Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  But Rosso wasn’t breathing. His blood-rimmed eyes were glazed over and vacant. He must have died only minutes before I arrived; he was still warm, and the enlarged facial pores around the bubboni still oozed. Black spots stippled his sturdy neck and strong hands, the front of his lucco was stained with vomit. He had died in pain. I was sorry I had not been there to ease it for him.

  I dragged his body inside the shop, into a spacious, white-plastered room with two long worktables and many shelves set with dyestuffs and small bolts of fabric. Dust had sueded over everything during the long siege of the plague. I sat down on a bench and looked at Rosso’s empty body. Outside a pair of horses trotted by, pulling a wagon. Ufficiali rode in it, but I didn’t worry about them harassing me. They were busy rebuilding the city, now that the plague was loosening its grip. I remembered Rosso’s stories about his wife and children. He had asked me what it would mean if everyone died. I thought the point would be amusing God, and that an empty earth with all of mankind dead would be a great joke for Him. What did He need us for? After a while I stood and looked out the window. The tall gray stone houses across the street obscured all but a sliver of azure sky, which was hazing over with the lush honeyed light of afternoon.

  “Laughing God, let his soul join his loved ones,” I said. Then I dragged the corpse back out to the street and laid it on the bier. I folded his hands in a prayer over his heart, because I knew the limbs would soon stiffen. Over the next few hours, sweating in the harvest sun, I dragged the bier through the twisty cobblestone streets, out the brick and stone city walls with their battlements that had seen armies march past so many times, past cedar trees and olive groves and neglected vineyards with heavy grapes dragging down sun-burnished vines, all the way into the rolling hills of Fiesole with its cool breezes, Roman ruins, and views of the city’s stone towers and red roofs. I stopped near the cathedral of San Romolo. Rosso had told me he’d buried his family near there. I knew I would not find the exact location of the graves in the tall autumn fields of lavender and the groves of pine and ilex, and, indeed, there were many graves there now, as well as rotting unburied corpses, but I might get close to the bones of his beloved. It might lend some comfort to his spirit. I borrowed a shovel from an abandoned farmhouse near the church, and when I found a place that seemed restful and the sky seemed especially blue and open, like something Giotto might have painted, I set to work digging. My arms, shoulders, and back had grown strong over the last few months of digging graves; I made short work of it. I laid his body in the grave as gently as I could and then covered him over with dirt. I packed it down well so no dogs or wolves could get to him. At least I would cheat God of that laugh.

  I MADE MY WAY BACK TO GEBER’S brimming with purpose. I meant to confront him about his knowledge of me and of my origins, of good and the loss of good people, of God’s need for people. It was dark and cool, a star-filled night with a full white moon whose dreamy seas were illuminated. I walked through the city without fearing the curfew. Once I saw some ufficiali on horseback. They approached, but stopped short when they caught sight of my face in the silver light, and then cantered away. I was not to be provoked this evening.

  For once, Geber’s door was closed. I knocked, but there was no answer; I called his name, still no answer; then I tried pushing, but the door refused to budge. I beat on the door and kicked it, but it didn’t give. I leaned my back against it and then slid down until I was seated on the floor with my back resting against the door.

  After a while—maybe hours, maybe minutes, for time seemed stopped up like a river with a boulder blocking its current—I went down to the street. The wooden bier I had used to haul Rosso to his grave lay beside the door, and I worked at the iron nails on the handle. My fingers grew ragged and bloody, despite the thick calluses I had earned from months of hard labor. Finally the nails gave and the handle came off the top of the bier. I brought it upstairs to use as a battering tool. As I swung the plank back for the first thrust, the grainy surface of the door rippled like a cloudy mirror, or like the Arno. Bernardo Silvano’s pockmarked face looked back at me. He grinned, that knowing sneer of all the years of my indenture in his establishment, and I swung the plank at the door, at his face with its narrow nose and thrusting chin. Silvano laughed at me. He knew that I would never be able to forget him. He knew that he would live forever inside me like a worm perpetually rotting an apple. A fury vaster than the horizon rose up inside me. I howled like a wolf and went berserk, battering the door with the same supernatural strength I had summoned to kill all those men at the brothel. The rough board splintered in my hands. Silvano laughed again. All of my rage and frustration and bitter dregs of humiliation slammed into the wooden door. It groaned and then banged open. I strode in.

  Inside, instead of Geber’s familiar room with its playful smoke and seething curiosities, a cave greeted me. It was stony, dank, and dim, and smelled of animal droppings and old air. I had to duck my head to enter. The hem of a familiar crimson mantello fluttered ahead. I felt a shock of recognition. Anger surged through me. Carrying the long jagged stick from the ruined bier handle, I bolted after the red mantello. I ran through a maze of low tunnels dripping with moisture, and finally trapped the red-clad figure against a cave wall. I swung the splintered wood, and he turned—his face was invisible, swathed in a luxuriant red cowl—and he parried with a sword. It was no ordinary sword. It was one of the costly, elegant longswords made by northerners, a nobleman’s sword, the kind I had seen strapped on the sides of honorable men with the wealth of their wives, families, friends, and name. We fought that way, my wooden shard against his gleaming sword, until his sword stuck in the wood. Instead of stepping back, I pressed forward. Ingegno, as Giotto had advised me long ago. I swung my left hand up and punched him in the throat, hard. He coughed and loosed his sword, and I spun the stick away so that sword and stick came away together in my grip. The sword flew off, and I plunged the jagged point of the wood deep into his chest. Spraying blood, he fell, first on his knees, and then to the floor. I leaned down to rip off the red cowl, which was of the softest wool I had ever felt. I gasped, because the glassy-eyed face that stared back at me wasn’t Nicolo Silvano’s. It was mine.

  As I stood in shock, the gray smoke of the cave drained away. Geber’s room emerged, with all the tables bare but for candles, except one, which bore a still. Standing shoulder to shoulder were Geber and the Wanderer. They were clad in plain white lucchi instead of their usual garb, Geber’s black lucco and the Wanderer’s coarse gray tunic belted with frayed twine.

  “It’s time for you to encounter the philosopher’s stone,” Geber said.

  “I see no stones,” I said, looking around. “The stone caves I thought I saw are gone!”

  “It’s not a physical stone,” Geber rebuked, slapping the back of his hand into his other palm for emphasis.

  “Then why do you call it a philosopher’s stone?” I asked.

  “It’s an image for transformation! Pay attention, boy! You are to be ennobled.”

  “Ennobled, me?” I laughed bitterly. “An urchin off the streets, a whore, a killer?”

  “I know, you still have a long journey ahead of you,” Geber agreed, weariness lacing his voice. “But you’re as ready as you’re going to be in the little time I have left.” There was a new bubboni on his cheek and purple half-moons beneath his lively eyes, and I knew that the plague had started to fatigue him.

  “The ways of the cosmos are splendid,” the Wanderer added. “You are the bridegroom encountering the light. Your body has grown strong, now it’s time to strengthen your soul.”

  “What is this all about?” I asked, looking from one man to the next. “Are you finally going to teach me how to transform base metal into gold?”

  “The name of God transforms everything,” the Wanderer answered solemnly.

  “First, the sacred marriage,” Geber said. He held out his hands. In one was a plain beeswax candle, in the other a silver winecup, engraved with
the symbol of an upside-down tree with its fruit webbed together. “Fire is the element that multiplies; the cup fills and empties.” He laid them in my hands and then motioned me to follow him. I trailed along behind him to the table set with one of his rattling stills. He reached over and plucked some hairs from my head. I grunted, but he ignored me and pulled off a chunk of nail from my torn fingertip. Murmuring “Into the retort,” he took the stopper out of the bubbling flask and carefully dropped the hair and fingernail into the boiling liquid.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “There are four worlds of being: emanation, creation, formation, and action,” the Wanderer answered. He came to stand beside me. He chanted in a language I could not understand and rocked back and forth with his chanting. Then he said, “We can see a pattern. But our imagination cannot picture the maker of the pattern. We see the clock. But we cannot envisage the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions. How can it conceive of a God before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”

  “I can conceive of a God who plays cruel jokes, and I think he’s doing it right now,” I said uneasily. I looked toward the door, but it was closed, without even a seam of light to show where it was cut into the wall. Instead, there appeared the face of an horologe of the new mechanical kind seen in the past few years on towers around Florence, which always, like a vain woman, prided herself on having the latest, best appurtenances.

  “That’s the laughter of the Trickster.” Geber’s narrow intelligent face relaxed into a smile. The Wanderer chanted and swayed, his wild mane of hair fluttering around him in gray and white fringes. Geber poured wine into the silver cup with its strange tree and gestured for me to drink. I sipped, the wine was sweet with a sour finish. He said, “The Trickster leads you to feel the nothingness of human desire and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought, of art. The Trickster shows you that your own existence is a prison. He instills in you the desire to experience the cosmos as a single significant whole.” Geber lit the candle and put on his leather gloves with the extra pads sewn onto each finger. “Pay attention to the Trickster, boy; he’s your only hope for escaping prison.”

  “I’m not in prison now, now I’m free,” I answered, a little stubbornly, because I was confused and I did not like the feeling of confusion. “I freed myself. And I’m going to stay free!”

  “To substitute nothingness for chaos is to guarantee freedom,” the Wanderer said. “Within the King, this abyss exists along with unlimited fullness. Thus is His creation an act of love freely given. It is written thus. ‘In the beginning, when the King’s will began to take effect, He engraved signs into the heavenly sphere,’” the Wanderer recited in the bold voice of a storyteller. His large hands made dramatic gestures to illustrate his words.

  “Do you remember what I taught you, boy who lusts only for gold?” Geber asked, his voice holding a faint tone of mockery. “About the distillation process. From the retort, through the condenser”—he ran a gloved finger along the pipe leading out of the retort flask—“and into the distillate!” He removed the distillate flask and uncorked it. Something shining and white flew up, wings fluttering noisily so close to my face that I exclaimed; Geber sighed, the Wanderer laughed. Geber produced a gold vial from his white lucco. He shook out two drops of some thick, oily liquid into the distillate flask. In a melodious voice he chanted, “One nature rejoices in another nature; one nature triumphs over another nature; one nature masters another nature!”

  Within the distillate flask a spark lit up. It began as a tiny iridescent point of light and then grew spherically until it filled the flask. As it grew, it shimmered with colors in sequence: first a curious black light, then white, yellow, violet. A sharp crack like the strike of lightning against a tree echoed through the room, and the point of light bulged until it exceeded the flask, then flared out to fill the room. It threw rainbow slicks of color on all the surfaces: the tabletops, the rough-plastered walls, our clothing. Looking through the light, I saw Geber’s bones, but not his flesh. The Wanderer, too, was visible as a skeleton, but not as a person. I held my hand up and saw the narrow phalanges spreading out before me. My hands tingled as if full of running water.

  “What is this magic?” I breathed, and the light dwindled, and the room was as before, lit with the soft lucence of many candles. Geber poured steaming liquid from the flask into a small earthenware cup, and handed it to me.

  “Before the world was created, only God and His name existed,” the Wanderer said. “As you are rectified by the stone which is not a stone, repeat in your mind a word which I will speak into your ear, a word which you must never utter to another person. It is one of the sacred names!”

  “Prima materia,” Geber said. “Drink, and return to your essence!”

  I held the cup in both hands. It was a small brown cup, painted with green leaves, and oddly frosty to the touch. The Wanderer leaned forward and whispered into my ear, and with his whisper ringing in my head, I swallowed the bitter elixir.

  Geber and the Wanderer vanished. They were simply not present, as if they’d never stood before me, the Wanderer with his maddening riddles, Geber with his sharp-tongued instruction. Geber’s room remained as it had been: lit with dripping wax candles set on bare wooden tables, a central table displaying a still which rattled while it boiled. I gagged. Weakness seized my limbs, and I pitched forward. I was able to grab the edge of one of the tables, but it steadied me only for a moment. My knees crumpled—kind, doomed Marco must have felt this way all those years ago, when Silvano hamstrung him and we children watched in horror—then I was lying on the floor. With the last strength in my arms, I pulled myself upright against the leg of the table. A shudder went through the room, and my body was fragmented into parts: hands burned and flew off into a deep blue void, while my limbs separated from my torso, from head, from breath, from the thoughts that scrambled about in my head like objects tangling up inside a peddler’s sack. Everything was disjointed, and the center fell away. I knew I was going to die.

  There was sorrow that I was dying alone, having hoped for so many years, with death dogging my steps at Silvano’s, that I would eventually pass peacefully, with someone kind at my side. I thought of Rosso and wondered if his spirit lingered nearby and could greet me. He had surrendered to death so gracefully, when he knew it was inevitable, that I decided to follow his lead. I sighed—or would have, if my frozen chest could have moved—and let it come.

  A ragged frisson of pain went through me, and my breath stopped weaving in and out. The steady pumping of my heart, which I was so used to, stuttered into silence. A body fell over, and as I looked down at the lean blond boy curled up on his side on the floor, I realized that I was no longer inside that body. It was a fine body that looked as if it would soon have ripened into manhood: it had clean, strong limbs, long rounded muscles on the shoulders and back, a pleasing, symmetrical face, staring dark eyes, and shaggy reddish-blond hair, but it no longer contained me. Darkness in the room was pushed back by dawn, and Geber came in, crying out when he saw my empty form. He knelt to feel for a pulse in my throat, murmured with sadness when his fingers failed to find the river of life streaming through me. Grunting with effort, he dragged me downstairs to the street and waited until becchini came with a wooden bier. They piled my corpse atop the bodies of an old man and a pregnant woman, the last few victims of the plague. Geber left, and when the becchini had dragged me outside the city walls to a burial site, Geber returned with the Sfornos. The Wanderer was not with them. They huddled together while a group of becchini dug a trench and laid in it a dozen bodies, including mine. They threw quicklime over us and then shoveled on the good crumbly brown-red dirt of Tuscany. Rachel, Sarah, and Miriam wept softly; Moshe Sforno chanted, while he held Rebecca in his arms; Mrs. Sforno looked out over the rolling lavender hills to the tall stone walls of Florence with its dark towers rising against the
endless blue autumn sky.

  Suddenly I was liberated. I could go anywhere. Joy spilled through me: I could see more of Giotto’s frescoes. I could see the glorious cycle of St. Francis in Assisi that Friar Pietro had told me about. And just like that, I was floating over a high hill with a white marble double cathedral, one church built atop another. Peace emanated from the hill. The great rose window of the upper basilica faced east, and I was drawn to descend down through the rose window into the transept of the church. I found myself hovering before a painting of St. Francis preaching to the birds. St. Francis was a gentle and lively figure in a monk’s brown mantle, gesturing tenderly to birds both in flight and at rest. His hands were calm and holy, expressing goodness even to dumb animals, and compassion shimmered in the humility of the great saint.

  I couldn’t linger because a brilliant force pressed against me, whatever “I” was now. The force opened like a door into a timeless, placeless whirl. Images like water sluicing off eaves ran past me: the cobblestone streets of Florence, dirty and silent and emptied by the plague; the market with barrels of grain and baskets of ripe apricots; the faces of people I’d known, dark-complected Paolo, and Massimo, who had betrayed me, and Simonetta with her birthmark; the faces of people I’d killed, the men in the brothel, Marco with his long black lashes, blue-eyed Ingrid; unknown faces which closely resembled mine; the bed with its horsehair mattress in the little room at Silvano’s; Giotto’s beatific St. John ascending; the hay in the Sfornos’ barn and the fat gray cat that mewled until I let her sleep in my sweaty armpit….

  The images arced past and then I was observing great swaths of time, like an illuminated manuscript whose pages were flipping rapidly to disgorge its secret illustrations: strange faces and bloody wars and new weapons that spat fire and floods and plagues and famines and huge new cities in faraway lands and marvelous machines that flew through the air or dove deep under the water and an arrow-shaped vessel that thrust itself toward the very moon…. Apanoply of unimaginable sights opened up before me; it seemed there was nothing that man’s art could not create, sustain, and then destroy. I could only witness in wonderment, much as I had witnessed Giotto’s frescoes during my secret journeying, when I worked at Silvano’s. All the while, the Wanderer’s sacred word pealed in my mind like a distant bell ringing.