Love and Sleep (61 page)

When he was satisfied and raised his head, the wood appeared to him differently: not wild but ordered, paths he had not perceived before leading in four directions; along one the moon was setting, along another the sun rose. It was the first day of May. Along the sunward path he saw coming toward him a boy, each stride carrying him so far it seemed his feet were winged, or that he glided on the sun's beams toward Kelley.

Gratitude and gladness, like the gratitude he had felt swallowing clear water. He knew this youth, who would use him kindly, as a friend: look at his smile, that cast out care and anxiety, look at his feet and hands, winged. He would guide Kelley from the wood.

No sooner had Kelley given his heart to the youth than from the dark wood around there appeared three armed men, black grinning villains, one with a net, one with a glinting knife, one with a crossbow and cruel barbed arrow. O Christ Jesus the lad did not see them, and Kelley was mute; though he screamed soundlessly, the boy came on, and the arrow
pierced his white breast
, Kelley felt it pierce his own at the same moment. The iron huntsman with the net threw it over the shot bird. The third tested his knife's blade against his thumb. And as the beautiful youth twisted and struggled silently, his winged hands were cut off at the wrists, and his pale blood gushed to mingle with the silver water of the stream; and then his feet, their wings fluttering wildly and vainly; and all that time his eyes regarded Kelley with a plea, was it a plea to help, he could not, or a plea not to forget, he would not.

He lay still, amputated.

The murderers, still grinning wickedly with white teeth, bound him securely in the net and bore him up upon a pallet of oak. Kelley followed the bier, sole mourner; but when they reached the gates of the shut palace he was carrying the hurt boy in his arms. The door was sealed with a seal, they could not get in, but when Kelley looked closely he seemed to recognize the seal. Yes he knew it:

The door opened as he gazed at the seal on it.

He carried the boy (nestled now against him like a sleeping child) down corridors of flint and darkness, past sleeping guards, through cobwebbed doors. The crippled child began to whisper in his ear: Take me no farther. Free me. Free me and I will make gold for you. I will make you rich. Free me and I will grant your dearest wish.

But Kelley knew he must stop his ears to these pleadings. He carried him to the last inmost door, the farthest chamber, marked too with the seal, as all the doors had been. There the King sat stony and inert on his throne. Kelley set down the child on the cold floor before him. Here is your son.

The King rose, bewildered joy in his face. My son! The boy held up his poor limbs to his father, as though to show his hurts, or maybe to fend off the big king, who came to him weeping with open mouth in happiness and grief, tears squirting from the corners of his eyes. As he approached, his mouth opened wider. Very much wider. He came over to his son where he writhed unable to escape, gripped the boy and with his great frog's mouth consumed him: swallowed him whole, beginning with the head. Kelley had leisure to see the great gray molars, the shining tongue like a purple whale.

Down. Inside him. The King, astonished and goggling, held his belly and gulped. He went with burdened steps, arms extended for balance like a gravid woman, to his couch. And lay down to digest.

The sun entered Leo. It was high summer. Peaches ripened against the wall of the garden in the center of the palace. In the center of the garden was a pool, Kelley could not see the bottom. In the midday the King came forth to bathe. Oh he looked fine and young, vivified by his meal, removing his robes; like Jesus with oiled locks and soft red mouth. Kelley looked on him and knew that he was himself naked. Nymphs helped the King descend into the jeweled waters. He rolled there in delight, laving his long arms and shapely legs, rolled again, lifting his white buttocks up, now look, when he rolls back he has begun to come in two.

Looking with sweet reassurance upon Kelley, now do you see? Now do you understand?
Two.
He is with his Queen, who is himself. Look (the King-Queen seems to say), I caress and kiss her, she is mine, he too is mine. The nymphs laugh and touch each other, admiring. Kelley in the hot pour of summer sun that gilds the garden feels his own prick stand, how could it not, look how lovely,
conjunctio oppositorum
, no King no Queen but One only, they cry aloud in their clipping and coming, the waters foam in pleasure over their nakedness, O God they have sunk thrashing beneath the roiling surface of the pool, they gurgle and spit, and then are gone.

Drowned.

Kelley stared in horror. The pool's surface settled, steaming. The sun was cruel. Then the water stirred, boiled, as though reversing itself, and there climbed out, silver skin streaming, eyes laughing, the winged boy, unhurt, healed though wingless, whole and tame, more loving and wiser than before.

—Come, he said, kiss me, cease weeping. It is I.

It was dawn of the second day now. The boy John was asleep. Kelley had not moved from the cushion where he knelt; though he had slumped forward like an infant asleep, his eyes were open.

John Dee put a sooty forefinger on the natal chart he had cast for the birth and growth of the matter within the world of the athenor.

In the Houses of the Spring Quaternary they had fixed Mercury, and then combined him with old King Saturn, lead. In the fourth House, first of the Summer Quaternary, he had been sweated, and labor induced. In the fifth House (
Nati,
of children and the getting of children) they had reduced the product in a bath of Water-of-Life, and from it had generated a Monad, the Young King, who was both and neither.

Now to reduce the new substance, calcine and nigrify it, till it was indeed the first matter, without qualities.

John Dee worked his bellows judiciously, and added oakwood to the fire, king of woods, as the old Welsh said:

Fiercest heat-giver of all timber is green oak;

From him none may escape unhurt.

By love of him the head is set an-aching,

By his acrid embers the eye is made sore.

In
Valetudo
Kelley took the boy for his servant, bound him, beat him for his waywardness. He would by the gods wipe the smile from his face. In the clammy underground to which he brought him (
Uxor
) he laid the fat heavy child on a bed or table and pressed and tormented him (at his behest, at his behest) until he gave forth his gold, spewed it horribly from mouth and anus, huge piles of gold-colored mess, coated with shining slime and cold to the touch when Kelley reached for it, while the boy, laughing, relieved of his burden, ascended free and escaped.

Only to be brought back again (sublimated, condensed, sublimated again, as John Dee's fire consumed oakwood steadily) to Kelley's awful workshop, unchastened. Kelley, sweating and weeping, did not know whether he beat him, ate him, fucked him; he drew oils, acrid butters, coruscating sugars from his body as it changed from white to red to blue to black.

At last he sickened, shrank; the silver body lost form. He ceased teasing and talking as he had done through all the tortures to which he had been subjected. Grew still, reproachful, sad. Died in that darkness (
Mors
) and Kelley lay down beside him in guilty despair, O my son. O my only son. The corpse blackened and stank; then dried and hardened like a stockfish, unrecognizable, mouthless, handless, faceless, no person at all.

Done, done, all done.

By Dee's calculations the year within the athenor had now come to its shortest and darkest day, the day of the death and birth of the Sun, the cusp of Capricorn. He took the stone jar of Kelley's powder, and he broke the seal. A wondrous odor filled the chamber; the serving boy stirred and touched his lips with his tongue. Kelley now knelt erect; he opened his hands as though in adoration. John Dee went to the furnace doors and opened them.

The athenor's walls were nearly transparent in the heat; Dee could see activity within, as though he looked at a tent with a candle lit inside. With a hollow pin he punctured it, and through the pin, as through a reed, blew the seed inside.

Kelley (the other Kelley, the Kelley who had gone out from Kelley into the athenor) bent over the formless chaos of his son. All that he had done he had also suffered, everything the boy had lost he had also lost; and when the seed of transformation entered the hot blackened mass, it entered him too. O terrible: the summons to grow and change, the struggle to move and act! The seed working in him was like a sickness not a cure, he had not imagined it could be so fearful.

But he is alive, the Sun is born. Fiery blood coursing in his veins, skin changed from black to silver to gold, he smiles and laughs as though his death and rotting had been a game, he admires his own loveliness, tests his joints and takes steps, he is alive, alive-O. Why is he so small?

No he was alive, that was what mattered, there was to be no more death ever now. Kelley would feed him, of course; feed him as the Pelican feeds her young with her heart's blood. He would grow, he would grow tall and lusty, they would gown him in red and wed him with the White Woman, his own mother, the Queen of Heaven; and
their
Son, at last, at length, would be the Elixir,
filius philosophorum
, Crown of Glory, Basilisk, Salamander, Lion of the Desert.

No. Why was he so small?

—God His grace to us be praised, he heard John Dee say. God has granted to His servants the fruit of time, the great fruit. O look, come look.

Kelley staggered to his feet. John Dee's trembling fingers held the opened athenor. The hem and sleeves of his gown were blackened and ember-eaten. His face was radiant, red, golden; a sort of wind seemed to tremble around him and the crater he held out.

Kelley, uncertain what room he was in, looked into the vessel.

—Look, Dee said. He was near tears with glee and gratitude.

Down at the bottom a globule of gold gave off light, a tiny bright mass like a writhen body, perhaps twenty grains in weight.

They had achieved the first stage of the Work. They had always known it to be possible but they had never been able to do it or even quite to believe it was given to them or to any man to do: and now they had done it. They had made gold, sophic, wonderful.

—Why is it so little? Kelley asked. His throat was dry, his words a croak.

—There was no Multiplication of the seed, said Doctor Dee. Some barrenness. Some lack of vigor in it somehow.

Kelley blinked, staring. This? This was the end of all their promises to him? If he had hewed wood and hauled water for as long and as eagerly as he had worked to achieve the Work, he would have earned in wages more gold than this.

—Not enough, he said.

—No, said Doctor Dee. Not enough to make the Stone. Let us therefore be patient.

O God he would have to go back into that dark fiery country of copulation, decay and death, to find and free and kill another boy, or the same boy once again. His heart fainted within him.

And the prize for which he had sold his immortal soul was gone, used up in an instant to make twenty grains of gold that would not have bought a minim of the red powder, not an atom. How would they finish the Work now?

—
Did you think there was but one Seed?
Madimi asked him, when at dawn he bent weeping to ask her help.
Foolish man, did you think that there was but one Crater, one Stone, one way of working?

He stared open-mouthed at her. She had grown into a woman, or nearly; her breasts were full, her neck long, her golden hair afloat in some wind, the same perhaps that blew around the room, the broken athenor, the doctor's white beard.

—
There are small Stones and great ones,
she said.
There are Stones quick to make, and Stones that have been in the making since the beginning of time. The earth is a Crater itself, and within or on it the Marriage will take place, the Son will be born. Yet even that is not the greatest Stone.

As he watched, the woman in the glass began to undo her garment of red and white.

—
What do you want?
she asked them smiling.
I have all in my gift. Did you think I trifle with you here? I have seen the foundations laid of the Heavens and the Earth, I know where every lost thing is hidden, I know every great thing and sin and shame, there is nothing I cannot do or say or be.

Her breasts were bare, her great dawn-colored eyes were wise and somehow lewd. She opened her skirts to him.
Are you not twice-saved?
she said to him.
Have you not had favors of God that few men have had since time began? There is no sin for you, you may do as you wish, and have what you can.

They bowed their heads, afraid of her for the first time since she had stepped forth from the glass, a child.

—
Would you reach higher than you have done?
she said.
Would you have a Stone greater than any yet spoken of? I will find it for you, it is hidden in a place I know. Would you have gold? I will bake it as bread, you will have a surfeit if you love gold. But if you would have what I offer, you must cast away the opinions of men.