The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

Merlin stood aside and watched her go. She swept past a cluster of people outside a bedroom near the stairs where the porter was opening the door for Salem and Kassim Chakrouty, the two men who had been checking in when Merlin was collecting his key. Kassim did not expect the American to recognise him because he knew Merlin had never seen the face of any of his captors. All the same, he kept his back turned and pushed Salem ahead of him into the room. Once inside, he let his brother tip the porter and sat down at the dressing table, took out a sheet of headed notepaper and wrote on it Leila’s address which Merlin had used for himself and Jay in the hotel register. As the porter departed, Kassim was mentally thanking the French for making provincial addresses so simple to memorise: just a person’s name and that of a village plus a five digit postcode.

  Chapter 9

  Jay was aware that the restaurant was full, but the other patrons were an out-of-focus blur behind the pale blue eyes fixed on hers. Kreuz rambled from one subject to another, mixing politics with history, genetic theories with musicology, religion with economics. The hard-to-follow monologue in his monotonous voice was so like the hypnotherapy sessions Jay had had with her father that, at the start of the meal, she wondered whether her host was trying to mesmerise her. Two hours later she could not remember anything about the meal: neither what she had eaten nor what Kreuz had been talking about. It was as though he had been talking at her but to another person. Her legs felt woolly as though she had taken alcohol, although in fact she had drunk only water in the restaurant. She found it difficult to unravel why she had agreed to go along with Kreuz’s proposal – or even to be certain what it was exactly that she had agreed to.

  She walked with him out of the restaurant and back across the street to the parador. The fountains in the courtyard had been turned off and the peacocks were asleep in one corner like huge ungainly hens. There was some classical music being played as background music which Jay identified as Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons.

  Kreuz said goodnight at the bottom of the stairs that led to the bedrooms. When Jay turned at the top, he was still there, the pale blue eyes fixed on her. He bowed without speaking. Her bedroom was stuffy. Jay threw the window open and gazed at the Alhambra, flood lit on its hill. Below, in the shadows behind the hotel a veiled woman hurried out of sight round a corner, followed by the taller figure of a man.

  *

  The journey through the streets of the sleeping city led to a small gate in a blank wall, which opened at Mercadier’s first knock. Inside the courtyard stood three huge black slaves clad in velvets and silk. Mutes, they communicated by a series of grunts and gestures. One of them closed and bolted the gate before showing Eleanor up a flight of stone steps leading to the first floor while the other two remained below on guard.

  At the top of the steps, Mercadier went to open the door but was stopped by a thick and sinewy forearm. The mute signed for Eleanor to go in alone. He slipped the latch. Through the crack she saw only darkness.

  ‘Where I go, he goes,’ said the queen.

  Her meaning was clear. The slave grunted several times, went inside and left them waiting. When he reappeared and motioned them both to go in, Eleanor and Mercadier heard the door close behind them. There was a loud pop! and a blinding burst of light which came from a pile of whitish powder atop a metal tripod, hissing and crackling as it burnt with a strong sulphurous smell, spitting sparks in all directions.

  The intense light revealed a host of glass retorts, pottery bowls and metal devices covering several tables. Hanging from the ceiling was a small stuffed crocodile and a dried ostrich carcase. A cage held a pair of large rats, one green and one red. In another cage, a score of rainbow-hued mice scrambled over each other frenetically. In a third sat several huge green toads, their chests ballooning with each inhalation. A stuffed elephant’s head watched them from the far wall. Beneath it, two young lions stood on guard either side of the small figure in Arab robes chanting what sounded like a prayer in some strange tongue. The light fizzled and spat burning particles, casting a harsh white light that changed colour each time Yussef el-Kebir’s hands passed above it.

  ‘Sorcery!’ hissed Mercadier.

  ‘Be quiet,’ ordered the queen. ‘This is but trickery designed to impress the ignorant. The light is to blind us. Do not look at it!’

  She ordered Mercadier to remain by the door and walked towards the crackling powder and the turbaned wizard beyond. He threw up a hand and called urgently in Latin. ‘Stay, oh queen! Do not cross the mark or my magic is undone.’

  There was a line chalked on the stone floor right in front of Eleanor. It was one side of a pentagram within which he stood, the powder hissed and coloured fluids coursed from one retort through tubes into the next. Eleanor stopped short – not because she was afraid of witchcraft but because one of the lions had just blinked and turned its head towards her.

  She coughed as the sulphur fumes caught her throat. ‘What magic?’ she asked.

  The light sputtered and went out. The shutter of a horn lantern was opened, lighting the wizard’s face, thin and bearded with eyes that glittered as he reached with a pair of tongs into a small furnace. He took something out of it and dropped it into a pot of water where it sizzled briefly. He removed the object from the water and placed it on a cushion, holding it in front of him as he approached Eleanor and bowed low.

  ‘My gift,’ he said, offering her a large ingot of gold.

  Eleanor weighed it in her hand. ‘All the pure gold in Granada belongs to the emir. That is the law here.’

  ‘I can do with that what I will,’ said the wizard, his glittering eyes fixed on here. ‘Did you not see? I made it myself.’

  Eleanor was amused by the little drama. ‘You did this to impress me?’ she asked.

  Yussef el-Kebir’s eyes flicked from her to Mercadier who was keeping well back in the shadows. ‘I did it so you should know who I am, O Queen. In all the emirate of Granada there is only one man who makes gold for the emir!’

  While most of the inhabitants of the walled city of Granada slept, Eleanor and Yussef el-Kebir talked through the night. They used Latin, their only common language, of which Mercadier had but little understanding.

  It was a bizarre scene in the alchemist’s den. The lions had been led away by two hunch-backed dwarfs; one of the giant slaves now crouched in a corner, his eyes never leaving Mercadier. Beneath the hanging crocodile, surrounded by all the impedimenta of the alchemist’s art, a scholar in turban and silken robes sat on a richly coloured carpet, face to face with a woman dressed as a Christian knight.

  Yussef el-Kebir began by treating Eleanor with condescending politeness: a queen she might be, but a queen was still a woman and therefore every man’s inferior according to the law he served. Then, as Eleanor’s extraordinary intellect and wide knowledge forced him to converse with her as with a man, came the delightful realisation that this woman who did not veil her face before him or flinch in argument was that rarity: another mind on the same plane as his own, a person whose sex and station in life were irrelevant.

  The conversation was a fencing match between two erudite minds, embracing after the manner of the time, when disciplines were yet undemarcated, history and theology, politics and poetry, medicine and philosophy. Some time long after midnight, Eleanor abandoned the cut and thrust of disinterested and scholarly debate, to lead the conversation onto the subject of alchemy.

  ‘Al khimia,’ she said. ‘To us it’s another science you Moslems have and which we lack, but the word is Greek from khemeia meaning transmutation.’

  ‘A Greek name,’ he agreed, ‘for an Egyptian science.’

  They thrust and parried, he citing Zosimus of Alexandria while she responded with relevant Socratic theory, he telling of his own long studies at the temple of Ptah in Memphis while she offered morsels of the teaching of Diodorus Siculus.

  ‘You seem to know as much as I,’ Yussef admitted at last. ‘The truth is that we can make a small quantity of pure gold
into more gold of a lesser quality. More than that no man has yet achieved.’

  ‘…which is a truth revealed to anyone who brings a touchstone to your den.’

  Yussef toyed with the ingot she had handed back to him. He was puzzled. ‘If you know so much, O queen from the north, then you could make gold yourself, or seem to do so as well as I or any other alchemist. You don’t need me, so why do you come here at such risk to yourself?’

  ‘Because,’ said Eleanor, ‘there are two strands of alchemy. The one concerns itself with the transmutation of metals, while the other, of which I know little …’

  He interrupted her quickly: ‘ … is a blasphemy in which no true believer could involve himself.’

  Eleanor’s green eyes challenged him. ‘The other matter of alchemy concerns itself with the elixir of life and with reincarnation. Of this I know little and you know much.’

  Yussef shifted uneasily; the slave was a mute whose tongue had been removed in infancy and Mercadier had given no sign of being able to follow the learned discourse in Latin, but even so. ‘To admit such a thing would be to forfeit my life on the rack, my tongue and eyes torn out with red hot pincers – as well you know.’

  Eleanor was growing impatient. The dawn was not far off. As she led Yussef to an understanding of the reason for her visit to Granada, he sat still, fascinated.

  ‘Now,’ he breathed, ‘I see why a Christian queen should take the risk of entering a Moslem citadel in disguise. If apprehended, the least you risk here is imprisonment and ransom.’

  ‘At my age,’ countered Eleanor, ‘risking the remaining years of my life is a small price to pay for the pleasure of discourse with the greatest scholar of our age.’

  ‘Flattery,’ Yussef stroked his beard, ‘is the braying of asses.’

  ‘Tell me, Moor,’ she said curtly, ‘are you the man who can do this thing for me, or not?’

  ‘It is impossible,’ he said seriously. ‘No man can raise the dead, Madam. And if I could, I’d not raise Melek Ric for you. Should I bring back your son, the monster who slaughtered thousands of Muslim hostages? No, if you want to raise the dead, go to the priests of your own prophet. They say he worked such miracles in Galilee.’

  ‘I was told,’ tried Eleanor, ‘that you have sought and acquired all the forbidden knowledge of Egypt.’

  ‘I have learned much of the ancient wisdom. More than any man now alive, I’ll grant you that.’

  Eleanor tried to penetrate the Moor’s integrity and find a chink where some vice showed through. ‘If you will undertake this task for me, I’ll reward you with gold and jewels – not false gold and valueless baubles – but the very treasure that caused Richard’s death at Châlus. I hid it safe to bring him back. It is all yours, if you will do but this one thing.’

  ‘You come too late,’ he said.

  ‘How so, too late?’

  Yussef rose and stretched. Now he understood what had driven Eleanor to cross hundreds of miles of enemy territory to reach him. It was the strongest emotion known in Nature, the unreasoning love of a mother for her child.

  ‘Do you think’ he asked, ‘that it’s an easy thing, to prepare a soul to come back to this earth? Do you think I need but to mix a magic potion and wave my arms, muttering some incantation in a long-dead tongue? No, lady. The science of the Egyptians demanded that the candidate for reincarnation spend the last years of his life preparing the inner self. It was a discipline that few accomplished in several thousand years. I doubt that Melek Ric would have been able to begin the course, let alone finish it.’

  Eleanor was silent. The Moor had just dashed her last hopes. The pain of Richard’s death still throbbed within her breast, but her mind was clear. ‘Would I be able to prepare myself to live again?’ she asked.

  Yussef studied her a moment. Then he laughed, ‘Of all the men and women I have met, I think perhaps you might, O Queen. But would you want to live again?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  The Moor shook his head. ‘I have sons. They and their sons and their sons’ sons are my immortality. Why should I seek to live again? That sort of arrogance fits a Christian perhaps, not a Muslim. Your priests talk of everlasting life, I’m told.’

  ‘They talk of sexless, disembodied angels singing praises till the Last Trumpet sounds,’ Eleanor said scornfully. ‘If that’s what my first husband Louis Capet is doing right now, it’s also how he spent his wedding night, as I recall. What a waste of my body! That is most certainly not what I want. This flesh which has served me well is dying and I don’t want to be extinguished as a column of tallow is snuffed out at daybreak. I want to walk the earth again, Moor. Can you magic that for me? Or is it just a dream?’

  Yussef glanced at Mercadier, moving closer to Eleanor on the carpet and lowering his voice. ‘My researches in many lands have revealed that what you seek has been achieved. Not often, but in exceptional cases.’

  ‘And can be again?’

  He stroked his long white beard. ‘To make the journey from one body to another with the spirit intact takes not just preparation. It takes enormous strength of will, not to weaken on the way. The distance to be travelled and the time involved are vast, even though the Egyptians proved with their mathematics that time slows down in limbo so that what may be a century on earth passes as an hour or two in the realms of death. Whether they be right or wrong, I cannot say.’

  ‘You talk of will? I have it.’

  ‘Many have started but failed before their destination,’ he cautioned her. ‘They end like travellers who have strayed in the desert, driven mad by thirst and the sun. Neither dead nor alive, they find their way occasionally from limbo back to the scenes of their earthly life, there to trouble the living as ghosts, mere shades of their former selves.’

  She cut him short; the first tinge of pink was in the eastern sky. ‘How can such misadventure be avoided?’

  Yussef stroked his beard. ‘As on any uncharted journey, the prudent traveller hires a guide.’

  ‘And where do I find such a guide, Moor?’

  ‘The best – of that there is no doubt – were the priests of Egypt. They were the cartographers of this uncertain territory. None have excelled them since.’

  ‘But you have studied their esoteric science. So, will you be my guide?’

  ‘The journey which you contemplate is fraught with danger,’ he warned. ‘The will alone is not enough. And even when the weary traveller sets foot once more on earth, there remains the danger of madness. So many returned souls entered their second flesh to find themselves regarded as lunatics, gibbering tales of nonsense built around a grain of truth. “I was Caesar or Alexander or Socrates”, they babble, and end confined in chains, insane.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Perhaps from simple loneliness – the unutterable loneliness of being alive and friendless outside one’s time. We Arabs have a curse. To an enemy we say, May you outlive your friends!’

  ‘We Christians say the same.’ Eleanor was one step ahead. ‘But as to that, what do you think a queen is, if not alone? She has no friends. As soon as a princess can talk, she learns that her parents will one day sell her for an advantage or in endeavour to keep the realm intact, as was my lot. From womb to tomb, she is surrounded by servants who deceive, courtiers who lie and friends who betray her.’

  She laughed, ‘At fifteen when my father Duke William died and I became Duchess of Aquitaine, my tender young flesh was not mine to enjoy. It was the property of the duchy, to be used for the good of the duchy. And do you think I had friends at Louis’ court when I was Queen of France? Not one! I was surrounded by spies and tricksters. Those whom I thought otherwise, turned out to be the most dangerous. And when in despair I took lovers openly, it was to outrage Louis’ monkish morals and taunt him with his impotence, not because I felt for the men I bedded what lovers normally feel. So don’t warn me about loneliness.’

  ‘Yet Henry Plantagenet you loved?’ Yussef whispered slyly.

  He had
caught her off her guard, this Moor who knew so much. Eleanor’s face softened. ‘Ah, yes. With Henry, for a while, I loved. We loved each other, Moor, with a passion and a violence that will echo down the centuries. For love of Henry, I threw away a throne. And Henry would have done no less for me. He would have thrown away the world for me. He would! He would!’

  Her raised voice roused Mercadier who yawned, stretched and went to the window to check whether the sun was yet above the horizon.

  Eleanor closed her eyes, the better to see Henry’s bluff Plantagenet face as it had been when he first came, aged eighteen but already a belted knight, to Louis’ mournful court. In memory she heard the sound of that voice which, rising from the courtyard as he dismounted, had been enough to make her moist with longing and sick with desire for a man, for the first time in her life. But Henry had also stolen fifteen years of her life, and now she had a chance to live those years again.

  ‘I want to walk this earth once more,’ she whispered. ‘I want to thrill to a lover’s caress, to hear poetry, to make music, to weep for happiness and grief. I want to feel!’

  The Moor looked at Eleanor’s wrinkled face, which she was trying to hide with her hands. ‘There,’ he cautioned her, ‘lies the greatest obstacle. In the secret Books of the Dead at the temple of Ptah, so often I read the record of failure. After spending their entire lives awaiting the rebirth of a pharaoh or general or high priest, the temple servants could only watch helpless as the returned soul died a second time in torment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘From their descriptions, meticulous and detailed, it seems to be impossible for any mind, however great, to stay sane inside another body, whose intimate sensations every minute and second of the day are torture to the soul which does not belong there.’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘If that’s God’s last ambush, I know a detour.’

  The Moor listened to her plan with growing admiration. The longer he talked with her, the more Eleanor’s intelligence fascinated him.