Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Are you really so old?” I asked in wonderment. “How is that possible?”

  “How is it possible for a person almost thirty years old to look like a boy of thirteen?” Geber glanced at me. “The thinking man questions himself first. For me, time is running out.”

  “Maybe the physico can help you,” I said uneasily, dodging the issue of age and time, though I wondered at his secret source of knowledge that revealed to him my true age. I was determined to wrest answers from him, though I could tell he wouldn’t yield them easily. I would have to use ingegno and circumspection with him. Changing the subject, I asked, “Can you really turn base metal into gold?”

  “Any good alchemist can,” he said dismissively. “A dog trained in alchemy could.”

  “I want to learn how!”

  “Soon. There are more important concerns, with the plague consuming me as I stand here. I want to create the perfect philosopher’s stone…. I want to revivify the dead, I want to generate a homunculus and to master nature and to avert chaos, that is the end of alchemy!”

  His words were so fiery and ambitious, so unlike the false, pious platitudes mouthed by priests, that I was intrigued. “Isn’t nature everything? How can that be mastered?” I asked.

  “Many agree with you: ‘art’s so naked and devoid of skill that never can he bring to life or make it seem that it is natural…He’ll ne’er attain to Nature’s subtlety though he should strive to do so all his life….’” Geber winked at me. “So it says in the story of the love of a rose.”

  “I love roses,” I said, thinking of how pretty noblewomen held them in their gloved hands. “The color, the smell, the softness of their petals. They’re beautiful and good.”

  “Do you not love painted roses more? As if from nature but with man’s artfulness applied to it?” Geber asked. I shivered, wondering if he really did know about my singular travels. He went on, “The mistake in your logic, if you can call what comes out of your thick head logic, is separating my work from nature. I do nature’s work for her and with her, so she submits to me.”

  “If Giotto had painted a rose, I would love it more,” I admitted. “But Giotto turned to nature to find what was sacred and holy. He copied figures from nature, people as they really move in life. As God made man. It’s part of what gives his paintings such power and holiness.”

  “Neither is alchemy an unholy art,” Geber replied. “Though demons attend it, as they do everything in the material world, even saints and magicians with thick-headed sons.”

  “Do you know about my parents?” I demanded. “Who they are, what happened? Why did you call them magicians before?”

  “What if I did?” Geber asked.

  “Then you must tell me!”

  “Must I? Would I really be helping you if I did?”

  “Bastardo, Bastardo,” called Rosso, a faint voice from outside.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Why won’t you tell me what I want to know?”

  “Why would I deprive you of your journey? He who fails to keep turning the wheel thus set in motion has damaged the working of the world and wasted his life, Luca.”

  “You speak in riddles,” I grumbled. “Everywhere I go lately, riddles. No answers!”

  Geber smiled. “Maybe you’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “Then tell me about yourself,” I said. Maybe if he revealed himself, he would let slip other answers. I said, “Where did you come from?”

  Geber nodded slowly. “I belonged to a people who are mostly gone now. We were the guardians of secrets that the world needs, but isn’t ready for. We were trying to purify and perfect ourselves. We called ourselves Cathars.”

  “Cathars, I’ve heard of them,” I said, remembering a long-ago day in the Oltrarno, an uncaring northerner, and a beautifully crafted vial of poison for blue-eyed Ingrid. “I heard that the Cathars were a heretical sect that the Church killed.”

  “Not a heretical sect! One that possessed the secret teachings of the Messiah, for which the Church largely exterminated us,” Geber said bitterly. “The things we taught—direct experience of God, tolerance, purity, the equality of man and woman, unyielding devotion to the true ministry of Jesus—threatened the secular power that the Holy Roman Empire craves. There was no room for us in their corrupt doctrine of the lust for wealth, hate, and exclusion! They coveted our secrets and our treasures while pretending to worship the Lord of love!”

  “Luca Bastardo!” called Rosso, more loudly and with exasperation.

  “But Cathars still exist,” I said hurriedly. “Some were in Florence twenty years ago.”

  “You want to know about the connection between your parents and my people.”

  “I want to know who I am, where I came from, why I’m different from other people, and what it means! I want to know the secrets of my origins, and if I’m different even from my parents!”

  Geber looked at me for a long moment. “The Cathars knew many secrets. We kept treasures. Our purity made us worthy. What makes you worthy, Luca?”

  “I have struggled my whole life to answer that question!” I cried.

  “Could it be that the struggle itself is your answer? That it’s not for me to shorten your quest?” Geber asked steadily. “Does not your personal quest progress history along toward its end, allowing men to be the swords with which spirit wages war? What, after all, is history: the great swaths of events or the sum of individual lives? Which is more important?”

  “Luca, now!” Rosso shouted.

  Geber and I regarded each other. I realized that, today, he would not answer my questions, except with questions of his own which I could not begin to answer. “You asked me to bring you something. Here.” I held up the sharpened stick and then laid it on the table.

  “A pointed stick?”

  “For copying letters into a wax tablet, a task which is purgatory on earth,” I said. Rachel’s merciless face flashed into my head. She was a hard mistress.

  “An alchemical gift.” Geber looked pleased and surprised. “Thoughts transmuted into signs, which become spoken words and thoughts again: the richest alchemy…”

  “Bastardo! Ufficiale!” Rosso called urgently. I waved good-bye to Geber and fled down the stairs. Rosso waited outside the door, nervously rubbing his hand through his bristly, balding red hair. We walked toward some bodies, dead condottieri, on the cobblestones. Three ufficiali on horseback cantered up to us. The two in the lead stared at me, and I stared back defiantly. I was free now. I didn’t have to drop my gaze and slink off like a guilty mongrel at the approach of the police. My boldness must have unsettled them, because they pulled back. The one in the rear drew his dancing horse alongside me, then spat at me. I looked up into Nicolo Silvano’s narrow face. For a moment, furious and appalled and a little terrified that some diabolical alchemist had reunited Silvano’s pneuma with his body, I saw his father’s mien. But then it was Nicolo, dressed in the red of a magistrate with an elaborate rolled cowl around his neck.

  “The city must be desperate for ufficiali if they’re making magistrates of scum like you,” I sneered.

  “There is witchcraft about you, Bastardo,” Nicolo hissed. “I’m telling people about you, and we’re watching you!” He dug his heels into his horse and trotted off with the other ufficiali close behind him. Furious, I picked up a stone and flung it after him.

  “Beware, Luca,” Rosso warned. “You’ve an enemy in Silvano. Fear runs alongside the plague, and people are quick to kill what makes them uneasy.” I shrugged, stifling my anger. We each took a bubboni-spattered body by its armpits, lugging it to the ubiquitous heaps of the dead.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, my days fell into a rhythm. Rachel woke me before dawn and taught me letters, or rather, attempted to. I possessed the gift of auditory recall and verbal mimicry, and I never forgot a painting or a sculpture that I saw even once, but the meanings of the little squiggles she drew eluded me. It made no sense to me that those scratches cut into wax meant something.
Rachel took to pinching me with her elegant, strong fingers when I forgot how to form a letter or drew it backward—which was almost always.

  I escaped her schooling as soon as I could, ran from the barn to the house, bade the other Sfornos and the Wanderer good morning, and then took some bread dipped in olive oil and a chunk of cheese with me to meet Rosso at the Piazza del Capitano del Popolo. While we collected bodies, he would tell me stories about his wife and children. I liked hearing how his oldest son had copied him, how his second son had teased him, and how his daughter with the pretty hands used to help her mother sew his lucco. Once the girl had sewn his hose closed as a joke, and laughed until she wept when he hopped around on one foot trying to get his other foot in. When Rosso went to rest and take his midday meal, I ran off to see Geber.

  One day Geber met me at the door laughing. “At this rate, you’ll never learn to read, my fine ignorant sorcerer,” he said. His face and black tunic were smudged with grainy ocher powder and he emitted the scent of salt and wet leather. Behind him, tendrils of dun-colored smoke scrolled about his room, weaving through the plethora of strange objects. “I’ll give you a lesson as well, perhaps spare your arm some pinching!”

  “How do you know so much about me?” I demanded. In truth, the inside of my upper arm was black-and-blue because of Rachel’s slim strong fingers.

  “The philosopher’s stone tells me,” he said mysteriously, chuckling. He gestured me in impatiently and set about giving me a second lesson. From then on, we would stand at the end of the table where his three-beakered still bubbled as he painted letters, and then combinations of them, onto small linen squares. When I read the square correctly seven times in a row, he let me toss it into the fireplace and watch the ink, like magic, paint the flames purple and green.

  Despite myself, after a few months, as Florence baked in the natural oven of the Arno valley and then cooled again, and the number of corpses swelled like the tide and then finally began to wane, the double lessons began to work. Through no merit of my own, letters surrendered their mystery and spoke to me, first in whispers and then in clear, reasonable tones. As I read first syllables and then whole words, Rachel began to scribble numbers and sums alongside sentences. Before the plague, and hopefully again after, Florence with its banks and merchants abounded with people who could cipher well. As Silvano had told me, this skill was called abbaco, it was much valued in commerce, and I was pleased to learn it.

  As my reading skills quickened, Geber spoke of other things. He showed me weights and measures, demonstrated the properties of metals and herbs, lectured on the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water, and the four qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry, and explained how all ores come from mercury and sulfur. He discussed with me the transformation of matter, such as when water, through evaporation, becomes air, and through condensation becomes water again. He instructed me in the difference between the purely mimetic art, which copies nature, and the perfective art, which improves upon it.

  “The alchemist must use what nature uses, and restrict himself to that; the naturalness of his products depends on his imitating the workings of nature whenever possible!” he insisted as if I were arguing with him—which I was not. I had the sense of an old argument that persisted in his head. He ranted on about the need for experimentation, for a consistent witnessing of the alchemical art without taking anything for granted beforehand. “Not all alchemists agree with me. But I write down my observations, all of them, in detail,” he confided. “I have made a great book of them, the Summa Perfectionis.” Then he gave me a sad look, and I saw his sadness as an opening to ask him again about the Cathars.

  “We were a group of worshippers devoted to God. We believed not in faith but in direct access to God, without the intervention of clergy.”

  “And?” I prompted him slyly.

  “And because we were devoted, we had access to the indivisible point within, the grain of mustard seed like a radiant blue pearl….” Geber’s voice softened and his eyes grew distant.

  “Where did the Cathars come from?” I persisted.

  “Directly from Lord Jesus,” he said sharply. “Our teachings are pure and perfect and come from Him. We knew, for example, that there is a feminine component of God in the soul of the world, that this material world was created by an evil God and that it is our task to escape material trappings through following the star within! That Judas Iscariot was no traitor, but was a beloved intimate of Christ and did only as the Lord asked in order to fulfill His mission on earth, that Judas was the only one to possess full knowledge of the truth of the God within—”

  “Judas betrayed Christ, even I know that, and I have no catechism!” I argued.

  “If Judas hadn’t handed over our Lord, would there be salvation?” Geber snapped.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “But I meant what place did the Cathars come from?”

  “Woolly-headed boys don’t think much.” Geber gave me a piercing look over the rims of his spectacles. “Cathars have been in all places and all times. We were intimates of the Sethian race before we received Christ. The Sethian race is the secret, incorruptible race of man, who carry the great knowledge and hide—”

  “Am I of that Sethian race?” I interrupted, excited. “What does it mean, if I am? Do they have marks on their chests, and should I have one, too?”

  Geber’s face smoothed suddenly. “I am not the one to reveal these things to you, boy.”

  “Then at least teach me how to turn base metal into gold!”

  “Not today.” He shook his head. “You will learn, eventually.” It was a promise he dangled before me, and with gold as the goal, Geber found me a willing student. He covered many subjects. He unrolled a great map on one of his long tables and showed me the Republic of Florence’s position on the boot of land extending into the Mediterranean, with the Tyrrhenian Sea on the east and the Adriatic Sea on the west. When I came to him with news of how a roving band of soldiers had killed three men and raped their women in the countryside and nothing was done about it by the city fathers, who had been decimated by the plague, he explained the city government and its history, how the nine-man Signoria which led the city was now jeopardized by the plague.

  “Even the great Florentine casate are foundering, which is a measure of the plague’s devastation,” Geber said. “The casate originated hundreds of years ago. These ruling families are the Uberti, the Visdomini, the Buondelmonti, the Scali, the Medici, the Malespini, the Giandonati, most of whom had moved into the city but maintained their country lands with their patronage rights in their ancestral zones. They also nurtured a spirit of vendetta, which has haunted Florence, and which erupted into violence at a wedding banquet in 1216. There, a Buondelmonti wounded one of the Uberti with a knife. A marriage was proposed as reconciliation, but Buondelmonti chose vendetta. He was ambushed, and ended up a bloody corpse on the street by the statue of Mars.”

  “The Uberti had their vengeance, problem solved,” I noted.

  “It was the beginning of more than a century of problems!” Geber snapped. Everyone in Florence took sides, and the city was torn apart. Those who supported the Buondelmonti became Guelfs, supporters of the Pope, while Uberti supporters were Ghibellines, who supported the emperor. The two vied cruelly for power until the Ghibellines were finally broken.

  “Which led to the Neri-Bianchi struggles in this century,” Geber continued. He looked up as if preparing his thoughts, and I saw the small black spot on his throat. I made a small sound, pointing, and he nodded. “The plague has marked me. Now let me tell you about the Donati….”

  THAT NIGHT I WAS IN THE BARN scrubbing the stink of plague off me, listening with only half an ear to the Wanderer. He was prattling on about how the universe was a balance of light and dark forces that seemed to be separate but were really all a part of the great formless Oneness. I drifted into my own thoughts because, after all, the Wanderer couldn’t teach me how to make gold and wouldn’t pinch my arm if h
e caught me daydreaming.

  “I have been out tending to the ill. I hear your name being spoken in the city, Luca,” Sforno said seriously, as he came in and took the strong lye soap from me. I knew now from Geber’s lessons that the soap contained potash for the cleansing.

  “What name do they call him?” the Wanderer asked. He sat on the tripod stool and stroked the fat gray barn cat. “Ah, but the question really is, and the right question is everything, do they give him a name or take away from him a name? Because to lose his name is perhaps the first step in the long climb up the tree of life to its Source.”

  “I don’t want anyone to take away my name,” I said stubbornly. “Luca Bastardo may make me less than other people, but it’s mine. I intend to do great things with it!”

  “The ultimate essence isn’t limited by name,” the Wanderer commented, “though for our convenience it is referred to as the Ein Sof, and one who contemplates it is annihilated in a sea of light and passes beyond control of his natural mind.”

  “They call him ‘sorcerer,’” Sforno answered.

  “Divine names unfold in accordance with a law of their own.” The Wanderer shrugged, combing his great gray beard with his meaty fingers. The warm-blooded animals in the candlelit barn swayed and uttered their moos and clucks and whinnies, and the gray cat even mewled, as if in response to his words.

  Sforno dipped the scrub brush in the trough of water. “They say he practices black magic to remain youthful and beautiful, that no ordinary boy could have killed eight men in one night.”

  “Do they say he kills Christian babies and drinks their blood, as they do about us? Do they give you satanic horns, too?” the Wanderer crowed. “Welcome to the tribe, wolf cub! God has chosen you, too, and tribulations and struggle await you!” He clapped me on the shoulder.

  Sforno shrugged. “Silvano’s son is telling tales. Those left alive in Florence are listening. Florence is a meddlesome place. People are quick to believe nonsense when they’re afraid.”