The Map

by T. S. Learner

  ‘A court report, an English court report?’

  ‘Indeed, it says here, “Shimon Ruiz de Luna was to be burned at the stake for espionage”. But you should read it yourself.’

  The librarian set him up in his favourite corner of the library, a small table, quiet and comparatively secluded, then left him. August switched on the desk lamp and pulled the file towards him. The sound of the rustling paper made several readers at nearby tables look over. Within seconds August made a psychological assessment of his fellow readers, a trained reflex from his SOE days. There was a couple of students, both bearded, obviously folk-music lovers, perhaps even beatniks, August decided, guessing that their chosen era of study would most likely be that of the French Revolution and its fall-out across Europe. He glanced over; appropriately one of them was reading Rights of Man by Thomas Paine.

  Diagonally across from them an attractive redhead was now eyeing him flirtatiously. August, not wanting to encourage conversation or contact, smiled faintly back. Twenty-one, undergraduate, father a banker judging by the expensive imported clothes she was wearing, he mused, perhaps the eldest child with no male siblings – hence her pursuit of a career. Although she appeared to be more in the market for a husband, he suspected. The girl, sensing his scrutiny, blushed and dropped her gaze. Opposite her, hunched over a pile of books, sat a man in his late thirties. He wore his hair in a military cut and there was a gaunt severity to his posture that August recognised instantly. A mature student, one of the many returned servicemen, who, having missed out on an education, had gone back to university – the campuses were full of them. He had been the only one not to glance up at August and despite the cheap frayed shirt and slightly stained tweed jacket, August trusted him instantly.

  Reassured that no one had followed him there, August opened the file. Inside were the photocopied papers of the original seventeenth-century document – the actual court report was locked in a safe in the library’s archives. He was glad to see that the handwritten scroll was legible. On the first page was the simple sentence ‘The Court Report of the Prosecution of Spanish Physic Shimon Ruiz de Luna.’ August’s heart quickened at the name, again he had the sensation that the alchemist was leaning over him, silently urging him on in his investigation.

  This is the testimony of Justice Winch, his account of the trial and interrogation of the Spanish Hebrew Physic and self-acclaimed Alchemist Shimon Ruiz de Luna, accused of both wizardry and spying, an accusation that resulted in a guilty verdict and the execution of the same gentleman. Dated January 12th, 1613.

  So Shimon Ruiz de Luna did reach England and was executed despite all his precautions in coding his chronicle, August observed, and yet Shimon’s prosecutors had failed to find the chronicle – what did it contain that Ruiz de Luna felt was worth dying for? Again, August felt a strange intimacy with this mysterious Spaniard, a curious affinity, but why?

  He read on, the account describing how Shimon was arrested at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields after apparently trying to bribe a courtier to take a message to King James, a letter asking for a secret meeting with the monarch. This was interpreted as a potential assassination plot after the Spanish ambassador identified Ruiz de Luna as being one of the accused named in the witch trials of Logroño.

  Shimon Ruiz de Luna and his Basque Catholic wife – named as the sorceress Uxue of Cabo Ogoño – were the only two who had escaped. Justice Winch’s prose was dry, detailed and painfully analytical and August could imagine the frustration of the unfortunate clerk whose sole job must have been to transcribe the judge’s pedantic account, the official’s objectivity only serving to heighten the horror of Ruiz de Luna’s torture.

  When it was established the prisoner had some skills in foretelling of the future, I had the torturer follow the wisdom and proven techniques of revealing evidence of Devil worship and sorcery through the referring of such insightful works as the King’s own tome – Daemonologie – and the great Germanic text The Malleus Maleficarum. This involved dunking and the placing of hot irons in the areas of the body where marks of the Devil are said to be seen – the armpit, genitals and the soles of the feet … the first iron was applied to the inside of the upper arm, an area known to display flesh marks and other unusual bodily growths that are a sign of the Devil. The prisoner, tied at the time to the wheel, did scream most loudly and yet refused to surrender any further evidence of his satanic practices.

  August froze, his fingers now gripping the side of the table. No, not now, not here. His rattling heart quickened his breath and a sickening panic swept through him. He closed his eyes and the face of an older man, with dark eyes and hair, flashed through his mind, the man’s patronising smile and apologetic air a brutal contrast to the searing pain August felt: fingers broken over the edge of a metal table, urine and blood pooling around his chair, wires crossing his lacerated torso, the distinctive acrid smell of curing leather, the soft murmur of Spanish, himself hovering high up in the room looking down at a naked man being tortured, then the terrifying realisation that he was that man. The cellar of a leather factory, Madrid, 1937. The memories were all there, under the surface of his waking mind. I will never escape them. Breathe, breathe yourself back into the moment.

  August focused his gaze on the most ordinary, most prosaically anchoring object he could find – a pencil, sitting on the desk opposite, a blue pencil, its end neatly sharpened, ready for use. Forget, forget, you are in a library, you are safe. But his body, ignoring him, began to burn – at the back of his neck, the soles of his feet, his testicles – all the places where the fascists had attached the electrodes. He closed his eyes and tried escaping into a pleasant childhood memory – night fishing in the Massachusetts Bay with his father, under a high yellow moon, the silent rhythmic activity of hauling the nets in, one of their only truces. I will not be dictated to by the past, I will not. He took one last shuddering breath, and willed the face of his torturer General Molivio away.

  Embarrassed, he glanced across the reading room – no one seemed to have noticed his sudden lapse of concentration, no one except the ex-serviceman who was now staring over at him. August caught his gaze and knew immediately that the man had recognised August’s symptoms, the tell-tale tremors, the clenched hands as if the whole world were unexpectedly lurching. The ex-serviceman paused over his page as if waiting for August to ask for help. August shook his head almost imperceptibly. Tactfully, the ex-serviceman looked back down at his book.

  August returned to his reading.

  In past interrogation I have found torture to be of remarkable effect and have witnessed countless witches’ and wizards’ confessions when these techniques are applied. But in the case of Shimon Ruiz de Luna, the accused remained stoic and unco-operative.

  The accused displayed remarkable foolishness in that he hath refused to give up the name of the devil he worshipped nor any witch accomplices he might hath had congress with. Instead he was heard to utter one name and one name only over and over. A name I can only assume was of a fellow Hebrew, an Elazar ibn Yehuda. The utterance was almost a chant and indeed the first time the accused uttered this name I hath misheard him and hath thought he said Beelzebub and was summoning Satan himself. This was the cause of some fright and mishap but I hath recovered myself and sent men to find this Elazar or at least some information. They found none and yet upon further questioning the accused would not give up further information. Unfortunately, he then fell into a fever and was no use to me from then on.

  The account then went onto to describe Ruiz de Luna’s trial that, to August, sounded like a sham, rustled up quickly to ensure the Spaniard was executed as a spy and not a wizard. Reading between the lines, he assumed this final charge was to send a message to King Philip III of Spain, but there was one footnote August was particularly interested in. It described how King James himself had a secret meeting with the prisoner on the way to the gallows in the hope Ruiz de Luna would surrender up his methodology and tell the monarch how he had come to his
accurate predictions of the future. According to Justice Winch’s account, the King had insisted there would be no record of the conversation between king and alchemist.

  It were on the fourth day of his imprisonment and before my interrogation hath begun that, to my great surprise, King James himself, requested a secret audience with the prisoner. The only witnesses to this audience were the Earl of Northampton and myself. The King, as flabbergasted as ourselves as to how this young Physic had prior knowledge of great battles and events, was determined he hath used sorcery or perhaps some great magical secret that heralded from Biscay, and sought to secure a confession. The prisoner offered up neither, claiming he had come to the King to prevent a great war from occurring in the future. Thereby the King declared the prisoner’s first charge to be that of a spy, the second of wizard and that he should burn. He then, grim-faced, departed as empty-handed as he hath arrived … ’twas maybe just as well, for, I wager, whatever the prisoner was concealing was not a Christian secret.

  Again the mention of a great secret. Did the chronicle contain such a thing? If August was to decode it, trace Ruiz de Luna’s journey, perhaps even find the very object he appeared to be looking for and tried to warn the English about, such a subject would finally secure August’s academic reputation. It was a seductive thought. August turned back to his reading.

  After the body was pronounced dead, I ensured that the charred remains be collected to be buried in an unmarked grave away from a churchyard or any other sacred ground, as is the custom of those executed for sorcery. However, as the body was being transported, a highwayman held up the cart. To the astonishment of the coach driver, the highwayman demanded only the remains of the condemned and nothing further. This confounded me greatly and I took it upon myself to question the driver personally. All he could say was that the highwayman was of small stature, masked and hooded, and spoke in a foreign accent, and that he was, however, mightily convincing with a pistol. Therefore I regret

  August turned the page. Instead of the final page of the account, there was a blank page with a note attached that read, ‘Last page missing from original document – never found.’ Like the chronicle, the last page was missing. He gazed down, pondering the fate of the mysterious seventeenth-century physic. He shut the file – if anyone knew anything about Elazar ibn Yehuda and his significance to Shimon’s story it would be August’s great mentor and old Classics professor. He glanced at his watch. It had been many years since he last saw the professor but he knew if he moved swiftly, he would be able to catch the professor before his customary afternoon stroll in Regent’s Park. As soon as August stood up to leave there was the slam of a door somewhere above him in the gallery.

  ‘By Christ, it’s good to see you, Winthrop. Unusually cold for this time of year, come in and take your wets off. I’ve often wondered what happened to my most brilliant protégé.’ Professor Julian Copps ushered August into the elegant high-ceilinged reception room of his apartment, part of John Nash’s neo-classical Park Crescent, which encircled Regent’s Park. August was pleased to see that the apartment had managed to survive the hardships of the war and was still resplendent with an array of art deco and Victorian furnishings. The professor, a tall stooped man in his late seventies, his face peppered with sunspots earned on countless expeditions in the Middle East, walked with a cane, having lost a leg below the knee in an accident as a younger man – an incident that had led to various outrageous undergraduate myths around the event. As the professor led August into a narrow but spacious sitting room that had a line of windows each framing a view of the park, his characteristic limp sent August straight back to the tutorials of his early twenties.

  ‘Just in time for tea, you will take tea, won’t you?’ Without waiting for an answer, the aged academic pointed with his cane to a small Regency armchair by a marble fireplace. ‘The guest chair is there.’

  ‘I went to fight in Spain, remember?’ August ventured, cowed slightly by the professor’s authoritarian manner. He took off his leather jacket, hung it over the back of the chair then sunk down in the seat, noting regretfully that he was now lower than Copps, who, after ringing a servant’s bell, had taken a higher chair opposite. I have become the stuttering rookie again, in awe of his intellect.

  ‘Well, naturally Spain was a good cause, but talk about a brilliant career suffocated in the cradle. Because that’s what you did, Winthrop, you committed academic suicide before you’d even given yourself a chance. And after all that sacrifice, Mr Franco won, didn’t he?’ Copps rang the bell again, then got up in frustration. ‘Mrs O’Brien, two teas, both white with the option of sugar, and I mean real sugar!’ he yelled through the door, then sighing, returned to his seat.

  ‘There was the other war – lots of men lost their education,’ August said.

  ‘Now that war had to be fought. Besides, Winthrop, you were not lots of men. You could have had it all, the chalice of an academic post. There was only one other boy as gifted as you in your year … Charles …’

  ‘… Stanwick.’ Jesus, I was hoping he wouldn’t remember Charlie, but of course he does.

  ‘That’s right, Stanwick. You two were as thick as thieves, weren’t you? Feisty chap. Quite brilliant. What happened to him?’

  ‘Charlie died.’ Not wanting to elaborate, August was curt. Again he felt the shadow of Charlie’s unlived life running parallel to his own, the guilt and drive to make something of his in some strange compensation. My ghost brother, the hangman’s card.

  ‘So many of them have, a whole generation ripped away from their natural destinies. But you, August, you were one of the golden ones, despite the unfortunate mishap of your nationality … Oh well, I suppose one can’t help where one’s born … Although we are at the dawn of the great American empire it has to be said and like all great empires it will have its colonies, its outposts, its conquests and terrible defeats. It will be everywhere, not just in Korea; you mark my words, young man.’

  The housekeeper, a portly woman in a floral housecoat and headscarf, appeared with a tray covered with a teapot, two cups and a plate of biscuits. Without a word she placed it rattlingly down on a small side table then left.

  ‘I shall play mother. Milk, Winthrop?’

  ‘Please.’

  The professor poured milk from a small gilt-edged jug into a teacup, then handed it to August and they both sat, the cups balanced on their knees, the sunlight finally reaching the edge of the carpet. He offered August the plate of sandy-coloured homemade biscuits. Not wanting to appear rude, August took one then hid it on the saucer behind his cup while he watched the professor dip his own biscuit into his tea. The biscuit re-emerged soggy then surrendered, crumbling back into the pallid liquid. Professor Copps sighed. ‘Sorry about the biscuits, it’s the blasted rationing. Mrs O’Brien has been reduced to baking our own. Not the same without the butter. You were saying?’

  August glanced at the older academic. In his day, Professor Copps had been considered the brightest and most erudite of his peers. A world authority on Arabic and Jewish history, he was regularly consulted by both governments and kings. But that had been twenty years ago, and time appeared not to have been kind to the academic, whose hands shook and who now, August noticed, peered short-sightedly through pebble-thick glasses.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ August answered, quietly, not wanting to offend.

  The overweight cocker spaniel curled at the professor’s feet growled in its sleep then broke wind, and the two men sat there pretending it hadn’t happened. Somewhere else in the flat a clock chimed.

  ‘Quite. Well, my young man, now we are in peacetime and what do you intend to do about it? A man’s future is now stretched out in front of him unhindered – well, at least at the moment. Isn’t it time to return to things that matter?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. After years of research I think I’ve stumbled upon something that could resurrect my academic career. Something potentially extraordinary.’

  As if to steel h
imself the professor poured another cup of tea and prodded the small dog with one foot. The dog awoke. Copps fed him the remains of a soggy biscuit then watched the animal trot off good-naturedly only to take up another sleeping position in front of the small coal fire.

  ‘As long as you don’t mention the words “The lost city of Atlantis” or “Alexander’s tomb”. You’ll be amazed at the number of amateur archaeologists who come knocking at my door. I don’t think I have the patience to substantiate another ridiculous treasure hunt.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with Alexander the Great or Atlantis.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘There’s a philosopher, perhaps a physic, I’m trying to trace the history of – probably seventeenth-century Spain. An Elazar ibn Yehuda.’

  Copps looked up, a tremor seemed to run through his body and the teacup and saucer tipped from his knees, tumbling down to the carpet. As if on cue the dog trotted over and began licking up the pooling tea. ‘How do you know this name?’ His changed voice was urgent and far more alert. Suddenly, it occurred to August that Copps’s dithering might all have been an act masking a far sharper and unchanged intelligence. But why would the professor conceal his intellect? Should I trust him? I have no reason not to.

  ‘I found it in a chronicle I’ve received. The name was linked with another man, a Shimon Ruiz de Luna, who was executed in 1613.’

  As if biding his time to formulate a response, Copps leaned down and rescued the teacup. Getting up slowly, he placed it back onto the small side table and shuffled over to the large Regency windows. He stayed there, looking out at the lattice of naked branches laden with melting snow.

  ‘Elazar ibn Yehuda was not of the seventeenth century but from a far earlier period than that,’ the professor finally replied, ponderously. ‘He was a Jewish physician attached to the court of Caliph Al-Walid, who was made the ruler of the Iberian Peninsula in AD 711.’