogden

  Bones by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Passage by Shannon Connor Winward

  One Man’s Folly by Pauline E Dungate

  Dragonsbridge by Anne Nicholls

  The Satan Stones by Misha Herwin

  Gandalph Cohen and the Land at the End of the Working Day by Peter Crowther

  Ringfenced by Lynn M Cochrane

  Ithica or Bust by Bryn Fortey

  The Sound of Distant Gunfire by Adrian Cole

  The Cauldron of Camulos by William Meikle

  Time and the City by John Howard

  The Great and Powerful… by Selina Lock

  Ys by Aliette de Bodard

  About the Contributors

  About the Editors

  Copyright Details

  Available from The Alchemy Press

  Dedication

  For the Alchemy Writers

  There shrines and palaces and towers

  (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

  Resemble nothing that is ours.

  Edgar Allen Poe

  “The City in the Sea" (1845)

  Introduction by Kari Sperring

  ANYTHING CAN BE A wonder, from the memory of an elderly man (Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine) to a soft drink bottle falling from the sky (The Gods Must Be Crazy), from a microprocessor to an historic bridge. When we think of a wonder, our minds go most often to the great buildings of the past – the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge – but the human mind can make almost anything wondrous. The Bradbury novel mentioned above is a case in point. Nothing very dramatic happens over its course: it is an account, in the main, of a single summer in the life of a boy in his teens. Yet despite the absence of pyramids and dinosaurs and spaceships and dragons, it is filled with wonder, with that sense that we all possess of the numinous, the liminal. A year on the cusp of turning towards the fallow months; a boy on the cusp of adulthood: the wonder lies in the writing, in the ways that Bradbury uses his words to draw us into the mind and emotions of his young protagonist.

  And that, perhaps, lies at the heart of wonder, that sense of ambiguity, of mystery, of ‘how does that happen’? In our post-enlightenment world, the natural world – from an erupting volcano to the pattern of spots on a ladybird’s wing – remains astonishing and beautiful, but perhaps we no longer wonder at them as much as our predecessors did. In the backs of our minds, scientific explanations about tectonic faults and volcanism, camouflage and survival, loiter, reminding us of ourselves and our achievements. We turn not to gods and mysteries to explain them, but to geology, biology, chemistry. We are more comfortable with scientific answers than human ones – or more comforted, anyway.

  The Taj Mahal and the pyramids are beautiful and awe-inspiring: we wonder at how they were built, how they sit in their landscape, at their human dimension. We know their history, or some of it, but their significance transcends that – they are layered over with the wrappings of all the stories that we tell ourselves about them.

  This current collection is filled with such wonders: ancient constructions whose meanings are occluded from us by time and distance, but whose power, whose attraction for us, remains powerful. Why did ancient men erect menhirs and stone circles? We do not know, not completely. We reach for explanation – funerary monuments, markers of nobility, places for ceremony or magic. But we can never been entirely sure. There are gaps, spaces where story and wonder slip through. Adrian Tchaikovsky reminds us here that stories – and history is itself a collection of stories – are mutable, that the explanations they offer us may change with time and necessity, may be lost, may be rewritten in new and dangerous ways. The same point about the mutability of story is made by Shannon Conner Winward, though in her story knowledge is lost and recoded in new ways. There are a lot of forgotten histories here, a lot of old explanations discarded – perhaps foolishly – by our scientific modern age. Human time is shallow in geological terms, but – as several of the stories here point out – we are remote from our ancestors and their meanings are not ours. Their beliefs remain oblique to us, but we discard them at our peril, as several protagonists in this collection learn. Meanings shift, are reworked, but the older levels remain and may come back to haunt or harm or change us.

  Many of the wonders recounted by the authors in this anthology are frightening, but not all are harmful. The harm lies in how we approach them, what we expect from them, and what we do. Pride precedes a fall for Anne Nichols’ protagonist, but in Aliette de Bodard’s story, the heroine’s persistence and humanity strengthen her in the face of an inhuman enemy. Several tales revisit famous legends – the Odyssey, the Arthurian cycle – or bring members of other cultures face to face with the British past, in order to cast new light on familiar myths and places. Peter Crowther’s story brings us a wonder that is temporary, mutable, built of the power of human need and hope, while Pauline Dungate offers a glimpse of how wonders change over time. Stolen lovers and friends who choose the past over the hardships of the present, sacrifices and battles, births, deaths and betrayals, old stories and new needs, loneliness, greed, love and madness. We walk with wonders everyday, through the power of curiosity and imagination and our human tendency to make stories about what we fear, what we desire, what we wish to understand. This collection offers new glimpses into the wonder we all feel: enjoy.

  If Street by James Brogden

  I NEVER THOUGHT it would be this boring, waiting to become a ghost.

  The last few stragglers are leaving now, and soon there’ll be nothing up here with me except rabbits and the wind. For a while, at least. If this were summer I’d have a problem. For a start, it wouldn’t be getting dark much before ten, and even then there’d still be a handful of annoying teenagers come up from the sink estates of Telford determined to get shitfaced and shag each other in the overgrown hut circles. There’s probably something poetically poignant about the idea of the youngest generation coupling on the same hearths as their Iron Age ancestors.

  But it’s winter, and the dark and the cold are coming on fast. I’ve got my thermos and my down-filled gilet and I wonder what the Cornovii will make of all my modern twenty-first century technology. They’ll probably laugh their socks off. If they have socks.

  Wind chill is a factor up here. The Wrekin is a good three hundred meters above the Shropshire plain, a stubborn hummock of volcanic rock overlooking what millions of years ago would have been a tropical lagoon. It stands apart from the other local clusters of hills like the Long Mynd, the Stiperstones, and folded-blanket ridge of Wenlock Edge. All of these features have disappeared into the deepening gloom leaving the lights of towns glowing in big orange splodges all over the landscape like the radioactive sc
ars of a thermonuclear war. So many people, crowded so close together. It’s no wonder we’ve all gone insane.

  I can easily understand why the Cornovii built a hill-fort up here – apart from anything else, the strategic value of its position would have been enormous, and for precisely the same reason I can see why the Romans would have wanted to burn it. Their own city of Viroconium is down there somewhere, its grid pattern under the fields, all lines and squares and ruthlessly militarised efficiency. But I try not to think ill of the Romans. After all, they saved my friend Paul’s life – if not his soul.

  THERE ARE NO friendships quite like the ones you make when you’re thirteen, and I’m certain that the way me and Paul Felton knocked around together confused the hell out of our parents and teachers. I was bookish, nerdish, and about as sporty as a draught excluder. He was on the football team as often as he was in detention, driven by an inexhaustible anger at everyone and everything. His dad had died in the Falklands and his mum’s new boyfriend was a shit, but that was all I knew. Yes, I said we were friends, but there are things that thirteen-year old boys just don’t talk about. What drew us together were two things: Doctor Who, and the old Roman road which ran through the park behind his house.

  I say ‘park’: Sutton Park was, and I suppose still is, nearly two and a half thousand acres of municipal recreation space for cyclers, joggers, and horse-riders. It has seven lakes, ancient woodlands which haven’t been touched since the Middle Ages, and it preserves a one-and-a-half mile stretch of Roman road called Icknield Street, which everywhere else is buried beneath concrete and tarmac, but in Sutton Park is hidden only beneath a thin skin of topsoil and grass. You could scratch away a few inches of dirt and stand on the same road that – with a bit of boyish imaginative license – carried legionnaires from the coasts of the Mediterranean up north to do battle with the marauding hordes of Pictish barbarians.

  It fascinated us utterly. Paul and I had a pretty decent arrangement: he came around to mine to watch any episodes of Doctor Who that he might have missed due to things kicking off at home, and which I taped obsessively on our new VCR, in return for which I gained a certain amount of street cred for being friends with the school bad boy. We had a plan to save up our pocket money and buy a metal detector, absolutely confident that we’d find bits of armour, or gold coins or – best of all – rusted bits of weaponry lodged in old bone. But since Paul never got any money except the change he nicked when his mum sent him out for fags, and I was incapable of walking past a videogames arcade or a second-hand bookshop without spending every penny I had, it was slow going.

  I think Paul must have finally lost patience with the plan, because late one evening he turned up at my place in a state of high excitement, covered in dirt and clutching something wrapped in a plastic carrier bag.

  Mum opened the door to his knocking. “Paul? It’s very late, dear. Is everything…”

  “Hi, Mrs Cooper!” He grinned, launching straight past her and upstairs to my room.

  “Paul! Shoes!”

  “Yeah I know! Brilliant, isn’t it?”

  I don’t suppose she bothered to spare a moment’s thought trying to work out what he meant by that, since teenage boys plainly occupied a parallel universe only marginally connected to the real world; just so long as she reminded herself to make me clear up the mud he left behind. Which she did. Rule number one in the Cooper household: Your Guest, Your Mess.

  He barged in without knocking. I was in the middle of making an Airfix model of an X-wing, which was only slightly less embarrassing than some of the other things he could have caught me doing.

  “Check this out!” he said, and tossed the carrier bag onto my desk.

  “Yeah, hi, I’m fine thanks, how are you?” I scowled, and opened it dubiously. Paul’s finds were generally dangerous, often pornographic, occasionally illegal – and seldom safe to handle carelessly with bare hands. “It’s a shoe,” I observed, unimpressed.

  To be precise it was a sandal, made of leather, a bit like the kind worn by our religious ed. teacher, Mr Holy-Molyneux.

  “It’s a Roman shoe,” he corrected.

  “Are you shitting me?” Instantly this had become a million times cooler.

  “I shit you not. It is a Roman legionnaire’s caliga. I found it on the Street.” He didn’t have to explain which Street.

  “But it looks like new.” I turned it over in my hands. I was no archaeologist – wasn’t interested in any dates in history which had an AD after them – but I’d sort of expected leather which had been buried for two thousand years to be stiff and hard, or else disintegrating. This was neither. It was supple and shiny and – I gave it a sniff – yes, still stinky with Roman foot-sweat. Which, of course, it couldn’t be.

  “Bollocks,” was my considered opinion, and threw it back at him. “This is a wind-up. Either you got this from a charity shop or you’ve been out mugging hippies.”

  “It is not bollocks! It’s from a real, genuine Roman foot-soldier. He was marching along, part of it snapped – see that bit there? So he chucked it away and put on a spare.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  Paul’s eyes, usually dark and troubled, were on this occasion shining. “Because I saw him.”

  SUCH AN OUTRAGEOUS claim demanded testing, and an opportunity to completely take the piss out of him it couldn’t be refused because, obviously, there was no way it could be true. So it surprised me how readily he agreed that we should take a look out on Icknield Street the following night. It had to be at night, he said, not because they were ghosts – and he punched me so hard on the arm when I made a few harmless woo-oo noises that the bruise lasted for a week – but because something about other people being around caused interference. It did occur to me that he might have taken the latest episode of Earthshock a bit too seriously, but I didn’t fancy another bruise so I kept my mouth shut. That, plus, as I say, the piss-take potential.

  We found ourselves sitting in a large bush in the freezing cold on a March night, munching sweets and jumping like idiots at every sound. Paul had chosen a part of Sutton Park as far away from any lights as he could get – not that there were many. From our hiding place the remains of the Icknield Street agger was a flat, black ribbon seemingly hovering above the ground, while the trees around us were dim rustling shadows against a sky the colour of orange charcoal. We saw several rabbits, something which might have been a fox, and shrank in terror at the approach of two human shapes, only to be disappointed when they stopped to kiss.

  “Close-knit unit, are they?” I whispered at him, for which I earned another dead arm. “Right, sod it,” I said. “I’m off.”

  “You can’t go yet!” he protested.

  I glared at him but I think the effect was lost in the dark. “I am not spending the night sitting in the middle of a bush watching people snog!” I hissed back at him. “It’s pervy! Plus you keep hitting me!”

  “Well you keep being a wanker, so sit down and shut up.”

  I did as I was told, and we resumed our voyeuristic vigil.

  When we finally heard the legion, it was a bit like when you go scanning through the airwaves on an old radio and you pick up the faint thread of human speech but it’s gone before you can be sure you’ve even heard it, so you crawl back slowly with the tuning dial listening for coherence to emerge out of the crackle and hiss which is the background noise of the universe. Not that I suppose anyone these days knows what a radio is, let alone a tuning dial. Nevertheless, out of the rustling of wind and foliage emerged a faint rhythmic noise. Unsustained at first, only a random-sounding one-and-two-and, just enough to set my heart racing so hard that I was afraid I was hearing that and nothing else. Then came a-three-and-a-four-and-a, and while I was straining to hear more I realised that it had resolved clearly into the unmistakable sound of many dozens of footfalls. Marching.

  Marching towards us.

  I clutched Paul. “What do we do?”

  “Shut up!” He fo
rced me back down with his elbows in the small of my back. “Lie still. Watch. Do not make A. Single. Fucking. Sound.”

  I did exactly that. The noise grew louder, came abreast of us, and resolved into a dozen other combined sounds: the creak of straps, the harshness of laboured breathing, muttered comments from one man to another, the heavy flap of their armour and the hollow clank of their gear. And the smell! A wide mantle of leather, sweat, wool, iron, piss, and spices swept after them, thick enough to insulate them from the cold on its own. If they were ghosts, then they were the most solid ghosts I had ever imagined. I could see nothing more of them than a bristling mass in the gloom. The tips of their javelins reflected dully the same burnt-orange colour of the city sky, and I knew then without a shadow of a doubt that they were real. If their weapons reflected the light of our sky then they were in our world; they weren’t ghosts or illusions. The only other plausible explanation was that they were the result of too little sleep, too many sweets, and too much Doctor Who, but I ask you, what thirteen-year old boy is going to side with plausibility over a park full of Roman legionnaires?

  Paul and I managed to keep our cool until the last of them had disappeared into the greater darkness, and then we just lost it completely – whooping and yelling with excitement and jumping around madly so much that the locals in the houses bordering the park’s edge could have been forgiven for thinking that an actual battle was being fought there. Then we made our separate ways home. Each of us got a bollocking from our folks, but it didn’t make any difference; Paul was used to it and I was too wired to care.

  It certainly didn’t stop us from going back the following night. And the next.

  “HOW DO YOU think they got here?” I whispered to Paul, as I peered out from our customary hiding place. “Where do they go to?”

  We were watching a group of half a dozen of them standing around a flaming brazier, cooking pieces of unidentified small mammal on sharp sticks and generally slobbing about in a way which we imagined was little different to soldiers of any time. A few others were off to one side, gambling with a pair of dice.