The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  It was not a trivial question; lives had been made or broken on the order of birth. He expected some hesitancy, or a wish to be part of the decision. Already he was feeling each head, testing for an excess or deficiency in any of the three elements that made up their nature, seeking anything he might pass on, that could be held later to have been a sign that one was inherently the stronger.

  He thought perhaps one had a swelling on the crown that could indicate a strengthening of the mercurial aspect, which was enough to go by. Feeling the other to ensure there was no mistake, he became aware of a thickening in the silence about him that did not grow from indecision.

  Opening his eyes once more, he looked about and saw the sign of the cross being made over and over on the breasts of those who stood in attendance; most particularly on the breast of Charles, the youth come early to manhood who had introduced himself as the father. Ashen-faced, the boy leaned back on the lime wash of the wall and crossed himself, again and again.

  Owen had never been greatly impressed with the combination of youth and money that infected all courts. He allowed an edge in his voice that he would not normally have brought to the birthing chamber. ‘Sir? God may guide my hand, but I need your permission before I act.’

  He might have spoken Portuguese, or English, so little notice did they take. Dully, the young courtier said, ‘The Queen had twins in June, both girls. One died at birth. The other, Victoire, lies in the care of the best physicians in the land. Some say she will live. Most do not believe it. We cannot have twins as did the Queen. The King will see it as ill luck.’

  Owen eased his hand out of the tight confines of the birth canal and looked up along the swollen belly-line to the woman in labour. The fear in her eyes was more for her children and the racking pains of her body than for any superstitions of the court.

  He laid his hands where they might not be seen in all their blood, but might give her comfort, and addressed her directly.

  ‘Madame? Maybe there are three children within you. It is not unknown. Even if not, there is nothing to be done but let them see the light of day. King Henri is not known for his illogic. I doubt if he will truly see you as an ill omen for his child.’

  He saw her mouth move and could not make out the words. She wet her lips with a dry tongue and tried again. ‘Do what you must. Choose well by your own lights.’

  The raw courage in her gaze was what had first brought Cedric Owen to his calling and what kept him there in the face of idiocy, superstition and plague. With a strange, familiar ache swelling his breast, he sent the most coherent of the serving women out for more hot water and clean linen and then sought out in his mind the sense of the blue stone that had shaped the path of his life and aided his vocation at every turn. It lay concealed beneath a floorboard in his lodgings, wrapped in brown hessian and well hidden, but its touch reached him, as it had done since his first foray into medicine, so that for a moment he floated in a clear blue sky and saw the world from above, with all the tumult of humanity as so many ants below. Among the ants, precious as gold dust at harvest, were his patients, and he cared for them.

  Coming back into himself, holding the distance and the closeness equally, Cedric Owen turned every part of his newly honed attention on the woman and the two new lives he had felt under his fingers.

  ‘M. Montgomery?’

  He heard the voice from a long way off. He sat on the scrubbed wooden floor, still damp from the wash-mops of the serving girls, and listened to the one living child suckle its mother. The Part of Fortune had remained in Gemini long enough for this one to be born under its blessing, but had moved on before the second child could be brought to life, and the claws of the crab had crushed its breath. That one was already wrapped in linen and laid to the side. A priest had been called and had spoken Latin and then an archaic French that the young mother had understood, and had left again, crossing himself.

  Owen was lost in the world beyond exertion where the cramping pain in his arm had become something sweet to be treasured and the closeness to new life was a gift that transported him beyond the fears and hopes and trivia of those around him.

  It also temporarily caused him to forget the pseudonym he had taken.

  ‘M. Montgomery? The Queen requires your presence.’

  ‘The Queen?’ He remembered very suddenly who he was and where. Catherine de’ Medici was not known for her patience. ‘Why?’

  Charles, father to one dead girl and one living, was now a sick shade of grey. He bared his teeth in a grimace that made pretence of a smile. ‘Word has reached her majesty of our … felicity. She wishes to see the young Scottish doctor who has brought a healthy girl-child into the world.’

  They had both been girls. The living one, perforce, had been named Victoire after the daughter who had come to grace the lives of Queen Catherine of France and Henri II, her husband.

  Therein lay the problem. Not only had the King’s sister married James V of Scotland, France’s strongest ally in the complex wars of politics and person that assailed Europe, but James’s daughter, the young Mary, Queen of Scots, was betrothed to Henri’s eldest son. The French court was home to as many Scots as Frenchmen – any one of whom would discover in the first minutes of conversation that the carroty-haired young Scotsman with the eyes that looked brown in some lights and green in others and so appealed to the ladies had precious few memories of Scotland, its people or its politics.

  If they discovered he was English, they might send him home to be tried for heresy. Or they might simply invite one of the many representatives of his holiness Pope Paul IV to do it on the spot; the Inquisition was as active in Paris as any other place in Europe. Either way, he would die at the stake if he were lucky, and under torture before that if he were not.

  Cedric Owen pushed himself to his feet and reached for the shirt he had left folded on a clothes press on one side of the room. Even more than the English, the French court was notorious for its licence, and the Queen was foremost in the setting of fashion. Owen looked down at himself. He had always eschewed the London fashions that filtered down to the court-in-miniature that was Cambridge. His breeches were clean, which was the best that could be said for them; the weave was as good as anything to be got in Cambridge, but it was homespun and not likely to appeal to the most riotous nobles in Europe. His cloak was of good velvet, but, like his suit, it was brown. He recalled – and now regretted – believing the draper’s daughter who had said the colour matched well with his eyes. In any case, he had left the thing at his lodgings, together with his cap.

  He looked up and found Charles staring at him. ‘The Queen will make allowance for your dress. It is your skill she seeks, not the references of your tailor.’

  Owen bowed low, because it was easier than speaking, and gestured to the door. They passed the small casket containing the dead child on the way out.

  In all his life, Cedric Owen had never been to any court. He passed through corridors that dwarfed those of his old college at Cambridge, and he had thought those beyond all grandeur. He climbed stairs that went on for ever and was ushered into an antechamber to the ailing infant’s bedroom, an oak-panelled place that smelled of sulphur and rosemary oil and more faintly of rosewater and sickness. The narrow windows were shuttered on one side against the glare of the evening sun, but open on the other, so that there seemed the faintest breath of a breeze in the room, which was as close as Cedric Owen had come to witnessing a miracle.

  At one side of the room stood a clutter of middle-aged men who shared in common the belief that long beards and black gowns gave them an air of studious learning. Owen noted them peripherally and accounted them little danger.

  It was the Queen who held the better part of his attention; the vision of ivory silk with primrose yellow bows about the waist and hem and diamonds worth an emperor’s ransom set about her throat and hair. His one glance told him that she had been weeping, although the women who attended to her appearance had done an excellent job of cover
ing it.

  The part of him that was always professional admired her fortitude. Catherine de’ Medici was two months past her own confinement and it could as easily have been two years for all that it showed on her body or her face. The entirety of her court knew that her husband, the King of France, was in love with his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and slept with his wife only as was required by his duty to create heirs to the crown. That the woman could look as regal as she did in such circumstances was a testament to her Medici breeding. Power begets power and the Medici were never starved of the stuff of rulership. It radiated from her now, making smaller the men in the room.

  Left alone, Owen bowed as low as he knew how and then stood awkwardly with folded hands and his eyes downcast, not knowing how he should deport himself in the company of a queen.

  ‘You may view us.’ She spoke her French richly, and with only the trace of an Italian accent. ‘And then you may view more closely our daughter. For how else may you heal her?’

  ‘My lady … your highness …’ Owen’s French came out in poor order. ‘I am a bringer to birth and a giver of such medicines as I might find useful. I can scry the heavens for their wisdom and test the elements of a man or woman and bring them back into balance. I regret that I have no skills in the treatment of children. Your majesty has in this room physicians far more skilled than I.’

  There was a rustle amongst the black crow-men who were pretending not to listen. He was not winning friends amongst them.

  The Queen said, ‘We have men who have so far neither freed our child of her fever, nor permitted her to thrive. We would have a fresh eye and a clear mind assess the case. They say you do not consider the four humours to be chief in aiding your diagnosis.’

  This was controversial and had nearly cost Owen his studies in Cambridge. The pressure in the room became delicately brittle, like new ice at the corners of a horse trough.

  Somewhere in the depths of his own ears, beyond the hearing of others, Owen heard a high, bright whine, which was the warning sound of the blue heart-stone.

  Always, when he heard it, his life took a new turn.

  He took a breath and smoothed his sweating palms on his shirt tails and said, ‘Your highness, I believe that Paracelsus was correct and that life is better measured by the balance of the three elements: salt, sulphur and mercury. I still wholly believe in the testing of the six pulses at either wrist, but would rather read their speech in a newer tongue. The estimation of humours has its place, but it is not the full explanation of life.’

  They hated him for that, the crow-garbed men, and they were not stupid; they could sense falsehood as easily as they could smell putrefaction. By the law of averages, at least one of them was likely to be a Scot, and so able to unearth his deception.

  Owen was turning his back on them when one, the youngest by a good ten years, looked across the room at him and offered a subtle, but perfectly clear, inclination of his head. The Queen saw it. ‘Michel, mon ami, you have an ally.’

  ‘And gladly so.’ The man bowed so deeply that the finger-grease on the crown of his skullcap showed. His voice was surprisingly delicate. ‘In which case, perhaps between us we may begin to—’

  A wail began in the bedroom beyond them and rose to a shriek. Another joined it. The Queen spun, and staggered. She wore heels to her shoes to augment her height and they were not made for fast movement.

  Within her daughter’s chamber, a bass voice stilled the shrieks, but only for a moment. Then the Queen reached the door and flung it open and the grief spilled out, enveloping them all.

  There was a great deal of noise and consternation and very little sense to be made from it, except that the young princess, clearly, had died.

  The small man with the delicate voice slipped unnoticed through the chaos and came to stand with his shoulder pressed tight against Owen’s, moving them both back, closer to the far wall. ‘When we can leave, we should do so. You have lodgings nearby?’

  ‘On the south bank. Maison d’Anjou.’

  ‘A plain place, but clean, as I remember it. You choose well for one newly come to a foreign city. We should go there forthwith, with but a small detour to my own lodgings en route. I have in my effects a letter addressed to me by a young man which contains within it a letter of recommendation from Dr John Dee, a gentleman of great renown. Would you know anything of it?’

  In the heat of the day, a ball of ice formed in Cedric Owen’s guts. ‘I have sent a letter to a physician of even greater renown in Salon,’ he said. ‘None to Paris.’ His voice, he was glad to hear, remained level.

  He looked up into eyes that laughed and warned together. ‘I was summoned here three days ago from my home in Salon. Your letter followed me, and a second one from my friend, Dr Dee, giving the description of a young man of great talent who was in possession of a particular stone,’ said Michel de Nostradame, physician, astrologer and prophet. ‘We should perhaps—’

  Once again, the urgencies of the royal family interrupted him. The Queen stepped back into the antechamber, spitting orders, catlike, at anyone and everyone in her path.

  Things happened fast.

  A herald in blue and gold livery materialized at the door, took his instructions and left.

  A priest passed through the crowd like a breath of old wind and joined the two already in the princess’s chamber. This one wore cloth of gold and a crucifix of value to rival the Queen’s diamonds.

  A woman came bearing a black dress and black jewels and a hair ornament of jet and black lace for the Queen. They were approved and taken into an adjacent chamber.

  Through it all, the failed physicians stood bunched in a corner like crow-caped cattle. The smell of fear came off them in waves.

  Catherine de’ Medici raked her gaze across them all. ‘You will attend us,’ she said, icily. ‘Now.’ It did not sound like a kind offer.

  Cedric Owen did not need the high, urgent whistle in his ear to understand the closeness of death. By fate and the fortuitous sideways step made by Michel de Nostradame, neither he nor the physician-astrologer was anywhere close to the black-robed men. The Queen, it seemed likely, had forgotten their existence.

  Owen felt a hand tug at his sleeve. A delicate voice said, ‘We should go now. I, too, had not yet examined the infant; her blood is not on my hands. I would be honoured if you would join me for wine, perhaps, and some dinner at your lodgings? There is much to talk of that is best not spoken in public. In particular, I would see the stone you have, which has been the inheritance of your family.’

  ‘Does it require your death, this stone?’

  Michel de Nostradame asked his question casually, towards the end of the meal. The blue heart-stone lay on the table, a third interlocutor in a curious conversation that was both comforting and unsettling at once.

  The wine was red and not overly sour. Mme de Rouen, proprietor of the Maison d’Anjou, may have kept a plain house, but she was discreet in all things, and a consummate cook. Her dish of pigeons roasted with almonds and port was the equal of anything offered in the palace. She had served it herself in Cedric Owen’s chamber on the first floor, with a linen tablecloth spread across the trestle and the wine served in cups of good boiled leather.

  The wine was cloudy now that they were near the bottom of the bottle. Cedric Owen watched the swirl of it in his mug and considered the question. He was not sure, as yet, how to take Nostradamus; the man was not intrusive, indeed had been the soul of courtesy. He was not commandeering in the way that John Dee had sometimes been. Crucially, he neither was afraid of the stone, nor sought to possess it.

  Owen had dared show his treasure only to those few men whom he trusted with his life. Most, on seeing the likeness of their own unfleshed heads, had found it at first disquieting. Some had continued to fear it, stepping away from him and avoiding conversation ever after, but others – and these were the more dangerous in his view – had begun to view it with a passion bordering on lust, so that he must needs take step
s to avoid them.

  Not the Queen’s physician; Nostradamus had laid his napkin flat that Owen might set the stone down cleanly, had got up to check that the lock on the door was secure, and then opened wide the westerly shutters, the better to let in the long, cool slant of the evening sun.

  The light had stirred the fires in the depths of the blue stone, so that the empty eye sockets filled with it, and the perfect arch of the cheekbones sharpened. In this company, it was accorded the wisdom and experience of any man, and came alive, knowing it.

  Nostradamus had said, ‘May I touch it?’ and, on a nod, had done so, laying his hand at the nape of the neck, and been silent a long while. It was then, moving his hand away and raising his wine, that he had asked his curious question. ‘Does it require your death, this stone?’

  Owen took his time in finding an answer. There was no danger that he could feel. The urgent whine of the Queen’s chamber was long gone; whatever fates had hung in the balance, they had been settled and a new path set.

  Presently, he said, ‘I have the stone from my grandmother. My first memory in this life is of the blue at its heart, calling to me, and me to it; such has always been the way of choosing. It should have come to me on my twenty-first birthday, but my grandmother was slain on the orders of King Henry’s counsellors, he who is father to our present queen.’

  ‘For heresy?’ A soft question, asked with due care.

  ‘What else? She was to be hanged, but fought the men who came for her and was slain at sword-point. I was thirteen and saw it happen from a hidden place in the hallway. My great-uncle, who was keeper before her, died in like manner and his mother before him was killed by a thrown knife from a thief who desired to possess the stone. It has come to be known in our family that the keeper of the blue heart-stone will die for their care of it, but also that the life lived before is both rich and long – none of these died at less than the age of sixty. This, therefore, is both the gift and the curse: that the stone gives a long life of great joy but the end must come in violence.’