Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  “Where did you get that scar?” I asked.

  “Battle of Turin,” he said.

  “I don’t remember any Battle of Turin, Corporal Cuckoo. When was that?”

  “Why, the Battle of Turin. I got this in the Pass of Suze.”

  “You were wounded in the Pass of Suze at the Battle of Turin, is that right? When was that?” I asked.

  “1536 or 1537. King François sent us up against the Marquess de Guast. The enemy was holding the pass, but we broke through. That was my first smell of gunpowder.”

  “You were there of course, Corporal Cuckoo.”

  “Sure I was there. But I wasn’t a corporal then, and my name was not Cuckoo. They called me Le Cocu. My real name was Lecoq. I came from Yvetot. I used to work for a man that made linen—Nicholas, the . . .”

  Two or three minutes passed, while the Corporal told me what he thought of Nicholas. Then, having come down curse by curse out of a red cloud of passion, he continued:

  “. . . To cut it short Denise ran off, and all the kids in the town were singing:

  Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq,

  Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq . . .

  I got the hell out of it and joined the army. . . . I’m not giving you anything you can make anything of, see? This is the layout, see? . . . Okay. I was about thirty, then, and in pretty good shape. Well, so when King François sent us to Turin—Monsieur de Montegan was Colonel-General of Infantry—my commander, Captain Le Rat, led us up a hill to a position, and we sure had a hot five minutes! It was anybody’s battle until the rest cut through, and then we advanced, and I got this.”

  The corporal touched his head. I asked: “How?”

  “From a halberdier. You know what a halberd is, don’t you? It’s a sort of heavy axe on the end of a ten-foot pole. You can split a man down to the waist with a halberd, if you know how to handle it. See? If it had landed straight . . . well, I guess I wouldn’t be here right now. But I saw it coming, see, and I ducked, and just as I ducked my foot slipped in some blood, and I fell sideways. But all the same that halberdier got me. Right here, just where the scar is. See? Then everything went sort of black-and-white, and black, and I passed out. But I wasn’t dead, see? I woke up, and there was the army doctor, with a cheap steel breastplate on—no helmet—soaked with blood up to the elbows. Our blood, you can bet your life—you know what medical officers are?”

  I said soothingly: “Oh yes. I know, I know. And this, you say, was in 1537?”

  “In 1536 or 7. I don’t remember exactly. As I was saying, I woke up, and I saw the doctor, and he was talking to some other doctor that I couldn’t see, and all around men were shouting their heads off—asking their friends to cut their throats and put them out of their misery . . . asking for priests . . . I thought I was in hell. My head was split wide open, and I could feel a sort of draft playing through my brains, and everything was going bump-bump, bumpety-bump, bump-bump-bump. But although I couldn’t move or speak I could see and hear what was going on. The doctor looked at me and said . . .”

  Corporal Cuckoo paused. “He said?” I asked, gently.

  “Well,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with scorn. “You don’t even know the meaning of what you were reading in your little book—Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez, and all that—even when it’s put down in cold print. I’ll put it so that you’ll understand. The doctor said something like this: ‘Come here and look, sir, come and see! This fellow’s brains were bursting out of his head. If I had applied theriac, he would be buried and forgotten by now. Instead, having no theriac, for want of something better, I applied my digestive. And see what has happened. His eyes have opened! Observe, also, that the bones are creeping together, and over this beating brain a sort of skin is forming. My treatment must be right, because God is healing him!’ Then the one I couldn’t see said something like: ‘Don’t be a fool, Ambroise. You’re wasting your time and your medicine on a corpse.’ Well, the doctor looked down at me, and touched my eyes with the ends of his fingers . . . like this . . . and I blinked. But the one I couldn’t see said: ‘Must you waste time and medicine on the dead?’

  “After I blinked my eyes, I couldn’t open them again. I couldn’t see. But I could still hear, and when I heard that I was as scared as hell they were going to bury me alive. And I couldn’t move. But the doctor I’d seen said: ‘After five days this poor soldier’s flesh is still sweet, and, weary as I am, I have my wits about me, and I swear to you that I saw his eyes open.’ Then he called out: ‘Jehan! Bring the digestive! . . . By your leave, sir, I will keep this man, until he comes back to life, or begins to stink. And into this wound I am going to pour some more of my digestive.’

  “Then I felt something running into my head. It hurt like hell. It was like ice water dripped into your brains. I thought This is it!—and then I went numb all over, and then I went dead again, until I woke up later in another place. The young doctor was there, without his armor this time, but he had a sort of soft hat on. This time I could move and talk, and I asked for something to drink. When he heard me talk, the doctor opened his mouth to let out a shout, but stopped himself, and gave me some wine out of a cup. But his hands were shaking so that I got more wine in my beard than in my mouth. I used to wear a beard in those days, just like you—only a bigger one, all over my face. I heard somebody come running from the other end of the room. I saw a boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. This kid opened his mouth and started to say something, but the doctor got him by the throat and said . . . put it like this: ‘For your life, Jehan, be quiet!’

  “The kid said: ‘Master! You have brought him back from the dead!’

  “Then the doctor said: ‘Silence, for your life, or do you want to smell burning faggots?’

  “Then I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was in a little room, with all the windows shut, and a big fire burning so that it was hotter than hell. The doctor was there, and his name was Ambroise Paré. Maybe you have read about Ambroise Paré?”

  “Do you mean the Ambroise Paré who became an army surgeon under Anne de Montmorency in the army of Francis I?”

  Corporal Cuckoo said: “That’s what I was saying, wasn’t it? François Premier, Francis I de Montmorency was our Lieutenant-General, when we got mixed up with Charles V. The whole thing started between France and Italy, and that is how I came to get my head cracked when we went down the hill near Turin. I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Corporal Cuckoo,” I said, “you have told me that you are four hundred and thirty-eight years old. You were born in 1507, and left Yvetot to join the army after your wife made a fool of you with a linen merchant named Nicholas. Your name was Lecoq, and the children called you ‘Le Cocu.’ You fought at the Battle of Turin, and were wounded in the Pass of Suze about 1537. Your head was cut open with a halberd, or pole-axe, and your brains came out. A surgeon named Ambroise Paré poured into the wound in your head what you call a digestive. So you came back to life—more than four hundred years ago! Is this right?”

  “You’ve got it,” said Corporal Cuckoo, nodding. “I knew you’d get it.”

  I was stupefied by the preposterousness of it all, and could only say, with what must have been a silly giggle: “Well, my venerable friend, by all accounts, after four hundred and thirty odd years of life you ought to be tremendously wise—as full of wisdom, learning, and experience as the British Museum Library.”

  “Why?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

  “Why? Well,” I said, “it’s an old story. A philosopher, let us say, or a scientist, doesn’t really begin to learn anything until his life is almost ended. What wouldn’t he give for five hundred extra years of life? For five hundred years of life he’d sell his soul, because given that much time, knowledge being power, he could be master of the whole world.”

  Corporal Cuckoo said: “Baloney! You can take it from me, bub, because I know, see? What yo
u say might go for philosophers, and all that. They’d just go on doing what they were interested in, and they might . . . well, learn how to turn iron into gold, or something. But what about, well, for instance a baseball player, or a boxer. What would they do with five hundred years? What they were fit to do—swing bats or throw leather! What would you do?”

  “Why, of course, you’re right, Corporal Cuckoo,” I said. “I’d just go on and on banging on a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I’d be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment.”

  “No, wait a minute,” he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. “You’d go on writing books and things. You’re paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you’d have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I’m fit for is to be in the army. I don’t give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don’t mean a thing to me. I’m no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees, and whatnot,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with bees and roses, etcetera?”

  “Well, it’s like this . . .” said Corporal Cuckoo.

  “. . . I told you about how Doctor Paré healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn’t live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of a lot better than my old man ever looked after me . . . chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said ‘I guess I’d like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,’ I had it. If I said: ‘Doc, this wine is kind of sour,’ up came a bottle of Alicante, or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Paré said he wanted me to stay. I said to him: ‘I’m an active man, Doc, and I’ve got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.’

  “Well, then Doctor Paré offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was an army surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor’s office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he’d always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he’d been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Paré hadn’t saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor’s game was. You know doctors, eh?”

  Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said: “Uhuh, go on.”

  “Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they’d treated what they called ‘poisoned wounds’ with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Paré had run out of the oil of elder and theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a digestive.

  “My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with digestive. His ankle got better,” said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, “—like that. I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Paré’s digestive. The Doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know how doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there I was, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he’d got what I had. So he poured some of his digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Paré believed he’d got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.

  “I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said: ‘Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what is this digestive, or whatever your master calls it?’

  “Jehan said: ‘Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine.’ (I don’t mind telling you that, bub, because it’s already been printed.)”

  I said to Corporal Cuckoo; “I don’t know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they’re true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Paré’s digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in 1537. Paré said at the time: ‘I dressed his wounds and God healed him’ . . . Well?”

  “Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. “Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, eggs. That’s right. You know the proportions?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “I know you don’t, bub. Well, I do. See? And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not just oil of roses, eggs, and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Paré slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is.”

  I said: “Well, go on.”

  “Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Paré was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a ‘unicorn’s horn.’ Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out—hell, everybody was having a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes.”

  I said: “No doubt about that. What—”

  “—What the hell,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “What the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn’t been for me? And where do you think I’d have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Paré and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.

  “As soon as I thought I was safe, I went into a saloon, and drank some wine, and got into conversation with a girl. It seems somebody else was interested in this girl, and there was a fight. The other guy cut me in the face with a knife. I had a knife too. You know how it is—all of a sudden I felt something pulling my knife out of my hand, and I saw that I’d pushed it between this man’s ribs. He was one of those mean little guys, about a hundred and twenty pounds, with a screwed-up face. (She was a great big girl with yellow hair.) I could see that I’d killed him, so I ran for my life, and I left my knife where it was—stuck tight between his ribs. I hid out, expecting trouble. But they never found me. Most of that night I lay under a hedge. I was pretty sick. I mean, he’d
cut me from just under the eye to the back of my head—and cut me deep. He’d cut the top of my right ear off, clean. It wasn’t only that it hurt like hell, but I knew I could be identified by that cut. I’d left half an ear behind me. It was me for the gallows, see? So I kept as quiet as I could, in a ditch, and went to sleep for a few hours before dawn. And then, when I woke up, that cut didn’t hurt at all, not even my ear—and I can tell you that a cut ear sure does hurt. I went and washed my face in a pond, and when the water got still enough so I could see myself, I saw that that cut and this ear had healed right up so that the marks looked five years old. All that in half a night! So I went on my way. About two days later, a farmer’s dog bit me in the leg—took a piece out. Well, a bite like that ought to take weeks to heal up. But mine didn’t. It was all healed over by next day, and there was hardly a scar. That stuff Paré poured into my head had made me so that any wound I might get, anywhere, anytime, would just heal right up—like magic. I knew I had something when I grabbed those papers of Paré’s. But this was terrific!”

  “You had them still, Corporal Cuckoo?”

  “What do you think? Sure I had them, wrapped up in a bit of linen and tied round my waist—four pieces of . . . not paper, the other stuff, parchment. That’s it, parchment. Folded across, and sewn up along the fold. The outside bit was blank, like a cover. But the six pages inside were all written over. The hell of it was, I couldn’t read. I’d never been learned. See? Well, I had the best part of my two gold pieces left, and I pushed on to Paris.”

  I asked: “Didn’t Ambroise Paré say anything?”

  Corporal Cuckoo sneered again. “What the hell could he say?” he asked. “Say what? Say he’d resurrected the dead with his digestive? That would have finished him for sure. Where was his evidence? And you can bet your life that kid Jehan kept his mouth shut: he wouldn’t want the doctor to know he’d squealed. See? No, nobody said a word. I got into Paris okay.”