by Manda Scott
Only a very confident man tempted fate with such hubris. In truth, de Aguilar’s chart was, indeed, one of brilliance, marred by a single hard square from Mercury to Jupiter, on the cusp of the third house. His sun/Venus conjunction rising in Aries less than one degree above the ascendant saved that square from misery.
The natives knew something about astrology. Owen had already found that they referred to Venus in the male form and dubbed it the Morning Star, calling it a warrior. Had there been time, he would have asked their opinion of its position in Fernandez’ chart. Lacking that, he had only his classical instruction, as taught by Dr Dee and Nostradamus, by whose lights it was reckoned to lead to recklessness, and possibly greatness, if impulsion could be harnessed.
None of which Owen had ever spoken aloud, nor did he intend to. He lay back against his rock and pulled his hat over his eyes, shutting out the sun and the sky and the distant, disconcerting redness of the city.
‘Fernandez, I trust you with my life, but perhaps not with my money. To grow these plants in quantities such as you dream of would need torrents of water and there is none here. I walked round the fields outside the town this morning while you were unloading the ship. The people have barely enough to keep their peppers from shrivelling on the stalk.’
‘No, my friend, this is because they do not have my great-uncle as their adviser. He had travelled the whole land in his time as a slave to the natives and he told me things that even they have forgotten – that in the inner lands, where the cities are overgrown with jungle, or on the edges of this barren plain, the natives of old chose the sites of their cities for the great underground reservoirs that exist naturally here. The land has chalk beneath and it forms aquifers that hold the water. He never put these two facts – the water and the rope plants – together; nor did any of my family.’
The rock was warm, but not overly hot. Owen stretched his full length lazily along it, ironing out the kinks in his back.
Presently, he said, ‘That sounds good. You can use the water to irrigate the plants and then if we can get Father Gonzalez who is half native by now to organize a monopoly on the rope trade for all of New Spain, you’ll be able to—’
‘Cedric! Don’t move!’
It was the first time in the entirety of their acquaintance that de Aguilar had used his Christian name. Frozen, Owen lay staring up into the crown of his hat. Sweat flowed freely across his temples and soaked his shirt so suddenly that the cool of it swamped his chest.
‘What?’
Evenly, Fernandez said, ‘There’s a snake behind the rock. One of the ones Father Gonzalez told us of last night, that is most dangerous, with the red bands on yellow with black between. It hasn’t seen you yet. If you can stay still a while longer, I will kill it with my sword … don’t breathe, my English friend, and you will be fine. It is so good that my arm is healed because I can use my sword … and you can lie still while I … bring my blade from its sheath and position it … so … and then I will— Ah! No!’
‘Fernandez!’ Owen sprang to his feet and spun round.
Red on yellow will kill a fellow. The night before, as they retired for bed, the priest had warned them of such snakes, even making a ditty in English that they might remember it better.
Owen had mocked him for it in private afterwards. He regretted that now. He regretted a great many things, most of all his choice of place to sit, and his appalling inattention. The snake was coral red banded on stripes of yellow with black at intervals between. Thrashing viciously, it hung by its teeth from the snowy white linen of the Spaniard’s shirt cuff, which had been pushed lazily halfway up his once-broken arm. Small speckles of scarlet blood scattered about it, fat as rowan berries; its teeth had punctured living flesh as well as linen.
De Aguilar stood rigidly still with his eyes white all round the rims. His sword dropped from his fingers, noisily.
The snake’s venom stops a man’s muscles from working – first his speech slurs and then he cannot eat. In time, he can neither walk nor stand and then his chest ceases to move and his heart stops. It is inexorable. The only way to stop it is to remove the limb. Few men live through that. Ah, thank you, Diego. If you care to clear the plates, we will take port outside in the cool of the evening …
Owen grabbed a blade and, this once, the voice of his fencing master did not sound in his head to tell him no.
With no thought for his own safety, he swept the borrowed sword high and sliced it down again, so close to de Aguilar’s arm that he removed half of the white linen sleeve.
More important, his sweep cut clean across the head of the snake, severing it. The body fell to the ground, writhing and pumping thin, dark blood. The front part of the head, with the teeth and all the venom they contained, remained fixed to de Aguilar’s wrist below the light linen bandage that still covered his earlier wound.
‘Fernandez? Will you sit, please? I can’t take it out if you stand. I need to work with your arm low, like taking out an arrow-head. Please sit.’
Like a puppetmaster manipulating a doll made of wood and horse-sinew, he manoeuvred de Aguilar to sit on the rock. Using his eating-knife as a scalpel, and with a strip of torn linen as a tourniquet, he set about employing the battlefield skills whose descriptions he had read in Nostradamus’ books and had never thought he would use.
The snake had ground its teeth deep into the flesh of the Spaniard’s forearm. Owen had to disarticulate the mandible to remove it, driving the knife’s point into the pinch of skin below the dead eye and wriggling it up and down to separate the upper and lower jaws. They came apart slowly and with much swearing on his part.
De Aguilar sat through it white-faced. At the end, he looked down to the four deep puncture marks in his arm.
‘I am dead.’ He said it without sentiment. His eyes were bright and level. His skin was a greenish white, with yellow at the corners of his mouth. ‘We should go back to Zama. There is much to be arranged if I am not to captain the Aurora on her voyage home. If Father Gonzalez is correct in his prescription of the poison, I have half a day in which I might function as a whole man, and I would not waste it. Juan-Cruz will be a serviceable captain for daily running of the ship, but he has not the vision to make her great. You could do it, but I think your stone will not let you leave yet, and the ship should go swiftly, while the men still have heart … We can decide later. For now …’ He stood up. ‘Perhaps you could help me mount. I have a day’s life left in me. Tomorrow …’ He drifted to silence. His gaze rested on the sea beyond the limestone bluffs. ‘I should like to see that dawn again. They say that from the lighthouse tower one can see the edge of the world on a clear day, and that all days here are clear. Will you sit through this last dawn with me, Cedric Owen?’
‘No.’ Owen was weeping, a thing he had not done since the blue stone became his at the age of thirteen. He kicked the limp body of the snake back to the other side of the rock and dragged de Aguilar’s unwilling mule closer.
Hoarsely, he said, ‘It will not be your last dawn. Father Gonzalez said amputation could save your life.’
‘But he also said that this was hypothesis and that none had ever survived it.’
‘So say the natives. They are not physicians trained in Cambridge.’
‘And you, as you have often told me, are not a surgeon.’ It was said gently, without rancour, as an elder brother might chide a youth for an excess of zeal.
Owen cursed again. ‘You don’t understand. Nostradamus made me read his books. He had me spend ten days of the princess of France’s mourning sitting in his festering bloody inn reading books on surgery and answering his questions on things I had never considered and did not think I would need to know. He made me take notes, which I carry with me. He foresaw this, and did not tell me that it would break my heart. Therefore I will perform the surgery and you will not die.’
‘But, Cedric, with all due respect …’
‘Don’t. Just don’t … Just get on your mule now and come bac
k with me. You may lose your sword arm, but I will not let you lose your life. Not when you are about to make me one of the two richest men in Europe.’
15
Law Forensic Laboratory, Oxford, June 2007
STELLA WALKED ALONE through a corridor of white tiles and concrete, through doors of brushed aluminium, to a laboratory of steel tables and glass cabinets that smelled of chemistry and cigarette smoke and death.
Dr David Law met her at the door. He did not look as bad as Kit had described, but the root of it was there, enough to build the caricature. She faced a small, wiry man with straggling, mouse-tail hair and chisel teeth that pushed his upper lip from his face. They were English teeth, stained brown by years of tea and tobacco so that when he smiled his breath preceded him into the corridor.
‘Dr Cody.’ He wiped his hand on his white coat and thrust it out. ‘Professor Fraser called to say you were on your way. Any friend of Gordon’s is welcome to my time.’
His grip was firmer than Stella had expected, with an impression of underlying strength that made five years spent exhuming Kurdish mass graves seem more plausible. Had she remained in any doubt, the photographic evidence hung on the walls; frame after frame of clean-picked bones in pits, in rows, in ordered and numbered alignments, all with fragments of hair or clothing or small bits of precious metal hooked over fleshless limbs or protruding from empty eye sockets.
Davy Law was somewhere in most of them, dressed in cut-off jeans and a dusty T-shirt with a cigarette hanging from lip or fingers. He looked more at home in the arid mountains than he did in an Oxfordshire lab.
He saw her looking. ‘It isn’t pretty work, but someone has to do it.’ His eyes drifted past her to the corridor. ‘Kit isn’t with you?’
‘He’s asleep in the car,’ she said. It was true, and sounded like an excuse.
‘Right.’ His too-thin lips tightened as he held open the door of his lab. His eyes glanced over hers without meeting. Walking away from her, he said, ‘Gordon told me you had a skull and needed to build the face from it?’
He turned to look pointedly at her backpack. The blue skull-stone slept in it, silently. Since the warning of Kit’s room, it had been quiet. She reached for it now, and felt nothing, no instinct to go or to stay. Gone, too, was the image of a face that had led her here. She stared at the floor, trapped in an unexpected uncertainty.
She followed him in, not speaking. He reached a glass-fronted cabinet on the far side of the room, a smaller version of the hyperbaric acid bath in the geology lab. She said, ‘It’s not a bone skull. It’s carved out of stone. Gordon thought we could trust you to keep it private.’
‘Did he? How touching.’
Leaning one shoulder on the wall, Davy Law rolled, and then lit, a cigarette. Blue smoke flavoured the air between them. Whatever had unsettled him earlier was gone, replaced by an acid, uncompromising stare that looked through her and past her but did not acknowledge her presence.
It was easy to imagine how this man might push against the boundaries of authority until he, or they, broke. She was beginning to understand both why Gordon had trusted him, and why Kit had loathed him.
Stella slid the backpack off her shoulders and unzipped it. Without ceremony, she lifted the blue skull-stone into the harsh lights of his lab. It no longer screamed at her, no shards of yellow lightning stabbed through her brain; they had gone as soon as she had walked into Kit’s river room. It was peaceful now, watchfully alert so that all her senses were sharpened.
She held it out, letting its blue cast lighten the clinical cold of his room. ‘We found this,’ she said. ‘There was a cipher in Cedric Owen’s ledgers that led to it.’
She was expecting a short moment of shock, of a breath taken in and let out again slowly, at first sight of the stone. She did not expect the surge of rage, or grief, or pain – she could not tell which – that warped Davy Law’s gargoyle features as his eyes flicked between the stone and her face, nor the astonishing burst of feral lust that had flashed ahead of it.
‘Dr Law?’
‘Keep away!’
He flung himself away from her, to the far side of the room, and slid down the wall to sit on his heels with his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms about himself, shuddering. For a long moment, the only sound was the rasp of his breath, sawing the air.
‘Should I leave?’ Stella asked eventually.
‘Probably.’
He stared a long time at the floor. When it was past the time for her to speak, or to leave, he dragged his stricken, bloodshot gaze up the length of her body, to rest for a blink on her face.
‘But you stayed. Thank you.’ He gave a small, tight smile. ‘Who else has seen this?’
‘Besides me and Kit? Only Gordon. Tony didn’t want to look. He said it carried the blood of too many people he respected.’
‘How did Gordon … Did he say how he felt?’
She remembered the hoarse quiet of the Scotsman’s voice in that first phone call. Your wee stone’s ready. I hope you are. And then later, It’s too beautiful. It’s just asking to be picked up …
‘He thought I should crush it to powder with his pile driver. He offered to help.’
‘Wise man.’ Law’s smile was broader now, full of acid irony. ‘He wouldn’t tell me what it was you were bringing. There’s not many could keep a secret like this to himself.’
‘He’s a good friend.’
‘Which is worth a lot, in this world of the friendless.’
Law’s cigarette was gone, lost in his flight. With shaking hands, he rolled himself another and lit it, staring at the redly glowing end. ‘This is Cedric Owen’s blue heart-stone, yes?’
‘We think so.’
For the first time, he looked at her full in the face. ‘Men have killed for this, Stella. They killed Cedric Owen, and his grandmother and everyone else who held it, back up the line of his ancestors.’ He pursed his lips, staring at her. ‘Were you followed, coming here?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure I’d know.’
‘Stella!’ He was angry with her, and did not know if he was allowed to show it. He bit on his cigarette. ‘Tell me you understand the danger you’re in?’
‘Am I in danger from you?’
‘No.’ He could laugh now, and did so, coughing at the end. ‘Not now. I’ve seen beauty and grabbed for it once in my life. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.’
There was an edge in his voice, just as there had been in Kit’s. Carefully, she said, ‘Is this the reason Kit and you fell out?’
He began to answer honestly, and bit it back before the words were out. He shrugged, loosely. ‘He’s your husband. I can’t answer for him.’
‘But he was a friend of yours? A good friend?’
‘Once. Not now.’
His bloodshot eyes were hard, but they did not flinch from hers. After a while, he looked round at the pictures on the wall behind her, and on both sides.
‘Everywhere in the world, there are men who see something they want and think they can take it and that the cost to others doesn’t matter. Always, it’s the men who take and the women and children who pay.’
‘That’s a particularly sexist viewpoint, Dr Law.’
‘Maybe, but I haven’t excavated a mass grave yet where the killing was done by a woman. I promise you it’ll be front-page news if I ever do.’
He was more in control of himself now, on well-trodden ground. He leaned back against the wall and blew smoke into the air between them. He looked directly at the stone for the first time since Stella had lifted it from her backpack.
‘Your skull carries the heart of the world. What man would not kill to own that? Here, in one handful of blue crystal, is everything we ever wanted: splendour and nobility and passion all in one. It aches to be taken, to be owned, to be possessed, so that only the strongest of men, or the most broken, could turn away from it. The rabbits amongst us want to destroy it, to crush what they can’t control. The wolves wa
nt to own it, to take into themselves all that it carries, not seeing that they can’t ever do that. And then, perhaps, if it’s what I think it is, there are the very, very few, who know what the skull can do, and want to stop that and take ownership. Francis Walsingham was one of these: Elizabeth’s spy-master. There have been others down the centuries. There will be one or two around now, for sure.’
‘What can it do? What is it they want to stop?’ Her skin was raw with listening, her throat dry.
‘I’m not sure yet. I may be wrong.’ His cigarette was a horizontal column of ash. He tapped it into an empty coffee mug and crossed his arms across his chest. ‘Does it speak to you?’
No one had asked her that, not even Kit. ‘It … sings. And I feel things from it: a need for care, an equal care for me.’
‘Care?’
‘Love, then.’ She smiled weakly. ‘But not only that. It has …’ she struggled for words, ‘an awareness I don’t have, as if it can see the world in ways I never will, with senses I don’t have. With it there, I can see more clearly, hear things beyond normal hearing, feel the scrape of my clothes. It’s like being newborn and old at the same time. And the stone is like that, there’s a truly ancient wisdom there, like a Buddhist statue carved into a hillside, that has life we can’t see. At the same time, it’s a lamb newly born that’s lost its mother and I’m all it’s got.’ She pressed her fingers to her face. ‘Why me? I haven’t a clue how to take care of it.’
‘But you have no choice.’ Davy Law smiled sadly. ‘You’re the rightful keeper, just as Cedric Owen was. The rest of us, who might like to be, but are not, have to accept that.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t want to own it?’
Law laughed at that, softly. ‘I did once, but not now. I think, of all the men on the earth, I am no longer a threat. A young woman called Jessica Warren taught me more than I can ever thank her for.’
