Manda Scott's INTO THE FIRE reviewed by Elizabeth Fremantle

Manda Scott wrote a number of critically acclaimed crime novels before turning to historical fiction but with her latest release, INTO THE FIRE, she appears to have created a work that perfectly amalgamates both genres, with an impressive story that interweaves gritty contemporary crime and revelatory medieval history.

A Scott trope, across both genres, is ballsy women and who could be more ballsy than the figure who lies at the heart of INTO THE FIRE, Joan of Arc? Joan is depicted here as, rather than the somewhat whimsical saintly figure we learned about in school, a proper warrior woman. Scott hasn't plucked this idea from the ether – her Joan is based on groundbreaking historical research, a version of which becomes the focus of the modern day thriller that is threaded through the historical narrative.

The novel opens with modern day Orleans ablaze. A group called Jaish al Islam are setting buildings alight. But when a the charred remains of a scientist, who has hastily swallowed a memory chip, is found in the burnt out shell of a hotel, police detective Ines Picaut (another seriously ballsy woman) believes there is more to the conflagrations than meets the eye.

The narrative slips effortlessly back and forth between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, with each thread feeding into the other and both equally compelling. The potent symbol of the Maid, on the battlefields of medieval France and in the hearts and minds of the modern day French, is the link that ties the separate periods and stories together and the city of Orleans, both medieval and modern, provides the backdrop for the action.

In medieval France the English, more accurately a hotch-potch of mercenaries and Bergundians, are struggling to hang onto the territory won by Henry V. But with the old king dead and a child on the throne the French are gaining back Northern Franc battle by battle with alarming rapidity. It is The Maid who girds the men on with her singular courage, inspiring and leading the French army from the front and it is the supernatural belief invested in her by her own and the opposing army that makes her so powerful.

Modern day Orleans is in the throes of a different kind of power struggle. With mayoral elections imminent, the far right are gaining ground and capitalising on the fear that Jaish al Islam is spreading with its deadly fires and they are using the iconic figure of The Maid to promote their cause. Their flame haired female candidate is on billboards all around town. Picaut finds herself at the heart of this political conflict as the husband from whom she has recently separated, Luc Bressard, is running against the far-right for mayor and the Bressard family, a tight knit mafia style network, mean business.


Just as the Bressards have to use all their whiles to overcome their political opponents, so the medieval English must resort to drastic measures prevent their army from being entirely overwhelmed by the French. So seasoned fighter Tod Rustbeard is sent to infiltrate the French and assassinate The Maid. But nothing is as straightforward as it seems for Rustbeard or Picaut and so begins a gripping, twisting and turning, quest to uncover the truth, not only about Joan of Arc but also about Jaish al Islam.

Scott remains in complete control of her complex material throughout and this makes for a thoroughly absorbing and page-turning read as we follow the narrative through to its final series of revelations. But beyond that her impeccable research makes both periods spring vividly to life. The depiction of medieval France at war, with its brilliantly choreographed scenes of combat, feels as gritty and vibrant as the present day politics of Orleans. It is the attention to detail that achieves this with two entire and believable worlds separated by seven-hundred years emerging from the page, but also in the little quirks and tics of her characters – Scott invests them all with passion and originality and for that reason we care deeply about their fate.

INTO THE FIRE is a thrilling read that is both a fascinating exploration of an iconic historical woman and a masterclass in suspense. It is the kind of novel you will be compelled stay up all night to finish.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel WATCH THE LADY, set in Elizabethan England, is published by Penguin.

History Repeats: Rome and Egypt, by Manda (MC) Scott

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I spent yesterday evening at Rossiter books with the wonderful Andrew Taylor: one of the best historical writers alive today (do read ‘The Scent of Death, his latest book that explores New York, the bastion of loyalty to the English Crown during the war of Independenc). 

We started off the evening by looking at how we’d both made the shift from crime writing to historical writing but the conversation slipped sideways, as these things always do, into the fact that history seems doomed to repeat itself: in our own personal lives, in public life, in the great span of empires and civilisations, we seem doomed to wander in great, repeating cycles.

Or perhaps it’s just that, as writers, we are doomed to see the patterns in things, and then to imagine that they are repeating: this may also be true. Certainly, having spent a year immersed in AD69, the Year of the Four Emperors in Rome – which lasted 18 months and in which there were, strictly speaking, 5 men who called themselves Emperor, even if one of them never made it to Rome – I can’t help but see startling parallels with what’s happening just now in Egypt.

Morsi's ousters celebrate in Tahrir Square

So, whether it’s authorial paranoia, or a genuine recycling of inevitable history, it’s worth another look at the past and the present.

The differences shroud the similarities and the most obvious of these is that Egypt is hardly a superpower in the way that Rome was: and Hosni Mubarak was not a hereditary ruler who clawed his way to power over the murdered bodies of his relatives.  He was, however, a man who ruled largely by force, and by intimidating the opposition, even if he did not, as far as we know, go as far as Nero went in ensuring that the opposition remained cowed.

Nero, taken by Bibi: Saint-Pol, Wikimedia Commons

Nero – who did rule the single superpower of his age -  overspent to such an extent that the treasury was in danger of bankruptcy.  His answer was not austerity –he cared too much about what the common people thought of him - but rather to present the Senators, (who were the super-rich of their age) with the option to kill themselves and leave their entire estates to the Imperial treasury , or stay alive, in which case he’d let his executioners wax creative on their families and they would die last after they’d seen each of those they loved die ghastly deaths.   A great many good men fell on their swords, and those left behind were too cowed to do much about it – until he killed Corbulo, and put down the Pisoan conspiracy and the legions decided it was time to lead a revolt.

The situation in Egypt is less clear cut but there is no doubt that Mubarak used the powers of police and army to suppress dissent and particularly to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood and what’s striking is that in each case, the army (the legions in Rome) brought down the ruler and then took a relative step back to allow a new Emperor/President to take over.

Mubarak, Former President

In Rome, Galba was the first of the four men to reach Rome and name himself Emperor.  He had been a legionary commander but then in those days, legionary commanders were Senators and every Senator had to have spent some time commanding a legion: It’s one of the reasons that some legions made outstanding mistakes (the XIIth) while some were led by men of military inspiration (Vespasian and all the legions he led, including the by then ‘unlucky’ XIIth).  By the time he took the Imperial throne, he was Governor of Spain, which was a political position.

And here the similarities start.  Everyone thought Galba would make a good Emperor until he actually started the job, at which point, it took a remarkably short time for everyone except Galba and his closest associates to realise he was worse than Nero had been: not an ‘actor’ or a musician, not given to spending money on wild artistic ideas, not prone to roaming the streets after dark assaulting girls and boys he fancied… but nonetheless, he was a martinet of the worse proportions, and nobody wanted him in the post.

It was the legions who replaced him and, as in Egypt, they were split.  The Praetorian Guard in Rome killed Galba and installed Otho, while the legions in Germany gave their oath to Vitellius.  These two men were second and third of the four, respectively and the civil war thus begun would have been far, far worse had not Otho done the decent thing and fallen on his dagger to prevent men from throwing away their lives in his name.  One month after Vitellius arrived victorious in Rome, the legions of the east, of Judaea, Syria and Alexandria (which was then the capital of Egypt) took a look at their comrades in the west and, deciding they could have a bit of the cherry too, declared for Vespasian.

Vespasian, image byShakko wikimedia commons

The point, it seems to me, is that the legions, once they had realized they could make or break the Emperor, carried on until they got one they could all agree on.  Vespasian was one of the greatest emperors Rome ever had, largely because he didn’t really want the job, but, having been offered it, was a good enough organizer, a good enough military strategist – and a good enough Emperor once he returned to Rome – to be allowed to stay in post.

And so in Egypt, the generals installed Mubarak, one of their own and his reign was lengthy, but still, the army sided with the people when the riots became overwhelming. The army stepped back and let the Muslim Brotherhood install one of their own as leader, but they were not slow to get rid of Mohamed Morsi when his incompetence and corruption became evident. 

That’s two down.  And here is where I think history is repeating itself.  The gap between Emperors reduced exponentially in ancient Rome: Galba to Otho was 9 months.  Otho to VItellius was 3 months.  Vitellius to Vespasian was one month (tho’ it took longer for Vespasian’s forces actually to take Rome).

If Egypt follows the pattern, we may see another President relatively soon, but the gap, I think, between his taking power and losing it, may be measured in weeks and months, not years, should he prove (as is likely) not to be up to the job.

What Egypt needs is a Vespasian: a pragmatist, a generally sane, thoughtful, humane and above all, competent, individual.  Like Rome, there is no chance that a woman could take the top job, but in default of that, we have to hope that there’s someone with the courage to put his head above the parapet, and the foresight to lead the nation into peace: Rome’s civil war touched almost all parts of the Empire.  Egypt’s, should it spiral out beyond the borders, may well trigger another global meltdown. And as Einstein so presciently said: “We do not know with what weapons the third World War will be fought, but the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones.”  

The first gamers: and the end of history - by Manda Scott

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World of Warcraft: the biggest MMORPG in the world

I have a confession to make: I play World of Warcraft.   I have a battleground healer who has in her time, been an undead shadow priest called Kyst, and a night-elf discipline priest called Warfaryn. I have a shaman called Saffyk and when nobody in the player world got it, I created a healer monk called Sapphic. They still don’t get it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is in the community and the competition. 

Arathi Basin battleground

I play, I discover, at what is generally termed semi-hard-core levels, which is to say I give it fair amounts of time (10pm – midnight most nights) but I don’t compete at the super-high levels. I am, though, in a rated battle ground team and the work required to stay there is significant: I have to keep my gear up to scratch which means doing a lot of sub-optimal fighting, but when it’s right, and the team is working well, there’s nothing like it.

Actually, there are a few things like it: climbing was one – that sense of absolute partnership with whoever’s holding the rope and who does, quite literally, hold your life in their hands: if you climb regularly together, you develop the kinds of intense relationships that tend otherwise only to happen in high pressure jobs like surgery or theatrical acting, where people take risks together on a daily (or nightly) basis.   Battle re-enactment had a similar effect: the team work, the practice it took to reach a good standard, that sense of all the pieces coming together when we won a particularly hard battle: and yes, the sense of being able to defend someone’s ‘life’ and of having them defend me.

Scoreboard: a vital part of gaming feedback

Game designers define these bonding experiences as some of the most intense in human emotional evolution.  They have words for the pride we feel when our side wins (Fiero), or the almost equally powerful pride we feel when someone we have coached and helped also wins (Naches).  They name the sense of everything coming together as ‘flow’ and they list the four components of gaming that make it so addictive: games have an attainable goal (that often pushes us to the edges of our competence, where we are most in flow), games have clear, succinct rules, games have voluntary participation, games have a feedback system.

Arena competition 2vs2

By combining all of these, a game – defined as any voluntary activity involving the solving of unnecessary obstacles – has the potential to provide us with massive positive emotion, as opposed to the outside world which often provides less than obvious goals – certainly not goals that are theoretically attainable and for which we are given clear, regularly irregular, obvious feedback.  In short, we have the chance to excel in a social context that matters to us: when I heal the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch and my team caps, there is a moment’s peak experience that is the same whether I have ‘died’ or survived (and in any case, I’ll resurrect fairly soon, so dying is not too much of a problem, it just removes me from the game for a bit, thus depriving me of my chance to throw game changing heals).

The evolution of games is one of the most interesting historical stories – this is, after all, an historical blog, so this is the history:   It is widely held that the Lydians were the first to engage in serious gaming as a culture.  Herodotus tells us that in the reign of king Atys, there was such a famine as the Lydian people were in danger of starvation.  So he set up a law, by which the entire population would eat one day and on the next day, they would play games that were so immersive, they wouldn’t notice they weren’t eating, They played dice, knucklebones, ball games and ‘in this way,’ Herodotus said, ‘they invented all the games that are common.’ 

They passed the time this way for eighteen years and at the end of it, when the famine still gripped the land, they played one last, ‘epic’ game, in which the ‘winners’ – half the population – took to boats and sailed off to find a land free of famine, while the remaining half stayed behind and had enough food to sustain them.  Current archaeological theory, backed by DNA evidence, suggests that the Lydians were the fore-runners to the Etruscans who were in turn, the biological ancestors of those who founded Rome: and went on to make the public slow death of other people the most gripping set of games their culture could imagine. 

All of which leads us to examine games rather hard, because the current generation of children is the first to grow up with immediate access to all that digital games can offer.

I was very struck reading an original Grimm Brothers fairy tale recently, which described the young princess ‘amusing herself by playing with a golden ball: she threw it up and caught it and in this way kept herself happy for days on end’. Until the ball fell into the well and was found by a frog and we slide into psychosexual allusion rather fast.

But I am trying to imagine any of the children of my acquaintance finding amusement in throwing a ball of any colour at all into the air for hours on end and catching it, when they could be playing Warcraft. Or Halo4. Or Angry Birds. Or on-line Scrabble. Or Chore Wars (yes, you can turn your household chores into a game. It works.  Details here: http://www.chorewars.com/)

Modern kids spend roughly 20 hours per week at school – and another 24 hours per week playing games.  That will rise as games available on mobile phones become more immersive and more multi-player.   So the children of today know that ‘work’ can be fun, can provide flow, can provide tangible evidence of success and social bonding. Or it can be dull, repetitive, with high stress levels and no obviously attainable goals.

Our educators are only lately catching onto this. I have read of one school in the US where the entire school experience is structured as a game: a pupil might discover a ‘secret code’ hidden in the library which takes quite advanced mathematical skills to solve, and she’ll get extra points if she solves it ahead of her team mates (aka class mates). She might have to bring in two or three of them to help, because some have higher maths-scores than she does, but they will discover ‘fiero’ and ‘naches’ in the success of the ‘secrete mission’ and in the helping of others.  At other times in the day, our hypothetical student will spend time teaching a computer how to do some more basic maths – because teaching others is the best way to learn, at other times, she’ll be powering up her language skills in order to help others find their way out of a labyrinth.  She’ll come home full of self-created projects she wants to get done before the next day and, because the whole of school is one big, epic game, she won’t need or want to spend time on Warcraft or Halo or Call of Duty.

So: history is useful when it teaches us how we can be, if it shows us mistakes we can avoid (we never do, but that’s a different post), if it helps us to understand ourselves.  But we are on the brink of the singularity and games are becoming an increasing part of the world we inhabit.  We as writers and readers are the last generation who will have grown in a world where we created our own games.  We, as readers and writers, need to understand the realities of the world that is evolving, and step into it.

One way to do that is to create games of the world around us: Chore Wars is one.  SuperBetter is another (https://www.superbetter.com/)  which helps people recover from acute or chronic illness.

We can work out how to survive without oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm), or we can generate our own games based around, perhaps, discovering the folding of proteins that may one day help biologists to understand the causes of cancer.  (http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/foldit/)

The possibilities are without end and probably beyond our current imagination. Which is why we are at the threshold of ‘beyond history’ .  Never, not even in ancient Lydia, have we had an entire generation that understood games as a way of life.  How that will shape our future is also beyond our imagining.  But very probably not beyond theirs.

Colossus: The First Computer by Manda Scott

I am watching the first flurry of 2013 snow spin down outside the winter and very glad that we have central heating. And that the dog is with my step daughter and is not pleading to go out, regardless of the temperature or conditions outside.

I am reminded also, of the 108 year old lady who died in our village recently, and her stories of how, as a child, she was sent up into the south Shropshire hills to collect blaeberries (blueberries or bilberries to the southerners around here)  - if she didn’t collect enough, she didn’t get her winter shoes.  But whatever the state of her footwear, she still walked the five miles down ‘Muddy Lane’ and over the hill to school in the neighbouring village every morning and back again in the evening. The lane was a river during the recent floods, and most mornings, it’s a wellie-sucking nightmare of freezing, slushy mud.

Every morning I walk there, I think of Elsie, and am glad of modern footwear, and the car drive with my father that took me to school in the morning.  Granted it was a good thirty eight miles, but we were warm and dry and the train, then train, then bus ride home in the evenings wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined at the time.  The waiting at freezing bus stops was nothing compared to trudging through freezing mud.

Bill Tutte (photo from Wikipedia)

All of which leads me to  WT (Bill) Tutte, a Suffolk lad, son William John senior (can we hope that one day, men are going to stop naming their sons after themselves?) of an estate gardner and Annie Tutte, née Newell, a cook and housekeeper.  The family moved around in his youth, but when he was five, they moved to Cheveley, a village just outside Newmarket, while his father took up a position at the Rutland Arms Hotel in the town.  Bill was a bright lad at primary school and won a scholarship to Cambridge and County Day School – which was twelve miles away.  Several of his biographies tell that he had to ‘make his own way’ to the school (and back) daily; none of them has ever enlightened me as to how he achieved this, but I imagine it makes Elsie’s trudge over the Clee hill pale by comparison: I used to live in the next village along to Cheveley and one of my main clients when I was a young stud vet was the Chevely Park stud: it’s a beautiful place, but there’s not a lot between Newmarket and the Urals when the wind is easterly and it can be bitterly cold.

Nevertheless, the young Bill went on to read Chemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge, although his interest in mathematics was such that he published a paper with four friends on the problem of  ‘Squaring the Square’ (For those with a mathematical bent, the problem was described in the book ‘The Canterbury puzzle and other tales’ and involves decomposing a rectangle into squares, each with sides of different integer lengths.  Tutte and his three friends described the rectangle as a graph and the graph as a circuit with resistors connected to their top and bottom edges and then described the flow of an electrical current through the graph-circuit.

Bill was studying for a post-graduate degree in Chemistry when the Second World War broke out and it became imperative to decipher the Axis military communications.  The powers that be were coming round to the idea that they needed mathematicians more than the linguists who had broken previous ciphers and soon Bletchley Park sent out a quiet word to senior academics in Oxford and Cambridge to keep an eye out for young men (exclusively) of a mathematical bent who might be prepared to enlist in the secret never-to-be-spoken world of the cryptanalysts.

Originally rejected by Alan Turing’s team, Bill was ultimately recruited by John Tiltman who headed the research station, and came to Bletchley Park in January 1941.   Soon after, he was handed a copy of the newly intercepted LORENZ teleprinter (‘Geheimschreiber’) cipher to see what he could make of it. Considerably more complex than the ENIGMA ciphers, the LORENZ code had so far proved entirely intractable.  Given that it was the code used by the Nazi military command to distribute comments, orders of battle and progress updates to and from their headquarters in Berlin, cracking it was vital to the Allied war effort.

Alan Turing and the team that broke the Enigma codes had the advantage of a real machine to examine and a background of Polish work that had contributed in a large part to the early cryptanalysis.

Bill’s team never had any access to a Geheimschreiber machine and had to achieve the complete analysis based on an understanding of German military language and sheer raw  statistics.

Bill’s colleague, Captain Jerry Roberts, described him a spending hours sitting at his desk, staring into space. “I used to wonder if he was doing anything, but my goodness he was.  Breaking [it] was a most extraordinary achievement.” 

Photograph of Geheimschreiber from Wikipedia

The breakthrough came in August of  1941 when a German operator made the fundamental error of sending the same message twice in a row, but used an abbreviation for an early word, thus allowing the cryptanalysts some insight into its nature.  It still took four months, further ‘depth’ transmissions, an increase in the accuracy of the ‘Y’ listening stations and many hours of advanced statistical analysis, but Bill Tutte lead the team that unlocked the mathematics of the cipher and thus was able to describe the twelve-wheel machine that was creating it.

It became swiftly clear that without mistakes on the part of the enemy operators, no transmission would be deciphered, and that four months from transmission to reading was too long.  This is where Tommy Flowers comes into the story of the first computer.  Bill Tutte developed the statistics, but Tommy Flowers, an east end lad who had progressed through the GPO’s engineer training scheme and had worked with Alan Turing on devising an electro-mechanical method of breaking the Enigma ciphers.   

Brought in to work on the Lorenz ciphers, Tommy devised and built the COLOSSUS: the first fully electronic computer.  He did it against the overwhelming theories of those around him (who resented his use of thermionic valves) and funded the first Colossus largely on his own.  Having proved itself, ten models were commissioned, each one more complex than its predecessor and an eleventh was in production when the war ended.  Capable of the (then) astonishing speed of 2000 calculations per second, each involving up to 100 Boolean calculations on 5 separate streams.

The Colossus machine (photo from Wikipedia)

Much of the post-statistical analysis had to be done by hand and the operators – many of whom were young women with a flair for mathematics became adept at reading the results and reconfiguring the machine to test for other analyses so that the cryptanalysis moved more swiftly.

The first real-time use of Colossus came in the battle of Kursk in which Stalin was not only informed of the Nazi intent to attack, but given the entire order of battle verbatim. The subsequent defeat of Hitler’s troops was a crucial turning point in the war on the eastern front.

By the closing stages of the war, the team at Bletchley was able to hand General Eisenhower a print out of Hitler’s response to the preparations for D-Day, thus triggering the final command to commit the troops as planned.

Bill Tutte lecturing in Canada (Photo from Wikipedia)

Bill Tutte, the boy who made his own way twelve miles to school and back each day, was never decorated for his work in Bletchley Park although others since have described it as ‘the greatest intellectual achievement of the twentieth century’.  Never the less, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later, having attained his PhD at Cambridge and moved to Canada, he was made an Officer of Canada.  His work was classified for many years, but, unlike many at Bletchley, he lived long enough to be able to talk about it.  His lecture ‘FISH and I’ makes fascinating and inspiring reading. 

Bill Tutte died in 2002 an acknowledged hero, but one whose name deserves far more widespread recognition.

21.12.12: The Mayan Apocalypse... or not... by Manda Scott

Unless you live on Mars and even that without access to broadband, you’ll know that we’re nearing the End of the World.  Or at least, that there are people who are willing to tell you that the ancient Mayan prophecies predict some kind of cataclysm on the winter solstice of this year: 21/12/12 – or if you live in those parts of the world that don’t work in ascending date order, 12/21/12.

It’s not true, of course, very few Apocalyptic prophecies are, but the truth is far more interesting, and while it takes several large volumes to explain it in detail, I’ll do my best to paraphrase it for readers of History Girls.

 First we need to have a brief over view of the ancient Maya: the indigenous (probably – there may have been people before, but if so, they’re extinct) tribes of that part of central America that’s encompassed now by southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and the Honduras.  From earliest records around 2600BC, the Maya grew into a large civilization with vast city-states, reaching a xenith around 900 AD, after which it suffered a rather sudden collapse – some say because they wrought havoc with the local ecosystems, but their culture was not sufficiently resilient to adapt to new food sources. (a scarily familiar concept).

Even in its diminished form, the Maya were still a culture of astonishingly intricate and beautiful art, and quite mind-bendingly outstanding mathematics, astronomy and astrology.   Not only had they defined the concept of zero long before it hit the west, they had a dual calendric system with which they had measured the length of a year to four decimal places: 365.2422 days .(Today, we define it as 365.242198 days – but it’s worth remembering that we only made the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars in 1528, nine years after Hernan Cortez arrived and instigated the genocide of the natives – and the destruction of their culture.

Their two separate calendars were the relatively brief, ‘Short Count’ which measured in base 13 and was used to define the dates of rituals, births, harvests and the like, and the longer, base 20 ‘Long Count’ which measured lifespans. 

The ‘Short Count’ calendar was made up of the Tzolkin and the Haab.  The former merged 20 day names with 13 day numbers to defined a year of 260 days (which is the length of a human gestation).  Interlocking with this was ‘Haab’ which had a vague year of 18 solar months, each of 20 days, plus 5 ceremonial days in which evil deities would wreak havoc.  Together, the Tzolkin and the Haab united to form a calendar round of 18980 days, or roughly 52 years.

Longer periods of astronomical time were measured by the Long Count calendar which measured time in exponential units, again arranged largely in bases 13 and 20.  It’s the Long Count that gives us the world ages, so bear with me while I lay out the time frames.

1day= 1k’in

20 k’in  = 1 uinal

18 uinal = 1 tun (360 days)

20 tun = I katun (7,200 days)

20 katun = 1 baktun (144,000 days)

13 baktun = 1 ‘World Age’  = 1,872,000 days or 5, 125.36 years.

So we have units of time that are ‘World Ages’ measured in 5,125 years, more or less.

The Mayan civilization may have arisen in 2600BC, but they set their calendar so that the end of the current World Age would coincide with certain astronomic events, namely the point when the rising sun on the winter solstice appears to overlay that part of the galaxy we term the ‘Dark Rift’ – an apparent gap caused by interstellar dust and gas cloud.  The Maya called it Xibalbe be’ or the ‘Black Road’. 

In order to be able to predict this with accuracy, the Maya must have been able to calculate the precession of the equinoxes to a stunningly accurate degree – the entire transit of the winter solstice sun over the centre of the dark rift takes 36 years – so they Maya predicted that the mid-point of that cycle would be the winter solstice of 2012 – and in a civilization that was thriving around 600 – 700 AD in our calendar, they back-dated their own calendar so that it started in August 3114 BC – long before their own civilization had begun – in order that it might reach the point 13 baktun 4Ahau 3 Kankin – on 21/12/12.

We know they did this because, in spite of the Jesuit’s best efforts, a number of Mayan monuments remain and scholars have spent the best part of the twentieth century decoding them.  Almost everyone is agreed on the 3114 BC start date for the calendar and therefore the 21/12/12 end date – but nobody at all is sure exactly what the Maya imagined would happen now.

If we jettison into the realm of myth, we find that they believed there had been four previous world ages in which humanity had begun to flourish and that the human race had been largely obliterated at the end of each one as a consequence of a natural disaster  involving one of the four elements: fire or storm or earthquake or flood. Myth (or rather, rumour loosely based on myth) says that the fifth – and current World Age would be ended by the actions of humanity and this would be an end to the Large World Age of 25,772 years.

So the upshot is, that the ancient Maya were capable of calculating an astronomical event that occurred once every 25,000 years and that astronomical event is taking place now, more or less.

If you want to believe that humanity is about to destroy itself, there’s plenty of evidence gathering to support that thesis, from the war in Syria, to the government’s current infatuation with fracking for shale gas (who needs a clean water supply anyway?) to the – in my mind more likely – immanent arrival of the technological singularity in which we create the computer – or at least, the chip – that is capable of designing and building its own successor. At which point, we’ll be out of the loop as far as the evolution of intelligence goes. And if I were a super-intelligent silicone-based life form and I looked at the mess the bipedal organic, carbon-based life forms had made of the planet, I’d have no hesitation at all in wiping them (us) out at the earliest opportunity. And yes, I am planning to write the book based on this concept. If we're all still here to read it.

Happy Solstice, everyone!

Images are from the book 2012: Everything you wanted to know about the Apocalypse (written by me, images from Transworld, courtesy of the ever-wonderful Phil Lord)   There's one more to come, but I'm waiting for permission.

Cryptography and Linear B by Manda Scott

 

One of the real joys of a writing life, is the ability to fall into a topic, to become immersed in the minutiae of something out of the ordinary and call it ‘work’. It is possible, even, to be paid for doing so, and then exercising one’s imagination on the product of that immersion; a fact that never ceases to amaze (and delight) me.

So it is with spies and spying.  Since the first cave family sent someone out to listen in on their neighbour’s plans for hunting woolly mammoths, spying has been part of our world, so hidden, so unspoken that it didn’t even merit the title of ‘the first profession’ although it surely was.  

Since then, almost every era has had a text that relates one way another to clandestine investigation, to codes or ciphers, starting with Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ which lists the five types of spy and how they should be treated.  

The following, from Chapter 13 still seems to me a perfect distillation of espionage, it’s value and promotion: 

Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.

When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.

Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.

Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.

Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.

Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.

Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp.

Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies.

None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.

Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.

Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.

Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.

If you allow that 'men' also equals 'women', I have yet to find a better elucidation of the nature of spies or their use. 

But the spy herself is only the first part of the chain of espionage; information is of no use if it cannot be transmitted back to those who need it most, and it's the use of codes and ciphers that seems to me most fascinating, particularly nowadays, when we conduct so many transactions over the internet, and rely on secrecy – ciphers – to keep our bank and credit card secrets secure. 

The origins of ciphers doubtless also goes back to Sun Tzu even if he was astute enough not to mention them.  Julius Caesar wrote a treatise on ciphers, which has sadly been lost to posterity – the only surviving example is a simple letter substitution cipher of the kind we all used at school where A=b, B=c and on until the alphabet wraps round and Z=a.  This isn’t enough to fill a whole book, though and there seems little doubt that the man with the military capacity to conquer Gaul will have found more complex ways of scrambling and unscrambling text than simply shifting letters one space along in a linear alphabet. 

(Image of Julius Caesar courtesy of ‘thisisbossi’ on Flickr)

Other methods of the time that did not require either party to write out the alphabet to decode the message included winding a strip of leather around a stick with (say) a hexagonal cross section. The message was written along the leather-wound stick, then the leather unwound and hidden, or perhaps used as a belt with the letters on the inside. As long as the recipient had a stick of the same diameter, then winding the belt around it would once again demonstrate the message.

Sometimes simply writing – or sending – the message in a different language was enough. We know that the Romans used Greek on occasion, believing that ‘barbarian’ tribes couldn’t read it (this was almost certainly false given that Greek was the lingua franca of the time) and in the second world war, the US successfully used teams of native Navajo speakers to produce entirely unbreakable wireless transmissions. While the statisticians of the US military cryptographic units were working out Japanese code, their counterparts were unable to penetrate the Navajo, partly because of the entirely unique language structure.

And then there’s the fascination of a code that is in an entirely different language – such as Linear B.   The story of the breaking of Linear B has been called one of the greatest archaeological decipherment of all time (Breaking the Nazi Geheimschreiber teleprinter codes in the Second World War was probably the greatest military cryptographic feat of all time, if only for the technological development of the computer that grew out of it).

Linear B is found on a series of baked clay tablets – most of them either leaf-shaped or rectangular - found in the remains of a large and complex palace at Knossos, on Crete, at the start of the twentieth century.   These were unusual for a number of reasons, but primarily because clay tablets of the time were rarely baked hard to preserve them, but usually kept ‘air dry’ so they could be soaked in water and re-used. 

(Image courtesy of Sharon Mollerus, ‘Clairity’ on Flickr)

These, however, were complete and covered in inscriptions of a kind never seen before.  They were soon sorted into three groups: ancient tablets with symbols that related (probably) to seals of office; these came from 2000 to 1650 BC.  The second group hailed from 1750 to 1450 BC and were called Linear A. The third group, Linear B, were dated from 1450 to 1375BC.   Of these, many were inventories and the numbers were easy to decipher.  The writing was a different matter: 90 separate characters existed, but none were related in any obvious way to any of the ancient languages of the region

Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who found the tablets, was convinced that Linear B was a form of pre-Greek Cretan, arising from the Minoan Empire – the same civilization that gave rise to King Minos and the Minotaurs (in fact, it was suggested that the highly complex, labyrinthine palace had given rise to the Minotaur legend).

(Photo taken by flickrolf on Flickr, This is the room described by Evans as ‘The Queen’s Boudoir’)

Evans’ argument was supported by much of the Establishment and they didn’t take dissent lightly: individuals who dared suggest that the tablets might not be Minoan (and evidence of Minoan supremacy in the region at the time) frequently found their careers suffered as a result of their audacity. Still, nobody decoded the plates.

(Photo courtesy of Kiminoa on Flickr)

It took an American academic, Alice Kober, to begin to break the code. Using statistical analysis of the type that became the bread and butter of Alan Turing and the teams at Blechley Park during the war, she created tables of allied symbols: pairs of symbols which were seen together frequently.   It had been decided already that Linear B was a syllabic script – there were too many symbols to be alphabetic, and too few to be purely symbolic (as in Chinese),  thus it made sense for some pairs or groups of syllables to be allied.  Kober also found certain ‘bridging’ syllables which joined other pairs.

Sadly, Alice Kober died before she could take the next essential step in decoding the cipher, that was taken by an English architect with a fascination for Linear B, Michael Ventris.  As with many cryptographers, Ventris was an outstanding linguist: he was fluent in French and German by the time he went to school and taught himself Polish at the age of six.

Although by profession an architect, Ventris spent all of his spare time on Linear B, and began to work out which consonant/vowel combinations carried similar consonants but different vowels. By linking these together, and by discovering which of the 90 symbols represented vowels alone, he was able to discover the name of a city within the text: Knossos.  (or rather, Knosso – the final ‘s’ was missing, but in the scale of things, that was irrelevant).

Using the syllables already discovered, Amnisos and Tulissos soon fell to his statistical analysis and so the threads began to unravel.  Codebreakers at Bletchley Park said they could work for 30 hours at a stretch on a code, in the early days, when they were all done by hand; that finding one word and then another became addictive, and over-rode the need for sleep.

So it may have been with Ventris who began slowly to discern other words within the text: there was only one problem: what he had found was Greek and that meant turning over an entire archaeological theory about the nature of the ancient world: that the Minoan Empire perhaps was not supreme when it was thought to have been: that Greece was superior for longer than was known and was able to exert influence – and force a change in language – far earlier than anyone had believed.

It took another scholar, John Chadwick, who had worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park to complete the cycle.  Chadwick was an expert in the evolution of ancient Greek and so was able to support Ventris at a point when the Establishment might otherwise have closed against him.  Together, they decoded the script and thus the tablets – and in doing so, found out why they were baked: several of the tablets record the possibility of invasion, and outline detailed ceremonies aimed at placating gods who might repel the invaders.  It seems likely that the palace was destroyed by fire, thus baking for posterity the last words of the ancient scribes.

And the greater mass of the tablets? They were inventories, written in exhaustive detail, of the taxes paid and good traded, so that we know to the nearest pig and sheep who paid what and where and when.  If we think our own Inland Revenue are a bunch of mean minded bean counters, at least there is some consolation in knowing that they didn’t arise in the recent past. Three thousand years ago, someone was busy recording the details of one sheep in a herd of thousands, so they could tax the owner accordingly.

HWA/Goldsboro Crown for Best Debut Historical Fiction Novel 2012

by Manda Scott

Having recently read Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, ‘Cryptonomicon’, I was going to write a column on the evolution of codes and ciphers, but looking at the date, I realized that exactly a week today, I’ll be in Cecil Court, London at History in the Court, and, together with Dave Headley of Goldsboro Books, will announce the winner of the first ever ‘HWA/Goldsboro Crown for Debut Historical Fiction’. 

The prize, self evidently, is for the book that is, in the judges’ opinion, the best first work of fiction with an historical content published within the dates of the prize, in this case, October 2010 to end September 2011.  Goldsboro books has kindly put up a perpetual prize of £2000 for the winner, and Dave Headley has commissioned an amazing crystal award which should grace any winner’s mantelpiece. 

I can’t, of course, tell you who the winner is, but in many ways, I really don’t want to.  Our shortlist is so strong that I would far prefer it if we didn’t have to pick one out of the pack and set it above the rest. I’m well aware that many of those involved in literary prizes say this, and, having been shortlisted 3 times in my career so far, I can tell you that I’ve always thought that was a sop to the losers, particularly since I have never yet won, (first novel award, Orange Prize and Edgar Award respectively).  This time, though, it’s true.  Our panel of judges, ably chaired by Dave Headley included a publisher – Maria Rejt, a non-fiction author, Tom Holland, who was until recently the Chair of the Society of Authors, a blogger and reviewer, Ayo Onatade, and me, in my capacity as Chair of the Historical Writers’ Association. 

We had planned a big splash for the announcement of the shortlist at Kelmarsh this year as the highlight of our two-day Festival of Historical Literature.  But this was the year of the Great Wash Out(s).  I began to grow nervous the week before it was due to take place when the CWA Game Fair was cancelled.  The GF is never cancelled (Foot and Mouth doesn’t count), but the authorities at Kelmarsh promised that they had the best-drained land in the whole of England and would never ever cancel.  We believed them, right up until 5: 30 on the Saturday morning, 3 hours before gate opening, when the Viking re-enactors who had been camping on site called to say they were stranded on the wrong side of a river that had arrived in the night.  The stories of the Viking family who lifted their (authentic Viking) tent onto dry ground only to see their daughter sail off downstream on the (not authentically Viking) airbed are amusing in retrospect, but weren’t at the time.  The only good thing to come out of it was the moment we discovered that the rumoured collapse of the Paviliion, which contained over a hundred books each for 35 authors hadn’t, in fact, caved in.  Life is full of small mercies. 

So: the shortlist was released to the press, but it wasn’t quite the same and we never had quite the fanfare I had planned for.  This then, is my making up in the best way I can.  Below, are all four of the shortlisted novels: they’re not all by women, though by happenstance, and dint of beautiful writing, two of them are. They’re presented in alphabetic order of author’s surname, that being just about the only fair way to do it. 

First is Ellen Byron’s amazing book, ‘The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno’.  Ellen is one of those people who has done all the most exotic things I dream of but never quite get around to.  As a modern dancer, she met her husband in Buenos Aires where she was teaching the Samba.  Returning to the US with him, she became involved in philanthropic work, both for private and community foundations, culminating in a job with the Council of foundations in Washington DC, and now she’s thinking of moving to France.

In the midst of all this, she penned a barnstorming novel set in New York in 1865.  Lincoln has just been assassinated, the Civil War is still bright in people’s minds and Phineas Taylor (PT) Barnum, he of ‘there’s one born every minute’ is peddling his exotic mix of theatre and circus, his ‘prodigies and exotics’ to an ever-fascinated audience.  Bartholomew Fortuno is displayed as The World’s Thinnest Man.  His best friend and soul mate is The World’s Fattest Woman. They rub along together fairly well with the Giantess and the Rubber Man in a hotel/theatre where the hierarchy of True Prodigy > Prodigy > Exotic is what keeps every man and woman in his place (our hero considers himself a True Prodigy.  The Rubber Man, by contrast, is a mere Exotic).  When the maid, Bridget, is transformed into an Exotic, there is outrage.  

But into this mix comes the Incredible Bearded Woman, a rarity of such exotic allure – such eroticism – that it turns Bartholomew’s carefully controlled (and manifestly anorexic) life on its head.  

This is a beautiful novel of humanity and love and loss, all the more potent for the close-knit nature of the narrative.  Everything takes place in the theatre or its immediate surround and the emotional pressures, the need to succeed, to draw in the crowds, bring their own narrative drive.  It’s an era and a place about which I knew nothing, but was completely enthralled. 

Next along is ‘Partitions’ by Amit Majmudar.  Another American, Amit Majmudar is an award winning poet (his collection, Heaven and Earth won the Donald Justice Prize in 2011) and a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.  His medical training shows through at one point in Partitions, when the protagonists have to deal with a pneumothorax, but in the main, what sets this book apart is the astonishing poetry of the writing. 

Set in 1947 at the time of the partition of India, this is a ghost story, a story of loss and recovery and a heart-breaking story of family’s broken apart forever by the appalling sectarian violence that consumed the nascent states of India and Pakistan. 

The book is narrated by the ghost of an Indian surgeon, who looks in on the lives of twin six-year-old Hindu boys – his sons – who have become separated from their mother and must try to get from what will be Pakistan and Muslim, to Delhi on the safe (ish) side of the border.  He also follows a lost Sikh girl who has evaded her family’s suicide pact, and a Muslim doctor, Ibrahim Masud, (he of the pneumothorax treatment) who is forced into Pakistan despite the fact that his practice was amongst the Hindu population of India.   This is a slim volume, but the story could not be more engaging.  The ghost-narrator shields us from a reality that would otherwise by too appalling to contemplate, while never stepping back from the raw hatred, the violence, the sheer inhumanity – and occasional powerful humanity – of those involved.  Given the repercussions that will stretch easily into the next century, this is a powerful, moving book that should be on everyone’s shelves. 

Third in our list is ‘Mistress of her Fate’ by the historian Hallie Rubenhold.  Hallie’s non-fiction works include ‘Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies; sex in the city in Georgian Britain’  - Harris’s list was the ’50 Shades’ of its day, although one assumes that the overwhelming majority of the 250,000 sales (this in the days before mass consumerism) were men, not women. An annual ‘guide book’ it listed the ‘specialities’ of the prostitutes of Covent Garden. 

Her subsequent non-fiction work, ‘Lady Worseley’s Whim’ details the then-scandalous activities of a ménage a trois that made it to the headlines when Lady Worsley’s husband sued her lover for Criminal Conversation. The resulting trial was the talk of the town. 

These two together make an excellent foundation for Hallie’s novel.  First of a trilogy, it is told in the first person by Henrietta Lightfoot, detailing her transformation from the downtrodden foundling ‘sister’ of an appalling society prig, to ‘kept woman’, to ‘actress’, to adventurer-in-France evading the French Revolution, then in full swing.   Through it all, she is driven by her love for Geroge Allenham, the man who first seduces her, and leaves her pregnant while he vanishes to places unknown.  Her narrative thereafter is drive by her need to survive in a society where single pregnant women had no place but the gutter, as much as it is to find George.  A complete naïf at the start, she becomes ever more worldly-wise, which means, in effect, ever more able to manipulate the men who fall for her gamine charm. 

So often, novels written by historians are solid blocks of research hung about barely plausible narrative pegs.  ‘The Confessions of Henriatta Lightfoot’ (the subtitle) could not be further from that baseline.  The writing is beautifully evocative and feels perfectly ‘of the time’  - it reminds me in that way of AL Berridge’s “Into the Valley of Death” or Andrew Taylor’s masterful ‘American Boy’.  The pace is fast and each new man takes up long enough to understand what Henrietta has to sacrifice to be with him, and then to be ready for her to leave. It’s a joy of a book, and well worth reading. 

Finally, at least in our alphabetic list, is Robert Wilton’s ‘The Emperor’s Gold’.  Robert is another historian – he studied for an MA in European history and culture at the University of London, but soon after, joined the UK Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office.  He’s been Private Secretary to three Secretaries of State and was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead up to that country’s independence. He lives and works their now as a senior international official. 

His novel stems from his time in the shadowy underworld of government.  Set in 1805, its premise is that Wilton has discovered a dossier in a dust-filled cabinet pertaining to the ‘Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey’, a deniable organisation considerably more clandestine than MI6, operating independent of Government to unknown and uncertain ends.  The clear implication is that it is still in action doing things that we’d all rather not know about. For this novel, Wilton has pieced together the gap-filled narrative relating to the time immediately preceding Napoleon’s planned invasion of Britain.  

The narrative is based on the person of ‘Tom Roscarrock’ – not his real name – who is pulled from the sea off Cornwall, the only survivor of a shipwreck.  Given his new name, Tom is conscripted into The Comptrollerate and, with remarkably little direction, is propelled into the heart of an organisation, a city and a nation on the brink of collapse.  Around England, men are calling for the same freedoms they see in France, while the victorious Napoleon sees Britain as the last remaining prize that will complete his Empire.   Without any clue as to whom he can safely trust, Roscarrock must make decisions that will not only keep him alive, but decide the fate of nations. 

This is the first spy thriller I’ve read in a long, long time (and I write them, so I’ve read pretty much every one that’s worth reading) where I truly haven’t known who the bad guys were and how they did it, until the very last page.  The twists and turns in the narrative give it tremendous drive, but it’s the poetry of the writing that makes it stand out.  In some novels, a sentence or two is exceptional and leaves me, as a writer, in awe of the work.  This novel left me in awe from start to finish.  Nothing is unnecessarily flowery, but every single sentence is a joy to read.

So that’s our four.  All of them deserve to win. It’s just unfortunate that one of them has to.  This time next week, we’ll know which it is.  In the meantime, enjoy them all as equals; it’s what they should be.