The Alchemist's Revenge

by Martin Archer

  The sun was going down by the time the meeting finished and Richard and I walked out into the Commandery’s bailey together. A number of things had become clear. One of them was that we should make an effort to take some high-ranking prisoners to question. We particularly needed to know why the Greek commander used the Venetians to carry part of his army to Adrianople instead of having them all march there, and why he had immediately sent a few riders to Constantinople ahead of the army. And why did the Venetians do it? Something was up; but what?

  “Oh, Richard, wait. I forgot something that could be important. Tomorrow morning I want you to ride over to the Citadel to break your fast with me and have a meeting with Aron, the company’s alchemist.”

  “The alchemist fellow who is trying to make gold for us out of lead? What about him?”

  “Do not say a word to anyone or mention a word about it tomorrow when you are at the Citadel, but Aron, that is his name, may have developed a weapon we can use against the Greeks. You need to know more about it in case something happens to me.

  “So come to the Citadel’s eating hall about a half hour after the sun arrives tomorrow morning. We will break our fasts together and let the courtiers and spies see our optimism about fighting the Greeks. And we particularly want the Empress’s servants to overhear our optimism since everything they hear and see will quickly spread through the city when they talk to their friends and visit the market.

  “And be sure to bring your apprentice sergeant with you so he can listen and be learnt. Mine will be there too. We will visit the alchemist’s workshop in the stables immediately after we break our fasts.”

  ******

  Richard and I met in the Citadel’s hall the next morning just as we had arranged. Usually I sat at the far end of the long table with my guards sitting around me so that none of the Empress’s courtiers could get close enough to bother me with their inane observations and stupid questions. This time was different. I motioned for Richard sit across from me amongst a crowd of courtiers at the higher end of the table.

  I had, of course, already heard about Richard’s men slaughtering the front part of the Greek column on the mountain road and the fate of their weapons and armour. And the men sitting around us and the people in the city had almost certainly heard rumours about what had happened. What I wanted to do that morning was encourage the Empress’s supporters and those who were undecided, and discourage her potential enemies so they would not decide to rise against her.

  “So tell me what happened in the mountains, Richard. You had six companies of English archers carrying pikes and swords in addition to their longbows. What caused you and your men to let some of the Greek army get away with their weapons and armour?”

  “The fighting was easy. The Greek column massed in front of us and we shot them down left and right with our arrows until they ran.

  “The Greeks in the rear, however, were able to get away because we could not climb over the pile of bodies in front of us fast enough to chase them. It was a huge pile and it was hard to climb over it to get at the others because some of the Greeks in the pile were still alive and moving about.

  “In the end all we got was the weapons and armour of the men in the pile—and then, damn it all, we had to leave most of it behind in the river so we could go further up the mountain and get ready to stop them once again where it was even colder.

  “It worked as it always does when we go against the Greeks. We stopped them once again with even more Greek casualties, many because of the cold, and then the whole Greek army turned and ran for the coast leaving as many as thirty thousand of their dead and wounded behind. We took the weapons and armour off the second lot. It is generally inferior and certainly nothing we would use ourselves, but I suppose it will fetch a decent price when we sell it.

  “Now the Greek king and the Patriarch are once again spending their men to their deaths with the Venetians helping to transport them. The result will be the same, of course, the only difference being that now we will be grinding the Greeks down slowly instead of taking them all at once.

  “At the moment, my horsemen are hanging on to the Greek columns like wolves surrounding a flock of Greek sheep. But their friends keep grabbing the weapons of the Greeks we kill and wound and running away with them before we can get to them. It is making my men angry that the Greeks have no stomach for fighting; my men want to get on with taking their weapons and armour so they can go home and sell them.”

  “Aye, you are right, Richard. There is no doubt about it; we need to let the Greeks and their supporters assemble all together in one place so we can eliminate the whole flock of them and capture all their weapons. You might want to explain that to your horsemen—that they should pull back and let the main body of Greeks get through to the city. Then they can move back in and cut them off so we can take them all.”

  Then I pretended that a thought had just crossed my mind.

  “You know what? I am bored sitting around here all the time waiting for the Greeks to show up. I think I will ride out and explain things to the Company’s horse archers and see for myself what is happening. Perhaps I can try out my new longbow. It is your turn to stay here for a while. You can explain things to the lads who are here.”

  The wide-eyed men sitting around us were hanging on our every word and taking it all in. So were the servants who were bringing the food and re-filling the bowls. What Richard and I hoped, of course, was that the listeners would be gullible enough to believe what we were telling each other and spread the news that it was not wise to take up arms against the Empress.

  One thing was certain—the Empress’s vassals and her subjects living in her capital city had best remain loyal to the Empress for their own sakes; the Varangians were telling the truth about killing everyone who came against her and so were we. The real question, of course, was whether we would last long enough to do it.

  And the only other thing that was certain was that it was going to be one hell of a fight because we were so badly outnumbered.

  ******

  Aron, the Company’s alchemist lieutenant, and James Howard, the sergeant assigned to assist him, were waiting for us when we arrived to see the demonstration they had been ordered to provide. It was held in the far back corner of the wall that surrounded the Citadel’s little-used rear bailey, and it started with a flock of sheep.

  No one except Richard and me and our apprentices were there when Thea, the stable master’s young daughter, and Aron’s betrothed, used a switch pulled off a tree to drive a flock of sheep into the corner. Some sheaves of cut grass had already been brought to the corner where the bailey’s walls came together and had been scattered about in great clumps next to the wall. The sheep immediately began eating the grass and stopped trying to get away.

  We stood there looking at each other, a bit amused and perplexed, as Aron smiled at us and James disappeared around the corner of the nearby building. Sheep?

  A few moments later a heavily-loaded four wheel wagon with no sides clattered around the corner of the Citadel and came into sight. It was pulled by James and three of the Empress’s hostlers. We could tell it was heavily loaded because the men were straining to pull it across the bailey’s cobblestones.

  At first glance the flat-bed wagon seemed to be loaded with a cargo of large and heavy sacks. But then it soon became obvious that the sacks were stacked up to surround something in the wagon, apparently so it could not be seen.

  Aron noted our curiosity.

  “Those are sacks filled with dirt and stones. They will protect us from the ribaldi if it comes apart when the lightning escapes.”

  Aron made the explanation before anyone even had a chance to ask about the wagon and its strange cargo. There was more than a little pride in his voice when he did.

  A ribaldi? Now I knew what the sacks on the wagon were concealing—one of Aron’s ribaldis, the long gold-making tubes into which he stuffs with rocks to keep the lightning inside so it would hit the lead h
e puts in the tube and turn it into gold.

  Richard had been told the ribaldis were used for making gold, and had seen one before he rode off to harass the Greeks, but he and our apprentice sergeants had never seen one actually used to make gold with man-made lightning. I certainly had, and I instinctively began backing away from it until I saw that the candle Aron was holding was not lit. Richard saw my move and raised his eyebrows in a question.

  None of the others had seen my concern, or, if they did, they did not understand the danger. They were curious and promptly walked forward for a better look. Richard and I followed them, but only after I saw it was safe to do so.

  What we could see when we gathered around the cart was not much—the open end of the ribaldi where the lightning power and rocks were put in was the only part not covered by the sacks of dirt and stones. I knew what I was looking at because I had seen it before.

  This time, Aron told us, he was using a hollowed-out oak log to hold the powder. It was about six feet long and so heavily wrapped with a galley’s mooring line that the wood could not be seen. Its open end was pointed at the sheep.

  “Is he really going to make gold?” Richard asked out loud, but to no one in particular. The tone of his voice suggested that he did not believe it.

  “I think he has something else in mind,” I answered. And you my fine friend are going to be astonished.

  Chapter Three

  The new weapon.

  We gathered around and watched in fascination as Aron and James Howard started preparing the gold-making log that Aron called a “ribaldi” since no one ever knew exactly what it would do when he put fire to it.

  Aron began by taking handfuls of dark grey powder out of a leather bucket and using his bare hand to push it down into the hollow log to make room for more handfuls. Then he used a rounded pole to push it all the way down to the very end. The pole looked like one of our oars with the paddle cut off. It probably was.

  After the lightning powder was pushed in, Aron and James Howard began stuffing many handfuls of small rocks into the end of the log. Every so often Aron stuck the pole into the end of the log and used it to push the rocks tight against the powder. He seemed to know what he was doing. We were obviously watching an expert at work.

  “Normally I would have put a piece of gold-making lead in before the rocks, but not this time,” Aron offered as he got down on his knees and began putting handfuls of the lightning power on a piece of linen he had laid on the ground.

  Aron used his hands to shape the powder on the linen into a narrow line about two feet long. And then, to my surprise, when he was finished he rolled up the piece of linen to make a short rope with the lightning powder in the middle of it.

  “This is something new, a fire rope,” he explained. “It will make it safer and easier to make the lightning because I can roll the rope in advance and then run to safety after I put a flame to it.” None of us understood a word of what he was saying, of course, but we nodded out heads as if we did.

  When Aron finished making the fire rope, he reached through a gap in the dirt bags and mooring line wrapped around the log, and then stuffed one end of into a hole he had drilled in the log.

  “Now I am putting one end of the fire rope into a hole I gouged into the log where the lightning powder is located.

  We could not see how Aron was stuffing the fire rope into the log because only his arm fit through the opening between the dirt bags, but he told us all about it as he worked. It must have been important because it took him some time to get it right. A handful of lightning powder dripped out of the open end of the short fire rope as he worked to get the other end into the log.

  Finally he nodded to himself and withdrew his hand.

  “We are almost ready,” he said as he pulled his hand out of the hole between the sacks and rubbed his hands together to dust them off.

  “Everyone please go stand over there by the building. Thea, you get behind the building so I cannot see you.” He pointed as he gave his orders.

  We walked back towards the Citadel; Thea lifted her skirts and ran.

  “Further back, Commander, please go further back. You too, James; there is no need for you to risk yourself if things go wrong.”

  ******

  Our little group of watchers walked about a hundred paces away from wagon and stopped. Aron waited until we were gathered there. Then he walked towards the corner of the Citadel where Thea had run. He picked up a candle lantern that was already lit, said something to Thea who had poked her head around the corner that caused her to hurriedly withdraw, and walked back to the wagon.

  We watched as Aron used the lantern to light a candle. Then, shielding the flame with his hand so it would not blow out, he walked briskly over to the wagon.

  Aron shifted the candle to his left hand, murmured something and made the sign of the cross, and then he held the candle to the end of the fire rope. Suddenly, he spun around, dropped the candle on the ground, and ran desperately towards us. As he did, the fire rope caught fire and began hissing and popping and burning faster and making more smoke than I would have thought possible from burning a linen scrap.

  Then the hissing and burning seemed to stop. Nothing had happened.

  Aron had stopped running when he reached us, and turned around to look. The smoke from the burning rope was drifting away.

  We waited and watched. Nothing. After about one hundred heart beats, Aron started to walk back to the wagon. There was a look of great disappointment on his face. Richard and I looked at each other. Richard shrugged.

  Suddenly, without any warning, there was a great clap of thunder and a flash of lightning reached almost from the end of the wagon to the sheep. Both the ground and the air shook and a huge cloud of black smoke appeared in front of the wagon as if by magic. Foul-smelling smoke was everywhere and so thick between the wagon and the sheep that we could not see them at first.

  My ears seemed to be hurt and for a brief moment I could see that Richard was wide-eyed and gobbling something that I could not hear. Even so, for some reason, I could understand the words his mouth was making.

  “Holy God! Did you see that? What happened?”

  There was the strange smell of rotten eggs in the air as we all instinctively ran to the wagon and the cloud of black smoke that covered it. The wagon had rolled some distance backwards on its wheels, and its cargo was all askew with some of the bags of dirt having greatly shifted. Some of them had burst open. The hollow log was gone; the lightning had burst the mooring line hold it together and torn the log into pieces, some big, some small.

  “Look. Look! My God.”

  It was Richard’s apprentice and he was pointing at the sheep as he ran towards the wagon.

  They were almost all down on the ground dead or dying, and a good number of them had literally been torn apart. There were great amounts of sheep body parts and blood splattered up against the bailey wall, and we could see fresh chip marks all over the wall as if masons had been at work with their hammers.

  “Oh my God,” someone said.

  “We will be eating mutton for weeks,” someone said with a happy sound to his voice.

  Chapter Four

  The long night.

  There was unrest and rioters were in the streets the day after Aron’s ribaldi killed the sheep. It was a Sunday and that night only the Latin Quarter of the city was quiet. A few hours earlier the city’s Orthodox priests, every single one of them, told the Orthodox faithful at their various Sunday services that the Patriarch had intervened to unite the armies of the Epirus and Nicaean kings, and that the restoration of the Byzantine Empire was imminent with the King of Epirus as the emperor chosen by God.

  That was merely repeating old news. It was what the priests said next that caused the trouble and rioting—that God had spoken to the Patriarch and told him that he wanted his people to rise up against the heathen Latins once again just as their grandfathers had done, and that God said that every person who did not
participate in ridding the city of the Empress and her Latin gobbling priests would burn forever in the fires of purgatory. Rising up against the Empress and her supporters was, the priests told their parishioners, what God wanted them to do.

  One of the many rumours that had already begun spreading through the city was that the head of the Orthodox Church had offered enough coins and concessions so that Venice had stopped being neutral and Genoa had changed sides. Those two sea-going states were now, it was said, actively siding with the King of Epirus, one of the many men who claimed to be the rightful heir to the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople once again its rightful capital and the Patriarch of the Orthodox church once again residing in the city.

  It was a believable rumour as Venice was already known to have helped carry the Greek army towards Constantinople and had always been the Latin state most defiant of the Pope. And it certainly was an indication that the world was changing rapidly—it was Venice, as everyone knew, that had actively supported the crusaders some years ago when they captured Constantinople and established the Latin Empire with its Latin gobbling priests replacing the Byzantine Empire and its Greek gobbling priests.

  The crusaders had succeeded against the Greeks and replaced the Byzantine Empire with the Latin Empire—with a leader of the crusaders as the emperor and others of the crusaders as its princes and nobles. The Greek-gobbling Orthodox Patriarch had abandoned his palatial residence and fled for his life, and many of his priests had been replaced in their churches with Latin-gobbling priests who answered to the Pope.

  According to Eric, the trouble had started that morning when the city’s Orthodox priests, every one of them according to Eric, told their flocks of worshippers during their morning services that the Empress was a heretic who should be either killed or overthrown so she could be replaced by a Greek-gobbling emperor approved by God.

  More importantly, the priests said God had spoken to the Patriarch and told him that he wanted his people to rise up against the Empress and her devil-worshipping Latins once again. God, the priests told their congregations, wanted the Empress replaced by the King of Epirus.