“Now, take a look at this, Margaret, and you’ll understand every-thing—and cease worrying about the fate of your florins. Of course, you’ll both have to keep it secret that I’m carrying it—especially when we reach the Count’s. He’s perfectly capable of making sure I have no more earthly need for it. There are many of us who would do in a brother—to get their hands on this.”
“Of us? Surely you wouldn’t do such a thing!”
“Oh, not me. But by ‘us’ I mean the whole alchemical fraternity. You have no idea how frantic some of my brother philosophers can get. They’d sell anything, even their children, drive any bargain—even with the Devil, in some cases—or try any method, no matter how unsavory. You’d be surprised—fetuses, babies’ blood, virgin’s sweat—you name it, they’ll try it! Hmph! Not scientists at all! How do they expect to get results working at random like that? Now, I use the theory of Signs when I search, that, and the guidance of the Ancients, who were so much wiser than us. No, like so many others, the fools among us, too, are driven mad with the pursuit of gold. But even so, we’re a tightly knit group. We have to be—when outsiders hear what we’re doing, they very often arrange a kidnapping, or a bit of a torture session for information.”
“Oh, I never had any idea. I thought it was dangerous because of the heresy in it.”
“Oh—that.” Brother Malachi waved a hand to dismiss the notion. “Some say it is, some say it isn’t. It’s quite illegal in some places. In others, like this realm, the king says, ‘The more gold, the better; let them work.’There’s even a pope was one of us, they say. But there are ruthless, money-hungry people who would do anything at all to get their hands on the secret of Transmutation.”
“Well, I must say, I know something about that. Everything that’s happened to me lately is because of money, one way or another. Transmutation is obviously worse.”
“Exactly. But we aren’t stupid—we put everything in code. Those who aren’t adepts can’t figure out a word. We have passwords, secret signs of recognition, and a lot of other things I’ll never tell you about. And we adepts never refer to what we are doing directly—we use other terms. One of them is ‘hunters of the Green Lion.’ If you’ll open the book, I’ll show you why.”
Malachi had unwrapped the oiled cloth. Inside it lay an old-looking leather-bound book, with heavy metal clasps, set with semiprecious stones. He opened the book, and the acrid stink of old dust and long-gone workrooms rose from its yellowing parchment pages. Between rows of faded brown unreadable pothooks, the still bright colors of startling illuminations shone in glory.
“Oh!” I was quite taken aback. It was magnificent, glittering and mysterious. I could feel it holding and drawing me, as if it had a secret power of its own.
“Feel it?” Brother Malachi said. “I do too. It’s the Book of the Secret. It’s in there—I know it—and I can’t read a blessed word of it.” Brother Malachi’s eyes half closed, and he entered a state of reverie most unlike him. “It will bring us our dreams. It will shape our fate,” he murmured, passing his hands over the pages, as if the writing itself was so powerful that it gave off the perception of warmth. “Here—the end of my quest. And yours, too, Margaret.”
“But if you can’t read it, how do you know it’s got the Secret?”
“By the illuminations, Margaret. They’re code. Alchemists’ code. The text, obviously, explains the pictures and gives directions for achieving the various stages of the process. See here—” He opened a page at random near the beginning of the book.
“Brother Malachi! This isn’t a book about alchemy at all! It’s a book of dirty pictures! For shame!”
“No, no, Margaret. I told you it’s code. This is the mystical marriage of Sol and Luna—the Sun and the Moon. You can tell because they’re wearing crowns. The Sun is gold, the Moon is silver—just as Mars is iron, Mercury is quicksilver, and each of the seven metals is one of the seven planets. Sol must impregnate Luna in order to get the Stone.”
“The Philosopher’s Stone? This dirty picture gives you instructions?”
“Well, I need the text too. It’s not explicit enough in the picture.”
“I should think that’s plenty explicit. What about this one, where they’re lying naked in the bathtub, hugging each other?”
“That’s not a bathtub, that’s a tomb.”
“Well, it certainly fooled me. They look perfectly content, even if they are bathing with their crowns on.”
“You should observe more closely, Margaret. The code is in the details. For example, how many sets of feet do you see?”
“Oh, how nasty! Just one set between them. Ugh!”
“That’s because this is a picture of the alchemical death. Sol and Luna must lie together after being wed, and die together, to be reborn as one single person of mingled essences—that’s why they’re drawn as a hermaphrodite; they’re all mixed together, if you look closely. They must perish to be renewed—that bird there, that’s the spirit. Then they give birth to the spiritual body, which has mastery over all the elements.”
“But there’s lots more pictures here—what’s this one?”
“If I knew that, I’d be that much closer to the Secret. The Virgin being swallowed up by serpents. That’s the trouble with code. It’s hard to read. Now this one at the end, after the Peacock’s Tail, that’s the making of the Red Powder. That’s the stuff I’m after.”
“Powder? I thought it was a stone.”
“Only in a manner of speaking. It’s really a red powder, water without being wet. I have other works that are quite explicit about that.”
“Oh, look. This one’s a dragon.”
“That dragon, I have. And it does indeed eat metals. I’ve got it in that glass jar over there. It would eat its way through anything else.”
“It’s a liquid?”
“Of course. I told you this is code. The bathtub, as you call it, is my crucible.”
“So it’s all in here? The secret of making gold?”
“No, Margaret. The secret of Transmutation is a far bigger secret than simply making gold. Though, of course, you can use it to make base metals into gold if you want to—which is why most people want it. Transmutation isn’t just for metals.”
“You mean, it changes other things too?”
“Yes, all kinds of things into other things.”
“But all kinds of things are themselves, not something else. A pot’s a pot, and a spoon’s a spoon.”
“Oh, yes, for now they are. But the pot was clay, and will be powder some day. And the spoon used to be tin, and if you melt it, it’s tin again. So by applying heat, you transmute it. But if you keep on heating it and fooling with it, you can get it down to its basic elements, or essence. There are only four essences on earth, four things that never change: earth, air, fire, and water. Everything else is made of them, but mixed together in characteristically different proportions, you understand.”
“I think I see—like a cake. You stir the ingredients together differently, and you’ve got something else.”
“Yes, that’s it, Margaret.” Brother Malachi’s face, as he spoke, had changed. He was never a beautiful person. Cheery, but not beautiful. But as he grew serious, explaining the workings of nature, the light of intelligence shone in his face, and the love of the ideas he spoke of made him beautiful. It made me see why Hilde loved him.
“But cakes don’t transform. They just rot. You can’t make gold from a cake.”
“A cake’s not metal. The character of metal is not to rot—but it’s one of the characteristics of cakes to be transformed in this manner.”
“Or to be eaten.”
“Oh, yes, to be eaten”—he smiled and patted his stomach—“but that’s an entirely different transformation.”A singey smell had penetrated the laboratorium.
“Oh, my cakes, they’re burning!” Mother Hilde hurriedly took her elbows from the table, where she had been leaning beside us to see the book, and sped to the fireplace
in the hall, where she found Clarice had already snatched off the griddle with the cakes. Malachi was entirely unperturbed, as he was in the face of most domestic difficulties.
“Burning is a process that transforms cakes, too—but have you ever wondered why things transform? That’s what I’m after. Not the what, but the why,”he went on.
“Do you know why?”
“We all know why in general, we alchemists, but it’s the specifics that have eluded us. You see, there’s a fifth essence—another element.”
“Another?”
“Yes, but it’s not on earth. Haven’t you ever wondered what the stars are made of? They never change. The heavens are made of special stuff—celestial stuff that is entirely different than anything on earth. I’m oversimplifying a bit for you, Margaret, so you’ll understand, but I know you can—Hilde does. The stuff of the heavens—there’s a little tiny bit of it present in every earthly thing. Not much, just like the salt in the cake, or the stew, or whatever. But it’s the little bit of the fifth essence—the quintessence, we call it—in a thing that allows it to transform. So, to make a long story short, if I can get the quintessence out of something, I can apply it to any substance, and that will make it transform itself into its higher form.”
“I see—so a base metal turns into gold, which is higher.”
“Exactly. But, of course, that would be just one very ordinary transformation.”
“Oh, yes, I see now. Would it work on people, Brother Malachi?”
“It ought to—haven’t you wondered why people decay and die? The Philosopher’s Stone I seek would heal the sick, since wellness is the higher state of mankind. It would rejuvenate the old—why, people might be able to live thousands of years!”
“Thousands of years? Wouldn’t that get dull?”
“Not if you could transform the mind—the highest state of the mind is wisdom, Margaret. People could become wise—in thousands of years you could find a lot of wisdom.”
“Could you make them good, too, Brother Malachi?”
“Why, yes, I suppose, that too.”
“So it’s not really gold you’re after, then. That’s just a small thing.”
“The smallest in the world, Margaret. Who needs gold? Well—I do, for my experiments, and to buy a pie or a winter cloak, which is why I’ll make gold first. But gold isn’t really the important thing. No, not in the least.”
I turned the pages again, looking at the enigmatic pictures. Very near the end of the book was the strangest picture of all. A lion, all in green, swallowing up the sun.
“Look, Malachi, here’s your Green Lion. What’s he doing there, swallowing up the sun?”
“The Green Lion. So very near the end. He’s the symbol of Transmutation, Margaret. He’s very hard to make. I have a bit of him in a flask too. There’s a method—the method in here, once I can read it, of getting him to swallow up Sol—now, you should know—who is Sol?”
“Gold, isn’t it. So you eat up gold to get gold?”
“The Green Lion is the most powerful of the beasts of transformation—much more powerful than the Dragon. Only he can swallow the sun, the noblest and the only incorruptible metal, to release its quintessence—the Stone, the Red Powder of Transformation. That is the page of the Secret, Margaret. It’s there—there with the Green Lion.”
I traced the outline of the Green Lion with my finger. There was something oddly compelling about him.
“I have to have him, Margaret, just as you have to have your Gilbert back again. So, if you’ll allow me to transform your florins, then we can take you with us. There’s a ship leaving for Bayonne as soon as the master finds enough cargo, which should be before the week’s out. That gives me just enough time for the multiplication. Oh, no—I don’t need all ten. Take these two, and get yourself a pilgrim’s cloak, hat, and staff, and anything else you think you’ll need. Oh, yes, you’ll be wanting your own pillow and blankets on shipboard, and get some biscuits or something that will keep, so you won’t go hungry if there’s nothing but salt meat. You do think Master Wengrave will look after your girls, don’t you?”
“As if they were his own.” I could feel my heart sinking. This was the worst idea I’d ever heard of. Leave my babies? Go someplace horrid and full of foreigners? Well, if I had to, who better with than Malachi and Hilde? Malachi spoke so many languages. Besides, he had a way of always landing on his feet in any strange place that made him the ideal traveling companion. Oh, why couldn’t Gregory just bring himself home, like proper people do? A reason—there must be a reason I couldn’t go.
“But, but—don’t I need travel permission from the Bishop?”
“Of course you do—and you’ll have it too. After all, I write indulgences from the Pope every day. A letter from the Bishop is nothing. Why, I’ve even got a plaster cast of his seal somewhere around here.” He rummaged around in a box, and came up with several casts he’d made of official seals, along with the papal seals that he’d had forged in metal abroad. “It will look quite official. Margaret—de Vilers, is it?—permission to go on pilgrimage. Oh, yes, I never travel without a sackful of good-looking documents.” Then he caught sight of my face.
“What’s wrong, Margaret? Are you frightened? You? I saw you walk on live coals once for far less. Now me—I have a right to be frightened. I’m getting on, you know. I love my ease, and my Hilde, and my cozy house. But if I’m not a fool who’s wasted my life, then I’ll pursue the Green Lion wherever he leads, even to the end. Now you, you say you love Gilbert and want him back. But if you’re too frightened to make the attempt, then say it now, and I’ll try myself, for your sake and for the sake of an old friendship. Though I haven’t the luck you’ve got in these matters. Say now—will you stay here?”
My mind was whirling. My head was pounding. Pounding like the hoofbeats of pursuing soldiers. I hesitated. “I—I think—they’re safer at Master Wengrave’s even without—without me. I could be killed. Or carried off and forced to marry. Then he’d die there. It’s me—it’s me that heard him calling, not anyone else. No—I need to go. I have to go. It’s the only way I see. God forgive me.”
DEEP WITHIN THE CASTLE on the crags, in a hidden laboratorium located just above the torture chambers, Messer Guglielmo Petrini, adept of the Great Work, philosopher, alchemist, and sometime conjuror of demons and spirits, was twitching all over with annoyance. “Call Asmodeus again?” his irritated voice shrilled above the steady creaking and puffing of an immense bellows apparatus, worked by a huge mute who heaved upon a rope-and-pulley system. “What does he take me for, a fool? I told him that’s positively the last time—the demon grows too strong.” The little man’s dark, tightly curled hair, bristling eyebrows, and stiff beard all quivered with irritation, as an eyelid twitched in sympathy with the left corner of his scornful upper lip. “I tell you, I deserve respect. If all he wants is back-country spells, he should hire the local wisewoman, not the world’s most celebrated alchemist. And if he wants gold in a hurry, he should loosen his purse strings a bit and get me some decent equipment and proper assistants. Six masked mutes! The idea!”
He gestured with disdain at the apparatus that stood about him in the hidden laboratorium. The aludel was aboil atop the athanor, dripping its distillate into a copper vessel. Two cauldrons stood on the open hearth, brewing unspeakable smells. Objects both repulsive and familiar were suspended from the walls and ceiling, and above an assortment of glass and pottery vessels, as if to catch their essence—bat wings, large beetles, and sheets of beaten copper growing green in the fumes of the acid beneath them. Atop the worktable stood an open book, greasy with fingerprints and candle droppings, propped to display a complex drawing of pentacles and overlapping circles. The room was an unusually wide one, hidden behind a tiny iron door in the depths of a great tower. Its floor of black tile glistened with the orange lights of the reflected fires, but the room’s low ceiling, supported by massive stone arches, seemed perpetually lost in shadow. Burned-out torches i
n brackets and the melted ends of candles stuck on top of each other in niches in the wall were testimony that this was a place of much night work.
At this speech, Fray Joaquin shrugged his black-cloaked shoulders. “If he had an endless supply of money, do you think he would have hired you to make gold? You had best hurry it up; his losses supporting King Charles in the north have been immense—to say nothing of his gambling losses, and what he spent on that pageant of the seasons that he wrote.”
“Did I tell him he had to be King of the Poets? Visiting foreign courts all smelling like a perfumery, chanting epics and having his rivals strangled! Now tell me, do you think that’s a respectable occupation for a warlord? And all the while, I have to do with the most inept glassblower this side of purgatory. And clothing! Look at this! He promised me two new gowns a year, and a fur lined cloak. Cheap stinking wool cut from dead sheepskins. And I imagine it was used before I got it.”
“It was used; he impaled the previous alchemist who wore it. And let me warn you, you’ve delayed too long. And now you balk at calling Asmodeus again. You won’t like it if you anger the Count.”
“Anger? Why anger him? Just tell him that we’ve done the job, but that the demon was slow and cranky. Then send a fast messenger to the man’s family with a ransom message, saying that the ransom will only be accepted from the hand of his wife, Margaret. The same thing will happen, and we run no risks. The man’s a fool. I’ve told him often enough, he’s thinned the ether here too much with his constant experiments—it’s dangerous, playing games with one of the most powerful spirits of the infernal. Next time, it won’t just be bruises we’ll be getting. Asmodeus may very well break free into the world. Tell me, do you remember where the letter was from?”
“Of course. I wrote it down, just to make no mistake.” Fray Joaquin drew a wax tablet from his sleeve.
In Pursuit of the Green Lion Page 24