by Tom Holt
“Kings,” said the young German, “are an anachronistic obscenity. Mankind will never be truly free until the last king’s head is impaled on the battlements of his own palace.”
If the young German had bothered to look closely at the stranger (which of course he didn’t) he would have seen a neatly-dressed weather-beaten man of absolutely average height and build, who could have been any age between a gnarled twenty-nine and a boyish forty. There was just a hint of grey in his short beard, and his eyes were as sharp as paper can be when you lick the gum on an envelope. He considered the German’s statement seriously, wiped a little foam off his moustache and replied that in his experience, for what it was worth, most kings were no worse than a visit to the dentist. The young German scowled at him.
“How can you say that?” he snarled. “Consider some of the so-called great kings of history. Look at Xerxes! Look at Barbarossa! Look at Napoleon!”
“I thought,” interrupted the stranger, “he was an emperor.”
“Same thing,” said the young German. “Look at Ivan the Terrible,” he continued. “Look at Philip of Spain!”
“I did,” said the stranger, “once.”
Something about the way he said it made the young German stop dead in his tracks and stare. It was as if he had suddenly come face to face with Michaelangelo’s David, wearing a top hat and a frock coat, in the middle of the Champs Elysées. He put down his glass and looked at the stranger.
“What did you say?” he asked quietly.
“Please don’t think I’m boasting,” said the stranger. “I don’t know why I mentioned it, since it isn’t really relevant to what you were saying. Do please go on.”
“You saw Philip of Spain?”
“Just the once. At the Escorial, back in ‘85. I was in Madrid with nothing to do—I’d just got rid of a load of jute, you could name your own price for jute in Madrid just then, I think they use it in rope-making—and I thought I’d take a ride out to see the palace. And when I got there—took me all day, it’s thirty miles if it’s a step—Philip was just coming home from some visit or other. As I remember I saw the top of his head for at least twelve seconds before the guards moved me on. I could tell it was the top of his head because it had a crown perched on it. Sorry, you were saying?”
“How can you have seen Philip of Spain?” said the young German. He never doubted the stranger’s word for a moment; but he needed to know, very badly indeed, how this could be possible. “He’s been dead for two hundred and fifty years.”
The stranger smiled; it was a very peculiar smile. “It’s rather a long story,” he said.
“Never mind.”
“No but really,” the stranger said. His accent was very peculiar indeed, the sort of accent that would always sound foreign, wherever he went. “When I say long I mean long.”
“Never mind.”
“All right, then,” said the stranger. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The young German nodded impatiently. The stranger took a pull at his beer and sat back in his chair.
“I was born in Antwerp,” he said, “in 1553.” He paused. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
“No,” said the German.
“Funny,” said the stranger. “I usually get interrupted at this point. I’ll say it again. I was born in Antwerp in 1553. Fifteen fifty-three,” he repeated, as if he wished the young German would call him a liar. No such luck. He went on, “…And when I was fifteen my father got me a job with a merchant adventurer he owed some money to. The merchant was in the wool trade, like more people were then, and he said I could either work in the counting-house or go to sea, and since handling raw wool brings me out in a rash I chose the sea. Funny, isn’t it, what decides you on your choice of career? I once knew a man who became a mercenary soldier just because he liked the long holidays. Dead before he was thirty, of course. Camp fever.”
“Well, I worked hard and saved what I earned, just like you’re supposed to, and before I was twenty-seven I had enough put by to take a share in a ship of my own. Not long after that I inherited some money and bought out my partners, and there I was with my own ship, at twenty-nine. Dear God, I’m sounding like one of those advertisements for correspondence courses. Excuse me, please.”
“Anyway, soon I was doing very nicely indeed, despite the wars and the Spanish taxes—the Spanish were pretty well in charge of the Netherlands then, you remember, what with the Earl of Leicester and the Duke of Parma and all that—and I was all set to retire at thirty-five when I had a stroke of bad luck. Two strokes of bad luck. The first was the bottom falling out of jute, just when I’d got a ship crammed with the stuff. I’d put every last liard I had into jute, and suddenly you couldn’t give it away. I hawked it all round Spain and Portugal and people just stared at me as if I was trying to sell them tainted beer. It was amazing; one minute you had perfect strangers accosting you in the street begging you to sell them some jute, the next thing you know jute is out. I’m not even sure that I know what jute is. I’m absolutely positive I don’t care.”
“And then I had my second stroke of bad luck, which happened just off Cadiz. I happened to run into the celebrated Francis Drake, who was on his way to singe the King of Spain’s beard. You’ve heard of Francis Drake? Oh good.”
“When I said you couldn’t give the stuff away I was exaggerating, because actually that’s exactly what I did. I needed some persuasion, mind, but I think it was the way Sir Francis drew up alongside and said that if I didn’t surrender my cargo he’d blow me out of the water that tipped the scale.”
“Well, after that there was nothing much I could do except wait until Sir Francis had finished messing about in Cadiz harbour and go for a drink. Even that wasn’t easy, what with the bombardment and so forth—one of the depressing things about licensed victuallers as a class is the way they dive for cover at the first little whiff of gunpowder—but eventually I found a tavern that wasn’t actively burning down and where they were prepared to sell me fermented liquor.”
The stranger paused and looked at the bottom of his glass, but the young German didn’t take the hint. He appeared to be spellbound, and the stranger carried on with his story.
“I’d been sitting there for a while, I don’t know how long, when this man came in and sat down beside me. It’s odd the way people sit down beside me in liquor-shops—no disrespect intended, of course, perish the thought. Anyway, he had this huge box with him, a sort of junior crate, and he was obviously worn out with lugging it about. Tall chap, thin, nose on him like an umbrella-handle, about your age or maybe a year or two older. I thought he was Spanish, or Italian, or he could have been French at a pinch. Anyway, a Southerner. Well, he looked even more miserable than I felt, which would have made him very miserable indeed, and I remember wondering if his trunk was full of jute. Incidentally, I’ve often wondered what Sir Francis did with all that good stuff he took off me. I bet he had no trouble shifting it at all.”
“Do excuse me, I tend to get sidetracked. This Southerner came and sat down in this tavern, and I offered to buy him a drink. He seemed offended.”
“‘I can afford my own drink, thank you very much,” he said. “That’s the least of my worries.” Brittle sort of bloke, I thought, highly-strung.
“‘All right then,” I said. “You can buy me one.”
“He looked at me, and I think he must have noticed that I was still in my sea-boots and general working clothes, because he suddenly became very much less hostile.”
“‘If you could tell me where I could find a ship to get me across to England,” he said, “I’d buy you as many drinks as you like.”
“‘England!” I said. “You don’t want to go there. The English are a load of thieving bastards, they’ll kill you for the buttons on your doublet.”
“He shook his head. “Better than being burnt alive,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to happen to me if I stay around here much longer. I’ve got to get to a Prot
estant country double quick.” ”
“I didn’t like the sound of this, but he wasn’t going to give up. “If you find me a ship that’ll take me to England,” he said, “I’ll pay you a hundred pistoles, cash.” ”
“To a refugee from the jute trade, this sounded too good to pass up, even if the man was clearly three sols short of a livre tournois, as we used to say when I was a boy. “What would you pay me if I could provide a ship myself, then?” I asked.”
“‘Think of a number,” he replied, “then double it. I can afford it, rest assured.”
“‘Who are you, then?” I asked.
“‘Does it matter?” he said.
“‘No,” I replied, “I’m just incurably nosy.” Which is true, as it happens.
“‘My name’s Juan de Montalban, but I trade as Fortunatus Magnus,” he said, with just a hint of pride. “You’ve probably heard of me.”
“I mumbled something about how out of touch you get in my business, but I could see he was disappointed. It’s true, though; you do lost track of things when you spend most of your life surrounded by hundreds of miles of open sea. Oh yes.”
“‘Well,” he said, “if you must know I’m an alchemist.”
“You mean cures for headaches and things?” I said.
“‘Certainly not,” he replied. “I am a philosopher, and I have discovered, the answer to the riddle of transmigration of the elements.”
“I was startled. “Base metal into gold and all that sort of thing?” I said. He sneered slightly.”
“‘That’s transmutation, not transmigration,” he said. “Vulgar party trick, though it pays the rent, I’ll grant you. I do that, too.”
“Suddenly I could understand why he wanted to get out of Spain in such a hurry. Apart from being incredibly hard on heretics—and alchemists are heretics by definition—the Spanish had a peculiar horror of anything which might disrupt the nice little monopoly on gold and silver they’d been enjoying ever since Cones came back from the Americas. Have you ever been to America? Funny place. You can’t get a decent boiled egg for love nor money.”
“‘Be that as it may,” he said, “I’ll give you five thousand pistoles for a ride to Bristol. Good Spanish coin,” he added, “I wouldn’t try and palm you off with the home-made stuff.”
“By now my natural scepticism was telling me that alchemists you meet in taverns at the end of a long, difficult day may well turn out not to be alchemists at all, particularly if they end up trying to borrow money or sell you a lump of cut-price gold; but there was something unusually convincing about him—probably the way he wasn’t trying to convince me. Do you see what I’m getting at, by any chance?”
The young German nodded. He saw only too well.
“So,” continued the stranger, “I said that if he showed up at the quay next morning with five thousand pistoles I’d take him to England with the greatest of pleasure, and then I went off to get drunk in slightly less eccentric company. I was so successful in this—getting drunk is one of the things I’m best at—that I didn’t get up till quite late the next morning, and I reckoned that even if he’d kept the appointment he’d have given up and gone away long since. But when I got down to the quay at about half-past ten—I had some business to see to in the town first—there he was, looking extremely nervous and asking what the hell had kept me.”
“I explained about my bad headache, but he didn’t seem terribly interested. He did, however, seem extremely anxious to show me a large number of very genuine-looking gold coins, and I decided that even if he was a lunatic he was a rich lunatic, and that if he wanted to go to Bristol then I wanted to take him there, before any unscrupulous character turned up who might exploit the man’s mental frailty by asking for six thousand pistoles.”
“My crew were by no means overjoyed to be off again so soon, and when I told them that we were going to England they made some very wounding remarks about my intelligence. They pointed out, perfectly accurately, that Sir Francis Drake was English, and so were John Hawkins and Black Jack Norris, and that a country capable of producing such unsavoury characters was somewhere they were in no hurry to visit. In fact, so determined were they that I had to take the unprecedented step of promising to pay them before they would do any work at all.”
“Their fears turned out to be absolutely groundless. Sir Francis and his fellow merrymakers were far too busy chivvying honest businessmen off Puental to bother us, and an unusually obliging wind took us right up to the mouth of the Bristol Channel.”
The stranger hesitated for a moment. “You don’t really want to hear the rest of this,” he said. “I think it would be much better if we go back to discussing kings. Take Charlemagne, for instance. Did you know that Charlemagne didn’t learn to read until he was forty?”
“Never mind Charlemagne,” said the young German. “Go on with what you were saying.”
“I’d really much rather talk about Charlemagne,” said the stranger, “if it’s all the same to you. Believe me, I have very good reasons.”
The young German said something vulgar about Charlemagne, and the stranger shrugged and went on.
“It was then,” he said, “that things started to go wrong. The unusually obliging wind went away again, leaving us stranded in mid-sea with nothing to do but look at the coastline of Wales, which is not something I would recommend unless you have an overwhelmingly keen interest in geology. To make matters worse, something unsavoury got into the ship’s beer, and when you put twenty Dutchmen on a ship—did I mention we were mostly Dutch? Well, we were—when you put twenty Dutchmen and a Scot on a ship in the middle of the sea with nothing to drink but cloudy beer, then you have a recipe for unpleasantness on your hands.”
“Halfway through the second day we were starting to feel more than usually thirsty, and by that evening the ship was alive with parched mariners in search of hidden caches of the right stuff. Me among them, I might add; I had an idea that the answer to the riddle of the transmigration of matter wasn’t the only thing Fortunatus Magnus had in his luggage. You see, he was the only person on board who didn’t seem worried about the beer crisis. When the first mate told him about it, all he said was “So what?” Suspicious, you’ll agree.”
“As soon as I’d got his big trunk open—it didn’t take more than five or six blows with the axe—my suspicions were confirmed; there was this huge glass bottle arrangement, carefully packed with straw and about half-full of the most delicious-looking tawny-yellow liquid you ever saw in your whole life. I closed what was left of the lid of the trunk and went in search of privacy and a tankard.”
“The tankard was no problem at all; but more or less the only privacy you can find on my ship is in the crow’s nest, which is why I tend to spend a lot of time there. Even then, I wasn’t going to take any chances, since the crow’s nest is directly above the beer-barrel—we keep it permanently on deck, where everyone can see it; just knowing it’s there can be a great help at times of stress—and there was a crowd of indomitable optimists gathered round it trying to fine the repulsive mess with Irish moss and fishmeal. I pulled the rope ladder up after me, uncorked the bottle, and poured myself a drink.”
“It tasted odd to start with, but it had a certain something, and after the third tankard I was feeling much more relaxed and in tune with the music of the spheres. Just then the alchemist appeared on deck, looking absolutely livid, like a sort of manic cormorant. I reckoned I knew why, but by then of course I couldn’t care less.”
“He started telling about how someone had broken into his trunk and stolen something of great value, and of course I was grinning all over my silly face with pleasure. Nobody was taking much notice of him apart from me, because a couple of the crew had just put another cupful of Irish moss in the beer-barrel and were peering anxiously at it to see if it would do any good. Funny stuff, Irish moss—I think it’s made up of ground-up fish bones, and I haven’t the faintest idea why…Sorry, you’re right, I do tend to wander off the sub
ject from time to time. It’s probably subconscious.”
“I imagine the alchemist must have lost heart, because he stopped shouting after a while and went and leaned sullenly against the rail, muttering to himself in Latin and breathing heavily through his nose. Did I mention he had a big nose? Oh, well, anyway, what with the drink and the general stimmung, and it was extremely wrong of me, I admit, but I suddenly felt the urge to let the alchemist know exactly what had become of his precious hoarded treasure. After all, selfishness is a major sin, and the creep hadn’t offered any of us so much as a sniff of the cork. I leaned over the edge of the crow’s nest, waved the flagon at him, and jeered.”
“Given the quantity of its contents which I had consumed, waving the flagon was a bad move. It was, as I said, a big thing, and as soon as I lifted it up so that the alchemist could see it, I felt it slipping through my fingers. I made a desperate attempt to grab it back, but all I succeeded in doing was spilling its contents, which went soaring off into the air in a magnificent golden wave, like a sort of proof rainbow. A moment later I followed it, since I’d completely lost my balance; and that is a foolish thing to do in a crow’s nest. Shall we talk about Charlemagne now? All right, please yourself.”
“It’s a very, very strange feeling to fall from a great height, I can tell you, and not something I would recommend to anybody who isn’t employed by the Revenue. It seems to take a long time, and it isn’t actually particularly frightening, even though the logical part of your mind is telling you that when you land you are definitely going to die. Of course I did land—eventually—and very unpleasant it was, too. Only I didn’t die.”
“I didn’t even break anything. I just lay there on my back feeling an utter fool, with the crew gathered round staring at me as if I’d just grown an extra ear.”
“After a while I got up and walked round the deck a few times, and my loyal crew seemed to lose interest. They muttered something about some people being born lucky, looked back a couple of times to make sure I was still alive and hadn’t been fooling them, and went back to the beer-barrel. The only person who seemed to want to talk to me was the alchemist, and since I had a fairly good idea of what he was likely to say I kept plenty of deck between him and myself. He was gaining on me steadily when a terrific cheer went up from the vicinity of the beer-barrel.”
