Before she could formulate any semblance of an answer, Jonas unfurled his legs and stood up, setting off down the hill in the direction of the lake. She scrambled upright and tottered off after him. On the close turf at the edge of the water, they stood looking at a family of ducklings plopping off their nest into the water.
"Steven told me you and he have practiced fire walking," she said.
"It was part of the learning process, that the artifex might be aligned with the product in his alembic."
"Do you still do it? Firewalk?"
"Not in some time. It was necessary only at the beginning. Why do you bring it up?"
"Just interested. Something about what you said, the "bed of flame" in your vision, I guess it was, made me think of it."
He fixed her with a long and peculiar look. She felt pinned down by it, caught by the intensity of his gaze, and when he opened his mouth, she braced herself for revelation. In anticlimax, all he said was, "I want my breakfast now."
They walked on through the restored woodlands, and although he was still difficult to read, she thought Jonas seemed as pleased as if he had found a new disciple—which, Ana reflected, he had.
"You should thank alchemists for the distillation of alcohol. Do you drink?" He did not pause for her answer. "The scientific process, the discovery of ammonium sulphate. Algebraic formulation we owe to Jabir ibn Hayyan, nitric acid…"
The words washed over her, but she made no effort to remember them, merely listening intently for a clue, a sign of what he needed from her. Elixirs and dragons; the characteristics of mercury; the alchemical references in Ben Jonson; the names Kalid ibn Yazid and Cheng Wei, Robert of Chester and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton, Abu Bakr and Charles II; the magnificent Latinate stages of the alchemical process, the seven or twelve or more levels of transformation from the prima materia and the nigredo of dissolutio to the white of purificatio and the red of the Stone itself; the links between the planets and the metals; the alignment necessary between the artifex and his universe and the work going on within the alembic.
On and on he went, like a breached dam it poured out, and although the half-hour walk back to the house seemed interminable, it also seemed too short, because listen as she might—and how she listened!—she did not hear the clue she was waiting for.
Did Jonas want an assistant? An interpreter? Twice she ventured a remark into his flood. The first time, when he was describing the role of the alchemist in society, she ventured a comment about shamanism that he seized with glee and approval. He talked about Siberia and Native American shamanism, the sacred journey and the return to the tribe with a holy object. When that merged into a description of the properties of the Philosopher's Stone, Ana listened attentively before interjecting a remark about longevity. This time the remark was ignored, as if she had not spoken. She did notice, though, that eventually he included a lengthy review of the evidence of immortality among alchemists, which took them as far as the house.
Once in the grand marble entrance hall, shucking off the borrowed coat, Ana said tentatively, "You said there were photographs of the gardens…?"
Clear breakfast sounds came from the dining hall, but Jonas swept her into the first room, the one with the small television set, to display a series of before-and-after pictures. The grotto in its earlier stage looked like a jungle—she would not have been surprised to see a sloth or a monkey peeping out of the greenery. A montage showed a narrow path through a wall of branches being peeled back to become an airy ride, with two helmeted riders perched atop a pair of horses. A stretch of muck from which emerged dead trees, a few bog plants, and the handle of a shopping cart achieved its transformation as the pristine lake that she had seen at the foot of the summerhouse, complete in the photograph with two children in a rowboat and a trio of swans.
Jonas tapped a blunt finger on the glass over a tree. "We counted seven bird nests in that tree the year this picture was taken. Two years before there was not one,"
"A remarkable transformation," she said.
Jonas displayed a lot of white teeth surrounded by hair, which she assumed was a grin, although it looked more aggressive than appreciative.
"Breakfast," he said, and left the room.
Ana followed slowly, so that she was still in the corridor when he entered the dining room. There was an immediate drop in the hubbub of conversation and clatter as his presence was acknowledged, but the pause was nothing compared to the brief moment of absolute stillness that fell over the gathering when Ana walked in on his heels. Surprise, speculation, and consternation, all over in a moment when the scores of conversations were resumed in loud and nervous tones to cover up the silence.
Ana cursed under her breath. She should have thought of how it would look, the new woman walking in for breakfast with the guru. But surely they couldn't think—Okay, she wasn't completely hideous, and she was about his age, but surely—
They could, and some of them obviously did.
At first she was annoyed by the community's swift assumption, irritated at the obsessive childishness of the group when it came to their leader. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the stainless steel covers of the warming trays, and she had to laugh at the thought of this crop-haired, graying, peculiarly dressed woman who looked all of her forty-eight years accused of vamping the guru. It was too silly.
It had been a long time since the three A.M. cheese-and-crackers, and she filled a plate and carried it to an unoccupied corner to reflect. Her thoughts fluttered around madly like a cage full of panicky songbirds: Jonas and Jason, Dulcie and the absent Sami, cabbage seedlings and a grotto put to the torch, a dog sent tumbling by a massive hand and a dead boy in Japan with bloody fingernails. She did not know what to do, she could not control the images in her head, and she had never felt so far from home. I've got to get out of here, she thought. The hell with Glen, and except for two people, I don't care what happens to Change. I can't do this. I can't. Not this time.
She heard the panic building in her thoughts, and wrenched them back from the abyss. Grabbing the handle of her fork like a weapon, she stared furiously down at her plate.
Jesus Christ! she raged at herself. You go around ordering a fourteen-year-old kid to use his head—what about you? Think, for God's sake! It's supposed to be what you do best, isn't it? You study a religious vocabulary, you figure out how to speak it, and then you use its symbols to manipulate people. What the hell difference does it make if it's an individual instead of a community? Jonas Seraph speaks a language: learn it. What is his key? don't think with your guts, woman—that won't help anyone. Stand back and look at the problem sensibly. Use the brain that God gave you and that Glen and Antony Makepeace and a score of others pounded into shape.
First, review the facts: What had she learned that morning between the time when she had woken up with the floodlights shining through her curtain and the moment she had sat down at this scarred table?
Well, she had learned who the mysterious Jonas was. Oh, yes.
She'd learned that he was nuts, just to be technical, and that he liked to… She went still. She'd learned that he liked to talk. He needed to talk, and yes, he had indeed told her what he needed of her, not in a word or a phrase but in a spate of them. He did not want her to do anything; he just needed someone to listen. Not necessarily someone clever enough to work with, or knowledgeable enough to suggest alternative processes to his own Work, but a bright smile with an adequate mind behind it to talk to. Yes, a disciple. Whether by accident or by the machinations of her subconscious, she had struck precisely the right note, and she had found her role: intelligent passivity. A boy like Jason would not do as a sounding board because he tried too hard and lacked the experience; a man like Marc Bennett had his own agenda; and the woman Sami had lost patience with his genius and left.
And there was no doubt of his genius. He was, as she would have anticipated, extremely knowledgeable about everything to do with metallurgy, from th
e mining of ore to atomic structure, but he had obviously also spent a lifetime ransacking the world's disciplines for shiny bits of knowledge. Botany, physiology, astronomy, linguistics, history—you name it, he had at least looked inside.
Right. She could fill the position of intelligent audience. It might drive her mad, but she could do it. What else did she know about him?
She'd discovered that he was a man who could drag a woman into the dark woods, lay hands on her, stand inches from her, even talk about sex with her and yet not rape her, not come on to her, not even sound remotely suggestive to her. Not a talent possessed by many men. And she might have thought him to be one of life's intellectual eunuchs but for the communal reaction when she had followed him in: The Change community believed that Jonas was currently without a woman but that such a state of affairs (so to speak) was quite possible, and in this tight-knit group, she was willing to credit common belief with sure knowledge.
Sami, then, had been here, had been his woman in some way or other, and had not been replaced.
Yet.
Ana stopped chewing. No, she would not—could not—seduce Jonas with her body; the very idea was as absurd as it was distasteful. But with her mind—no, go for the man's weak spot: with her spirit, she could indeed offer to fill the gap in his life. His spiritual life.
Think, woman.
Alchemy: the key to his mind and method had to lie there. Alchemy was by no means just a phenomenon of medieval Europe and the Age of Reason; the very name was from the Arabic, and alchemical writings and speculations were spread in a wide swath across the Middle East, out from the China that most probably gave it birth. In China as in India, the miraculous transformation of base matter into gold was inextricably linked to the idea of energy centres rising in the body. The erotic disciplines of Tantra and Kundalini in India, the esoteric sexual branches of the tree that was Taoism in China, all were rooted, back in their beginnings, in alchemy, and all… all rested squarely on the dual nature of the human being: a union of opposites, conjunctio oppositorum; The Hermaphrodite, a name for the Stone; the symbol of king and queen joined together; the alchemist as artifex with his soror mystica, his mystic sister, at his side. As another discipline put it: Male and female made he them.
Man and woman together explore the mysteries, yang and yin, sun and moon, gold and silver. If she could remind Jonas of this tradition, far older than that of the solitary European male working in his laboratory, if she could convince him of it, she might at the very least buy herself some time while he thought it over. At this point, time was gold.
Ana put down her fork and looked around for Jonas.
With half the community watching, Ana went after Jonas, and when she had tracked him down in the small and separate dining room used by the high-ranking initiates, its tables elegant with white linen and crystal glasses, she arranged with him for another interview at five that afternoon. She walked with dignity back through the dining hall and up to her room, planning to have a bath (it being England, "shower baths" were few and far between) and offer her labor to the garden for the day. When she reached her room, though, and shut the door behind her, she was hit by a wave of exhaustion and jet lag combined with the shuddering release of tension, and she dropped down onto the bed fully clothed for a ten-minute nap.
Three hours later, the sound of voices going past her door woke her. She took her oldest jeans and a T-shirt down the hallway to the bathroom, splashed herself in a tub of tepid water, and dressed. Downstairs she found lunch being set out, so she assembled a sandwich and went outside to present herself to the gardeners.
She was given the inevitable wide-brimmed hat and a short-handled garden fork, and as she took the tool, she realized wryly that her faraway dream of spending her free hours turning soil was about to be fulfilled. She dug until blisters opened along both palms, when she was sent to tote instead: hay to the horses, firewood to the house, and finally stones in a wheelbarrow to a wall being restored.
After four hours of hard labor, she felt as if she had been beaten about the shoulders and back. Her legs trembled, her hand and knee throbbed, her palms were aflame; every muscle in her body protested. Worst of all, she had not given a thought to her coming interview with Jonas. Whoever said that mindless labor gave one a chance to think had never hauled rock in a barrow with a crooked wheel. But the haunting memories had drawn back momentarily into their pit; for that she was willing to suffer greater discomfort than this.
At four-thirty Ana laid down her load and went in to grab a mug of tea and another bath. There was no getting the soil from under her nails, but at least she didn't stink when she presented herself at Jonas's study.
The Change leader's room was at the bottom of a dim, dank set of stairs under the kitchen, in a part of the house that the Victorian family upstairs had probably never set foot in. She stood on the uneven stones that formed the floor and looked longingly at the three firmly closed doors in front of her. All three had new, sturdy-looking locks. Although she would have given much to see behind them, she had no choice but to turn and walk beneath the stairway to the open door of Jonas's study.
"Lair" might have been a more accurate description. It was a big room, twenty-five feet across and nearly twenty high, and from the looks of it had been the original kitchen, back when servants were expected to run upstairs with heavy platters of hot food rather than taint the upper air with the sounds and smells of cooking. The high windows, excavated below ground level, may once have lit the space adequately: now they were so covered with uneven bead curtains as to be indistinguishable from the walls, aside from a certain glow behind the beads.
Or not beads—objects, thousands of objects hung up against the light on strings and ribbons and fishing line. With themes—one window held nothing but drinking vessels, from commemorative teacups to the small mended pottery anaphoras of an archaeological dig, while the next one had figurines from all over the world, all less than two inches in height. The third one seemed to be sticks and rocks until Ana looked more closely and saw that they were bones: chicken bones, bird skulls, the articulated foot of some small mammal, and near the bottom an object that looked disconcertingly like the skull of an infant human being. She hoped it was a monkey.
Jonas was reading a newspaper, apparently a current one, which seemed to her somehow extraordinary, particularly as he wore steel-framed half-glasses to do so. He looked up as she came in, and his eyebrows raised as if he had no idea who she was or what she wanted. She tore her gaze from the strange window coverings and offered him a tentative smile.
"Ana Wakefield. You told me to come at five?"
His face did not change as he said, "I hope you are wearing more adequate footwear than you did this morning."
She nodded, and he pulled off his glasses and tossed them and the paper on top of the huge wooden desk that was piled high with papers, journals, used coffee cups, and more books than Ana could have gotten through in a month.
"Wait here," he told her. "I need to urinate."
It was indeed a lair, or a den, or one of the illustrations of medieval alchemical laboratories come to life, lacking only the actual tools of the trade. She would not have been surprised to see Rackham's awe-struck alchemical gnome lurking in one corner. Tables were heaped high with books and papers, plates of half-eaten food and cups bristling with pens and pencils. The ballpoint pens seemed anachronistic, to say nothing of the elaborate computer array with scanner, phone line, and an industrial-strength-sized external hard drive: quills and an abacus would have been more appropriate. High, dark bookshelves held literally thousands of books, many several inches thick and hand-bound in ancient leather, but others considerably more recent, and she had a true shock when she saw a familiar spine tucked between two books from the end of the nineteenth century: Jonas had a copy of Anne Waverly's Cults Among Us on his shelf, and she was very glad that she had refused to have an author photo placed on the inner flap. It was disconcerting, as if she had caught sight of
Glen peeping through the windows: comforting, but she could only hope no one else noticed.
Jonas came back and found her standing in the same spot as when he had left. He ran his gaze over the room as if to make sure he had not forgotten anything, then grunted, and walked out. She took the grunt as an invitation, or a command, but as she turned to follow, she glanced over at the headlines of the paper he had been reading, and caught the words AMERICAN CULT. She swore under her breath; all she needed was for another notch of pressure on Change. If the media climbed onto the current load of problems, it would not make her time there any easier.
"Why do they so love the word 'cult'?" Jonas was saying irritably. "They use it as a term of opprobrium, certainly of derision. Did you know that 'cult' is from the Latin cultus, from the verb colere, meaning to inhabit or care for a place? And that it is related to the Greek kyklos, wheel, which in turn is linked to the Sanskrit chakra? You do know what a chakra is?" he demanded, stopping on the stairs to peer down at her.
This time he seemed to want his question answered, so she obediently said, "It means wheel, too, doesn't it? Or the energy centers of the body that are depicted as wheels."
He grunted and continued. "Cultivate, culture, they're all the same, though I would say in this country we're more a cultigen than a cultivar. You don't have the faintest idea what I'm taking about, do you?"
"Cults," she said promptly.
"I suppose," he said, and led her out of doors.
They walked again, out into the jungle that had once been the formal gardens of an estate. Twice they went through green walls that she would have considered impenetrable, but Jonas knew just where to push his way, and they continued.
And he talked. She was well on her way to establishing herself as his soror mystica, she thought, but she had begun to feel a deep sympathy for Sami Dooley. When she got caught on a branch as he was telling her about the life of Arnold of Villanova, he merely reached back and hauled her bodily through the gouging, scraping branches. She tried to raise her spirits by the thought of what a fascinating study she would someday write of this whole episode, but the humor was halfhearted and the pain too sharp, and more immediate was the knowledge that she was being led off into the lonely woods by a man who made her feel as if she were carrying a rattlesnake in her coat pocket.
The Birth of a new moon Page 34
