‘Had he a lover? A regular lover? Someone who knew him?’
One of the legionaries nods. ‘Helena.’
‘Bring her.’
Marcus looks horrified. ‘Learnèd … here? To see what lies within? Is that necessary?’
‘It will not be pleasant for her. But this is not a pleasant day, not for any of us.’
‘But why?’
‘The Learnèd Athenais is hoping against hope,’ Gnaeus murmurs, ‘that only the head of the corpse belongs to Scipio. That the rest was prepared beforehand.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because,’ Gnaeus says, patient, ‘if that were the case, then four clean cuts could be managed on a body with plenty of time in another place, and that body put aside against the moment. Perhaps stored in honey and then washed down in brine.’
Oh. I had not – please. Not honey. Let it be salted oil and the parts washed in water. Let it be ice, even, and sawdust. Not honey.
Let it not come back again to me, and all directions leading to the same room.
Gnaeus shrugs. ‘If the body belongs to another man, then one need only kill Scipio by severing his head, and leave it with four parts of the other in a duplicate set of clothes. That would make this a human assassination, perhaps even entirely unconnected to the Chamber. It would mean that the jinn is a shared error, a fever dream brought on by the manner of the killing and our fears.’
‘And me a liar,’ Julius Marcus says. To his credit, he seems more hopeful than offended.
Gnaeus shrugs yes. ‘Deceived somehow, or drugged. But no gods or demons, Father. No bad miracle, just a bad man. Learnèd Athenais considers this an outcome greatly to be desired.’
I do, though I wouldn’t bet the back half of a chicken.
They bring the girl, but of course she turns out to be one of those breathy northern wallflowers with flaxen hair. When they show her the body she begins to shriek, and doesn’t stop until they carry her away. I suppose I can’t blame her. We dicker for a while over whether her reaction implies she recognises the corpse or merely the head, or whether she has simply been overcome by a general and not incomprehensible horror. Then a waterboy brings word that she has recovered enough to confirm the body as being that of her lover. There is a birthmark on his shoulder, and a bite beside it that she made herself.
Youth.
Drat and drat. I look at Gnaeus, and he shrugs again: what did you expect? Another thing the legions don’t really go in for is false hope.
I avoid gods, these days, and all manner of spirits. Alcmaeon of Croton wrote that although the jennaye live, they do so at an angle to the world. Those that traffic with them are like a man who would argue with the driver of a chariot as it passes on the road, and they misread for anger or wisdom what is in the end only velocity.
And now it seems I have one of my very own.
Marvellous. Athenais Karthagonensis: detections, erections and exorcisms a speciality.
*
I make them prepare a study for me, and a couch to sleep on. Then I send them all to bed. I don’t know at what point I was made queen, but I’m not going to argue.
So long as I am not Tarset.
I read, eat, and – after years and years of sunset – the day ends. In the cool cotton I find a sort of dreamy calm, the perfect clarity of solitude. I realise I don’t really care if Scipio died of mortal agency; that is, I care because he reminds me of my son. But I was not brought here to avenge or to reveal. I was brought here for something else altogether, and that something has not diminished in its urgency.
No one has said it, but it hangs in the air, in the gaps between glances. They all want me to say I can do it, but they’re afraid at the same time because if I can the world will change completely. The meaning of things will change. A new sun will rise.
They do not, particularly, want me to cast out the jinn. They do not want me to investigate Scipio’s death.
They want me to bring him back.
I cannot. There are no miracles.
Except that since this morning I have imagined myself a hundred times a schemer and an assassin. I have given myself all the world’s resources, and I have tried to design this death as I found it. I have murdered Scipio in my mind, over and over again. I have found many ways to achieve this result that might work, if one had but will and time. But when I tested my conceptions against what is present in the Chamber, I found them lacking. There are no trap doors, no hiding places. There are no hidden blades. In that, it is precisely what it appears to be: a wooden room with precious ornaments.
The whole house, of course, might be the plot. From Julius Marcus and Gnaeus to the legionary who has definitely met girls, they could all be the masque. A troupe of liars.
Except that what is painted on the Chamber was in my dream. The quinsection of my son’s soul is heralded to taunt me on the east wall, and that is impossible.
This is not a mortal plot. What is done here grows from dragon’s teeth, not seeds. In this place begins a true kairos: the instant before the coming of the wave for which the worlds make way.
I am an alchemist. We live to make things explode. And even if we did not, there really is no other choice.
I go to the Chamber, and I try to make the Alkahest.
*
There are very clear instructions in the Scroll. All the ingredients are close at hand, because Scipio had already put them by for whatever he intended. And what did he want, dead Scipio? To bring back his parents, or a lover? Or was he underneath the laughter and the wine a scholar, and sought knowledge before anything else? The desire to learn finds its way into curious places. Or perhaps he wished to make the world his plaything and raise himself to an angel, or a god. That sort of person almost certainly should not attain what they desire, for all our sakes. Will I resurrect him, if I succeed? Will I drink, before I raise Adeodatus? If I do not do so, how shall I control who else may drink, and be remade, in this house of priests and soldiers?
It seems I am a woman in a world of stone and clay, who has the gift of making metal swords.
I had planned to clean the house today, and roast a duck slowly in my oven. Some of the local children come by each week, uninvited, to see if I will tell them stories from my library, and of course I do, concealing as much real learning as I can in stories of adventure. This week I thought to seal the compact, and make it a regular event. Dripping duck in warm bread, by my reckoning, should have made that easier. Now it will spoil – although I suppose, if I am successful, I can simply wave my hand and have duck from the pure firmament, though that seems like cheating. Christ, at least, had the good manners to multiply loaves and fishes, rather than conjure them from air. Well, perhaps I shall speak to the duck and make it fresh again, though always careful not to push too hard and bring it once again to life.
How if I ate the duck and digested it, and then brought it back? Would I be hungry again, as if I had not eaten? And if not, why not?
I do not think I am cut out for this. I have a need to ask questions that unravel the world. I’m tempted to vary the mix somewhat from what is written – I know rather more about transmutation and consilience now than I did when I imagined this. I could do a much better job of it today. So: should I? But that defeats the point. This thing is as I wrote it then. It exists in that moment, and the present must pay deference to the past or where are we? It is not to be fiddled with and adjusted to suit my present self. I must abide by life as it was, not how I think it ought to be now.
Except that I shall stand in the Chamber of Isis and make the Alkahest and all time shall be one and I shall not abide by how things were. I shall raise my son from the dead.
For God’s sake, Athenais, let’s get to it. Bless the quarters. Walk the room according to the Orphic pattern set by Pythagoras: step, turn, bisect; cross the floor and repeat, until all the corners are your own. The ritual cleansing feels rather pointed, here and now. There’s no sense of the jinn, no lingering whisper of the hive, but it won’t have g
one far.
Screw you, you gloating, murderous boggle.
Name the winds; give thanks for water, blood and life; bow to the goddess – and let’s have no foolishness, please, about her being a virgin. Isis was a mother of the more conventional sort, and did not turn up her nose at sex. Bow as women bow, not in emulation of florid men protesting their sincerity, all laid out flat upon the stone: just the simple inclination owed to the mistress of the house.
Of all houses.
Ring the bell five times. Pour a libation and drink in her name. Invite her into your mouth to taste the wine. The goddess is part of you, as she is all of us.
Salute the cardinals, one by one, saving the east for last. (I lock eyes with my portrait. I expect a shock of contact in this moment, but there isn’t one. Move on.)
And now the actual alchemy. Gold powder, for the sun. Silver for the moon. Ground pearls for the sea. Volcanic stone for earth and fire. Tears for the soul. (I have no idea whose tears. I suspect a baby’s, diligently collected and sealed with wax. I didn’t specify in the main text, but I implied in a later footnote that the tears of an innocent might be the best option. I think I just wanted to make the process of gathering the materials as obnoxious as possible, but it has occurred to me since to wonder how many perfectly happy babies have been goaded to weeping by bearded arseholes in search of Holy Truth. Add another host of tiny sorrows to the list to be laid at my door.) Heat over a brazier. Mix. Do not melt the metal: this is not jewellery we are making. It is magic. The transformation is not chemical, it is impossible. Respect the discipline: the art of what cannot be.
All right, almost done. The Chamber smells of lamp oil and must, certainly not of flowers and the woodland, as predicted in the Scroll. Nor do I feel transported by the presence of the divine. My feet remain firmly on the floor.
Do you recall what I said about there being a problem with the Alkahest? That it was not containable? And that I had solved that problem in the Scroll, and that solution was one of its principal selling points, as it were, in the marketplace of bullshit that is academic certainty? Well, here’s the reckoning. We have reached that point, and now I have to embarrass myself, and thankfully there’s just me to witness it, and my subsequent inevitable failure. Me and the goddess, of course. And the cardinals.
There is a doctrine in Orphic magic called the attraction of souls. It proposes that certain persons are fated to be together, for good or ill, and that their souls will move through the world, across as many lives as they need to find one another. The moment of conjunction will yield a shift in the nature of the world, for better or worse, and it is the duty of the wise and of the initiated to identify such moments of unison and prepare the participants, so that the scales of life are balanced towards the benign and the earth – little by little – is made a paradise. To the Orphics, the attraction is a literal force and not a metaphor: it is a power of nature that tugs and hauls upon these sundered ones the way a river flows to the sea. The reunification of disconnected parts cannot be stopped. The soul of Adeodatus is torn into five parts, the demon told me in my dream. Perhaps those parts seek reunion. Perhaps what I am doing is exactly what I am supposed to do, and this false Chamber emerges from that necessary remaking of the whole.
The true Alkahest – as I wrote it – is drawn up and out of these noble but mundane ingredients in a similar fashion, by a kind of necessity. It is a piece of soul stuff not deriving from the matter in the crucible but permitted into the human world by their conjunction. The ritual is not a prayer, but a species of geometry which opens the doors of the universe to what lies outside it. The ingredients are a door, and the lock must be undone by the pain of a human soul. (Yes, yes, I was maudlin drunk by this time, and growing Homeric. Let it be.) So this part is simple: you hold your pain – all your sorrow, your sin, your self-despite and guilt, your shame – in your hand above the crucible, and let it call out in supplication to the raw blood of the divinity, and that blood will rise up towards you, and where it touches you, you are made whole, and more. If you want to lift it to someone else, you must temper your pain and shape it as a cup. The only vessel that will contain the Alkahest is the agony of the heart that calls it up. The process is one of self-sacrifice. With practice, I wrote – rather smugly, it seems to me now – you can control your own needs, and meet the needs of others.
Is it obvious I was ever so slightly preaching there? Well, I thought so. But once you’ve decided that the Scroll is the real thing, apparently all this is just your average magical revelation.
I put out my hand and think of everything that has ever made me feel small and cold. I think of the staring moment of denial when I learned of Adeodatus’s death, of the scream I let loose when I realised Augustine had really kicked me out, that he had put his God between us. I remember Monica’s frosty gaze the first night we met, and how she passed the fruit to everyone at the table but me. I think of my small, spiteful revenges, of the idle notion I have entertained recently of telling the whole story so that my Reminiscences should stand in contrast to his hurtful Confessions. I think of my stupid, over-ornate prank, and how it has ensnared a generation of otherwise intelligent people and led to this moment, perhaps to Scipio’s death and surely to some greater plot to come. I think of all the times I have been less than I tell myself I am: passing beggars in the street without caring, shouting at my infant son, betraying confidences for the thrill of gossip. I remember I once took a lover purely because I knew someone else desired him, and relished the pain I inflicted more than the sex, and in the end they married other people and are still joyless. I confess, silently, that I am frightened above all else that I have wasted my life, missed my opportunities, and that everything I am will be lost absolutely when I die. I admit my greatest horror: that there is no goddess, no God, no jennaye and no afterlife, that all there is, is rot, and no meaning to any of it. That I will never see my son again, raised up in a new body and playing in a field for ever.
I hear a sob, and know it for my own.
Quite absurdly, the crucible fills with light.
the combination to
‘IMMEDIATELY, PLEASE,’ NEITH growls at the visiting nurse. The Witness required a check-up after this second episode of unbidden recall of the Hunter interrogation. Neith acceded out of a sense of good practice, though she privately believes the concern is misplaced. She is tired but energised, and has concluded that Tubman – blast his casual armchair profiling – is quite right: she and the recording share an intrinsic urgency, a desire to move forward.
Which is why she is now losing patience. The nurse has now fussed over her, poked her with wooden sticks to assess her nerve endings, and made her pee into a bottle absurdly ill-suited to the operation. She has had enough. There is such a thing as too much oversight. She glowers at him by way of emphasis.
‘I don’t know that it’s—’
The Inspector seldom pulls rank, but now she loads a Witness X tag (‘X’ being for ‘expedite’) behind the request to give it weight. The Witness approves it, and the nurse departs without further argument, returning a short while later from the living room with a single piece of printed paper which he fixes to the wall over her bed with a strip of blue electrical tape. The Witness has evidently expanded her instructions, because he also brings her lantern and a single ping pong ball in a translucent plastic bucket that at one stage contained individually wrapped muffins.
She thanks the nurse but does not apologise, and nor quite obviously does he expect her to. They are both professionals, exercising professional judgement. It occurs to her briefly that she might ask where the ping pong ball came from – she has no recollection of owning one – but concludes that the answer is either banal or utterly bizarre and in neither case will the question offer any relief of their social tension.
The nurse pronounces her well enough to be badly behaved and notes that this is a good sign. He reiterates the general infuriating injunction to take it easy and departs. She waits unt
il the Witness informs her he has left the building, then wraps both arms around the bucket and shakes it, watching the ping pong ball as it clatters and jumps. It isn’t as satisfying as the long drop of her tennis ball or the tactile thud as it lands in her palm, but it won’t roll away if she drops it and force her to get up when she doesn’t want to. Nor does it suggest the flexible physical laws of dream. She puts the bucket aside and flicks on the pen torch. On, off. Once, twice, three, four, five times, because her instinct is to stop at three, and dreams use precisely the recollection of habit to construct a facade of the real.
Finally, she turns to the poem on the wall, an untitled piece from a twentieth-century American.
I am the combination to a door
That fools and wise with equal ease undo …
She forces her eyes to pick out each letter before assembling the words, as if she were learning a new language. Halfway down she stops, and goes backwards to the top. The text is static. Good.
She lies back. ‘Is there a matching historical record?’
– I’m pleased to see you are tormenting the hospital staff. It suggests your recovery is going well.
‘Contextual/colloquial address: off.’
– Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, later St Augustine. Born AD 354 in Thagaste, Roman North Africa, died AD 430. Unmarried, one child: Adeodatus, precise date of birth unknown, died AD 388. Mother’s name: unknown.
‘Define: Alkahest.’
– The mythical Universal Solvent, a transcendent medical and theological substance.
‘What about the Chamber of Isis?’
– String not found.
‘It’s a figment?’
– There is no mention of it in the literature. It does not follow that no such place ever existed. Our knowledge of the ancient world is incomplete.
‘Isis, then.’
– The classical Egyptian mother and wife goddess, patron of magic. Sometimes considered as a benign iteration of the Trickster deity. She was an ally to slaves, artists and the demi-monde, hence her occasional invocation in the art nouveau and even art deco periods. Also the name sometimes given to a short-lived twenty-first-century militarised pseudo-nation in Syria. Also the section of the river Thames that is close to Oxford, and by proximity a linear particle accelerator at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Also—
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