‘Are you absolutely sure? I mean, you know, this map has got something to do with alchemy—’
‘Really?’ she interrupted him, with the same indecipherable expression in her eyes. ‘So perhaps you are about to suggest that the marriage to which the verses refer is that between mercury and sulphur, the metallic and inflammable principles of matter. Have I guessed right?’
‘How do you know about such things?’ was all that Mondino managed to say.
This woman produced one surprise after another. She didn’t talk like a country sorceress. In fact she didn’t even talk like a woman.
Adia leaned an elbow on the table and smiled, showing her white, regular teeth. ‘I come from a family of alchemists. My father didn’t have any sons and so he passed all his knowledge on to me. It’s not common, but it happens.’
‘But the man who gave me your name spoke of you as a sorceress,’ said Mondino.
Adia leaned towards him slightly and Mondino saw that she wasn’t actually all that young. She must have been about twenty-five, and yet there was no sign of the presence of a husband or children in the house. Could it be that such a beautiful woman had not found a man prepared to ask her to be his wife? or perhaps it was she who didn’t want to get married? It seemed absurd, but then she was a strange woman.
‘People don’t trust sorceresses,’ said Adia, seriously. ‘But they would trust a woman of science much less. I chose the lesser evil.’ she smiled again, and it seemed to Mondino that there was the shadow of sadness in her eyes. ‘Besides, the title of sorceress keeps the men at bay,’ she added. ‘The good ones and the bad ones.’
‘I see,’ said Mondino, in embarrassment, just to say something. ‘So if you say that the verses have nothing to do with alchemy, I can believe you.’
Adia Bintaba straightened her back. ‘I said nothing of the sort. The fact that there are verses referring to a marriage on a map full of alchemical symbols cannot be by chance. I only said that the verses are incomplete. If we knew the missing words, it would all be much clearer. Have you got anything else? I don’t know, a letter, a book ... If you want me to help, you must tell me the truth.’
‘This map is all I’ve got,’ said Mondino, shrugging his shoulders.
‘And how did you get it?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
Adia’s expression made quite clear what she thought of his lack of trust without the need for words. ‘You can’t tell me,’ she repeated, in a reflective tone. ‘Could you at least tell me what the secret is that you hope to discover by deciphering this map?’
Mondino had not anticipated that question and for a moment he was at a loss. He wanted to put her on the right path in the hope that she would see a link that had passed him by, but he certainly couldn’t talk to her about what he had done. He decided to make something up.
‘As I told you, I study medicine. Some friends and I are doing research on the circulation of the blood and it occurred to someone that if blood could be transformed into solid metal, we could get a very precise idea of the vascular system. Now, this map—’
‘To whom, precisely, did this idea occur?’ Her interruption took him by surprise and Mondino replied, ‘To my Master, Mondino de Liuzzi.’
‘Mondino,’ repeated Adia. ‘Taddeo’s student?’
‘That’s right,’ said the physician, unable to hide his amazement at finding she knew his name as well as that of taddeo Alderotti. ‘Do you know him?’ ‘Only by name. The man is ignorant.’
The smile vanished from Mondino’s face. ‘My Master is considered one of the best physicians alive,’ he replied, curtly.
Adia seemed to be trying not to laugh in his face. She lifted up both her hands to diffuse his protests and said, ‘I am not doubting his merits. In fact I have great respect for Mondino’s anatomical research and I am looking forward to reading the treatise that he is writing. But as far as I’m concerned whoever makes progress only externally and not internally will remain ignorant.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
Adia looked at him with an expression of condescension. Then she said, ‘Science must develop man just as man develops science’, as though it explained everything. ‘What do you mean? Be a bit clearer.’
‘I will explain in simple words so that you can understand,’ she replied. It was obvious that she was having fun at his expense and Mondino felt ill at ease, as if he were the only one in a group of people who didn’t get the joke. ‘But first tell me something. Why did your master send you and not come in person?’
‘He had no idea that you were an erudite alchemist,’ Mondino answered, shifting his position on the bench. ‘And he thought I could manage to talk to a sorceress on my own.’
When Adia Bintaba looked back at him she was no longer smiling. ‘As it happens, I once attended one of Mondino de Liuzzi’s anatomy lessons dressed as a man. Now tell me why you have come to my house using a false name, magister, and what it is you want from me.’
XII
Eventually the boy came back with the two men he had sent for. Guido Arlotti put on his now dry clothes, gave the tunic back to the miller and thanked him. The boy held out a hand, asking for the coin he had been promised.
‘I told you that I’d give you another coin if you brought my friends quickly,’ said Guido, making short work of the lad. ‘Off you go, before I give you a kick in the arse for keeping me waiting so long.’
The customers and hangers-on who were standing around the mill laughed at the boy’s forlorn expression and an old man put a piece of bread in his hand as consolation. Guido was already on his way to Porta Galliera, almost at a run. He didn’t know how much time the physician would spend with the sorceress and wanted to catch them there together. ‘Where are we going?’ asked one of his accomplices.
‘Beyond the Circla,’ replied Guido, without slowing his pace. ‘We must find the wretch who pushed me into the canal.’
When he was eavesdropping at the window earlier, he had heard Mondino talk about a converted Arab sorceress. What ‘Converted’ meant, given that the woman exercised practices that were contrary to the Christian faith, remained to be seen. However, for now, the important thing was that he remembered perfectly where she lived: in the Bova area. There couldn’t be many Arabs in those parts. ‘Do we kill him?’
‘No. The person who’s paying me wants him alive. But he didn’t specify how alive.’
The others laughed. Guido often used them when he needed a helping hand. They were trustworthy, didn’t flinch at the toughest job and knew the value of discretion. ‘Are you armed?’
The man next to him lifted up the side of his coarse hemp tunic, showing the dagger that he kept hidden under the shirt next to his skin. The other simply nodded. ‘There will be a woman with him. A witch.’ He said it to see how they would react. He didn’t want them to run off at the crucial moment, terrified at the threat of some witch’s curse. The two were silent for a few seconds, then the first asked, ‘What’s she like?’ ‘I don’t know.’
The other man, who had been quiet until then, smiled. ‘Let’s hope she’s young and soft, and not some shrivelled old harlot. Does she have to stay alive too?’
Guido didn’t think that the Inquisitor would object if they had a bit of fun with the witch.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘She’s of no use to anyone.’ thinking about it, Mondino was a problem too, alive. He was an important man, a professor at the Studium, and he could report Guido and have him arrested. Arlotti knew well that if there were any trouble, the Inquisitor would not contradict the comune judges in order to defend him. It was up to him to save his own skin.
He thought about it for a while, but by the time they arrived at Porta Galliera, he had made his decision. He would kill Mondino too. Then he would tell the Inquisitor that he had been rumbled and had had to defe
nd himself. Uberto da Rimini would be furious, but there wouldn’t be much he could do about it and he would just have to accept the fact.
At last a smile appeared on Guido’s face. The morning was turning out nice after all.
Adia Bintaba went to the chimney at the end of the room. She took a strangely shaped saucepan that was lying beside the embers and said, ‘I was forgetting my duties as the lady of the house. Please, would you accept a drink from my country?’
She poured an amber liquid from the saucepan into two tin cups and returned to the table. ‘It’s called atay,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that it came to Arabia from distant China, centuries past. It’s very good for the health, clears the mind and fights the symptoms of poisoning.’
Mondino brought the cup to his lips and tried a sip. ‘It’s good too,’ he said, surprised. ‘Thank you. But where were we. I’ve no wish to seem rude, but the fact is that, for reasons that I can’t go into, I have very little time.’
He had told her everything. Beneath her expectant stare, he had admitted who he really was, said why he was there and what he was looking for. He had even told her about Wilhelm von Trier, although without going into too much detail and without mentioning the long list of criminal acts that he had carried out in the past few days. He instinctively trusted the woman, but prudence held him back.
Adia took a sip of atay, then another, with obvious pleasure. ‘Time is something we must use, not a thing to be used by,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it becomes a cage. Calm down and listen to me please.’ ‘I am.’
‘You want to know who managed to turn that German templar’s heart into a block of iron,’ said Adia. ‘The only thing I can tell you is that it is a distorted application of the principles of alchemy. It can bring no good. You must drop it.’
Mondino felt himself blush with irritation. He didn’t like her professorial tone one bit. ‘I don’t agree,’ he said, leaning an elbow on the table and looking her straight in the face. ‘The application is distorted because it has been used to commit murder, but the scientific knowledge necessary to obtain that transformation is in itself neither good nor bad.’
Adia sighed, as though he were a stubborn child. ‘I’ll give you an example. Let’s pretend for a moment that the aim of your life was to climb to the summit of a mountain, all right?’ ‘Certainly. Go on.’
‘You begin to climb. You suffer from the cold and from hunger. You have to escape from wild animals and brigands. On your way you come across huts belonging to shepherds and woodcutters who offer you hospitality and food. You pay them back by helping with their work and curing sickness since you are a physician, then you say goodbye and go on your way. Until the day when you finally discover that you are at the peak of the mountain. How do you feel?’
‘Satisfied, I imagine. But I don’t understand the meaning of the story, and as I told you I haven’t got much—’
‘I haven’t finished yet. On the other face of the mountain, there’s a man who has the very same objective as you. He begins to climb and to protect himself from the cold he steals some clothes and blankets from the first woodcutter he meets.
In order to eat, he kills some sheep, and when he is caught he kills the shepherd too. To combat solitude he rapes the shepherd’s widow and takes her with him for a few days, ignoring her pleas for mercy. Then he tires of her, abandons her in the middle of a wood and continues to climb. He meets other shepherds, other woodcutters, and takes something from each of them, often their lives, but without ever giving anything in return. One day he gets to the top of the mountain, at the very moment when you too arrive.’ Adia paused, looking him straight in the eye. ‘The result is the same, obtained at the same time. But now can you say that the way in which it was achieved is unimportant and that in both cases the aim is in itself neither good nor bad?’
Part of Mondino could not but admire the clarity with which Adia had illustrated her thoughts. But he couldn’t stand the fact that she had done it at his expense. He, magister medicinae who was famous and respected throughout Italy and even in France, had been made to look stupid by a woman. Out of pure stubborn pride, he refused to reply.
‘I am not here to discourse on philosophy, mistress,’ he said.
‘My original question was a different one. Do you know how it has been possible to make iron out of the blood and veins of a human being? And who might have done such a thing?’
Adia sighed again, almost ostentatiously. It seemed as though she simply wanted to make a fool of him.
‘Abu Ali al-Husain Ibn sina, who you know as Avicenna,’ she replied, ‘Said that the knowledge of something could not be called complete until its causes are known. Do you agree with that?’
‘Yes, but what’s that got to do with it?’
‘I can’t tell you much about the processes necessary to obtain the transmutation of human blood into iron and successively into gold, but—’
‘Into gold?’ broke in Mondino, sceptically.
‘Yes, into gold. Aren’t you a physician? then you must know the works of Jabir ibn Hayyan, the man you call Geber, of michael scot, Arnaldus de Villa nova, Albertus Magnus ...’
‘Of course I know them,’ said Mondino, offended. ‘But in the Studium, the more modern masters teach their students to take from alchemy only what is useful to medicine, discarding the rest. I personally tried michael scot’s formula to transform lead into gold and got nothing useful out of it at all.’
‘Really?’ said Adia. ‘And what did you do exactly?’
‘I followed his instructions step by step. I took the lead, I blended it three times with lime, red arsenic, sublimated vitriol and sweet alum, and then I immersed it in essence of seapurslane and wild cucumber. After which—’
‘The lead did not turn into gold,’ she interrupted. ‘And you concluded that the formula was false.’ ‘Precisely.’
‘Well, you are wrong.’
Mondino was beginning to get annoyed. Adia Bintaba might well be a scientist, but she showed the typical feminine tendency not to take facts into consideration, relying exclusively on her own ideas.
‘Something cannot be true if experience demonstrates that it is false,’ he replied, in a dry tone.
‘You really don’t understand, do you? you don’t see that the result doesn’t only depend on the formula, but on the person who is putting it into practice,’ she answered, exasperated. ‘And yet you are an intelligent man. In alchemy, scientific progress is the mirror of interior progress. An alchemist who has not perfected his personal qualities can follow formula and processes explained in books all he likes. He will never obtain a result.’
Mondino decided that the game had been going on long enough. ‘Listen, mistress Adia, I would love to sit here discussing these things with you, but I have already told you that I haven’t got time. Have you any idea how someone managed to kill the German templar in that barbarous fashion, or not?’
Adia burst out laughing and Mondino felt himself flare up.
His journey had been fruitless: he had wasted almost an entire morning of the two days he had left and he couldn’t sit there acting as laughing stock to that woman.
‘I most certainly do have an idea, yes,’ said Adia, when she had finished laughing. ‘I have been trying to expound it to you, but you won’t let me speak.’
‘I won’t let you speak? that’s a bit much.’ the woman looked austere. ‘That’s enough. I haven’t got all day. So either listen in silence or go.’
Mondino’s opinion of women scientists was falling rapidly. He wanted to turn and walk out of the house. But he forced himself to relax. He was there now, he might as well listen right to the end. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Adia gave him an ironic glance. ‘As I told you, this mystery will never become clear to you until you make yourself understand the causes. You must know that the way to the House
of God, that is the perfection of the soul and the matter sought by alchemy, is not immovable. The point of arrival is always the same, but the paths to get there can be quite different, as in the example of the mountain that I gave you before. The most famous is the one that passes through the transmutation of base metals into gold.’ Mondino made as if to say something, but she stopped him with a sign of her hand. ‘To obtain such a result does not depend on reading a treatise and applying a formula, as you did. The transmutation of metals is like a scale. The higher the state of perfection the soul has reached, the closer the transmutation comes to success. Do you follow me?’
Mondino nodded and she went on: ‘As I told you, it is not possible for an impure soul to obtain perfect transmutation. However, there are those who don’t accept this, who want power for power’s sake, and who want to create al-iksir, what you call “the elixir of long life”, by forcing the progressive steps. They make pacts with obscure forces and even if they can’t reach perfection, they sometimes manage to obtain some power. For a brief moment they taste the illusion of victory, then inevitably, the power itself turns against them and kills them. To control the forces of nature, you need a soul in harmony with the universe. If the soul is closed, then the forces, once awoken, will crush it like a nut. Not out of wickedness, but because such is their nature.’
‘Come to the point, please,’ said Mondino.
‘I am convinced,’ said Adia, ‘That the man you are looking for has found a way of bringing human blood back to the first matter and successively turning it into iron. Then, from alchemical iron, a material that is very different from common iron, he might have managed to obtain gold.’
Inquisition Page 24