Universe 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  Whatever, we made a good livelihood out of those mighty words in our book, as long as the pilgrim’s gold lasted.

  Now, Brother, I’d not be surprised if you have heard something of the way this is done. You must find yourself a patron, someone who is well endowed with the world’s goods, yet feels he has not enough; a fat burgess is good, or the bailiff of a great lord—but you had best stay clear of the lord himself, he can too easily crush you like a louse between thumb and finger if you do not satisfy him. So, when you have found your man, you converse with him softly, slowly, at length, until you see he is enchanted; you discourse on lunification, on tincture, on fixation, on dealbation; on the secret names of Jupiter and Saturn, on the Black Crow, the White Eagle, the King and his Son, the Serpent who swallows his tail, and much more; thus it is beyond doubt that you are an adept, skilled in the lore of the mysterious East. We had an advantage, d’ye see, for if there was danger of being too clearly understood Tom would just speak a bit in Cornish.

  Next, your man must build his furnace and supply himself with alembics and crucibles and many rare substances; meanwhile you are living at ease in his house, sleeping soft and eating well, and if you cannot put by somewhat when you go on errands to purchase his materials, you had better choose some other trade.

  But you cannot let this go on too long; there will come a day when you must prove your work. You will let him place a bit of lead in his crucible, and throw in a bit of this and some of that, whatever; and finally you bring forth your magic powder. A black powder is good; you can use charcoal, with a sufficiency of powder of lead, and maybe the dried blood of a white cock. You should have him put it in with his own hand, making sure he tips it all in quickly, and then without delay you seal the crucible with moistened clay and place it in the furnace, for as long as you like. After the vessel has been well heated and the molten dross skimmed away, there will be a nugget of gold in the bottom, and why not?—for in your magic powder there was a fragment of gold covered with blackened wax.

  Well now, your patron is happy, and so are you. You may decide to make another trial, and the second lump of gold will be a trifle larger than the first. But then, alas, you have only a little of the magic powder left, and you must make a long and costly journey to find the ingredients necessary to make more. He will eagerly help you on your way, and you will generously give him all the powder you have left, with many difficult instructions on the use of it, so that you shall be long gone before he despairs of success.

  Yes, I know this is not the sort of gold-making your abbot wishes to learn, but remember it is said: Blessed are the meek, for they shall he patient until the end of the story. You would not have me omit any of my misdeeds from my confession? And before you lay a heavy penance on me, Brother, bethink you: this worthy patron I speak of has enjoyed a rare and strange adventure, and had great pleasure in it; has he not received good value for his money?

  Well; so it went. The time came when all our stock of gold was gone, and we sat together by our campfire at the edge of a lonely road, considering what we might do next. We did not see Black Jamie come, maybe just out of the shadow of the trees; there he was.

  “Well met, friends,” says he, and sat down by our fire without any by-your-leave, the dancing shadows making horn shapes out of his two tufts of hair, and spread his left hand to the warmth of the fire—only that one hand, and I remembered he was left-handed, a mischancy thing. We were not wholly pleased to see him, but we did not like to be unfriendly, so presently we were passing our ale flask back and forth, and making small talk about the ways of the road; we were two stout young fellows to one old one, we saw no reason to fear him. After a while he said, “You’ll have had good profit out of your book, I’m thinking. You’ll not be wanting to sell it back to me?”

  Tom says, “Nay, that we’re not.”

  “Ah, you’ve used it well, I’ll warrant! But, friends, have you not sometimes thought of the true art that lies concealed behind all that writing?”

  “We might have put our minds to it,” I said, and Tom frowned. But it needed no warlock to guess that such a thought would have come to us. For who would labor so mightily at all those mysteries, only to provide a few fellows like us with a chance of trickery? No, we knew there must be some truth in it When we had argued this, Tom always said the secret was buried too deep for us. I was not so sure.

  Black Jamie said, “Whatever, you’ll be needing more gold.”

  “Who doesn’t?” says Tom, a bit short, and Jamie laughed, a rusty-screechy noise with no mirth in it, a sound I did not care for. “Ah, a true word!” says he. “And there’s more nor one way of getting it, am I not right?”

  “I’ve heard so,” says Tom.

  Black Jamie yawned, like a man having no more to say and thinking of naught but sleep, and he says, tossing it out careless-like—”Well, there’s the ancient mounds, and the red gold in them.”

  Now some folk will tell you those places are entrances into faerie, and if you know the spell you may go in and spend one day in delight at the court of a beautiful elfin queen, but when you come out you will find a hundred years have passed and all your friends are dead. Others say these are only the burial grounds of old-time pagans, not to be feared by anyone who can say his paternoster, and men have broken into such mounds with pick and shovel, finding old bones and sometimes the red gold. You never do hear it told that those men have lived long and happy lives thereafter. I said, “It’s known that such gold is accursed.”

  Jamie yawned again, and stretched out on the grass with his back to the fire. “Ah,” says he, “that’s because the folk do not know how to get it safely. You will please yourselves, friends, but I am going near one of those places tomorrow, and if you care to walk with me I can show it to you.”

  Then he was snoring, and it made us feel easier to hear him. A snore is a natural and homely thing; you cannot be afeard of a little bald wisp of a man who makes comical noises in his sleep.

  So the next day we went along the road together, and Black Jamie kept us merry with songs and tales of old time, but never a word of himself or his own doings, and we somehow forgot to ask ourselves what manner of man he was. Near dusk he turned off the road into a great moor spreading westward, and we said nothing, but followed him. I will not tell you where the place was. We had lost sight of the highway when we came to the mound.

  “Yonder it is,” said Jamie, “and I’ve a notion to camp here for the night. You could join me and welcome, if you cared to.”

  It was only a hillock rising from the moor; you would think it a natural hill except for the smooth even shape of it. No tree or bush grew there, only the sheep-cropped grass, brighter and greener than common. Nothing fearsome about it Tom says, “I’ve spent nights in worse places.”

  We built ourselves a bit of a fire.

  “Ah, there is pleasant,” says Black Jamie. The dark was sifting down around us. “It would maybe surprise you,” says he, “the things I know that I would not be telling to everyone. But since you have been so friendly as to give me your comradeship, why, here is a secret you will not find in your book of alchemy. You will have heard that the gold found in the barrows is softer and redder than the common metal from the mines. Know, then, that this red gold of the ancient kings is not merely metal such as the goldsmiths use, but the very essence and spirit of gold. It is itself the Elixir.”

  I asked him, “Why then have the men who found this ancient gold not discovered what it was?”

  “Ah, there is the heart of the matter. They have gone in roughly as mere grave robbers, d’ye see, and when the gold is stolen that way, the virtue goes out of it. You must enter the mound gently, humbly, and let the gold be given you as a free gift.”

  Tom said, “Are you telling us a mortal living man can do that?”

  “It is not easy,” says Jamie, “but I am the man who can tell you the way of it. Share and share alike, if you can get it.”

  We sat looking at him, thinking
he mocked us, and he went on more urgently, “Of course, there is only one night in the whole month when it can be done,” and even while he spoke the great silver circle was rising and peering over the lip of the moor at us. Night of the full moon.

  I said, “If you know the way, why do you not get it for yourself?”

  “That is why,” he said, and thrust out his right hand at us, that he’d been keeping hidden. Half a hand it was, thumb and forefinger, three fingers gone. He said, “No one can enter the mound except he be a whole man.”

  It would have been childish to ask why not. ‘Well then,” Tom was beginning, but Jamie put up that lonesome finger and shook it at him. “Not you.” Now Tom had hurt his foot when he was a bairn and had lost the little toe off it: such a small old-time thing he’d nigh forgotten it himself. And Jamie had surely never seen him with his boots off, yet he knew. And now Jamie was studying me.

  Let him look, I thought, and I began trying to remember my fights and beatings—scars enough I had for them, but nothing lost. I might now and then have stood in peril of losing an ear or so to the law, for this or that misdoing; still, it had not happened, for they never caught me. “Scars!” said Jamie impatiently. “Nay, how can anyone grow to manhood’s years without scars? That is nothing. You could do it.”

  “I will, then,” I said.

  Now you see, Brother Albertus, here is that most deadly sin of which I spoke to you. For well I knew this was a trafficking with evil spirits, to the peril of my immortal soul, and yet I did knowingly enter upon it. Wherefore I will gladly suffer penance and go on pilgrimage if I may cleanse my soul of this thing. —Well; you must hear me out, to know how it was.

  A black cross was to be set upside down, Jamie said, and he would teach me a spell in ancient Gaelic, and then—halfway through the telling of it he broke off and cocked his head sidewise at me. Smiling, if you could call it that. “There’s a thing you ought to know, laddie, before you go on with this,” says he. “You’ll go in there a whole man, but you’ll not come out without leaving some part of yourself in their hands. Whatever they choose to take.”

  I did not like the sound of that I could imagine giving up a finger or a toe or two, even an ear, the red gold would be worth it; but there’s other parts a man would not like to find missing off him, and I said as much to Black Jamie. “Never fear,” said he, “they will play fair with you, they will take no more than you can spare. Even if they take one, they will leave you one,” says he, and he let out that screech noise of his, laughter you might call it.

  I’ll be frank with you, Brother, I did not find much comfort in that reassurance, hut it was too late for faint-heartedness. I came back at him cold and quick, the first words I found in my mouth: “Did they take your three fingers, then?”

  He said nothing, said it in his ancient Gaelic, the little cold eyes freezing into me, and the silence might have gone on until we had all turned to blocks of ice where we sat, if Tom had not spoken. “Eh, well, get on with it man,” he says, “tell us what more we need to do.” And so he did.

  I had first to learn the words of the old Gaelic spell, and while the moon was climbing the sky Jamie strove most patiently with me to be sure I could say them right. I’d not have ventured to ask him what they meant, and surely he would not have told me—no need for me to know, only to speak them correctly. And at last he was satisfied I could do it So I went up to the top of the mound and set that unholy cross in the earth, and walked three times widdershins around it saying the words I had learned; and I could not tell them to you now if I would, for as soon as they had served their purpose they went clean out of my head. Then I lay down on my back beside the black cross, and held my eyes open to the full light of the moon. And whether time passed while I lay there, or whether it stopped entirely, I do not know; I was not aware of anything happening, only that I found myself in another place.

  I could feel walls enclosing space, and yet there was great distance, and no walls to be seen, nor any roof or sky; there was light—soft, not bright—you could not tell where it came from. Whisper of clean moving air; somewhere a darkness of trees, and a smell of old forest growing more thickly over the land than it does now. And there were men in the forest, though I could not see or hear them.

  Then a man was standing in front of me, where there had been no one. He was no giant, but broad and thick, powerfully made, with a great gray beard and fierce old eyes frowning at me. He wore a short kirtle and a wolfskin flung over one shoulder, and held in his hand a bright sword; and around his neck and on either arm he wore heavy circles of red gold. So I knew he was a king.

  He spoke, and his voice was a deep rumble like the noise of drums; his words were strange to me, but the air of that place caught them up and twisted them around, the way sunlight spatters through leaves, making new patterns, and I knew what they meant. He said, “Is it time?”

  I must have been gaping stupidly, for he moved impatiently, and there was a ringing sound from his sword. “Have you no ears, clod? Have you come at last to fetch me against the enemies of the Land?”

  Now in the first breath I thought of great King Arthur, who is to return one day and fight for us; but everyone knows that Arthur is buried at Glastonbury, and moreover he was a chivalrous Christian knight, not a savage clad in the hide of a wolf. Then I saw how there might well be more than one ancient king standing guard over the Land. And at last I found my tongue, and answered him, “Sire, I thank you for your kindness, but I can tell you we’ve gotten the better of our enemies, for we have a strong warrior as king.”

  “Ah,” he said, and nodded. ‘That is good. You have driven them back from the beaches?”

  “Why, they never came so far,” I told him. “It would glad your heart to see it, sir, the way our good King Harry went over the water after them to kill them, and came home to a great triumph.”

  “Good, very good. Then I may sleep awhile longer.” His men had been coming out of the forest behind him; there was a gleam of eyes and a shadow of hands on clubs. He motioned them back. “You must be sure to keep a strong guard on the beaches,” he said sternly. “That is the way they always come. . . .”

  “We keep guard,” I promised him. And then I bethought me one must mind one’s manners in speaking to a king, so I went down on my knee and swept off my cap, as I should have done sooner. All this did not take as much courage as you might think, for something about that place made it seem right and proper for me to be there; it was all a part of the enchantment. “Great King,” I said, “I have come here boldly to bring you word that the Land is safe, and you may rest in peace. Now in my time, sire, we hold that the bringer of good news merits a reward, and if it should please your lordship to think thus, I would only ask most humbly for a small token of your royal gold.”

  He smiled; and oh, Brother Albertus, you have never seen such a smile! you could see the naked skull grinning behind the flesh, and I knew that all my secret thoughts and my desires for the gold were transparent to him. Yet it seemed he was not angry. “Be it so,” he said, and he drew the gold band from his left arm and gave it to me. The first touch of it burned my fingers like ice; then I felt the living warmth of my hand flowing into it, and it was no more fiercely cold than metal ought to be. I said, “Sire, with all my heart I humbly thank you.”

  My voice was flat and dull, and I was alone in a small dim space with barely enough light to see what lay before me in the dust, where I was still kneeling: clean old bones, undisturbed, arms straight at the sides; around the neck and the right arm were circlets of gold, but on the left arm nothing—only a fresh scar in the earth under the long arm bone, as though something had been taken away.

  Then I was lying on top of the mound in the moonlight, and I would have thought the whole thing a mere vision, but that I held a golden armband in my hands: bright and clean-shining, not like a thing dug out of old earth, and now I could see a swirl of markings on it, like a sort of writing. Down yonder by a fire were the shapes of two
men, waiting. In a little, I remembered who they were. I went down to them and said, “Here is the gold,” and fell flat on my face.

  There was a while I don’t remember, and then I was sitting beside the fire with Tom holding the flask so I could drink, and the gold circle on the ground in the firelight

  Black Jamie put out a hand toward it, moving slow and easy, the both of us watching him, Tom with his knife out and ready.

  “Given as a free gift, it was,” I said.

  Black Jamie said, “Yes, I know.” He took it into his hands, turning it over as though he could read the old writing. It seemed a long time until he laid it down, carefully, never letting his eyes shift toward the gleam of Tom’s knife. “Now,” says he, “we must divide it in three pieces.”