Company of Liars

by Karen Maitland

  ‘I hear they have food and wine in plenty at Voluptas,’ she told him. ‘But it would take a cunning tongue to persuade them to sell it. Some have tried, they tell me, but no one has succeeded.’

  It was as if she had thrown down a challenge and one that Zophiel, when he heard of it, could not resist.

  The friar came closer to the grill in the gate and peered first at Zophiel, then at me.

  ‘You can turn lead into gold?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘You do not believe it is possible?’ Zophiel raised his eyebrows in that too familiar gesture of his, a sure sign that he was laying a trap for some innocent to blunder into, but for once I hoped this trap would catch its prey.

  The manor they called ‘Voluptas’ or ‘Delight’ was as remote as the healer’s cottage. The ideal place for those who wanted to hide away from the problems of the world, and those at Voluptas did. According to the healer they were mostly from London, twenty or so men and women, wealthy, handsome and young for the most part, having fled when the pestilence first struck the city. But it was said the man who proclaimed himself their leader was not rich, handsome or young, he was a poor friar, but one with a great gift, for he knew how to stop the pestilence.

  From what we could see of him through the grill, he wore the robe of the White Friars, but this was not made of the coarse cloth with which friars usually like to humble the flesh; this was made of soft wool, thick and warm against the biting cold. His flesh was soft too and well rounded, his stubby fingers plump and dimpled at the knuckles. He held a posy of sweet herbs against his nose as he spoke to us, but they were hardly needed, for the heavy perfume which wafted from his own body was surely enough to dispel any unwelcome odours we might bring.

  The friar moved the posy far enough away from his mouth to speak. ‘Many believe it is possible to turn lead into gold,’ he said cautiously,

  Zophiel smiled. I had no idea where this was leading, but I already knew from what the healer had told Osmond that my relics would buy nothing here. The people at the manor did not put their trust in saints, but in this friar, and he put his faith in neither God nor the devil.

  ‘From where does the pestilence come?’ Zophiel asked.

  The friar looked puzzled at this change of subject. ‘From a surfeit of melancholy, an imbalance in the humours,’ he said abruptly. He was plainly anxious to get back to the subject of gold.

  But Zophiel hadn’t finished. ‘And how is this imbalance to be corrected and the pestilence prevented?’

  The friar sighed impatiently. ‘As we do here, by immersing ourselves day and night in the noble arts, by eating good food, dancing, playing sweet music, smelling pleasant odours, giving free reign to the pleasures of the flesh in all its forms, denying the body nothing it craves. People fall ill when they allow themselves to dwell on unpleasant thoughts and fears, when they deny the body that which it wants and make the flesh miserable. That is why so many have fallen to the Great Mortality, they dwell upon it, and so their body falls prey to it. I don’t allow it to be mentioned within these walls. We think only of beauty and pleasure here. But never mind that,’ he waggled his beringed fingers impatiently, ‘you spoke of changing lead into gold. What does sickness have to do with the gold?’

  Zophiel smiled. ‘You know, my friend, that all things are composed of the four elements, earth, water, fire and air, and the three principles, salt, sulphur and quicksilver. Lead differs from gold only in the proportions of these things of which it is composed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, this is well known.’

  But Zophiel would not be rushed. ‘Sickness, as you have so wisely said, comes from an imbalance in the humours of the body. If you keep the mind and body in their equilibriums, the body cannot fall sick, and if the body is sick it may be transformed into a healthy body by correcting the balance of humours. And so, my friend, it is with all things in the universe. Sequitur, one only has to find the right balance of elements and principles to turn base metal into gold. Just as you, my friend, through your wisdom have discovered that beauty and pleasure combined is the alchemic substance that transforms base sickness into the purity of health, so others have found the substance that transforms metals from corruptible lead to the purity of gold.’

  ‘You have discovered the alchemist’s stone?’ The man’s eyes lit up hungrily. ‘But this is what alchemists have been seeking for years.’

  ‘Not a stone, my friend. As you have discovered, it is not taking blood from the body that restores the balance of the humours, as doctors have so long misguidedly believed, but adding beauty and pleasure to the body. So the alchemists did not understand what they were searching for; it is not a stone that will transform, but a liquid, an elixir.’

  The friar’s eyes shone. ‘And you have discovered how to make this liquid? You must be a wealthy man indeed.’

  Zophiel sorrowfully shook his head. ‘Alas no, I have not discovered it, though I live in hope, my friend, but in my travels I have found one who has. He gave me a few drops of this precious elixir in return for some modest service I performed for him.’

  Here Zophiel pressed his hand to his chest and bowed humbly, implying that the service in question had been far from modest.

  ‘Alas, I have already used most of what he gave me to keep body and soul together in these hard times. But when I heard of the transformation you had performed on the body, I couldn’t resist coming here to show you what could be achieved. I knew that only a man like you would truly understand what you were witnessing. With the last remaining drops I would be prepared to demonstrate the wonder of it for your edification.’

  The friar hesitated, torn between wanting to keep us out and witnessing the great dream. He spoke to someone standing near him and we heard sounds of someone moving away from the gate. Finally we heard the rattle of chains and locks.

  ‘You may come in, but only as far as the gatehouse. I do not wish the women to see…’ He hesitated, staring at my scar.

  I smiled wryly; doubtless he was thinking that my purple scar and eyeless socket were neither a thing of beauty nor of pleasure.

  Once inside the gate, it was I who stood and stared. After all the ravaged villages and towns, the gardens stripped bare, the crops rotting in the fields, Voluptas seemed like an hallucination brought on by hunger. Here were well-tended orchards and herb gardens, clipped and neat, ready for the first spring buds. Turf seats nestled among banks of thyme and camomile, ready for lovers when the days were warm again. Irrigation channels ran with clear water and were doubtless teeming with fish, whilst the white doves pecking around the herbs suggested that somewhere there was a well-stocked dovecote too. There was not a single thing to distract the eye from the pleasure. It was a world that existed out of time.

  But we weren’t permitted to linger over these sights, for the friar hustled us into a small stone room to one side of the gate. A few minutes later several men came hurrying up. They were not wearing friars’ robes. The fine cloth, rich colours and warm furs they sported were proof that only the rich came here to think their beautiful thoughts. The friar knew what he was about; preach comfort to the rich and you will grow fat; preach hell to the poor and you will starve with them.

  Zophiel asked for a small brass brazier to be brought and some charcoal and he made a great show of heating the charcoal and testing its heat on fragments of wood and the blade of his knife until he was happy that the temperature was correct. He produced a small crucible, held it over the brazier, and with a flourish dropped three drops of a clear, viscose liquid into the heated crucible. It vaporized into a cloud of thick white smoke. He held up a small nugget of lead, grey and dull.

  ‘Watch closely,’ he commanded.

  Everyone bent a little nearer. They saw the lead fall into the crucible. They saw the smoke turn from white to purple to black. Everyone held their breath and then the smoke cleared.

  ‘Observe.’

  There was a gasp as they saw the glint in the pale afternoon sunshine. Zophiel
asked the friar to hold out his hand and as he tipped the crucible over the soft, fat palm, a small nugget of gold rolled into it, exactly the same shape and size as the nugget of lead.

  I waited until we were outside again and I was sitting beside Zophiel in the wagon. Not even a nugget of gold could wrest a barrel of flour from the friar, but we were trundling back to the camp with a large cask of wine and a live sheep trussed up in the back of the wagon, which was more than I had dreamed possible.

  I glanced sideways at Zophiel. His thin pale face wore an expression of smug satisfaction and his eyes had lost that hunted look that had haunted them ever since the day of Jofre’s murder. It had been months since Zophiel had the chance to work a crowd and his success had restored the old arrogance. He had done well and he knew it.

  ‘Gold covered by grey wax, I assume, Zophiel. Heat it and the wax burns off under the cover of the smoke. Behold, the gold beneath is revealed. Clever.’

  He inclined his head graciously in acknowledgement, flicking his whip across Xanthus’s back to make her quicken her pace. She ignored him.

  ‘But if you already had the gold, why not simply offer to exchange that for the provisions we needed? Why that mummery, which they might easily have seen through?’

  A smile twitched over his thin lips. ‘You’re losing your touch, Camelot. They are wealthy men. They didn’t want gold. What use is gold to them? There is nothing to buy with it. They wanted proof that they were right.’

  ‘Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?’

  He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for weeks.

  ‘No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn’t want hope, Camelot, they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right, that’s what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.’

  We camped that night at the base of the healer’s gully. We built fires and Zophiel slaughtered the sheep. His hands were skilled at that too. A flash of his knife across its throat and the beast dropped like a stone without a struggle or a cry. Zophiel caught the blood in a bowl and set it aside, then he and Osmond skinned and gutted it. Narigorm helped them, squatting on her haunches, as she dragged the steaming purple entrails into the bucket.

  The healer had told us that Adela should eat the liver and heart, so these I stuffed into the paunch with the kidneys and pluck, boiling it in the blood, along with the sheep’s head and trotters. We set two legs to roast on spits. The remainder of the carcass we wrapped and hung from the top of wagon, out of reach of scavenging dogs or foxes. In this cold weather it would keep for several days.

  We sent up some roasted meat, a trotter and a little of the wine to the healer by way of payment for the herbs. I declined to take them to her, but Zophiel offered to go. I had no wish to speak to the healer again.

  Darkness came quickly and the air grew colder still. The clear indigo sky was frosted with stars. Using the river as a defence on one side, we lit a semicircle of fires so that we could sleep between the river and the fires for protection. Then we sat under the stars warming our stomachs with the sweet roasted meat and picking the flesh off the trotters steeped in the rich blood gravy. Never had meat tasted so solid and satisfying. We stuffed ourselves until our bellies were swollen, and still had appetite to crack the bones and greedily scoop out the melting yellow marrow fat.

  Adela, though still tired, looked brighter. I hoped the healer was right and the milk would soon flow richly. The baby lay sleeping in her arms. He had taken several spoonfuls of the egg and already his eyes seemed less hollow and his skin smoother.

  The baby had been named Carwyn, which means blessed love. Despite his precarious grasp on life, he had not been named until he was several days old. For even had we been thinking of anything else but Jofre’s mutilated body, we could never have named an innocent child on the day we buried Jofre, tying him for ever to the name of death.

  It was Adela who named him. Osmond smiled wanly at her choice, but he never used the name. He never held Carwyn or tended him, even when he cried. There was something about the baby which he couldn’t bring himself to approach. He no longer sat with his arms about Adela as he used to do of an evening, but sat apart now, like Joseph in the paintings of the Nativity. Guarding, protecting, yes, but standing aside, no longer part of the mother and child.

  I had not told Adela and Osmond what I had guessed and I would not betray them to the rest of the company. I did not want to see the disgust in the eyes of Rodrigo and Cygnus or the pain in Adela’s and Osmond’s. And what right did we have to condemn them for being in love? ‘Bone of my bone,’ isn’t that what Adam said of Eve?

  Besides, little Carwyn was the only thing that could bring a trace of a smile to Rodrigo’s face. He doted on the baby and often cradled him in his arms while Adela rested. His own eyes gentled as he looked into Carwyn’s dark blue ones and for a few minutes he looked again like the Rodrigo I had first seen in the inn all those months ago.

  Since Jofre’s death, he had withdrawn into himself. His face was haggard and not just from the meagre diet. Before, I had seldom known him to go a day without practising his music. He said it was vital to keep his fingers supple. But since that day he carried Jofre’s body home, he hadn’t played a single note. I think he was punishing himself by denying himself his greatest joy, because he blamed himself for Jofre’s death. My heart ached for him, but I couldn’t find the words to comfort him.

  The only one of us unaffected by Jofre’s death was Narigorm. She did not change; things changed around her. Unlike most girls her age, she showed not the slightest interest in the new baby, almost as though she thought he was already dead. I tried to shake the thought off, but her way of looking straight through Carwyn, as though he was not there, frightened me. Osmond still took her hunting with him. He spent more time with her than with Carwyn. Yet even he would come back from these expeditions troubled by how much pleasure she took from the act of killing small creatures. But as Zophiel said, children enjoy the triumph of catching a bird or fish. It’s a game to them.

  Zophiel had been in a buoyant mood ever since we had returned with the wine and sheep. He recounted the tale of Voluptas with self-deprecating modesty, which from him always sounded more arrogant than a man who openly boasted. But as the moon began to rise, filling the gully with pale light and long shadows, his unease returned and he began to dart anxious glances about him, his hand straying to the knife in his belt. We all of us had drawn our knives and staves close to hand as the sky darkened. We had good reason to. Night was the domain of the wolf.

  I stared up at the top of the ridge above the gully. The moonlight brushed the brow of the hill with a silver sheen, but nothing up there was stirring. I could hear nothing except the crackle of the fires and the water in the river rushing over the stones and boulders. As I sat in the stillness of that valley, listening to the babbling of that river, I suddenly felt as if I was back in the hills of home. I could almost see the sleek otters hunting in the streams, the water so cold and clear it numbed your fingers. I could almost taste the sweet purple bilberries crammed into my mouth, staining my lips and fingers blue. And the wind, the clean, pure wind that in winter snatched your breath away and in summer tasted like white wine. I knew it was impossible, but that night I’d have given anything just to stand there and drink in the solitary peace of it, just one last time.

  I started as something huge and pale glided silently down the gully just beyond the light of the fires. Glimpsing it only out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t make out what it was. Then I heard the deep sonorous ‘oohu-oohu-oohu’: an eagle owl
out hunting for his supper.

  Cygnus shivered at the eerie sound and pulled his cloak tighter around himself. ‘What if the wolf smells the sheep carcass on the wagon?’

  ‘It’ll be drawn to the spot where we slaughtered and skinned the sheep,’ Osmond said. ‘The smell of blood there will be stronger.’

  They had deliberately butchered the animal a good way off from the camp, so as not to attract any scavengers, but now that it was night, it seemed uncomfortably close. The next valley would have been too near. Cygnus glanced in the direction of the spot, but it lay in the shadow of the hill, too dark to see anything moving there.

  ‘But what if it follows the scent back to the camp?’

  ‘It will not,’ Zophiel said. ‘It’ll find all it needs there.’

  ‘But there is nothing except some blood-soaked grass. That’ll only whet its appetite.’ Cygnus’s voice shook slightly.

  ‘There’s meat there. I returned to the place and left some.’

  I drew my stave closer. ‘That will divert it tonight, for which I am profoundly grateful, Zophiel,’ I added hastily.

  ‘But aren’t we in danger of encouraging it to continue to follow us for food?’

  ‘I assure you, Camelot, that if it takes the meat tonight it will be its last meal. The meat is laced with wolfsbane. Come now, you didn’t think I would simply leave it as a gift? Whatever or whoever takes that meat will not live to see dawn and then we shall be rid of it for good.’