Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  Three or four steps into the procedure, you have to dip the corner of a linen napkin in the brew, then set light to it. Alarming is putting it mildly. I was extremely lucky to have been shown how to do it by an expert; that said, Onesander’s wanted poster called him “a tall man with no eyebrows”, a description so accurate that he was in custody within three days of its appearance on the Temple doors. As a precaution, I filled the big basin with water and dunked my head in it. When the napkin had burned away, I shook the ashes carefully into a pot, and worked the bellows until the fire was as hot as I could get it.

  Next, the crucible, which I half-filled with expensive copper nails (hell of a waste; but they’re nearly pure copper, and I wasn’t paying for them). I used up most of a half-hundredweight sack of charcoal before they melted; whereupon I poured the molten metal into my dainty little five-cavity ingot mould and put them aside to take the cold. My bottle of aqua tollens proved to be empty, which was annoying, so I had to make some up from scratch; add salt to water, then add raw fine powdered silver to aqua fortis; combine the two in a glass vessel to produce a brown sludge; add spirit of hartshorn until the sludge disappears; aqua tollens. By the time I’d done all that the little copper fingers were cool enough to knock out of the ingot mould. Take one ingot, lower it slowly with tongs into the aqua tollens; wait five minutes, then fish it out again, wash off the aqua tollens, dry carefully. One small silver-plated copper ingot. Naturally, I’ve simplified and falsified the instructions (because if I told you how it’s really done you could do it too, and put me and my brethren out of business).

  Four copper ingots, one silver one. I put on my buckskin glove, shook a little of the burnt-napkin ash onto the tip of my index finger, and gently stroked the silver-plated ingot until the ash was all gone. It happens so gradually that at first you don’t notice, unless the light from your lamp catches it at just the right angle. It’s a long, slow business, and just as you’re in despair and convinced that it’s not working, the smear on the surface of the silver assumes an undeniably yellow tinge. That restores your faith, and you carry on until all the ashes are gone and your fingertip’s numb, and the silver ingot is now deep, glowing, honey-yellow gold.

  Piece of cake, really.

  Time doesn’t register when I’m working, so I had no idea how long all this had taken me; experience suggested six hours, but the copper had been painfully slow to melt, whereas the ashes had worked in quicker than I’d been expecting. Broad as it’s long. Time melts sometimes, flows and congeals, forms a hard skin over a molten core.

  I put all the bottles and jars carefully away, so anyone snooping around wouldn’t know what I’d used, then I closed Polycrates and put him gratefully back on his shelf. I poured water into a glass beaker, then added a drop of blueberry juice to turn it a harmless, inert blue; then I put the gold ingot in the beaker, and stacked the four copper ingots neatly next to it. Then I took my four-pound straight-peen hammer off the rack, wrapped the head carefully with cloth and banged on the door with my fist.

  The usual graunching of key in lock, and the door opened. I didn’t know the guard. I tried to look past him, but he stood in the way.

  “I need some stuff,” I said.

  He nodded. “What?”

  “Sal regis, furor diaboli, radix pedis dei, saturated sal draconis in vitriol—”

  He scowled at me. I smiled. “Come inside,” I said. “I’ll write it down for you.”

  He went off, with his little slip of parchment, and the door closed and the lock graunched. I upended my four-minute timer and waited for the sand to pour through. Then I knocked on the door again.

  The guard stuck his head round the doorframe. “What?” he said, and I hit him with the hammer. He went down like an apple from a tree. I waited, counting up to six, then carefully opened the door; there’d never been more than two guards on the door before, but there’s a first time for everything. Fortunately, not this time. I dragged the guard inside, slipped out into the passageway, gently pulled the door shut and turned the key. An hour, my best guess; maybe a bit more, unlikely to be much less. Just how far could I get in an hour?

  Scholars are proverbially celibate, and the life of the professional criminal doesn’t leave much time for romance, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I was only in love really and truly the one time.

  Which would’ve been enough, if things had worked out a little better. She was perfect; beautiful, clever, kind, funny, gentle; a joy to be with, under any circumstances. And she loved me, almost as much as I loved her; but what she loved most of all (which was better than her loving me) was philosophy. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have written On Form & Substance. She had this way of making me think; just the slightest of frowns, or a tiny upwards movement of an eyebrow, and suddenly I could see past the certainties to the real questions behind them. She made me realise that, up till then, all I’d cared about was making it so my enemies couldn’t prove me wrong; in other words, winning. Then she came along, and the world changed, and what actually mattered wasn’t beating some opponent but getting it right—

  Perfect. Almost perfect. Just one thing about her that I’d have changed, if I could. She was married. To prince Phocas.

  Which led, I’m sorry to say, to a falling-out between my old college chum and me. Not the first, and certainly not the last. He took the view that it was a betrayal of trust, not to mention criminal adultery and treason. I could see his point, and I also accept that under the circumstances, given his position of head of state and fountain of all justice, he had no option but to allow the law to take its course. What I couldn’t forgive, still can’t, is that it wasn’t me he put on trial.

  To his credit, he entered a special plea for clemency on her behalf. Unfortunately, in the political climate prevailing at that time, he couldn’t have made things worse if he’d tried; the six judges were all Popular Tendency, and that was that. There have been times, in my darker moments, when I’ve wondered whether he made that plea deliberately, knowing it’d prompt the judges to order the death penalty out of sheer spite; but no, I don’t think so. He loved her, no doubt about it, and losing her, especially that way, tore him apart. Didn’t exactly cheer me up, either. By loving her, I’d killed her, simple as that. Phocas was just the weapon I used.

  So; she died, I lived. Phocas had his chief investigator swear on oath, by the majesty of the Invincible Sun, that he hadn’t been able to discover the identity of the adulterer. The judges (two of them are dead now; the other four will have to wait till I’ve got a little free time) offered to grant him permission to put the accused to torture to extract the name, if he thought that would do it; I remember, he went white as a sheet and mumbled no, he didn’t believe torture would be effective in this case. And the judges shrugged, as if to say, well, if you’re sure, and moved smoothly on to passing sentence.

  I watched, from a high window. I remember how she stayed calm and controlled right up to the moment they started roping her to the stake. Then, when they grabbed her wrist, she screamed and went all to pieces, she was terrified, it took four strong men to hold her still while they tied the knots. They put a lot of green wood in, so the smoke killed her before the flames reached her. Standard practice, I gather. It’s one of those small mercies we’re supposed to be grateful for.

  I’m a terror for not wasting anything useful, so when it was my turn to deliver the Onesander Memorial Lecture at the Studium, I used her death as a paradigm of alchemical theory. She was, I said, made up, like everything else, of earth, air, water and fire, in due proportion, held in equilibrium by the vis minor, which Philosthenes argues is ultimately derived from the movement of the Invincible Sun in orbit around the Earth. When she was put to death, the addition by an external agency of additional fire broke the vis minor, allowing the external fire to encounter and react with her component elements. Her earth was consumed and transmuted into res iners Polycratis. Her water was evaporated, and joined the greater external. Her a
ir was expelled by vis major and dissipated, while her internal fire was subsumed by and joined with the external fire to produce ignis nobilis, the assimilatory or communicative process, analogous to the extraction of quicksilver from amalgam. What, I asked, do we learn from this? In transmutation, in this case her flesh and bone to ash, there is exchange through loss, since the ashes weighed considerably less than the unburnt tissue, and communication through change, in that flesh (a soft material) and bone (a hard material) are converted by an agency and a process into ash (an impermanent, brittle material soluble in water and easily dissipated in a draught of air); thereby, we can see that earth is essentially a donor element, weak, suitable for conversion. In the evaporation of water, by contrast, there is communication through continuity, in that her water became steam and migrated, ultimately to join with other vapours in the clouds, in due course to return to the lower levels through the medium of rain; therefore continuity, in that water is never lost and, though capable of transformation, ultimately defies transmutation through the agency of memory. Turning to her air, being the breath in her lungs and other hollow parts at the moment of death, simple expulsion through the action of heat removed it, essentially unchanged in form (though arguably in structure; see Brunellus on the forms of air), so that communication consisted of nothing more than a removal from one place and a relocation in another; which is why we call air the elemens invicta, because it is untouched by mere process. As to her fire, I argued, that was a different matter entirely. In the consummation of the process (my voice was a little shaky at this point), there was a coming together of the external and the internal to form one, a process akin to the act of love, a union or true combination, in that as the process took its course, inner and outer fire combined into an indissoluble whole, burning from without and from within, and where there were two there was now only one. Hence, I went on, fire is the agent among the elements, and it is to fire we must look. In fire all things have their origin (the ignis genitiva of Marcellus) and their ending (ignis feralia, as postulated by Caesura; but see Ammianus for a conflicting interpretation), only through fire can the other processes operate, only through fire in its aspects as destroyer and refiner can we achieve our objective; transmutatio vera, the genuine transmutation, transmigration of one element into another.

  Not everybody agreed, needless to say; but I think I had something there. Where I messed up was going on to associate the vis mutationis with the human emotion of love, and the process of burning with the transmutation of love into hate, or guilt, or misery, or pain, analogous to the refining of the noble metals from base ores by the agency of quicksilver. What can I say? It’s one of those intuitive connections you feel but can’t really prove, and once you get a reputation for intuition in academic circles, you’re screwed. Not that it mattered particularly, in this instance. Three months after I gave the lecture I got caught trying to stow away on the stupid bloody avocado freighter, and that was that; no more public appearances, ejected from my Chair, back to the laboratory with two guards on the door. Story of my life, really.

  So there I was in the passageway. Right or left? I went left. Good idea at the time.

  Left led past the minor state apartments (where they dump lesser ambassadors, trade attaches, counsel for appellants in civil cases, unimportant dependents and poor relations) to the back or kitchen stairs, which go down two flights to the stable yard, from which it’s possible, if you’re agile enough, to climb the curtain wall and sneak out onto the leads of the chapel roof; then down the waterspout into the cloister garden, pinch a gown from the vestment room, and then you’re just another Brother milling about in the chapel forecourt. That was how I got out the time before last, and on that occasion I got no further than the Chapter yard before the scuttlehats grabbed me and hauled me back in. Therefore, they’d argue, I wouldn’t go that way again.

  The important thing is, not to run. It’s hard. The temptation is to move as quickly as possible while unimpeded movement is feasible. But running sounds like nothing else, and in the palace, nobody runs. So I walked, hands in pockets, down the corridor, trying to sound like some minor functionary, in no particular hurry, waddling from office to archive or one duty station to another. Authenticity is the key. Learnt that the hard way.

  I was three quarters of the way along when I heard footsteps coming the other way. The corridor floors are ancient oak boards; you can’t help making a racket, unless you’re wearing slippers. Only one thing I could do. I pushed open the first door I came to and slipped inside.

  It turned out to be a bathroom. Phocas has a minor fetish about cleanliness, so there’s bathrooms everywhere in the residential areas. Lucky for me, I thought. I ducked down behind the bath and crouched on the floor, waiting for the footsteps to go away.

  There was this smell; really strong (it’d have to be, or I wouldn’t have noticed it. You can’t spend a large slice of your life in close association with oil of hartshorn and similar noxious substances and expect to keep your sense of smell). Familiar. It was a hell of a time to be struck down with scientific curiosity, but I couldn’t resist. Why had somebody filled a whole bath full of honey?

  So I looked.

  She lay on her back, naked, with the meniscus of the honey just covering the tip of her nose. Her eyes were open, and her face still had that look of mild bewilderment that I’d seen the last time I saw her, as the beaker slipped through her fingers and smashed on the floor. Her hair was trapped in the stuff; she reminded me irresistibly of a fly caught in amber, and that, of course, was the general idea. Honey, as is well known, is of all the soft materials the least prone to corruption, which is why it’s such a good preservative. Immerse a piece of meat—which was what Eudoxia was, now—in pure, clear honey, and it’ll stay good almost indefinitely.

  Good is a comparative term, and not one I’d ever be in a hurry to apply to my late wife. But, lying there submerged in the liquid gold, she was fighting decay and winning, no doubt about that. There was none of the shrinking of the flesh, withering of the lips, puffing and poaching of the ears and fingertips that you generally get with a dead body at that stage of the process. If there was a distortion, it was only the effect of light refracted in slow, golden liquid, adjusting rather than bending the line of her jaw, the angle of her nose to her brow. She was, I have to say, as beautiful as ever, and likely to remain so; exactly what she always wanted, frozen in her youth in her golden bath, finally safe from the vis mutationis, the weakness of earth, the spite of water, the gnawing of air and the irresistible compulsion of fire. I guess it comes down to what you want and what you’re prepared to pay in order to get it. In her case, death; but she’d never really got much out of being alive, because of the constant terror of loss, change, deterioration, decay. It was enough to make me want to sit down and write a paper then and there. I’d finally given her what she wanted, the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the catalyst of change) through the agency of death. She’d have been so pleased, if only she’d been there to see it. Still, you can’t have everything, and her body always mattered more to her than her soul, for want of a better word. I couldn’t help smiling. Now that’s alchemy, I thought.

  I stood there looking at her for quite some time, until an observation eventually filtered its way through my thick skull. The footsteps I’d heard in the corridor had got gradually louder until they reached more or less where I was, and then they’d stopped. Which meant that the stepper of those steps must have stopped too, directly outside the door of this bathroom. Factor in the presence of the prince’s dead sister—not something you’d leave lying about unguarded—and I was forced to a painful and humiliating conclusion. I could only suppose that the scuttlehat detailed to guard the body of the princess had gone away for a short while—call of nature or whatever—during which time I’d slipped in and closed the door. Now the guard was back, and I’d trapped myself in there, with no realistic chance of getting out.

  Idiot,
I thought.

  Well, there was nothing for it. I went to the door and belted it with my fist.

  Wish I could’ve been on the other side of that door and seen the poor bugger’s face. The guard would’ve been aware that he was standing outside a room containing one dead woman. Forcible knocking from inside the room, therefore—Well, he must’ve pulled himself together by the time he opened the door, because he had that scuttlehat look on his face; dead, stuffed and mounted. He recognised me, of course. They all know me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Do you think you could show me the way to the back door?”

  He thought about it just long enough. I really hate punching out scuttlehats. Miss by an eighth of an inch, and either they don’t go down or you skin your knuckles on the sharp edge of the steel ear-flaps. Luckily, I was on target this time. He sank to his knees with that faint sigh you get sometimes. I stepped over him and ran for it.

  Really, though, I was just killing time. I made it as far as the porters’ lodge, just inside the main gate. There’s a little sort of alcove in there, where they dump the mail sacks. I scrambled in and pulled a full sack on top of me, making sure there wasn’t a telltale foot or elbow sticking out. Time to think.

  Time, as I think I may have told you already, melts. In its liquid form (aqua temporis?), it seeps and penetrates, like a thin mineral oil, and pools, and floods, under the influence of heat (the agency of fire; see above, passim). Withdraw that influence and it congeals, like hot fat in a pan, and in its solid state undergoes a kind of slow transmutation into a gooey mess, in which you get stuck. Time pooled and congealed under that mail sack, whose coarse hemp fibres chafed my cheek as I huddled, denying myself the agency of movement. I hate waiting. I can feel time passing, I sometimes kid myself—time passing is a transmutation of decay, communication by an exchange through loss; components dwindle and are lost, though what remains is by definition the enduring, therefore the refined, the desirable. In theory, you can refine gold by just leaving it lying around, letting the rain and the damp air corrode out the impurities, until only the gold remains. Wouldn’t try it though. Someone like me might come along and steal it.