The Fire Worm, page 17
“Aye, the stone,” muttered Ranulph.
“Aye that; but first we will see the engendering of the worm known assalamander ! It is a necessary precursor.”
“A salamander? A newt?” asked Lady Euphemia in surprise. “You will throw a little newt into your furnace?”
“No, Lady, this is not your mundane salamander of the animal kingdom — just asphilosophic mercury is not common quicksilver …”
“So whatis philosophic quicksilver?” she enquired.
“Why, that is the name for aqua fortis, the volatile solvent. It is concocted from vitriol of Cyprus, saltpetre, and alum of Yemen — to which you should add sal ammoniac if you wish to dissolve gold.” Lully had always prided himself on clarity and openness, unlike the obfuscations of other alchemists.
“Hmm,” she said. “So your philosophic mercury is a symbol — and your salamander is also a symbol for some other natural substance?”
“No, Lady, the arcane salamander is acreature — one begotten of fierce fire, in which it dwells and which it sustains. My furnace’s constant flames, together with a certain ritual, will summon the salamander. Compel it, capture it! The salamander has the power to draw the stone from the heavenly sphere into our mundane level of existence. The salamander will be my philosophic stoker.” Lully drained his hot wine, and reached for a pastry.
“And have you yourself ever captured, or even seen, this philosophic salamander before?” asked Euphemia bluntly.
“Ah.” Lully wagged a finger. “The process is guaranteed. Arnold of Villanova evoked the salamander, though admittedly not in my presence.”
Euphemia pursed her rouged lips.
“Still,” she remarked after a while, “you did indeed cure Robert, when no one else could.”
“I hate to be awkward,” I said to Jack as we walked away from the Lit and Phil up Collingwood Street toward the Cloth Market, “but it would appear that when Longshanks sacked John de Balliol as King of Scotland in 1296 for being such a naughty vassal, the King also seized all of Balliol’s English estates. That included Barnard Castle.
“That’s why Balliol went to live in Normandy, on his family’s native turf. Our enemy Bishop Bek immediately claimed Barnard Castle as belonging to the Palatinate — and Edward commandeered the whole Palatinate and presented Barnard Castle to Guy Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick. So Barnard Castle stayed in the Warwick family for five generations until the Nevilles finally got hold of it at the time when Anne of Warwick married Richard Neville the Kingmaker.
“Thus, brother Jack, Robert de Neville couldn’t possibly have been a page to John de Balliol at Barnard!”
“I don’t care,” retorted Jack. “I prefer the first story, and I’m sticking to it. Hell, John, if we’re going to be pedantic, there wasn’t any piped water supply toTynemouth till 1846 — so there couldn’t have been a farthing pant in ’43. Tynemouth relied on a few private wells and one public one, right?”
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“Even when the town did twist the arm of the water company and get domestic supplies laid on from Marden Quarry, they were still forced to pump water from the sea for sewer cleansing and street washing, yes? Thus on any windy day there were snow storms of salt in the streets. We’ll not dwell on the eels — the fat blackworms — blocking up people’s water pipes. However, Harry met Jane at thepublic pant . There is a higher form of truth, John. Ilike pants. Just like Gavin liked short pants.”
“If only I hadn’t involved you with Tony. You’re really interfering. You’re risking my reputation.”
“Bit late for regrets, old son. We’re getting closer to the worm, aren’t we? That wasn’t any eel. It was an alchemist’s salamander.”
“What?”
“Lully said so. I quote: the worm called salamander.” We cut through High Bridge toward Grey Street and the Theatre Royal.
“You’re also doing your damnedest to screw up any relationship that might bloom with Brenda. Because that would screwyou up, Jack.”
“Changing our tune a bit, aren’t we? I wasn’t aware you actually wanted to get married!”
“I don’t. I don’t think so. Well, maybe. There could be advantages. Mother’s getting on. Anyway, I’m beginning to realize that Brenda has qualities. There’s a sort of core of … innocent goodness.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to try to get rid of me! You’d go mad without me, John.”
“In what way, mad?”
“The madness of banality. The madness of a one-track mind. You’d probably start believing in past and future lives.” Jack laughed hectically aloud, and I had to pretend that I had just remembered a wonderful, side-splitting joke.
“Look, nothing’s clear about Tony’s case. You talk about connexions but I only see contradictions. Barnard Castle. Public pants.”
“Reality’s a melty thing, old son. A branchy thing. With branches of branches, forking all over. Worming all over. That’s how you get connexions. Ignore those wormings — try to stick to the straight and narrow — and you’ll tumble into chaos.”
“I think I’m more likely to tumble into chaos by your route. You’re like some sort of demonic familiar who lures a fellow on and on along the golden road until he damns himself to hell.”
“We aren’t talking demons and devilry. We’re talking alchemy and salamanders.”
“Maybe they’ll cause the same mayhem! You’re trying to conjure up something, Jack.”
“Me, conjure? We don’t believe in devils, do we?”
“I thinkyou do. And you’re me. Meanwhile you’re melting my therapy.”
“Just a little round the edges. That’s so you can stay flexible, John. The centre is true enough, and you know it.”
“I no longer know what I know.”
“Do you want security? Is that what Brenda spells? A world poxed with AIDS craves security. But it can’t have it. Nothing’s secure. Everything’s loose. That’s the way the world has always really been. Horror is stuff oozing through the loose joins to remind us of that. So marry Brenda and be a wimp. Or follow me and discover wonderful, awful things. Powers and possibilities. Strange and terrible and golden.”
We passed by the Earl Grey Monument. The Earl stood high on his column, a stone man in the sky like that other fossilized figure of Admiral Lord Collingwood who overlooked the mouth of the Tyne from an even grander column. A pigeon perched on the head of the Earl, whose stone locks were whitened with bird shit.
To be frozen rigid, never to move, to be embodied in stone … However, a pigeon was no bird of doom, no raven or vulture. Busy traffic buzzed by. Through the dying city, yes. Where AIDS was loose.
Raymond Lully had sought an elixir of life … and maybe he had succeeded? If Gavin’s worm was still in Tynemouth, was an elixir also still to be found?
Chapter Twenty-three
Within four months of Lully’s arrival at Raby the Bulmer’s Tower laboratory was in full operation, though results could hardly be expected for many months more.
By now it was the Autumn of 1312, and golden crops were being harvested. It would still be a struggle to feed the increasing number of mouths in the land. Had Lully used his skill in astrology not only to ensure that the best planetary influences should preside over the ignition of the athanor but also, Nostradamus-like, to forecast the future, he could have predicted dire fortunes for England and all Europe within a couple of years.
Seven soaking, flooded summers in succession would produce paltry harvests, when there was a harvest at all. Murrain would plague cattle, sheep would die of the rot. The price of corn would soar from three shillings a quarter-ton to sixteen shillings. The poor would steal dogs to eat, or even eat their own children who were starving anyway. The Little Ice Age would have arrived, cramping the growing season.
Not that a minor ice age would impede the business of war, in which Ranulph and Ralph and Robert de Neville would all play their parts. … Meanwhile Robert was highly intrigued by the prospect of immortality proceeding out of the alchemical laboratory. Besides being a fighting man, Robert was also a dandy; and a dandy hates decay and mortality.
The laboratory was stiflingly hot. Robert shucked off his ermine-trimmed cloak and plucked the feather-plumed turban from his head. Old man Lully wore a plain leather tunic and a grubby apron on which to wipe his hands. Daylight streamed through the narrow stone windows, shafts dancing with particles of smoke which had evaded the chimney of the furnace. Vapours drifted from alembics. Stills bubbled. Pelicans steamed. A crowd of pots and bottles, some of them massive, held sulphur and mercury, alum and yellow arsenic, saltpetre and borax, vitriol and scales of iron, vinegar and oil.
“First,” explained Lully, “we calcinate our materials by means of acid, and distill till dry. Next, we dissolve the dry residue back into the liquor we have distilled. Do you follow? Then we circulate the liquid seven more times by evaporation and condensation. Repeated circulation is very important. Next we conjoin — we mix, we close our vessel, and heat it for several months.”
“How many?”
“Maybe four. We require a constant and exact heat all the while.”
“And then?”
“Finally the substance grows dark and thick and bubbly. It putrefies — and a rainbow shimmers in it. Once this rainbow disappears by congelation, we have arrived at the white stone. Lastly, most laboriously, we must repeat the stages which have gone before —”
“Excluding calcination?”
“Yes! Exactly. Excluding that. And ultimately we achieve thered stone. If we have succeeded, we only need to project a pinch of the red stone into heated mercury — and the mercury will turn to gold.”
“And the elixir, which restores corrupted matter to purity?”
“That is the merest speck of the stone, taken twice per annum in some convenient liquid. After the first dose you may expect your hair to fall out, and your nails too, and all your teeth. These will all soon grow back flawlessly. Thereafter … your wisdom increases.” Lully smiled. “You, Robert, might readily become a king of England — except that you would no longer care to do so. Instead you would be a secret king, of the cosmos.”
“And the worm called salamander? Isit wise?”
“That is the spirit of fire itself, the quintessence vitalizing a body as fluid as flames.Men speak and reason. A salamander burns, and shivers. It mediates what is fiery, whereas only Man deploys reason, the gift of God.Its wisdom is elemental, not analytical.”
“I see,” said Robert.
I had succumbed to Brenda’s suggestions that I should hypnotize her, with Mother acting as chaperone. So this took place upstairs one evening in my mother’s room. Brenda lay on the sofa, fluttery with nerves as though this was a bridal evening, a time of ravishment long wished for yet disconcerting. Mother reclined against pillows, smiling encouragement at her.
To me there was something obscene about my mother’s complicity. I thought of the old foreign wedding custom whereby the blood-stained sheet was hung out over a balcony the morning following deflowering to demonstrate the virginity of the bride to the public. In this case, I felt as thoughI was being treated thus by Mother. A kind of intimacy was about to occur before her gull-sharp gaze. Brenda was the object of this intimacy, yet I felt it was myself who was really under scrutiny, by two conspirators.
A good thing that I had my own back-up system, in the person of Jack! I could sense my co-conspirator lurking behind the doorway of my mind, keeping watch.
“Well now, Brenda, you understand the process?”
“Oh yes, John.”
“No second thoughts? No qualms?”
“Let’s do it. I consent. I want it.”
(“Don’t let yourmother put you off,” sneered Jack. “Don’t fluff it.”) Not unnaturally he sounded somewhat hostile, though the advice was helpful. This was the first time I had performed in front of Mother. Perhaps her intent gaze was only due to pride and curiosity.
So therefore I hypnotized Brenda. I told her to rewind to her previous life.
Nothing. A blank. Zero. Silence. A void, not even blue. No past life at all. She told me nothing. She had nothing to tell me.
I took her again down the time-line to her birth, and she was a baby once more, lying in her cot beneath a plastic rainbow mobile, gurgling, but articulate.
I took her back from there, but it was like trying to push-start a car on a flat battery. The engine wouldn’t fire. Before her birth, was emptiness.
I felt impotent. Subdued.
So I woke her; and she already knew. I always instructed my patients that they should be aware of the lives they were relating.
She looked at me soulfully. “John, I’m so sorry. What does it mean? Am I blocking you out … unconsciously?”
Dear John, I’m sorry. Yours truly.
Maybe Brenda didn’t believe that I believed in past lives? Or perhaps she had no inner life to speak of — no traumas or desires strong enough to generate an imaginary other life, to power the fantasy of one. Maybe she was just herself.
“This happens sometimes,” I said. “Not everyone is a perfect subject.”
“Does this mean,” interrupted Mother, “that Brenda didn’t live before? That this is her first life now?”
(“First life as a person,” suggested Jack maliciously. “Before, she was a sheep. Or a fish. The universe gave her a break because she was a good sheep.”
“Shut up, Jack. I’m thinking.”)
I said aloud, “It doesn’t necessarily mean that. Maybe she worked through all her karma and decided to wipe the slate clean.”
“Is karma that Indian meal you two ate at the Star of Bengal?” Mother asked. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”
(Jack giggled. “No. It’s soul food.”)
“What I mean,” I said, “is that Brenda may have no unresolved tensions left over.”
Now Brenda looked pleased, though still puzzled.
I said to her, “Your soul took a decision to start out clean and clear, without ties to the past — because nothing tied you. Nothing needed working through once again.”
“Then shouldn’t I have gone straight to Heaven? Whatever Heaven is. Shouldn’t I have been united with a bright pure light?”
(“Like moths,” whispered Jack. “They get united with bright lights.Zap. Sizzle.”)
“She’s an angel,” said Mother. “I always thought so.”
Damn my cowardly urge to propitiate people!
“In Buddhist terms,” I went on, “she might be a Bodhisattva. That’s someone whocould have united with the light, but who chose not to. Chose, instead, to stay on Earth.”
“To help people.” Mother nodded. “That’s right. I don’t know about Buddhism but I understand what you mean.”
Ought I to propose to Brenda then and there? Brenda, be my Bodhisattva, be my guide to the light. She looked expectant enough. She could help me with her blank goodness. And I could become bland. A wimp. A weakly interacting mediocre person. I felt a sort of whiplash inside me, in protest. That was my parasite, Jack, expressing his feelings. My tapeworm; and my serpent of power, of wild secret strength.
“We could try again,” I offered Brenda.
She shook her head. “I’m satisfied, John. Oh yes. Fully. In fact this is more wonderful than if I had discovered any number of exciting lives. Thank you! Now I suppose I had better be going home …”
(“Yes,” agreed Jack.)
Who knew? Maybe Brendawas a Bodhisattva? Though she could only be that if reincarnation existed.
“I’ll drive you home,” I suggested.
A gull could smile with eager joy; Mother did so.
Next morning I walked out, and Jack phoned Mandarin from the call box that still smelt of piss and acetic acid.
“Sally, this is Jack Cannon. Did I tell you I’m working on a new book?”
“I thought you said youweren’t ?”
“Well, I am. I am now. Fact is, I’m a good way through it. This is giving me a spot of bother about revisingThe Gaze — yes, you can change the wretched title if you like. Because, you see, I’m in the swing of this other book.”
“That’s exciting. What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the ending yet.” Jack fed in more money.
“If you get the revisions to us within two months,” said Sally, “that’s okay. I assume they’ll be fine. We do need to have them with us by then, to stick to schedule.”
“Yes, yes. You’ll get them. What I was wanting to say is that this new book might cause a bit of a sizzle, especially with my photo being on general release. I might be forced to go full-time.”
“But at Birmingham you said you were retired. You told everyone you’d taken early retirement.”
“I still do some consulting work.”
“For a shipping office? Why did they retire you, then?”
“I do other consulting. The point is, I’d like to delete the next-book option clause in the contract forThe Gaze . I could need bigger money for this next one, so it would help you to argue the case with Mandarin if there was some initial element of competition, wouldn’t it? A bit of an auction situation.”
Sally laughed hilariously. A publisher’s laugh, indicating that alas you knew nothing about reality. She calmed.
“You aren’t trying to change publishers because I asked for some itsy-bitsy changes, surely? You’d find other publishers have similar viewpoints, and costings, to Mandarin. Of course you might be lucky, and I’d wish you well, but it would be a real leap into the blue. Mandarin and yourself have built up a good relationship, I’d say, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, of course. This has nothing to do with the revisions. I might berelyingon my income from writing.”
“Write well, then, Jack. That’s how.” Obscurely we sensed that it wasn’t how. How it actually was, ah, that evaded us.
“You sound to me as though you’re going through a life crisis,” Sally went on. “Hell, the whole world is — that of course includes the publishing industry. Why don’t you come down to the metrop for lunch? Talk things over? We’ll fix up some radio spots, even one of the book programmes on TV. Make it worth your while. Be more prominent, be seen, talk to people: that’s the way. The Birmingham Fayre was a good start. I think you’re feeling out of touch, Jack. No need! Mandarin will look after you. And you look after us too, okay? But I have to convince people, as you say yourself. How do I convince anyone when you’re the invisible man? At leastI’ve met you — if only once. You don’t even let us know your real address. That slows communications. I think you ought to showbiz yourself a bit; which connects with what you’re saying about going full-time. Hiding under a stone is no way to push yourself — which I take it is what you want. I think you’re looking at the situation the wrong way round. You mustn’t expect a spontaneous miracle simply by shifting to another publisher. Why don’t you let us try to set up some real publicity, hmm? Not every publisher even offers to do as much. Let’s try it out, see how it flows, take it from there.”
