Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  Many years ago I saw a boy drop from a cliff. He’d been walking with his father when he saw gulls’ eggs nestled on an outcrop of rock. He clambered over to look. His father was facing the other way when there was a hollow tear; stone scurried and the ground split and slid under him. He gasped and his father ran to help, throwing out his arms, but the chalk dropped, the boy with it, noiseless except for a gentle crack as he hit the shore below. The father let out no sound; the horror was too unnatural. What had been was gone. The certainty of life had reversed; the change was undoable. For all time he would be cursed to live in that fleeting moment. Now, more than ever, I feel like that man, missing not just a part of myself, but all of it. My master was here, but now he is not. As I sink, so does Sporco, bereft on my behalf. He comes and sits by my side, pressing against me and delivers the last words of his commentary. ‘Not here.’

  There’s a squeal of wood and a door high up in the whispering gallery opens and Vilder comes in to check on us. He moves differently from before, no longer tense but in a drunken roll, and I see why: he has filled up my master’s hexagonal bottle with more of the pale yellow easing tonic. When he speaks his voice is blurry. ‘Where is he? The creator of our misery. Never mind, he’ll return. Now you are here he’ll come.’ He reels out and locks the door behind him. The last of the evening drips from the high window and all I can hear is Sporco’s breathing.

  * * *

  I’m woken by dawn light on my face. Sporco is curled up beside me, snoring, his head half buried under the coverlet, his outsize brows twitching in some fast-moving dream. The room is immense. It could be the Banqueting House at Whitehall, that my master and I visited on its opening. This version is even larger and must have been a stateroom long ago, where ceremonies would have taken place or ambassadors welcomed—but now, like the rest of the palace, it’s an unloved ruin.

  Although there are twelve windows, six great arched ones below and six square ones above, they’ve been long closed up with iron shutters, all except one, unreachable at the top, where the casing has come away. The ceiling frescoes are as bizarre as any I have seen. Usually—like the ones at the Banqueting House—they’re peopled with far-fetched celestial beings, clouds and chariots, sylphs and immortals. These ones, however, pay homage to a world of industry and metallurgy. A battalion of miners marches through a craggy landscape into a cavern below a mountain, where they dig, unearthing golden light. In others there are molten rivers of silver and mercury, floating ironworkers, furnaces and chimneys, bronze foundries and glassworks.

  The principal wall, in which the fireplace is set—which in turn is so colossal it could be the entrance to a cathedral—is patterned with tiers of pale rectangles, where large pictures must once have hung, but which is now marked with thousands of hand-drawn symbols arranged in drifting columns like hieroglyphics.

  As I observe it all, looking up from the bed, it strikes me how calm I am. Despite everything, I passed the night soundly. Because my master is alive. He slept in this bed. That is true. He was here. Even now, he is being searched for, waited for, expected. He is somewhere. Alive. After all this time, I am vindicated.

  For some moments I cling on to that miraculous fact—before doubts begin to pull me down again. How long was he here? Why did he never come back for me? Determined to stay calm, to remain methodical, I slip down and investigate the room. The furnace within the chimney place is a pitch-black hole where a fire has burnt constantly until recently. My master worked precisely here. His scent flickers off everything like little shocks of static. There’s even a halo of smooth stone where he slid back and forth between worktop, fire and shelves.

  Smooth stone. It would take years to shine it so flat.

  On the worktop there are stacks of jars and bottles, familiar scents—copper, mercury, bugbane, ambergris—and all the various ingredients he used for his distillations. In the past century, if I caught even a hint of one of these odours, I’d feel a pinprick of happiness at the reminder of him.

  I study the hieroglyphics, thousands of clusters, each containing a band of symbols, seven identical ones in each. Seven. Some of the scratched-out symbols have the shape of dogs.

  Prickles creep up my spine, from the root of my tail to my neck. My ears stiffen and my throat dries—as I begin to grasp what has happened in this room.

  Each mark is a day, each cluster a week, each column a year. My master was counting time. I pad along the wall. Every inch of it, every reachable part, is inscribed with a mark, many in the form of a dog. How many? How many dogs are there? A hundred and twenty-seven years since I set eyes on him.

  The gallery door opens, Braune stoops through, throws a bundle over the parapet and goes, leaving a pair of fleshy bones on the floor. Sporco, woken by the noise, un-burrows himself, nose twitching. He bounces from the bed and sniffs around until he finds the treat. ‘Not to be believed,’ he gasps, tail whipping against the floor. He pushes his snout right into them, before taking one in his jaw, shaking it, dropping it, arranging it, tongue unrolling. ‘You see this? Not to be believed.’

  I’m too distracted to pay attention. My brain is a souring fog, a sickness of shifting shapes, of things just out of reach, of trapdoors down to fiendish places. I can’t breathe. I stagger back and knock into one of the towers of papers. It lurches, topples and hundreds of sheets spill across the floor, fanning out, a breeze of dust travelling with them. They are drawings that my master has made, hundreds upon hundreds of them, some so old, they’re filament thin.

  Heat rises in my throat. The metal door with three bolts, the barred windows.

  A prison.

  All those years waiting, the mulchy autumns and whetstone winters, the cathedral steps, wishing on the horizon, all my little spins of hope, dozens of them a day, which were dashed over and over. Yet still I hoped. The cheerless pageant of my time alone, losing friend after friend, whilst all the dispiriting places of Venice—the inns stuffed with drunks, the slums and plague pits, the charnel houses and burial grounds—somehow all became markers and reminders of my failure. Alone all that time. The burning in my chest is insupportable, like a red-hot morass that will explode. And for what reason this imprisonment? For master to distil for that monster? To be an addict’s servant? You are the best of all at making them, Vilder had said in Whitehall, having demanded an opiate brew. Perhaps it is a deceit of the brain, but my own medicines never seem to work as well.

  Then a new fear comes upon me, more dreadful than all that have gone before, a notion that makes me cold to the bone. I look round at the wall. The markings change from one end of the wall to the other. In the first columns, the marks are clear and strong, but grow shakier and fainter the further they go. The last few inscriptions are feeble dashes—then blankness.

  I paw apart the drawings that spilled on the floor, vignettes of our life together: one here from Whitehall, another from Elsinore, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague. The last picture, which had sat at the top of the pile, is a self-portrait. From the faintness of it, from the thickness of the dust upon it, it must be twenty years old. My master is almost unrecognizable: a frail old man, bug-eyed and haunted. He’s imagined me beside him, straight-backed, ears up, full of life—smiling—even as he stares ahead with the look of death.

  I rush at the door and cry, ‘Give him back to me! Give him back!’ Dizzy, sick, skin crawling, nerves snapping, a bruise-indigo gloom fills my head from the inside, before the floor rolls beneath me and I collapse.

  When I come to, Sporco is standing over me. ‘What’s happened?’ he says, ears folded back.

  Where do I even start to explain? Just one thought remains in my head: I must escape this place. I must find him before it’s too late.

  10

  WAR

  Vienna, January 1628

  The day after my master made his confession to the village priest, we left our village in the Carpathian hills and went to Vienna. The jou
rney was punishing. Not only were we in the bitterest stretch of winter, but we’d barely any money remaining and had to take what meagre transport we could find. My master was undaunted, though.

  ‘The start of a new year, my champion,’ he called over the January wind, as we huddled amidst crates on the back perch of a mail wagon. ‘What better time to begin again.’

  Perhaps it was the weather, but I found Vienna gloomy in that age. There was a long wait at the town gates, as unfriendly guards cross-examined every new arrival. And inside, we found a place so resolutely built to defend itself, with layer after layer of bastions, walls and checkpoints, that civilized life seemed to have been pressed out of it entirely. I expected my master to whisper something amusing to me—‘What an uncongenial locale,’ or, ‘Where are the dances?’ he might usually say—but his mind was on other things. There was a hard glint in his eye and a straightness to his spine that were unfamiliar to me.

  We went to the Hofburg palace, to the court of Ferdinand II—both house and household were as plain and unwelcoming as the city, a warren of bureaucrats—and in his single-minded state, my master was faster than ever to persuade the necessary people of their vital need to employ him.

  But my master had more in mind than just working as a palace physician. As soon as we were given our quarters, he set about his project, his preparations—I would learn soon enough—for joining the war. I remembered his last vow to Frantz on Christmas Eve: I shall give up my former existence and start anew. I shall do my duty. To the battlefield I shall go.

  The first task, and the most vital—as well as the reason we then spent a full three years at Hofburg, my master playing the role of royal doctor—was the distilling of the powdered jyhr into its liquid form. The tincture would become the central substance of all he would do in the decades that followed, but I had no idea how fiendishly complicated it was to create. The process could not be hurried; it took months and months and was unpredictable at best, and oftentimes dangerous.

  Before the jyhr was even added, he had to manufacture a brew of other ingredients, a compendium of chemicals and minerals so diverse we had to go to nearly every pharmacist and apothecary in Vienna, as well as put in special orders for certain materials and wait weeks for them to be sent from some other part of the continent, until he had what he wanted. Back in our rooms, working late every night, he calibrated, mixed and reduced them on the hot plate of the furnace for long and precise periods. It was cooled and warmed and cooled again. When conditions were not exact, if the ratios were out, or the fire not constant enough, the concoction shrivelled into a torpid paste. When eventually he deemed it to be the right consistency, he poured the batch into an iron bowl, went round fastening the doors and windows, before opening the little tortoiseshell box, carefully tweezering up a tiny piece of jyhr powder, just a plain black thing, and dropping it into the brew. He stepped away, shielding me behind his legs.

  There followed a chaos of sensations that I would experience dozens more times, but never understood. The hum the little stone emitted, though still slight, became grandiose, like a choir chanting from beyond the city walls. It seemed as if day became night within the chamber and everything, including my master, appeared to multiply into overlapping versions, as if time itself were stuttering. The stone in the bowl burnt like a little sun before everything returned to normal. The room became completely ordinary again, except for the odour of the newly wrought material: tiny but elemental, with strains of granite, barium and mercury. The liquid was uniquely colourless, monochrome, neither black, white nor grey, but somehow all three at the same time. An abstract.

  Of course, the transfiguration was not always successful. More than once, when a stone had been dropped in the mix, an explosion ripped the room apart, upending furniture and throwing phials from shelves. ‘No harm done, my boy?’ he’d ask, alarmed and pale, coaxing me from my hiding place. We’d sit together on the ground as the light wilted from the windows and the place darkened into shadows. Eventually, though, he’d pick himself up and brush dust from his clothes, a multicolour of powders. ‘Tomorrow we begin again?’ He’d smile as he’d start to clean up the mess.

  He bought a new bottle of clear thick glass similar to the one he’d left behind in Amsterdam, though square rather than hexagonal, and as he began to succeed with his distillations often enough to slowly fill it, drop by precious drop, he went about his other preparations. He cornered anyone at court who seemed to have a military connection and bombarded them with questions.

  ‘I shall make it simple for you,’ one of the friendlier palace diplomats whispered at the star. ‘The war started when Ferdinand, a Catholic as you know, began, in his wisdom, to curtail religious activity, sparking rebellion amongst the Protestant factions. That’s why they call it a “religious” war, though of course once Sweden, Austria, Spain and France were drawn in it became less to do with religion and more with rivalry of power. Isn’t it always, however they dress it up?’

  After every conversation, when my master had found out all about the various armies, how they were divided up, where they were stationed and how great their number, he returned to our room, unrolling newly acquired maps of the continent and scribbling notes and coloured symbols all over them.

  He found or produced other more commonplace medicaments and tinctures. He purchased surgical instruments, tourniquets, styptics, forceps and many more, along with all manner of related ephemera from bandages to catgut. He bought a backpack, the type worn by soldiers, and painstakingly adapted it, sewing in pockets and pouches to most efficiently contain the various elements of his kit. He even embroidered on the back of it in yellow cotton a symbol of a serpent entwined about a rod.

  ‘It is the rod of Asclepius,’ my master explained to me. ‘He being the Greek deity of healing, and we his disciples. Listen how I talk now, my champion, of being disciples? I might have given you a knowing look once, if someone had pronounced that to me. In any case, the emblem is known near and far, and I make it bright, so everyone will know we mean no harm.’

  My tail wagged. I was excited by it all, by his cleverness, diligence and how he’d turned his back so completely against his recent misery. No matter that it all turned out to be a precursor to many horrors; it was a lesson to me then of how to survive the traumas that fall in our way.

  His mood darkened only when he remembered Vilder and Amsterdam. I knew instantly when he had, for his body sank and flickers of despair scented off him. More than once he sat down and began to write a letter, but would barely get halfway through before he thought better of it, screwed up the paper and threw it in the fire. When it caught light, and he was reminded no doubt of my ordeal, he grew angry. Then anger mutated to fear. He was caught between all these emotions, and whenever he stopped to observe a stranger, in Vienna, or in any of the places we travelled to after, he was frightened, but also peculiarly hopeful, that they might be Vilder. It reminded me of the event at the beginning of my life, of his strange reaction when we had found the corpse on the shore of Elsinore and he’d asked, half dreading, half wishing, ‘So now you are dead, are you?’

  Once my master was satisfied he had enough liquid jyhr in his bottle, we packed up and left Vienna, seeking out the battlefields most would avoid.

  I came across my first army in an encampment a week’s journey north-west of the city. I’d seen soldiers before of course; Aramis had been one, and various others at the courts of Europe, but those had been the favoured ones, of higher rank, conspicuously self-important in their battle attire amongst the cosseted civilians. But here was a vast morass, only half uniformed in grubby garb, unkempt, rough-eyed, ale-stained.

  ‘This is a branch of the Catholic League,’ my master mumbled like a university novice, broadening his shoulders against trepidation. ‘Aramis’s army. Wait here,’ he said and disappeared into the throng. He started up a conversation with a bearded dragoon who was fixing a leather cuirass to his ch
est. Being one of those hardened career soldiers who seemed contemptuous of anyone that wasn’t a fighter, the man answered with surly shrugs. In this milieu my master’s charm, that precious skill he’d honed all his long life, lost its advantage. But he persisted.

  I did not like the place, or the men, and the stench had grown quickly nauseating: the grit of male sweat, fermented with fatigue and fear into a sly, cloying odour, like rotting cherries or ripened lilies. An infantryman spotted me and came to say hello. He was young, a teenager, but his face was drawn and his skin puce. As he knelt to stroke me, the reek of gunpowder in the pockets of his bandolier sickened me and I jerked away from him. He tried again to make friends, but I removed myself to a new position and looked in the other direction until he relented. He was the first ordinary soldier I’d ever met, and even today, having stood side by side with so many, having felt their sorrows as if they had been my own, I still feel shameful of how discourteous I was. Doubtless the poor soul had been pressed into service by some greedy recruiting sergeant—the type that offers the world to such young innocents in order to secure their cut—and had likely lost his life before it had even begun, struck down in a field somewhere, realms away from his loved ones. I could have offered comfort and I didn’t. I would learn to, though, soon enough.

  ‘They march to Magdeburg,’ my master said, coming back to me, an out-of-his-depth dither about him. ‘There is a siege,’ he added, as if it were a question or as if I might understand. ‘We must go. Yes?’

  That first time, he was too timid to march with the army, so we followed at a distance, but always with their tail in our sight. When they halted to set up camp, we broke off too, passing the night under whatever shelter we could find. It was late spring and the land was so flat in that corner of the world, so verdant with crops, the days long and rich with genial light, it was impossible to foresee what lay ahead.