by Kage Baker
“But me. You recall? When we drank so much sack together. We were grievous deep in our cups, I fear. Have you decided to sell?”
“I had thought to.” Sir Walter let his words out one at a time, like frightened mice.
“You have, of course, told him of our arrangement? I trust, sir, you understand?”
“No, sir.” Very grim, very brief the reply.
“Then I must explain. I belong to a fraternity of scholars. We quest after knowledge of divers sorts, to work great good for men. Our brotherhood is wealthy, and not so respectful of priests as it might be, wherefore the Church hath put us under interdict, and so we work secretly—”
“No more, brother! I know whereof you speak.” Master Darrell’s voice had lightened up amazingly.
“You do?” said Joseph, after a pause in which I could hear his wheels whirring. He gambled and said, “Then in the name of the Widow’s Son, I need say no more.”
“You have a friend in me, sir.” Master Darrell’s voice was jovial, and there was a brief smack of palms as they exchanged lodge signs or something. Everyone, and I mean everyone, relaxed.
“My studies have brought me to Sir Walter’s garden for the rare simples that grow therein.” Joseph picked up the ball and ran like a thief. “As you may see, casting your eyes on Sir Walter, I have been able to reverse the natural decay of the flesh. I ask but that I be allowed to continue my studies here. I shall pay you well for the privilege.”
“Why, is it so? Then all is well. Tell me, can you … uh … restore that natural growth of hair, the want of which upon the head of a man who is yet young, shall make him appear older than his years?”
“Are you troubled with baldness? I can cure it without fail, my friend. You may consult with me when you will. But I had near forgot the purpose I came here for! I would remind you, Sir Walter, that you are to fast this night. No sack with eggs.”
“If I must,” grumbled Sir Walter.
“Lovers grow lean for love, and so must thou,” said Master Darrell. “Tell thy lady thou diest for her.”
“Lady?” Polite professional interest from Joseph.
Sir Walter drew a deep breath. “As you know—Doctor Ruy—I have made suit to the Lady Margaret. Marriage is my intent.”
Oh really? reacted Nef, without as much laughter as I would have thought.
“Truly? Then sir, God speed you in your suit. Her dowry is not base gold but spotless virtue, which you well know is a far greater treasure.”
“No, er, lands or inheritances, then?” said Sir Walter.
“Not nowadays, though I assure you her forefathers (pure Christians all of them) fought valiantly for the Cross, placing faith above base gain.”
“Oh.”
I’d better lay away my thirty-seven pounds, thought Nef.
“Be ruled by me and take the lady for herself, man.” Master Darrell spoke with a certain bitterness. “I had not told you all my news yet. A Spanish lady will serve you better than six hundred pounds a year, if you would try Court now.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is great news in Rochester, and we must rejoice. For, look you, this Christmastide the Parliament hath done wonders. England hath repented her sins and returned to the bosom of Rome, I say. The late King Henry’s Acts are voted down every one, the Mass is restored, whereat we must rejoice.”
In the great hall there was a shocked silence, until at last Sir Walter said: “Thou knewst all this, and came into my house so lightly to bargain with me?”
“How otherwise, sir? Is this not great news? Were we to go about sadly, we should be suspected for heretics, should we not?”
“So we should.” It was difficult to read Sir Walter’s voice. He was silent another long moment, and then he said: “So we shall have the abbeys and the monasteries back again.”
“Aye, forsooth.”
“And good sisters shall tell their beads so quaintly again, as they did when I was a child, and there shall be great paintings in the church to show the glories of Paradise and the torments of the damned.”
“Aye, forsooth.”
Joseph’s voice, sounding embarrassed: “Now, as I am a Spaniard, and a loyal son of the Church, I trust you gentlemen will not recall that I spoke of any brotherhood of scholars.”
“Oh, nay.”
“Nay, nay, sir. It is well, nowadays, to have a Spaniard for a friend,” said Master Darrell.
“I certainly count myself as such.” Joseph matched his irony note for note.
Mendoza, are you okay? sent Nef.
“How long, think you, before the bishop’s men are sent out amongst us?” asked Sir Walter.
“It is expected that the order to conform goes out before the end of the month.”
“Ah. I have some time, then, to put my house in order.”
I will never understand the English. Sir Walter had cried like a child because he could not serve his guests peacock two nights in a row; but at the news that his civil liberties had been taken away, the man was sensible and calm.
“So.” Master Darrell drained his tankard and set it down. “I would, if I may, sir, see the accounts for your garden, the better to know what income I may expect.”
“My secretary keeps excellent accounts.” Sir Walter got to his feet. “Let us go find the books, and thou shalt see for thyself.”
“And I shall take my leave of you, señors.” Joseph was bowing. “I must to my studies, er, prayers. Remember, Sir Walter, you must fast.”
“Aye. Aye.” And they went out of the great hall, all together.
Nicholas and I sat silent in the gallery for a few minutes. He was nodding, slightly, and his lips were moving, but no sound came out. Finally he gave a little choked laugh.
“Why, so is the silly world turned upon its head,” he said.
“How could they do it?” I whispered. “How could a people be so foolish?”
Nicholas lowered his head to his knees and wept. His sobs echoed in the great hall, where only a short time before he had played the winter king in his pasteboard armor.
Arrows you may dodge and fever you may antibody for, but mortal grief is a misfortune you cannot escape. That’s a translation of something solemn from my school days. It was, as I remember, the first sentence of an essay about the hazards of taking mortal lovers. The author compares this act to having a gangrenous limb grafted onto one’s perfect immortal body. He then proceeds to a little parable about the immortal heart as beautiful machine, flawless and balanced, designed by a master with all protection against weakness and damage—until the heart’s foolish owner attaches leads from it to the inferior heart of a badly made mortal engine, thus compromising the integrity of the better design and exposing the owner to all the shocks, faults, and stresses of the lesser model.
See, cyborgs have their Thomas Aquinases too. Though I’d been told, practically from the first day I went into the field, that all that was nonsense and it was actually really okay to sleep with mortals. Nothing to it at all.
It’s very important to give young operatives the straight dope, you know?
You can imagine that after a miserable interlude Nicholas and I crawled out of the gallery and walked away down the corridor. He turned suddenly to stare at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen with crying. I had expected them to be bewildered too; they weren’t. There was a clear, cold place in them, a country of ice I’d seen at a distance before. No distance now. “In this life,” he said, “we must be on our guard.”
“Yes,” I replied uncertainly.
Terrible music was beginning to play, an anthem for that frozen land; but a door down the hall opened, and Sir Walter emerged.
“Nicholas!” he said. “We must speak, now.”
“Right gladly.” Nicholas turned on his heel and advanced on Sir Walter so rapidly, and drawing himself up so tall and ominous, that Sir Walter shrank back a little. He retreated through the doorway, and Nicholas followed him in.
I had no urg
e to go and listen to them. For the first time in a long while, I badly needed the company of my own kind.
This sentiment lasted until I got to Nef’s room. Opening the door, I beheld Joseph bounding up and down in place like a rubber imp on a string.
“The son of a bitch! The ungrateful, dressed-up chimpanzee! The rotten little two-timing descendant of Saxon drag queens!”
“Ignore him.” Stonily Nefer turned a page of her magazine.
“Ignore me?” Joseph screamed. “IGNORE ME? YOU GO RIGHT AHEAD AND IGNORE ME, MISS TUTANKHAMEN! I’M ONLY GETTING A LITTLE AGGRAVATION OUT OF MY SYSTEM!”
I put my hands over my ears. The unicorn buried its head in Nef’s skirts.
“Ah! Ah! Ah!” Joseph went right on bounding with the precision of a jackhammer. “I’ll kill him! I’ll give him cavities and postnasal drip! I’ll rig his autonomic nervous system so he does something painfully embarrassing every time he sneezes!” He stopped, staggering slightly as an idea hit him. “Where’s the black hellebore? Where’s the nux vomica? Is he ever going to get a bedtime cocktail tonight!”
“You’re upset about the mission with everything else that’s just happened?” I wept. “The Parliament selling out to Cardinal Pole? The Church getting all those awful powers again?”
“Yes, I’m upset about the mission, and so should you be!” Joseph rounded on me. “It’s in jeopardy thanks to Little Sir Walt, and after months of cleaning out his lousy arteries, this is the thanks I get? Now I have to completely renegotiate the contract with the new owner, which is going to cost the Company money, which is going to reflect badly on me, although you still get to collect your Furbish’s lousewort or whatever so what do you care? I guess it’s just too much to hope that you might be providing your poor facilitator and group leader with sympathy, understanding, and commiseration. Hell, not you! You’re in shock because the monkeys are throwing coconuts at each other! We told you mortals did stuff like this, didn’t we? What did you learn at school, anyway? How can you have come out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and still be surprised by anything they do?”
“You were surprised by Sir Walter,” remarked Nef.
“Jesus H. Christ, was I ever.” Joseph collapsed on a settle. “The nerve. The consummate nerve of the guy. We had a deal! So now he’s going to sell the property and go into politics at Court, is he? Well, he’ll be sorry he crossed me. I wouldn’t accept that marriage proposal if I were you, baby.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Nef laid down her magazine and looked at him. “I don’t particularly want to go to Court. Maybe I can talk him out of it. Maybe I can make him buy a cattle ranch.”
“They don’t have ranches in England,” I said. She shrugged.
“Well, you’d have to watch him around the clock,” said Joseph bitterly. “The guy has no loyalty to anything. Can you beat it? After he gave me his knightly word of honor, too. How could he do this to me? I mean, his garden was his whole life!”
“My God, can’t you see why?” I cried. “You pumped hormones and who knows what else into him, you gave him his youth back, and now it’s not just his old clothes that don’t fit, it’s his old life! That’s why he wants a change. Blame yourself!”
“Hey! I only met his price for what we wanted.” Joseph glared at me. “And his price was youth, which shows he was restless already.”
“I thought the Indian maize was his price.”
“That was the official price.” Joseph examined his fingernails.
“What?”
“Bureaucratic levels of reality,” said Nef. “Don’t worry about it.” I looked from one to the other.
“Are we … are we really good for humankind?” I wondered for the first time.
“Sure we are, honey.”
“But everything that little man valued in life we turned to dust for him. Before we came, he didn’t mind about getting old. Did we really have any right to step in and change him?”
“Wait, wait, wait. Hold it right there. We didn’t just step in and change him without his permission. The dissatisfaction with life was already there in his tiny mind. We only give people what they want, and usually what’s good for them. I did what any doctor would do.”
“If a sixteenth-century doctor had the technology,” put in Nef.
“But you can’t make a values call on whether or not I should have let him stay a sick old man,” continued Joseph. “Even if the guy could see it objectively the way we can, do you think for a second he wouldn’t have made the same choice? There isn’t a mortal born that won’t try to cheat Father Time.”
“But he made the wrong choice.”
“Did he? Are you going to make his choices for him? That’s a violation of his natural rights, kiddo. Don’t forget that mortals have free will. They traded their Paradise for it, and they can jump into manure up to their necks if they choose to. We don’t care. We’re not here to make them happy, we’re not here to make them prosperous, we’re not here to help them on the road to self-realization. We’re here to do business for the Company.
“Sir Walters and Nicholases are out there everywhere. But your Ilex tormentosum is so rare, it’s only growing in one place in the whole world. If it wasn’t for the work you’ve been doing, it would become extinct, when we know it has properties that can save a billion mortal lives. Isn’t that, morally, worth the happiness of one old man?”
“But…” Unpleasant light had begun to dawn on me. “Because of what we did for Sir Walter, he’s sold the garden to Master Darrell. What if Master Darrell decides to cut down the ilex and replace it with something he thinks is more exotic, after we’ve gone? Then the ilex will be extinct, except for what the Company has. But Sir Walter would never have sold the garden if we hadn’t come and messed with him. What are we doing to cause and effect, here? Does the Company really know what it’s doing?”
“Of course it does,” said Joseph instantly. “And if you worry about this, you’ll drive yourself nuts. Really.”
“Just take it on faith, I always say,” Nef told me. “I mean, everything works out in the end anyway, doesn’t it? We know the ilex becomes extinct, because there isn’t any in the future except what the Company has. So you must have saved it. So why ask questions?”
“Believe me, Mendoza, there are better minds than yours grappling with this.”
“All the time, honey. Do yourself a favor, don’t get metaphysical.”
“Really.”
So I backed away from the void, which was a very deep and very dark void indeed, doubtless chock-full of unhappiness for anyone unwisely peering into it for too long. And what is worse, for an immortal being, than unhappiness?
Joseph got to his feet. “Once again, poor little Joseph finds himself having to hand out sage advice and counsel to younger operatives when he’d rather be crying into his pillow. Does anyone care? Fat chance. I’m going to have myself a glass of sherry and access all the information I have on A) freemasons and B) hair restoration, and then I’m going to review the microsurgery I was planning to do on the little shit tonight. I hope, I just fervently hope and pray, that I can keep an open and forgiving mind. It sure would be terrible if I connected some of his nasty organic pipes wrong. Or, better yet, planted some exotic disease cultures in timed-release capsules in his gluteal muscle sheath. Boy, now there’s an idea …” He went into his room and slammed the door.
“He’s so dramatic.” Nef picked up her magazine again.
“Are you really planning to marry Sir Walter?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, gee, no,” she said. “He’s kind of cute—now—but I don’t think the Company would okay it.”
“You’d have to ask the Company first?”
“Of course, Mendoza. So they could see if his proposal was advantageous to them, so they could analyze whether my tour of duty would be compatible with a life with him, so they could evaluate granting him higher security clearance. Frankly, though, after what he just did, I don’t think there’s a chance in Hell he
’d be approved. Doctor Zeus doesn’t like double-dealers.”
“You don’t mean Joseph is really going to poison him!” I was aghast.
“No, no, of course not. That almost never happens.” She became fascinated by her magazine. “Hey, can you beat this? The whole Bogart canon is coming out as a set on Ring compatible! We’re getting it for thirteen point seven. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“Real neat,” I said wearily.
But I was young then and had yet to appreciate the wisdom of Bogart, particularly as regards the problems of three little people not amounting to a hill of beans in this or any other crazy world.
Chapter Twenty
NOTHING WAS THE same anymore.
Sir Walter called his entire household together and gave them the news about the sale first. That their religion had just been changed was nothing to them compared with the shock of losing their jobs; they had never been a particularly devout household anyway. There was a private chapel at Iden Hall, dusty and disused, but it had furnished Sir Walter and his people with an excuse for not going to church every Sabbath.
No longer. Almost at once the order went out: Mass was to be celebrated in every church in every village in England, with one hundred percent attendance expected. In each parish a ledger was to be kept with the names of the persons who did not attend, and that ledger was to be turned over to the agents of the bishops, agents sent to each church to ensure the conformity of its flock. Whoever did not attend Mass would be flogged or given other suitable chastisement and returned to the care of the village priest. Those persons found to be resolute heretics would be burned, after a trial proved guilt.
Simple? Straightforward? See how easy it is to restore the true faith to a country? You just have to be firm. There weren’t even any Jews to hunt for.
Well, it certainly would have worked in Spain. Doubtless in many parts of France too. But this was England, practically the home of civil disobedience. It has always seemed bizarre to me that the race that invented the tea cozy should also so resolutely refuse ever ever to be slaves.