Judith Merkle Riley

by The Master of All Desires

  “A false bible of devils,” says The Scar.

  “No,” says Lorraine, his voice sounding curious, “It’s exactly the one we use. The word of Christ.”

  “Nonsense!” roars The Scar. “Christ has been dead for over a thousand years! He can’t do any writing. That proves it’s a forgery! Heretic lies!”

  “What kind of simpleton are you?” says the Cardinal, turning in rage to his older brother. Nostradamus sighs, and his breath ripples the water by accident.

  The vision in the water changes, and at the sight of it, the old man watching draws a deep breath, almost like a sob. Now there is smoke, climbing to the sky above city walls. Familiar walls. Closer, yes, it is Orléans itself, the city of princes and treasures, and there is the great cathedral that dominates the skyline. It is burning, the timbers for the foundation of the great cathedral bell tower undermined. Armed men in plain, dark clothing swarm like ants, looters flee the great doors ahead of the flames.

  “Take down the tower of Satan.”

  “Revenge! Destroy the idol worshipers! Today their cathedral of abominations, tomorrow, The Great Antichrist of Rome!” There is a creaking, groaning sound, as the timbers give way, then an explosion as the powder charges rolled under the foundation are at last ignited. The immense, ancient spire crumbles, and the crowd around the cathedral cheers.

  “A civil war,” said Nostradamus, his voice shaky. “A bloody civil war of religion. And soon. Anael, you always raise more questions than you answer. Who is the victor in this war? The True Religion?”

  “Hmm. I seem to have lost that part, under this stack of South American presidents,” said Anael, his upper half vanishing again.

  “You tempting, wretched Devil,” said Nostradamus.

  “Please, I’m an angel.”

  “A fallen one.”

  “Only semi-fallen. Besides, it was your idea to summon me up. It’s not as if I volunteered. Secrets of the Ages you wanted. Now you get them. You people are never content.” Anael yawned and stretched his raven wings. The twinkly things quit swirling and gradually settled out in little spiral patterns. “I’m going now; I’m tired and don’t want to answer any more questions.”

  “Just a little one,” said Nostradamus. “What is a South Armorican precedent?”

  But the spirit had vanished.

  ***

  In the chateau of Fontainebleau, the unpacking process was still under way. Certain heavy carts for furniture had been delayed on the muddy, rutted roads, and only now had arrived in the courtyard, where they were being unloaded with much confusion. Maids scurried through the corridors with armloads of linens, teams of lackeys carried heavy chests, while servants unrolled the last of the rugs and hung the arras in the king’s reception chamber. The court was full of small households, all busy: the king’s, the queen’s, the resident ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting, the great captains and nobles who followed the court when not on their estates, and the children’s household, when not away at Blois to avoid infection. Even the queen’s dwarves had their governors, laundresses, attendants, and household pets. In the midst of this turmoil, the queen, attended by only two of her dames d’honneur, strode rapidly, looking neither left nor right.

  The ladies who accompanied the queen today were the most trusted of the trusted; Italians from allied Florentine families, married to French gentlemen. They descended a wide stair, another narrow one, and passed through chambers unfashionable in their location, until at last they reached a low door. Here the queen rapped abruptly, and when it opened, she gestured her companions to keep watch outside. The room she entered was ill-lit and dusty, its contents only half unpacked. Work-tables stood empty before her; in a corner, an athanor, its fires not yet kindled, stood cold and empty of vessels. In the back, a figure clad in black leather scuttled among barrels and boxes of glassware like some sinister crab.

  “Send your boy off, Cosmo, I want to talk with you alone,” she said abruptly, looking at the shabby waif who had opened the door. Without a second word, the boy vanished, and Cosmo Ruggieri, the queen’s hereditary family sorcerer, came and bowed before his mistress.

  “Most beautiful, most serene highness—”

  “Enough, Cosmo. I want use of your powers to divine for me what magic the Duchess of Valentinois uses to hold the king’s love.”

  “At last, you have come to me, poor loyal Cosmo, instead of those dreadful charlatans who besiege you.” The queen’s magician had switched the conversation to Italian, as if speaking in her natal language might soften his patroness’s heart.

  “As if I hadn’t been here before! What haven’t you promised me? I’ve poured gold down on you, hired your relatives, and put up with scheming that would shame a snake!”

  “Cosmo has labored, labored to make you queen, to give you heirs—”

  “Are you still resentful of the payments the king has made to Doctor Fernel? That is not something I can help.”

  “If you let the king see my powers—”

  “The king does not believe in your powers, you disloyal rogue. It should be sufficient for you that I believe in them. And I believe that the duchess has got possession of a magic ring. And what is more, only you could have made it.”

  “My queen, knowing your desires, I was preparing it for you.”

  “You liar, you cast it for her. Your father would not have lived a day longer if he had treated my father so.”

  “My father was more greatly held in honor; he attended court on great occasions, and I, shunned, hidden away, so poor, so many relatives in need—”

  “I swear, this time I’ll have you killed, Cosmo. Pulled in tiny pieces alive, then gathered up and burned, for the edification of all treacherous magicians.”

  “Oh, Majesty, what a pity that would be. You know the stars have said that you will outlive me by only three days.”

  “You low, conniving liar—”

  “Try me, Majesty. Oh, much as I would sorrow at my own death, it would be a far greater pity for France to lose such a queen.”

  “I’ll send you away.”

  “Oh, pity, Majesty. Away from your beautiful and august presence, I’d poison myself out of pure grief.”

  “You are a devil, Cosmo. You know that.”

  “Alas, Madame, only a Florentine, no different than yourself.”

  “Of all the souvenirs I brought away from home, you are the one I’d most happily part with; do you know that, Cosmo?”

  ‘Ah, Majesty, it is only the bitterness of the moment that makes you speak like that to your most loyal servant. My heart is moved by your grief. Oh, how I regret that wicked duchess’s vile and seductive lies! But out of pure devotion, I would offer you a suggestion: in exactly three weeks, Saturn will come to govern the king’s house, and his old disease of the joints will return, with a fever that will lay him low. Take advantage of the confusion in his sickroom, and when the Duchess of Valentinois is away from the bedside, order the ring removed.”

  “Cosmo, if I get that ring back, you are returned to favor.”

  “Favor only? My youngest nephew’s baptism, the gifts, you under-stand, the feast, so expensive—”

  But the Queen of France had slammed the door behind her.

  ***

  Puddles glistened on the cobblestones and drops of silvery water still hung on the trees when Michel de Nostre-Dame, the seer of Salon, came to his front door to greet the town dignitaries who were making up the party on the way to the baptism of the son of the Sieur de Granville. It was one of those fresh, southern March days that comes after the rain, when the wind blows away the clouds and the pallid winter sun sits in the blue sky in chill imitation of May. But Nostradamus had been up too late to appreciate the day; his head hurt from breathing too much smoke from his braziers of strange herbs, and his mind was heavy with the sorrowful knowledge he had gleaned from his midnight researches. Now he saw that milling around his doorway, between him and the boy with his mule, was a crowd of townsfolk and a half-dozen peas
ants, sent from the country estate of the Sieur de Chasteauneuf, holding a monster in a basket.

  “Maistre Nostredame, Maistre Nostredame,” the cry went up from the crowd.

  Lord, not another. Every freak within a hundred leagues gets brought to my doorstep. Carefully, he stepped down to meet them, with the aid of his silver-headed malacca cane. The chill of the night before had not helped his gout. All these mysteries, he thought, and did I once have the sense to discover the mystery of gout? Perhaps Anael is right, and I should give it up.

  His dark, intelligent eyes swept the crowd. Around each figure he could see a dancing, shimmering motion in the air, not unlike the waves of heat that rise from a wheat field in summer. Each aura gave him a sense of fate: here, accidental death; there, good fortune and hearty old age; and in another place, a mortal disease gnawing invisibly. It was another gift he had developed during his long exile, and now he regretted it. In ordinary conversation, he always had to behave as if the aura wasn’t there, shouting the person’s secrets at him. Otherwise, one risked a black eye or a broken nose, or worse, a course of the strappado such as had crippled one of his teachers, the great Guy Laurie, who had foolishly told the truth to the tyrant of Bologna.

  My curse, he thought. I was young, foolish, filled with a passionate desire to see the future. I knew it was wrong, but who could have resisted that Agent of the Tempter, himself? A just fate decreed my punishment at the very moment that vile, supernatural thing granted me the powers I begged for: now I can see, but never tell. A lifetime of agonized silence is my punishment. Cassandra was at least granted the boon of telling her prophecies, but not being believed. Me, they believe, but if I don’t want to be hanging in pieces outside the city gates, I can never tell. God of ironies, I set out in search of the secret of eternity, and you set me to writing almanacs for farmers to plant by.

  “Well, well,” said Nostradamus, stroking his beard in a sage fashion, “what have we here? Ah, I see, a two-headed kid.” Behind the horn buds, one of the heads had an extra pair of ears, small and misshapen. It bleated at him. “Hmm,” he said, “I fear this is an evil omen.”

  “Master, master, tell us what it means.” The crowd was pushing around him now. Nostradamus pondered the safest of several dangerous answers.

  “It means,” he said slowly, “that the kingdom of France will be divided in two, but that its body and soul are ultimately one, and the right will prevail.” The misshapen head bleated again. The head with only two normal ears looked asleep.

  “Ha! The ugly one’s Lutheran!” shouted a wag.

  “The right-thinking head’s asleep. Wake up, wake up! The saints are in danger!” shouted someone else.

  Nostradamus shook his head. How these fools rush into an endless maze of sorrow and blood, he thought. Just as each individual had an aura, so did the crowd. It was filled with flickering black spots. Death and madness. But when? A chain of murders, prevarications, and treachery lay between France and this agony. If he published his Centuries now, would his predictions lead just one person to change his actions, abort one step of the dreadful descent into destruction? At night, sometimes he awakened and sensed the aura of France. It made his blood run cold.

  Six

  Menander of Corinth, also known as Menander the Magus, B.C. 239–? Little is known of the historical Menander, who supposedly founded a dissident sect devoted to the worship of Apollo that featured orgiastic worship ceremonies and ritual magic. The Menander legend of medieval alchemists may have been a later creation with no relation to the actual life of the celebrated magus. Said to have bargained his soul to the Devil in exchange for the secret of eternal life, Menander incurred a terrible revenge when the Lord of the Infernal discovered that he had been tricked, and the fulfillment of the wish made it impossible to collect the clever magus’s soul. The Devil “so filled the spirit of the King of Persia with envy and fear lest the Magus should serve another” that he struck off his head, which nevertheless retained its eternal life. The Devil’s revenge was to condemn the magus to serve the desires of any person who possessed the coffer in which his head resided, in exchange for the possessor’s soul.

  The search for the head of The Master of All Desires is one of the darkest secrets of occult lore of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. Various persons are rumored to have possessed the head at one time or another, including the Empress Theodora, Michael VIII Palaeologue, and Catherine de Medici.

  encyclopedia of the supernatural

  Vol. 6, L–N, p. 216.

  I am sorry, madame, he does not want to see you.” The valet at the king’s sickroom door was firm. The Duchess of Valentinois, her slender form clad in black velvet with white satin trim, was holding a bottle of cordial, made by her own hands. Aside from a slight tightening of the jaw, no sign outside revealed the furious rage that boiled within.

  “There is a mistake,” she said. “Only this morning he asked for this cordial.” Through the half-open door, she could see the king, feverish, propped up on several pillows in his great bed, his eyes closed, mumbling something. Several physicians in long gowns were present, supervising a surgeon who was opening a vein on the king’s wrist. Blood, almost black, dripped slowly into the basin, and each of the physicians in turn bowed over it, inspected it, and nodded as if in agreement.

  “You are barred from the room. Those are His Majesty’s orders.”

  The king fumbled at the bedcovers with his long, pale fingers. Rapidly, carefully, Diane de Poitiers inspected his hands. Where was her ring? That damned, treacherous Italian astrologer, she thought. He has betrayed me to her. Doubtless he’ll come crawling back to me with some story or other. I swear, I’d have him meet with an accident, if he hadn’t predicted that the date of my death would be the week of his own…

  One of the physicians handed some small object she couldn’t see to a valet, who bowed and turned to leave the room.

  “See here, boy,” she said as he came through the door. “What were you given there?”

  “A ring that the king promised to send to the queen, as a sign of his favor.”

  “May I see it?” she asked. Remembering the king’s habit of taking revenge on all who crossed the duchess, and sure of his eventual recovery, the valet showed her the ring.

  “My, it’s lovely,” she said, admiring it. Suddenly he feared she would take it. What would he say? What would he do? But then she handed it back to him.

  “I think they have made a mistake. This is a ring I gave him, and he swore never to part with it. It is the ruby ring on the other hand that was meant. Return this to the king’s hand and take the other one in its place.” Contentedly, the king’s mistress watched as the valet conferred with the physicians, the physicians conferred with one another, and the valet placed the ring back on the king’s left hand, taking the ruby one from the same finger on the right. The king, eyes still half closed, appeared to be saying something. One of the physicians leaned close to his head to hear him.

  “What is it?” she heard another of the physicians ask.

  “Has the Duchess of Valentinois brought the cordial she promised? He’s asking for it. He says only with her presence will he recover.”

  “Well, then, why is she late? Send a page to go summon her.”

  “Oh, don’t bother,” said the valet holding the ruby ring. “She’s waiting outside. I’ll send her right in.”

  There was triumph in the duchess’s cold eyes, as she swept through the door, her silk petticoats rustling, triumph as she knelt by the bedside, murmuring endearments, triumph as she stroked the hand adorned by the curious little gold ring.

  ***

  Up and down the queen paced along the long gallery between the state apartments and the oval court at Fontainebleau. Rain rattled against the tall windows and outside the rumble of receding thunder grew more distant. Behind her trailed several little white lapdogs and two dwarves in Moorish costume, who attempted to distract her with bad jokes. For days, she had complaine
d of a headache and the confinement caused by bad weather, but those who studied her eyes knew that she was consumed with some secret rage. Not only had Diane de Poitiers’s reign continued without the slightest sign that it would ever end, but in celebration of the king’s recovery, she had invited the entire court to her sumptuous chateau at Anet for an extravagant Christmas celebration the following winter, so sure was she of her continued dominance. The devious astrologer, Cosmo Ruggieri, had conveniently disappeared to Lyons on an “errand” where he could not be found, and the queen had dispatched a half dozen of her guard to locate him and drag him back. Now, suddenly, the little dogs began to bark and clamor, the dwarves gave up their joking, and the queen smiled a vindictive little smile: two guards stood at the far end of the gilded, heavily ornamented gallery, and between them was a familiar, beetle-like figure in black leather, slightly the worse for wear. Cosmo burst forward and flung himself on her shoe, bathing it in tears as he exclaimed in melodramatic self-abasement. With difficulty, the Florentine queen restrained a powerful urge to kick him.

  For several weeks now, she had played the role of humble and contented wife while Diane thwarted her at every turn. There was a little property she had wanted for the husband of one of her ladies of honor; Diane claimed it from the king. The Queen of Scots, that ungrateful little fourteen-year-old chit, had become ill, and when Catherine hurried to her bedside with a list of infallible home remedies, she was turned away from the sickroom, for Diane was already there with two celebrated physicians and a surgeon who had done not one, but two bloodlettings. Having drawn up a list of subjects essential to the Dauphin’s education, she found that Diane had already sent instructions to M. d’Humières that the Dauphin should study less and take more exercise in order to strengthen his constitution.