In Pursuit of the Green Lion (28 page)

“Long acquaintance? You’ve known him a long time? I never knew that—he never let on, in all the time I talked about you.”

“Talked about me? Oh, yes, the fable of the memoirs. Of all the surprises I’ve had today, by far the greatest is the possibility that he might have been telling me the truth when he said he met you by copying your memoirs. Really, Margaret, what ever put such a notion in your head? You haven’t lived long enough to have anything to say. Imagine. And here I thought he was over there seducing you all this time.” Brother Malachi shook his head as if there were no end to the wonders of the world. It annoyed me greatly, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t tell him I thought he was very unfair, and vulgar-minded too. He saw the look and laughed.

“Be fair, Margaret—who else but you would take such a fancy into her head? You have to expect people would believe the worst. Besides, when you told him about me, you probably didn’t know I’d changed my name since I’d last seen him. That was quite a while ago, when I had to move on very suddenly—” Sadness crossed Brother Malachi’s normally sunshiny face like a cloud, but was soon gone. “But I must say, I was mightily surprised when he turned up to borrow the money to abduct you. Something about hiring a horse. Goodness, I hadn’t seen him since Paris, where he went about under the nom de guerre of Gilbert l’Escolier, writing scurrilous theological tracts and satirical verse. A man of singular talents, Margaret, the chief of them being that he is always right and everyone else is wrong. Snobbish, obnoxious, and witty as the Devil—though I never thought he was interested enough in women to make off with you in that way. And half of London in pursuit! That Gilbert’s never managed to leave any city without a scandal yet. Did I ever tell you how they burned his book in Paris? The idiot! He told me he had twelve irrefutable theological proofs that they were wrong—so of course he stayed and they caught him. Impractical—yes, eternally impractical and stubborn, is Gilbert the Righteous.”

“It seems that we see him about the same way.” I sighed. “Now, how do I get him back?” Brother Malachi looked speculatively into the air.

“Well, Margaret—that’s the difficult way. It seems to me that we might combine all of our problems into one supreme solution: yes—yes, it makes sense. Of course, there’s the expense—but—hmm. How many florins did you say? Ten? Yes. Multiplication is in order, especially if you’re to go with us.”

“Oh, you can multiply it—I just knew you could. Can you make enough to buy him back?”

“Not from the Comte de St. Médard, Margaret. He’s eccentric, and already rich. He probably has some completely superfluous reason for not setting the ransom already. But—and here’s the useful part—admit, Margaret, you couldn’t do without me—he’s well known to us hunters of the Green Lion. So I imagine I might very well be able to work a trade. I’ll offer him the one thing he simply can’t refuse, and back it up with what’s left of my reputation. Did you know I was once celebrated, Margaret? And then, having retrieved Gilbert, it’s heigh-ho for the great centers of learning and my translator.”

“I don’t understand, Brother Malachi. Hunters of the Green Lion? Trading? And why can’t you get a translator in England, anyway?”

“Ah, thrifty, thrifty little Margaret. Your head’s transparent, as usual, and I can see all the thoughts in it. You’re thinking about the last of your florins, aren’t you? Do you think I’d hoodwink you like some foolish bumpkin from the country? Aren’t we old enough friends, Margaret, for you to know I don’t practice my skills on my own family? Yes—you’re a sort of family, just like Clarice and little Bet here. Things haven’t changed just because you left for a grander life.”

“I’m sorry, Malachi. I guess it was small of me. I’ve just been around Gregory’s relatives too much.”

“Very well, apology accepted. Come into my laboratorium; I’ll show you my book, and that will convince you of everything.” He looked toward the low door to the back room and for the first time noticed Sim. It was odd about Sim; even though it had been several years since I first saw him, he’d never really grown. He was still as short as an eight-year-old, though I’d figure him to be anywhere from twelve to fourteen or so. His head was large and a little misshapen, his teeth had gaps between them when he smiled, and he had the shrewd, dark little eyes of a boy who’d grown up fending for himself on the street. But he’d taken to us like a stray cat when we’d fed him, long ago, and from that day to this, he’d stuck to Brother Malachi like a burr. Sim had been listening, taking in everything on the quiet, the way he always does.

“Sim, you devil! Why aren’t you minding the fire? I tell you, if it’s gone cold, you’ve ruined it! Heaven save me from the lazy tricks of apprentices!” Sim scampered into the laboratorium ahead of us and poked up the fire with a great show of energy, while I ducked to follow Brother Malachi through the open door to the back room. Mother Hilde followed us and shut the door, so the grooms wouldn’t hear.

“It’s not as if I haven’t hunted far and wide for a translator here,” he said, puffing, as he removed a stack of books from the top of a little chest hidden in the corner of his oratorium. “Pothooks, I said to myself, looks as if it might be Hebrew. I’ll take it to the university at Oxford. Seems there was a fellow named Benjamin Magister, a Jew with a license to remain in the kingdom to translate the Old Testament. He was dead. Found some dismal doctor of theology who looked down his nose at me and said since the Old Testament was already translated, there was no need for any more Jews at the university. Phoo! What kind of scholar is that? Made inquiries. Went off on a hunt for one Isaac le Convers, said to be in Sussex somewhere, finally found his elderly daughter—she couldn’t read a word.”

Malachi lifted the little chest and put it carefully in the middle of his worktable. Then, as he rummaged about for the key, he continued.

“I chased all over the realm, leaving no stone unturned. Finally I was so desperate I came back to London and betook me to the Domus Conversorum, even though everyone knows there hasn’t been a convert there for a generation. Once the king had the Jews driven out, there was no need to maintain a house for converts. Except that by then it made a nice income for the Warden of the Domus, renting out the rooms. ‘Oh, no,’ says the Warden, ‘I’ve done my duty as a Christian—I’ve got a Spanish sailor here on full allowance who says he’s planning to convert.’ Ha! What people won’t do to keep a position—especially a cushy one like his! So I spent nearly a day with this fellow, who calls himself Janettus of Spain. He really was Jewish. ‘Oh, my, this is too difficult for me,’ he said. ‘I’m a simple man, and only know a few prayers—this is full of arcana. I can’t make out a word. You need a great translator and scholar, the greatest in the world. You need Abraham the Jew.’ I was all ablaze. ‘Where can I find him?’ ‘Oh, he moves about. When I heard of him he was living in Salamanca—but some say he was invited to Paris by the King of France, others that he went to Montpellier, or perhaps he is at Avignon, by invitation of the Pope.’ Hazy he was, entirely hazy. But it’s clear. Spain or France. He’s somewhere. I’ll find him. Take him into my confidence. The Secret—I feel it’s so close that I wake up at nights, trembling all over.”

Brother Malachi had at last located the key, and opened the little chest, lovingly taking out a packet wrapped in oiled silk. He cleared a space among the jars and odd-looking vessels of smoky, swirly colored glass on his table, and wiped it clean with his sleeve. Then he laid the packet reverently in the space. Hilde and I leaned close to him on the high table, to watch him unfold the silk.

“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.”