The Witchery, page 20
Blessedly, I did not linger overlong on Brù’s words, not then; for this new tent, well…
This was not quite a laboratory, nor an oratory, nor living quarters of any recognizable kind. Was it a combination of the three? Not quite, no; but I knew what it recalled: a taxidermist’s den. I’d seen such a stinking place once, in the Florida Territory. The proprietor had been a tanner by trade, a taxidermist by…what? It seemed a strange, rather sloppy hobby, but who was I to say? There’d been blades of every size and shape, and skins spread upon the walls—skins yet to be scraped lay piled beside the man’s door: a feast for flies—and he’d even shown me (unsolicited) his boxful of glass eyeballs. Yes: This smaller tent of Brù’s bespoke taxidermy, or something similar. But what, I wondered, is similar to taxidermy?…Surgery?…Torture?
Within that tent death knew no inordinate dominion. I’d have sensed it if it had. Still, how then to account for the stench, which was considerable, as bad as any shambles, charnel house, or cemetery I’d had the misfortune to find in years past? Could Brù’s creatures, though not dead, precisely, still take on the characteristics of the dead as he sought to preserve them in this space? For that is what he did. Enfin, it was not preservation per se, but rather…disposal.
…Admittedly, I was not overly dismayed to soon find Brù’s focus fixed upon the white python, Ourobouros. That said, I did not yet know what he’d do to it. Oh, but when I did, mon Dieu…: If the alchemist had so little affinity, so little affection for that snake of his, well, that did not bode well for any other creature coming betwixt the alchemist and his Art, such as it was.
The snake lay at full length upon two tables of deal set end to end. Beside the tables were skeletal-like stands of iron, with arms holding glass-bellied lights in which scented oil burned; burned, yes, but not strongly enough to displace the death-stench issuing from I knew not where. Leathern strapping secured the snake in two places, such that when Brù raised his cleaver—oh yes—and chopped the python into four seemingly equal parts, two sections were secured beneath said straps whilst two others lay center-all atop the tables, wriggling, writhing. Granted, I’d never seen the…the insides of a snake—their outsides had disturbed me sufficiently down the years, merci bien—but I’d read enough of Galen, Vesalius, and other anatomists to know that a living creature, thusly abused, ought to bleed. But, as with the bat, there was no blood. Too, I’d have supposed cleaved flesh—snake or otherwise, alive or…not—would show itself grayish red, pink in places; but the snake’s did not and was, instead, colorless, or rather dimmer than the snake’s outer skin, which yet was white, albeit not sun-bright, as earlier it had been.
I watched Brù work at this autopsy, or necropsy, and said nothing—the circumstances seemed not quite conducive to converse—all the while feeling the weight of the found Book upon my back and wondering why I’d had to climb so high above Havana to see this stomach-churning show; which fast progressed from bad to worse.
Stay: That is untrue: worse had been the surprise of seeing the snake chopped into four parts. Less worse it was watching Brù gather up those pieces—each as long as his arm—and lay them lengthwise in a rush basket, as if he were out in a wood collecting kindling. Yes, into the basket went all four lengths of snake, the last and topmost being that piece which bore its head, from which the split tongue yet flicked, flicked as if the snake sought its milk-snack. Horrid now—and off the scale of worse to worst—was seeing Brù take up the head-length of snake, kiss it upon its scaly snout, and, when again the tongue came, striking, fast as a mongoose might, to seize the tongue with smallish tongs and tear it, tear it from within the convulsing white-flesh.
Setting the snake’s tongue upon the table—where it moved like a scribbling stylus—Brù turned to me and said, as if I’d needed the act explained, “For the wall of the Stone Room.”
“I see,” said I, swallowing back the bile that had risen to the back of my throat…. I clutched the Book in my sack. Run! And oh, how I longed to.
Brù threw two parts of the snake into a barrel in the corner of the tent. Would that I could say I stood too far from said barrel to see its contents; mais hélas…Inside, piled three-fourths up the barrel’s sides, was…whiteness. Shuddering, alive-dead, animal whiteness. Flesh slowly ceding to bone. All of it adornments-to-be. From that barrel and another beside it there rose the stench earlier described.
The rest of the snake—its head and tail parts—Brù carried across the rooftop to his laboratory, bidding me follow. He’d stoked the athanor earlier, as evinced by the wavering air around it. Now he dipped the snake parts into a tinajone, or reservoir, kept outside the tent, such that I heard the rainwater hiss from off the fired snake flesh as Brù flung into the flames the last of Ourobouros, a snake he’d trained to sip milk, kitten-like, from a saucer.
Returned to the smaller, taxidermic tent, I wiped the sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my blouse. In a word, I was queasy; and grew more so as I watched Brù arrange his instruments—wiping the whiteness from off the cleaver, et cetera. And only then did I realize what part of the strange process I’d thought would follow upon the snake’s being cut into quarters: Brù taking up something similar to but larger than his thimble and cutting into the snake flesh, slicing, scooping, poking, and prodding until he’d found his stone. But no: Too much meat to search, I supposed. And I understood, too, what it was he’d do instead: He’d render Ourobouros down to ash—burn it, as was every alchemist’s wont—and later comb or sieve the cooled ash for stone.
Now, as to whether Brù ever culled any stones from the snake’s ashes—and a creature as large as Ourobouros might well have produced more than one stone, albeit each imperfect; for, as Brù said, or warned, “Perfection seeks a higher species, the highest species…”—well, I cannot here record; for by the time the athanor had cooled enough to be combed or sifted, I was already…
Oh, but stay: First let me say why I did what only a fool would do:
Though darkness had come, still it was steamy hot atop the assoltaire; and further, as I wanted, desperately, to slip from Brù as soon as I could, to read what Sebastiana had written, I thought it best to do as he bade me do; and so:
Yes, I took that goblet and drank it down to the dregs. Its sweetness I attributed to the fruit within whatever Brù had concocted; and mind you, Brù drank, too. Of course, he’d not drugged his drink, only mine. With what? Herbs, populeum, an elixir or potion bought from off some unscrupulous sister? I cannot say. I do not know. I know only that it was a soporific so strong, so…
Soon everything began to waver like the air around the athanor. And whilst I don’t remember sitting—the act of it, I mean—well I recall leaning back upon a divan, Sebastiana’s Book hard beneath me, and asking, stammering, “Why?…What species?”
I feared Brù would say Homo sapiens, was sure he would. Mad, he’d progressed through the lesser species, breeding them to the Light, let me say, and now he sought a human in which to plant his stone-seed, somehow alchemizing it within said host until it, until he or she, rendered the one Stone. Hence the need for a larger athanor.
“…species,” I was saying, “…Stone…” I was flat upon my back, flat upon the Book. The birds, all the birds had risen to circle and swoop, diving down to the level of the tents, such that it seemed Havana feted itself with silent fireworks. So intent was I upon my answer—though I could hardly form the question, the muscles of my mouth being the first to fall slack—I was neither scared nor surprised by the birds’ flight, though surely it presaged nothing too…auspicious, as far as I was concerned. I wanted to know: Was it a human Brù would use?
Somehow I got the question out, evidently; for Brù came nearer, to kneel beside me. I saw two hoods, two heads, two faces of obsidian with inset golden smiles. No, said he, it was not a human he’d use. He’d tried that. And he repeated himself, such that I heard again, “…the highest species.”
Did I somehow ask another question? Doubtful, as my head now lolled side to side, and my left hand had fallen, open-palmed, onto the floor, from which I could not raise it. Still, I heard that explication I may or may not have sought with further speech; for Brù said, “The highest species, yes…You: the two-as-one. The Rebus.”
It was then I surrendered to sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
…because Nature produces all metals out of three things, salt, sulfur and mercury;…and that which has been left by Nature might be completed by Art, since Nature herself is always inclined toward her own perfection.
—MARSILIO FICINO, Liber de arte chemica, 1518
HOW BRÙ DID IT TO THE LESSER CREATURES I CANNOT say; but it is safe to suppose the processes were the same as those he used on me whilst I lay for weeks in the Stone Room. Weeks, yes.
Waking from the soporific—a day, or perhaps several days after being drugged: I’d no idea—I saw I was naked, and restrained. Cuffs and chains held me, cruciform, upon the cot. Strange though it may sound, I was not surprised. Horrified, yes. Surprised, no; for immediately I recollected that cup and the long draft I’d drunk from it. I recollected, too, the perfection of the python and my falling, shortly thereafter, upon the divan; whereon I learned of my own impending perfection.
At first, I fought, fought as best one can who lay naked, cuffed, and cruciform upon a broad canvas cot, captive to a madman in a cell the walls of which are alive.
My restraints were slack enough to allow me to lift my shoulders from off the sweat-slick canvas of the cot, to turn my head and…and retch. My throat felt coated. Doubtless this was the aftereffect of whatever drugged drink I’d been given by Brù. It had tempted me, then, that drink—so cool, so smooth and aromatic, sweet-seeming yet tricky as the legended apples of Sodom, said to turn to ash upon the tongue…. Enfin, mercury was what I tasted, and mercury was what I sought to spit from deep in my throat. That retching turning to a choking cough; for the Stone Room was thick with smoke. In the four corners of my cell, Brù had piled and lit, and caused to smolder, cones of sulfur. And if that infernal smoke caused a cough to rise from my lungs, so, too, did it bring the Stone Room alive in ways I’d not seen when first I’d found the room.
Then, I’d seen the white-flesh writhing upon the walls, but now, as seen through the scrim of smoke, and by the light borne of those bone lanterns, the…things upon the walls and ceiling were frantic. Birds’ wings blew the smoke this way and that. Tongues lapped at the curing air. Other flesh which I could not identify—though I saw the two lengths of python, newly nailed above the arch that led into the secondary room—…other flesh was wildly alive now as well. Rather, it was all dead yet manifesting the attributes of life. It was all animate. So, too, were the myriad pieces of red-shaded stone tacked to the walls: The stones moved as stones will when seen through water. They wavered. They shape-shifted. Was it the smoke that made the stones seem to mutate so, or was it some other elementary effect that actually caused them to do so? All I know is that all imperfected stone is mutable. As for perfected stone, the one Stone, well, that is something else entirely.
That white-and-red, smoke-choked, and stinking room seemed a bad dream; or, more specifically, that dreamscape in which I would die, as had all those creatures that had come before me: The less lucky of Brù’s creations who’d not been rendered down to ash and had their stones sifted out, but rather those that had had their stones removed by blade, by the prying fingers of Brù; who’d then made of their remains these bicolored mandalas, these tridents, these Sephirotic Trees, these alchemical talismans on the walls all around me. Here then was my living crypt.
Oh, but how would I be disposed of? By athanor or autopsy? By flame or blade? Or both. As had happened to Ourobouros.
And when would it happen? When would Brù harvest whatever it was he’d sown within me in the hopes that I—the Rebus, the long-awaited, androgynous Vessel of the Great Work—would bear the one, true Stone? I’d heard and read enough to know his end. Heard and read enough to know what he’d done to those creatures whose remains I saw arranged about me. Heard and read enough to know what it was he’d do to me and…
Read enough? I sat up straight, only to have the leather-and-chain leads of my cuffs pull me back down upon the cot. Where was Sebastiana’s Book? Had Brù found it? Oh, where was the Book? Where was the satchel which…There. To my left. Upon the floor. Midway down a wall at the base of which were lain, lengthwise, bones drawn from animals larger than any I’d seen in the courtyard or stables. Bones so large as to call to mind the shinbones and forearms of…of humans, yes. Beneath these horrid souvenirs of all whom Brù had done unto death—Sebastiana herself? Or the Duchess?…Please no—I saw a pile of striped cloth: my dress of bolan. Having stripped it off me—and need I recount the feelings that thought occasioned?—it seemed Brù had folded it, neatly, so squarely it seemed my satchel must lay beneath it. But of this I could not be certain.
I hesitate now to dignify Brù’s misdeeds with more alchemical claptrap; for my hostess’s hand hardens toward inutility, and why should I waste precious body-time talking of a pseudo science, one that is half philosophy, half sham? Enfin, for one reason only: It is true, incontrovertibly so, that something there was that fired aright, literally, when finally I died a decade later; such that here I am, the Rebus, Risen, Returned, pushing this pen with a hand not my own. And so, sister, let us indulge a millennium of dead men for a few paragraphs more. As said indulgence, I offer this distillation of what was done to me in the Stone Room:
None of the aforementioned dead men—true it is, too, that women dabbled in alchemy, most notably Mary the Prophetess, whose veneration of the vas mirabile, or male ejaculate, rivaled that of the Duchess, who attributed her sister-strength to same—…I say, none of those alchemists sought the Stone in precisely the same way; though, if the particulars of the processes differed, the principles did not.
All, all alchemists—from Roger Bacon up to and through Queverdo Brù—believed that the opus alchymicum, the Great Work, the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, and Perfection, began in the union of three basic substances: salt, mercury, and sulfur. The contradictory qualities of two of the three—any two—were countered by the third; and therefore all three composed the prima materia…. Bon. D’accord. But what of those processes the prima materia ought then to be subjected to? “Aye,” sayeth Shakespeare’s Dane, himself as confused as any alchemist of old, “there’s the rub.”
In the interest of time—which is to say, rigor mortis—let me here side with Albertus Magnus—he of the thirteenth century, and as eloquent as any of his brethren—who spoke of the hoped-for progression of the prima materia succinctly; rather, as succinctly as any adept ever did, succinctness not being a striven-for attribute of the adepts. Thusly, according to Magnus the Magus, here is the progression unto Perfection:
First the three substances—again, mercury, salt, and sulfur, as commonly denominated—are combined in a suitable vessel. No mean feat, of course, the finding of a suitable vessel. (Hadn’t Brù thought I was such a thing?) In said vessel, the three substances combine to form the prima materia; whereupon the mercury and sulfur are extracted as slag, and the salt is left to purify. Oh but how so? What is the magisterium, the catalyst that causes the salt, mercury and sulfur to combine? That is the question. (Some said the magisterium was water; and I can here attest: They were right.)…At last, purifed, the salt is “like unto rubies;” i.e., Brù’s imperfected stones. Further alchemical progression—which is to say, more burning—was done in the hope of rendering these down to the white elixir; which the common man calls gold, but which, to the Practitioner who made it, and perfected himself in the process, is the one Stone: The Philosopher’s Stone: That which grants eternal life. Et voilà!
I jest…. Understand: Alchemy was a lifelong pursuit, as it can take a half day to read and distill sense from a single paragraph of its canon; and I do not mean to conjure the image of alchemists roasting ruby-like stones in their athanors and, poof, pulling out the Philosopher’s Stone—white as light—in their stead. No. Perfection was a process made of mysteries, and one which they all pursued, many unto madness.
Like Brù.
He had red stones aplenty, Brù did, but what of the precious white said to be akin to both gold and light? No. This he’d never harvested. Had he, he’d have already been perfected. And I’d not be…Oh yes, it was via some perversion of said processes that I’d be perfected, years hence, if perfection this be.
By the time Brù came to the Stone Room, well, yes, I’d grown despondent—to understate, terrifically, my tenor of mind—and might well have welcomed death. Oh, but all that changed when I opened my eyes and saw the hooded Brù before me, wreathed in smoke and dimly lit; and it changed further when that hood was thrown back and Brù let his burnous slip to the floor. Did he think he’d…use me somehow, in a way warranting his nakedness?
I was naked, too, of course; such that now I suffered the alchemist’s appraisal, and not for the first time: Doubtless he’d spied upon his Rebus whilst I slept.
He nodded, as if pleased. Pleased? With what? It was that one gesture—naught but a nod—that caused my sadness, my despondency, to alchemize, yes, into a thing so pure, so perfect, it hasn’t a name, hatred being but proximal to it.
When I saw Brù approach through the smoke and strip, when I saw his cold, appraising eye and that nod, well…I sought to strike.
But how? I hadn’t the means.
I’d the strength, yes, but not the…stillness, the calm requisite to Craftwork. I wanted to bleed him, to cause his every breath to blow as blood from his nose, to bubble from his mouth as ours does at the Coming of the Blood. I could do it. Rather, I’d done it before, as a girl seated in an Angevin café—I recall it was La Grosse Poule—when I’d ensorcelled an innocent man; but that had been clumsy, done more out of curiosity than crossness. Still, why couldn’t I do it again now, now?…Hélas, I could not.
