by John Crowley
After we’d eaten, we went back to work. The globe was cool enough now that we could lift it off its chain, which was no mean feat. Then we discussed how to divide it in half – which is what we were told we had to do – and decided that a sharp-pointed diamond might work best, which in the end it did. What was inside it was not red at all but white: a beautiful large white egg. We were so glad that it had come out well, because our mistress had been very worried that the shell might still be too thin and soft. We stood around this egg as pleased as if we’d laid it ourselves. But quickly the lady ordered it taken away, and followed it herself, and (as before) the door was locked on us. What she did elsewhere with that egg, whether it was treated in some way secretly, I don’t know, but I don’t believe so. At any rate there we were alone again and waiting till the opening to the fourth floor2 was uncovered, to which we got up by our different means.
In this room we found a great copper basin filled with yellow sand, which was warmed by a gentle fire. The egg was laid in it and the sand raked over it, so it could complete its incubation. This copper thing was square; on one side these two verses were inscribed in large letters:
O. BLI. TO. BIT. MI. LI.
KANT. I. VOLT. BIT. TO. GOLT.
On another side were these three words:
SANITAS. NIX. HASTA.
The third side had only one word:
F. I. A. T.3
But on the back was a whole inscription:
THAT WHICH
Fire. Air. Water. Earth.
Were not able to strip from
The ashes of
OUR SACRED KING AND QUEEN
Was gathered by the faithful flock
Of Alchemists
In this vessel.4
I leave it to the experts to decide if this meant the egg, or the sand it was put in; I’m just trying not to leave anything out. That egg was ready now, and was taken out, but it didn’t need to be cracked, for the bird inside it quickly broke out by himself, and he seemed to be very glad indeed to be out, though actually he looked rather bloody and unformed. We placed him on the warm sand, and the young mistress warned us to tie him up securely or he’d soon be giving us endless trouble. We did that, and then his food was brought in – which was certainly nothing but the blood of the beheaded royal persons, diluted with the waters we had prepared. You could actually see the bird grow from drinking it, so fast that we could understand why our mistress had warned us about him: he bit and scratched so strongly that if we’d let him go he’d have done for any of us he could get. He was very wild, and completely black, until some different food was brought in – maybe it was the blood of a different royal person, but as soon as he consumed it all his black feathers molted, and he grew snow-white6 feathers instead. He was a little tamer too, but we didn’t trust him. He got a third feeding, and this time his feathers turned the most gorgeous array of colors7 I’ve ever seen, and he became so gentle and tame, and was so friendly, that our young mistress said we could untie him.
“This bird’s been brought to life and raised to adulthood by your hard work and the old warder’s kind permission,” she said, “which is good reason for a feast in its honor.”
She ordered that dinner be brought in and said we should take it easy now, since the hardest part of our job was over. We began to celebrate, even though we were still wearing our mourning clothes from the castle, which seemed to clash with the party. The young mistress was as always inquisitive, trying to find out which of us she could put to use in what way, and her talk at this dinner was mostly about Melting. She was very glad to learn that one of us turned out to be an expert in that topic, well acquainted with the literature. We were only three-quarters of an hour at dinner, and we still had to get up in turn and feed the bird, though he had stopped growing much. Just as soon as we’d taken the last bite, the lady disappeared, taking the bird with her.
Soon the fifth floor was opened up to us, and up we went in the same way as before, ready to go to work. There was a bathtub in this room, ready for the bird, and the bathwater was infused with some white substance that made it look like milk. The liquid was cool, and when we placed the bird in it he seemed to enjoy it, splashing around gently. The lamps lit under the tub began to heat it up, though, and soon it was so hot it was hard to keep him in it; we had finally to put a cover over the bath, with a hole in it he could poke his head through, and we kept him in there until he had lost all his feathers and was as smooth as a baby. The heat didn’t harm him in any other way, which I thought was remarkable, since the hot water had completely dissolved the feathers and colored the bathwater slightly blue. We uncovered the tub so the bird could get some air, and he jumped out on his own. He was so shining smooth that it was a pleasure to look at him. He was still a little wild, though, and we had to put a collar and chain around his neck to lead him up and down the room. Meanwhile a hot fire was built under the bathtub, and the liquid boiled away till it was reduced to a lump of blue stone,8 which we took out, crushed, and ground to powder. We used the powder to paint the bird’s naked skin all over. Now he looked really weird, because he was all blue, except for his white-feathered head.
So that was our job on that floor, and after the young mistress took away the blue bird, we were summoned up through the opening to the sixth floor.
This was a little troubling. There stood a little altar arranged exactly as the one in the king’s hall in the castle. The six royal things were on it, just as I’ve described them, the ever-burning taper, the black book, the watch, the planetary model, the fountain of blood-red fluid, and the serpent in the skull. The blue bird now made the seventh.9
First he had a large drink out of the fountain. Then he pecked the serpent until she bled profusely; this blood we had to catch in a golden cup and pour down the bird’s throat, which she hated and fought against. Then we had to dip the serpent’s head into the fountain, which revived her, and she crept back into her skull and wasn’t seen for a long time. The planetary sphere had gone on turning, and when it reached some satisfactory conjunction, the watch struck one; that caused the sphere to start turning again to make a new conjunction, until the watch struck two. We saw the sphere reach a third conjunction, and when the watch struck three, the poor bird just laid down its head on the book and allowed us to cut it off. (We’d already decided by lot which of us was to do this task.) He didn’t bleed at all, though, until we cut open his breast – and then the blood spurted out so fresh, and as clear as a fountain of rubies.10
We felt terrible in a way about this death, but still it seemed obvious to us that a naked dead blue bird wasn’t going to be of any further use, and we shrugged it off. We moved aside the altar and helped our mistress to burn the dead body (along with a small plaque that hung nearby) in a fire she lit with the ever-burning taper, and then to purify the ashes several times and put them in a cypress-wood box.
Then a really cruel trick was played on me, I have to tell you. After we had very carefully saved all the ashes of the bird, our mistress said, “Gentlemen, here we are now in the sixth chamber. Only one remains, and when our labors there are over, we’ll be returning to the castle to awaken our gracious lords and ladies. Now. I really wish I could say that all of you have behaved in such a way that I could commend you to the king and queen and see you all properly rewarded. But I’m afraid I’ve identified four lazy sluggards among you.”
Here she pointed out three of the company – and me.
“Because of the fond feelings I have about all of you, I’m not going to turn these four in for the punishment they certainly deserve. But they can’t just go on as if nothing had happened, so I’ve decided that they alone will be excluded from the seventh and culminating action, more glorious than all the rest. That’s punishment enough, and in this way they won’t incur any further blame from Their Majesties.”
Well you can imagine how we felt on hearing this. The young mistress certainly knew how to look stern, and we were soon crying our eyes out and believ
ing we had just the worst possible luck. The young mistress sent one of the many handmaids that were always standing around to fetch the musicians, who were to blast us out the door with cornets, and they were so full of scorn and derision they could hardly blow for laughing. What hurt more was that our mistress laughed so hard at our grief, anger and distress; and it seemed that even some of our former companions weren’t all that upset about our disgrace.
The reality was actually very different. As soon as we went out and shut the door behind us, the musicians whispered to us to be brave and follow them up a winding stair. This led to a chamber above the seventh level,11 right under the roof – and there was the old warder of the tower, whom we hadn’t seen all day, standing atop a small round furnace. He greeted us warmly and congratulated us that we’d been chosen for the final tasks by our young mistress. When we explained what we thought had happened, he laughed till his belly shook, that we had thought our good luck was so bad.
“It goes to show, dear boys,” he said, “that men never know what good God means to do them.”
While we were talking, the young mistress came running in with her box of bird-ashes, and (after she’d finished laughing at us) she emptied the ashes into a different container and filled her own box with other stuff. “I’ve got to go now and pull some wool over the other workers’ eyes,” she said. “You stay here and do whatever the warder tells you to do. And work hard—just as you really did work before.”
She went down onto the seventh level, opened the opening, and called down to our companions on the sixth to come up. What she did with them, or told them to do, I can’t say, for they were strictly forbidden to speak of it after, and we were too busy to spy on them. What we up above did was to saturate the bird’s ashes with the prepared waters until they became a thin paste. Then we cooked the paste in the furnace, and when it was hot we poured it into two little molds and set them to cool. We had some time then to peek down at our fellows below through a couple of openings in the floor. They were very busy at a furnace of their own, blowing on the fire with a pipe. They stood around, taking turns blowing madly, thinking they were the important ones and doing the important stuff. Then our old tutor called us to work again, and I don’t know what happened down there.
We opened our little molds – and inside were two beautiful, bright, nearly transparent figures, a male and a female, each about four inches long. They were like nothing I’d ever seen, and perhaps like nothing anybody has ever seen. They weren’t hard, but flexible and fleshly, like actual human bodies, though they were lifeless. I was immediately reminded of the body of Lady Venus that I had seen; I’m sure it was made similarly.
We laid these angelic babes on two little satin cushions, and for a long time we just stared at them, too stunned by their delicate beauty to do anything. The old warder wanted us to get busy and feed them with the blood of the dead bird (which had been saved in a golden cup). We were to do this by dripping it drop by drop into their tiny mouths. It made them grow, definitely, and as they grew they became proportionately more beautiful than when they were small. If the best painters of the world could have been shown them, they’d have seen how far Nature can outstrip anything they can do! Finally they were so big that we had to lift them from the cushions and lay them on a long table covered with fine white velvet. The old warder told us to cover them up to the breast with double silk taffeta, which we almost didn’t want to do, they were so unspeakably lovely. We had used up nearly all the bird blood on them, and they were perfect and fully grown; they had long, golden-yellow hair. That body of Venus that I saw had nothing on them.
They had as yet no warmth, no senses. They were dead statues, though they looked so natural and lifelike. The old warder made it clear we had to be careful not to let them grow too big, so he told us to stop the feeding and covered their faces as well with the silk. Bright torches were then set all around the table. I have to say that there was no real reason for the torches – the old warder had ordered them put there only so that we couldn’t see the souls that were soon going to enter into these bodies. I myself wouldn’t have been on the lookout for this big event if I hadn’t seen those flames of spirit twice before. I said nothing about that to my fellows and didn’t let the old warder know what I knew, either.
…I could make out a small opening, now shut – none of the others noticed it.
He asked us to sit on a bench opposite the table. After a time our mistress came in, with musicians and other accouterments, including two exquisite white garments such as I had not seen anywhere in the castle. I can’t describe them; they seemed somehow made of crystal, but they were soft, and not transparent – well, I just don’t know what more to say. She laid them on a table, and when she had seated her maidens around the room she and the old warder began a series of actions intended to seem magical but which were only to distract us from what was actually happening.12 Remember, we were in the chamber just below the roof, which was curiously shaped: it arched upward in seven concave hemispheres, six around a central one, in which I could make out a small opening, now shut – none of the others noticed it.
After enough of this legerdemain, six maidens entered the chamber, each carrying a long funnel around which was wrapped a wreath of green, glittering, flammable material. The old warder took one of these, and after he had removed a couple of the torches at the head of the table, he placed one of the funnels in the mouth of the male body so that the wide end was directly under that opening in the roof. My companions were staring at the figures on the table, but I knew better – as soon as the papery wreath around the funnel was set afire, I saw the hole open above and a bright stream of fire shoot down the tube into the body. The opening in the roof immediately closed, and the old warder removed the funnel. The figure then definitely began to blink his eyes, though he barely moved otherwise, and my fellows of course thought that it had been the burning wreath of stuff that had brought him to life. Another funnel was then placed in his mouth, and the stuff around it lit, and the opening opened, and more soul went down through the tube.
The whole process was gone through three times for each figure; then all the torches were put out and carried away. The white velvet covering of the table was folded over the faintly stirring bodies. A farther room was then unlocked, to reveal a nuptial or birthing bed, which had been prepared for them. We carried the couple to the bedchamber, the velvet wrappings were taken off them, and they were put gently to bed close together. We drew the bed-curtains around them and left them there to sleep a long while.
The young mistress went off meantime to see how her other workers were doing. She later told me that they were very happy, because they were at the work of making gold – which is certainly a part of the Great Art, though not the main part, or the best, or the most valuable. They’d been given a portion of the dead bird’s ashes, so they believed that this was what the whole process had been for, and the gold they produced would be the thing that brought life to the dead.
But we all the while sat very still, waiting for the married couple to wake up. We’d only been waiting half an hour or so when who should fly into the chamber but little Cupid!13 After he’d greeted us all in his merry way, he flew to the bed, pulled open the curtains, and began teasing and pestering the couple there until they woke up! They were completely amazed to find themselves where they were, because as far as they knew14 they’d simply lain asleep from the moment they’d lost their heads till now. Cupid introduced them to each other, then stepped aside so that they could recover a little. Meantime he kept up his old tricks with the rest of us. “We need some music in here! I want music to cheer up these long faces!” So we had to go call in those musicians, who struck up a tune.
In a while our mistress returned. She humbly greeted the king and queen (who were still feeling a little faint) and kissed their hands. She brought them those two strange garments I tried to describe before and helped them on with them; then they stepped forth. Two fine but very odd thro
ne-chairs were put out for them, and there they sat. We all congratulated them with the greatest reverence, and the king whispered how grateful he was to all of us, and that we were all in his very good graces.
It was five o’clock now, and the king and queen had to depart as soon as all their important regalia could be loaded onto the ships. We accompanied the royal couple all the way down the winding stairs, through all the doors and the surrounding walls and battlements, down to their ship in the harbor. They got on board, with a number of maidens and Cupid, and sailed away so swiftly that they were soon out of sight. I learned later that several tall ships came out to meet them, and in just four hours they’d crossed those many leagues of sea.
The musicians now had to carry all of our things from the tower into the other ships and make them ready for the return journey. This was taking a very long time, so the old warder gave an order, and a number of soldiers appeared who had been concealed in alcoves in the thickness of the wall. (I realized then that the tower was well protected against attack.) These soldiers made quick work of the packing and loading of our stuff, so there was nothing more for us to do but go have some supper.
When the table was all laid, the young mistress brought the four of us who’d been called the “lazy sluggards” in among our companions again. We were supposed to behave as though we were very downcast and all, and not laugh.15 Those others grinned smugly at one another, though it seemed a few of them did feel a little sorry for us as well. The old warder had supper with us, and he was a sharp moderator of our table talk: no one could give a clever opinion that he couldn’t turn right around, or stand on its head, and improve on – or at least speak knowledgeably about. I learned a good deal from that gentleman. It would be a fine thing if everyone could go and sit at his feet, and study his methods. Things wouldn’t go wrong so often and so disastrously in the world.
