by Jack Whyte
Arthur found me, one dull and cloudy afternoon not long after that, engrossed, for the first time in years, in a meticulous inspection of the contents of the larger of the two wooden, iron-bound chests that had belonged to Caspar and Memnon, the long-dead warlocks who had brought about my father's death and plunged us into the first battles of our war with Gulrhys Lot of Cornwall. I had kept the heavy, solidly constructed boxes close to me, always locked, ever since they had first come into my possession, years before the boy was born.
Always I had told myself that I would learn the secrets of their tightly wrapped and carefully preserved contents, and in the early days of owning them I had, in fact, tested many of them and formed some hazy notions of the uses for which several might have been intended. As far as I had been able to discern, however, every single item contained in those chests had but one purpose: the infliction of death by means unknown and unconscionable to the soldier warrior. The forms of death within these two receptacles, meticulously ordered in nested trays and laid out in some bewildering symmetry of malevolence, represented an abundance, an entire spectrum of chaos that lay far beyond the intent or understanding of ordinary, sometimes violent men.
Each of the two chests contained several layers of trays, varying in depth, but each carefully fitted as a cover for the one directly beneath it, and all of them equipped with long, looping thong handles to permit their removal. As far as I could see, all of the evil deaths of political assassination, of sorcery, of necromancy and of ruin sown among mankind for the sheer pleasure of creating terror and chaos were represented in this unique collection. There was nothing in either chest, that I could find, that embodied anything other than grief and pain and agony and despair. And so I had soon abandoned any study of them.
Not daring to accept the risk of having them fall into other hands, I was nonetheless unable to destroy them. I had not yet explored them fully; indeed, I had not even looked at all the contents of the second, smaller, chest. My better judgment told me there was no such thing as good in either of them, but until I knew that to be absolutely true, I would remain incapable of simply destroying them.
My renewed interest in the chests had sprung from Tress's personal coding of our goods with coloured yarn. Within the seeming chaos of her coloured threads, I knew, there was a clear and flawless pattern, discernible to her, and that thought had led me to renewed thoughts of the warlocks' chests. A similar pattern, I suspected, must lie waiting to be deciphered among the neatly wrapped packages in their trays and compartments. Everything within them spoke of care and order.
"What are you doing, Cay? Oh, your pardon—may I come in?"
I waved to Arthur to enter and then sat back on my stool with a short, violent sigh, looking at the ordered disorder I had strewn about me. The contents of the two topmost trays of the larger box lay spread out on my left and on my right, arranged beside the empty trays themselves. The third tray, consisting of twelve compartments, four across by three down, all a handsbreadth deep and each containing a clay bottle of some kind, lay exposed within the chest. Several thoughts flashed through my mind as I heard the boy's voice, the foremost among them that I should banish him with the rough edge of my tongue before he could see what I was doing. I abandoned the idea even before it formed.
"Pull a stool over here and sit beside me, and don't touch anything else."
He did as I said and then sat there, bent slightly forward, his bright, gold-flecked eyes flicking over everything that could be seen within and outside the chest. I held my peace, waiting for him to speak, but he said nothing for a long time. Finally he glanced at each of the empty trays on the floor.
'Trays upon trays. There must be others beneath that one there, still in the chest?"
"Aye, there are. How many would you estimate?"
His eyes flicked back to the two empty trays. "Which one of those was uppermost?"
"That one." I nodded towards the one on my left.
"Hmm. Then they grow deeper as they nest deeper, so I would say there might be three more, the same depth as the one still in there. No more than that and probably fewer—one or two. Is the other one the same?" He was gazing now at the second, smaller chest.
"More or less," I answered him. "Different contents, but the same overall effect, I imagine. I find enough to occupy me here, in the larger one."
"What's the overall effect you mentioned? What's in diem?"
"Death, and a dilemma."
He glanced sideways at me, his eyes wide with surprise. "What do you mean?"
I turned to face him. "Do you recall the story of my father's death?"
He nodded. "He was murdered in his bed by sorcerers. What were their names ... ?" His eyes were distant, seeking recall. "Caspar, that was one of them, and Memnon."
"Aye, those were the names. Caspar and Memnon. Sorcerers, as you say. I think of them as warlocks."
"What's the difference?"
"Very little on the surface, I suspect. To my mind, however, a sorcerer is one who seeks to use things magical, supernatural, to influence the world of men. Whether they do it for good or ill matters little and depends upon the sorcerer himself, or herself. But since I do not believe in magic or the supernatural, I find sorcerers to be pitiable, laughable and usually harmless, once they've been exposed as being impotent."
"Woman can be sorcerers?" He sounded surprised, and I laughed at him.
"Arthur, women can be anything that men can be, except fathers. You'll find that out very soon now."
He was not to be distracted from his main interest this time.
"Tell me then, if sorcerers are pitiable, what makes the difference between them and warlocks?"
"Warlocks are an altogether different form of being, Arthur—at least they are in my estimation. The difference is no more than a matter of degree, in some respects, but in others—very important others—it is a matter of great moment. You should understand, of course, that that's no more than my own, personal opinion and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have thought about it long and often. Warlocks are real and frightening. They seek, and exercise, powers that normal men cannot credit, let alone understand. And in contrast to those others whom I think of as sorcerers, warlocks deal only in evil. They use physical magics like these things you see here: a hundred forms of poison, each one causing death. Warlocks bring death in their train. They deal only in evil and in ruin for the people they encounter." I had surprised myself, never having put these feelings into words before.
The boy sat staring at me. "Well," he said at length, "that's the death part. What's the dilemma? The death I can understand, if all those packages and boxes and those vials contain the poisons you spoke of. Do they? Every one of them?"
"Near enough. I don't know every use of everything that's there, but all of those I have identified are carriers of death in one form or another, most of them agonizing."
"Will you show me?"
"Partially. I'll show you those I have identified, but I will not demonstrate their venom for your amusement. You'll have to take my word for that."
"And you say you haven't yet examined everything in the boxes? How can that be? Aren't you curious? I would have had them all out and examined by now. How can you be so ... disciplined? You're amazing, Merlyn."
"You must call me Cay, remember?"
He threw me a glance of pure irritation. "Yes, I remember, but we're here alone, and you've always been Merlyn to me." He ducked his head. 'That one slipped out. I'll try not to let it happen again. But you still haven't told me what your dilemma is, regarding these ... things. Is there a name for them?"
"I think of them as nostrums, but that's not accurate, for nostrums are medicaments, whereas these are malignancies. As to the dilemma they present ... " I smiled at him, a weary smile completely lacking in amusement. "Can you not guess?" I did not wait for his response. "I don't know whether to destroy them or to study them further."
"You should study them, of course. But how would you de
stroy them, even if you wanted to?"
"Some I would burn—most of them, in fact. Others I might bury, or dilute to nothingness."
He inched his stool closer to the chest. "Show them to me, please."
Item by item, then, I showed him the various substances I had identified in the larger chest, beginning with the glazed clay boxes, with tight-fitting lids, that contained the noxious, greenish paste that brought awful, burning death to anyone cut by a weapon coated in its residue. This was the venom, I explained, that Lot's warriors had smeared on their arrowheads when they ambushed his father's troops in Cornwall, and which I had used to execute the warlock Caspar, slitting his brow with one of those same arrowheads.
Arthur listened closely, eyes wide with fascination as I moved on to unwrap and expose other items with which I had become slightly familiar during my first few weeks of study long years before. Among them were the tightly wrapped linen strips containing the deadly, envenomed thorns with which Caspar had thought to make me keep my distance from my threatened Aunt Luceiia. The notes which I had made at the time of my first, investigations were still there, folded on the topmost tray of the larger box, and I consulted them as I went on, remembering the thrill with which I had first ventured into these mysteries, and detailing my own discoveries about them for Arthur's understanding. I showed him all of those I had defined to any depth at all, and those I had set aside as having properties which I had not yet identified.
Watching his reaction, it was easy to recall my own fascination with the astonishing array of nostrums spread before us now. I remembered my amazement at the range of colours—every colour I had ever seen and many I had never seen before—and the textures and materials that had emerged from all the many wrappings and containers held within the compartments of each tray: glass phials and stoppered tubes of weird and wonderful proportions held dozens of crystalline mixtures and unknown powders; small boxes and containers made of wood, or clay or sometimes waxed papyrus, held strange pastes and crushed mixtures of things that had been ground down by mortar and pestle; others contained unguents and oily substances that seemed to me to have been rendered over fire; rolled tubes of bark and others made of leather protected bunches of varied grasses and dried leaves and twigs, and there were tiny, cunningly made boxes filled with dried berries, seeds and nuts.
I reached out and picked up one handspan-long tube made from the bark of some exotic tree and tied with a leather thong. It held a single twist of long, dried, yellow grass, folded upon itself time and again and bound, in turn, with a loop of its own stuff.
"This," I said. "I have no idea what it might be, and it looks innocuous enough, but I suspect, from the care with which it has been wrapped, that it has more than casually lethal properties."
He nodded "What would you do with it?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? Cut it up into tiny flakes and sprinkle it in someone's food? Boil it in water to extract its juices? Set it alight to give off lethal smoke? I've no idea. But judging from the materials with which it is surrounded, all of which are highly toxic—and I know that, before you ask, because I fed small amounts of each of them to animals and they all died—I would hesitate to think that this particular grass might have some therapeutic quality. There's little fear that I would bind a wound with it, for example.
"There is my dilemma, in miniature. If I wished to destroy this grass, this single substance, how would I go about it, safely? Can't burn it, because I might inhale the smoke and die convulsed. Nor can I bury it without wondering if something might dig it up and eat it. Can't scatter it upon the wind, in conscience. And yet it is no more than a twist of grass, only one element of what these chests contain." I paused, remembering. "But here's something else that will interest you, and it is the single, most convincing reason I have found for not destroying everything that's here, because it's the one and only thing I've found in here that is not poisonous, and I've tested it quite thoroughly. It is, nevertheless, lethal."
I dug into the lowest layer of the open chest, removing the remaining trays one by one, and finally brought out the most fascinating substance I had found in the entire collection. It was contained in a rather large; flat wooden box, the largest of all the boxes in the chests, that was tightly bound with twine. I undid the twine and removed the lid to reveal a blackish, granular powder, knowing it would fail, utterly, to impress Arthur visually. The powder was odourless and practically tasteless save for a saline, brackish tang. I knew it to be non-poisonous, since I had tested it by feeding it to three rabbits, none of which had suffered any ill effects. This powder, I had long since discovered, would not dissolve in water, but when I had thrown it on the fire, thinking it useless, it had frightened me near to death by flaring up with an appalling, flashing hiss and throwing off great clouds of dense, black, bitter smoke which had made me splutter and cough but had done me no other harm. Recovering from my first terror, I had made other tests and found this mixture to be the most volatile and dangerous material I had ever experienced, igniting even with the heat of a stray spark. What purpose it might serve lay far beyond my ken, but I suspected it must be dire. I had attempted to visualize the conflagration should an errant spark once fall into the box, and my spirit had quailed at the horror. In consequence, I treated the substance, which I thought of as "fire powder," with great care and circumspection.
Now I took a generous pinch of it between two fingers and my thumb and wrapped it tightly in a twist of cloth. I made sure to close the box carefully, then handed the twist to Arthur.
"Here, there's nothing more to see of it than you have seen. It has no taste, no odour, no particular colour apart from black and brown, and no use that I could find for it. It does not dissolve in water, nor in wine, and it's not poisonous. Throw it in the fire, there, behind you."
He turned and did as I had bidden, watching to see what would happen. The twist landed on some unburned coals and lay there, beginning to smoulder at the ends. He turned to look at me and I waved him back to the fire, and his eyes returned to the smouldering cloth just as the powder inside it ignited. There came a sudden, concussive whuff of sound, a blinding glare of blazing light, and then thick clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke, shot through with whirling sparks, boiled up and belched outward from the brazier. I had been expecting it, but even I was taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction.
Arthur leaped to his feet in terror, the colour fleeing from his face as he fought against the panic that urged him to run and hide. He teetered there for a long moment, poised between flight and acceptance, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees, grasping a piece of kindling from beside the brazier and using it to brush a number of fierce-burning embers towards the hearth before they could set the entire room alight. I rushed to help him, horrified by the sight of so many burning patches on the rug Tressa herself had woven for me. Between the two of us, we somehow cleared everything before any noticeable damage had been inflicted, and then we both sat back on our haunches, puffing and laughing nervously.
"Well," said Arthur, "that's two things you can't burn without risk: the yellow grass and the black powder. What is it, Cay? Do you have any idea?"
I shook my head. "None. It looks like crushed charcoal, doesn't it? But it's not like any charcoal I've ever seen before."
"It burns so quickly, that's the frightening thing about it. No warning of any kind, just whoosh! and it's gone. Have you ever heard of anything like it?"
"Absolutely not, but the warlocks who brought it here were from the distant reaches of the Empire. Their names were Egyptian, but I suspect they came from even farther afield than that, perhaps from beyond the eastern borders, where the people are said to be yellow of skin. I'd wager that even if they were not from those parts; they'd been to them. Anyway, now that you have seen how this powder works, what do you think I ought to do with it?"
He shook his head and then smiled. "Use it to frighten people? It works very well for that."
I laughed with him and then r
ose to my feet and placed the box of powder back into its space at the bottom of the chest, after which I allowed him to help me in repacking everything else I had unearthed. As I was locking the padlocks, he stood off to one side, watching me.
"These things are very dangerous. Cay."
"Aye, they are that, but they're safe enough in there, for now, so long as I have the only keys to the boxes. There's only one of each. I haven't looked inside these things in years, but now I know I have to go through everything they contain, meticulously, and try to discover what each item is, and what might be done with it. I could never bring myself simply to destroy them without trying to discover what they are. D'you understand that?"
"Of course I do. They represent knowledge. Though you might not, there are people somewhere who know all the uses of them, and knowledge is power."
Knowledge is power. I smiled, hearing him quote the words I had said to him so many times.
'There were people, once, who knew the uses of them, Arthur, but they are dead. Perhaps they took their knowledge with them into their graves. We may never discover what these things are."
"You will. If you apply yourself, the way you're always telling me to apply myself, you'll answer all your own questions. All you need do is work at it."
I grinned, dropping my keys into my scrip. "You are impertinent, but I hope you are also right. Come, let's find Tress before she finds us and sees what we almost did to her handsome rug."
Tress, I knew, was visiting Shelagh, and as we walked towards Shelagh and Donuil's quarters I placed my hand casually on Arthur's shoulder, gauging his height as I always did. In the past few years he had shot up so that, where once I walked with my elbow only slightly bent to hold him, I now had to raise my hand almost to the level of my own shoulder.