Planetary: Mercury, page 11
“She let my wife die,” Erasmus’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Rather than give her a single extra drop.”
“Did not you have your own supply?”
Erasmus’s head drooped. He pressed his face into his hands. “I had spent mine. On patients—trying to save their pathetic mortal lives.” He lifted his head. His eyes were cold as a dead man’s. “Not a mistake I will make again.”
“Have you no love left for mankind?”
“Any love I had, for anything, died with my Maria.”
“Then, I suppose you will not give me the ounce I would need to extend my influence enough to spare this castle.” Mercury gestured upward, indicating the palace above their heads.
“An ounce!” Erasmus exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Sweet Mary, Mother of God!”
The god buffed his nails with his linen shirt.
“You are asking for twenty years of my life!” cried Erasmus. “Twice that, if I am frugal! To save… what? The puffed-up fool who threw me down here? His doddering chancellor and harlot dancing girls? The scum that serve him? I might pay Water to ensure their demise. But to save them? Never!”
The psycopomp gazed at him steadily. “So be it. One drop then.”
Erasmus hefted the tiny vial and pulled the stopper. A heavenly perfume issued from the bottle. The dank cell suddenly smelled like a garden in springtime. The youth climbed to his feet, his eyes shining. He stepped forward and opened his mouth. With a sigh, Erasmus let a single drop fall onto the swift god’s tongue. The god closed his eyes and smiled.
“So now what?” Erasmus asked. “We wait for sundown?”
The god opened his eyes.
Erasmus would never have mistaken him for a mortal now. Erasmus stepped backward, unnerved.
Mercury spoke. “Enough power have I to work my will upon the world about the two of us. And enough time have we to reconsider your tightfistedness. Go.”
With these words, the god thumped Erasmus on the chest with the heel of his palm. The force of this gesture threw him backwards. His body collapsed, crumbling to the floor. Erasmus, however, was not in it.
Darkness and a glimpse of rock. Then Erasmus found himself, unseen and bodiless, in the throne room of the Don Rodrigo de Alegrias, Conde de Cordoba. The chamber was a riot of the brightest color. Never in his life, even when visiting Imperial China, had Erasmus seen so much red. Vermilion swathed the Conde’s guards and the court maidens. Even the wall hangings and the decorative tapestries with their embroidered scenes of daring-do dangling from ceiling crossbeams had been dyed this expensive color.
One such tapestry had been torn in yesterday’s fight and now lay across a footstool, where the careful fingers of two seamstresses worked tirelessly to repair it. The smashed porcelain and crockery had been cleared away, but servant girls, including the dancing wench from the previous night, still knelt on the colorful mosaic tiles of the floor chasing elusive tiny droplets of shimmering silver that seemed to shy away from their eager hands.
Erasmus smiled coldly as he regarded the results of his handiwork, but he also cringed mentally—as physical cringing was currently denied to him. Oh, what wonders he could have wrought with even a single one of those droplets.
In the center of the chamber was a wide ceramic basin, at least four feet across, set upon a stand such that pushing on the rim of the great bowl caused it to rock. The dancing girl, who had been scurrying around on her knees, now approached this basin. Carefully, she brushed the drops she had gathered onto the silvery pool within. Her offerings did not plop into the main body of the liquid, mingling as water would have, but remained atop the mirrored surface, rolling about like tiny silver pearls.
Glancing furtively over her shoulder, the dancing girl gave the rim a quick shake. The basin shook, sending the sunbeams reflecting off the pool’s surface leaping and dancing across tapestries and scarlet hangings. Slowly, the motion of the liquid embraced the pearly drops until they sank into the whole, and the surface again became mirrored and smooth.
Erasmus gazed covetously at the pool of quicksilver—enough to fulfill the dreams of every alchemist in the world. Then, he chuckled—a noise apparently heard by none but him. There were disadvantages of being outside of his body. He could not pick up any of the precious substance. There were, however, advantages as well. With a smirk, he stepped into the basin and stood atop the mercury. His arms crossed, he regarded the scene of last night’s struggle and recalled how it had come about.
The previous evening, Erasmus and his host had feasted amidst sweetly-perfumed exotic flowers. Dancing girls, draped in vermilion scarves and little else, whooshed and swayed on a raised dais. Unfamiliar six-stringed instruments played lively music, and expensive wine poured freely. Erasmus kept refilling his host’s glass, hoping to loosen the Conde’s tongue and learn the secret of his astonishing wealth. His host apparently had a similar intention, as he kept plying Erasmus with more wine.
The Conde de Cordoba was a tall man with one of those faces that promised either cleverness or malice. His thick, wavy hair, mustache, and goatee had once been a glossy black but now contained more silver than sable. His previous beauty could still be glimpsed though sagging cheeks and heavy jowls. He appeared hail and strong, but when the two men had gone to a high balcony near the roof, earlier in the afternoon, to gaze at the heavens through Erasmus’s enchanted telescope, the mild exertion of the stairs had been enough wind the Conde. He bent over and wheezed for more than a minute. Overall, Erasmus’s host had the aspect of a man who had once been handsome and strong but whose age was catching up with him.
Downing his fourth glass of wine, the Conde gestured around the chamber. Erasmus’s eyes followed, resting on the men-at-arms in their brilliant scarlet tunics, the priceless red tapestries with their scenes of battle and adventure, and the pool of quicksilver, twinkling in the torchlight, the value of which Erasmus could not even begin to calculate.
“Not too bad for a poor student! Would you not agree, Dr. Prospero?” The Conde laughed. “Who would have thought in the days when I was the favorite pupil of our mutual friend Nicholas Malebranche that it would come to this?”
“Ah, was it Malebranche who recommended me to you, then?” asked Erasmus, both intrigued and relieved. Malabranche had been a student of his once and then, decades later, a close friend. A churchman, Malabranche had served as a university professor for many years. He had told Erasmus a number of fond tales about his favorite pupil. “How is the old fellow? Still trying to reconcile Augustine and Descartes?”
“Much the same. Much the same.” The Conde declared with jocular fondness. “You know how old scholars are, especially churchmen. He’s deeply embroiled in a debate, though letters, about the similarity or difference of his ideas to those of Baruch Spinoza,”
“Yes, that sounds like the Malabranche I remember,” laughed Erasmus.
His eyes remained upon his host, but his attention kept straying to the massive basin of mercury shimmering in the center of the chamber. A drop of quicksilver was a priceless treasure to an alchemist. Even a small handful of it might change his fortune entirely—both in the sense of improving his finances and in the sense of lifting the burden that had held him back this last century. Oh, what he could do with a whole pool of it!
Erasmus and his host ate their braised delicacies. The dancing maidens swayed to the beat of castanets. One girl, a sprightly thing with dark Spanish coloring, came boldly forward and wrapped her red scarf around Erasmus’s shoulders, moving with sensuous promise, as if offering to sit in his lap. Erasmus scowled and tossed the scarf aside. Abashed, the pretty thing rushed back onto the stage and mingled with the other dancing girls, as if hoping to become lost in the herd.
“Would you care to see a wonder?” The Conde gestured to his chancellor, a bent old man with wispy hair as white as thistledown.
“Indeed!” Erasmus returned his attention to his host.
The Spanish lord clapped his hands. His chancellor, a wizened old man in his eighties, tottered over to where the two men dined, bringing with him a small bowl of mercury. The quicksilver jiggled as he placed it on the table. The old servant then clapped his hands twice, and a young servant brought a platter upon which rested thin sheets of beaten gold. The Conde took a sheet of gold and lay it ceremoniously atop the mercury.
The quicksilver drank the gold.
As Erasmus and the other two men watched, the glittering sheet of gold crinkled like paper, its edges drawing together toward the silvery surface. Then it sank into the mercury, dissolving as sugar dissolves into tea.
Erasmus sucked in his breath.
He loved gold. He loved it not as a miser, who wishes to hoard the yellow metal for its value, but rather he loved it for itself, for its beauty and, most of all, its durability. Of all the substances in the world, gold was the only one he could not wither away with The Staff of Withering.
“Did you ever wonder how the ancients could gild things so perfectly that they could fool an unwary merchant into buying a copper statue thinking it was silver or gold?” asked the Conde. “They harnessed the power of amalgam. They would dissolve the precious metal as so.” He lay another sheet of gold upon the bowl of mercury. It quickly drank this one up, too, until no sign of the gold was left on the calm silver surface. “They would then coat an idol or statue with the mercury. Finally, they would apply heat. The mercury would burn away, leaving behind a neat coat of the precious metal. Clever, was it not?”
“Yes. Indeed,” muttered Erasmus, who, fascinated though he was, felt the pain of the lost gold personally.
“Would you care for a demonstration?” the Conde lay another crinkling sheet of gold upon the bowl. “I could have my chancellor fetch us some artisans.”
“No!” Erasmus voice squeaked in a less manly way than he might have wished. “That is all right.” However much the temporary loss of the gold pained him, the agony of watching the permanent loss of the mercury, as it boiled off into gas, would be far, far worse.
As the Conde downed another glass of sweet white Jerez wine, Erasmus wondered whether recollecting about his youth might help loosen his host’s tongue.
“Didn’t Malabranche tell me that you once won a race riding a donkey backwards?” Erasmus leaned back in his chair. “Was it you who sat backwards? Or the donkey who went backwards?”
“Ah, the master’s memory grows dim,” chuckled the Conde. “It was my bosom friend, Philip Gordot who rode the donkey backwards. Though I was the one who made the most upon the wager.”
The Spanish lord laughed and flashed an enormous smile. It was the sort of smile a man gave when he was confident of dazzling his audience. Only, a few of the teeth that had once done the dazzling were now rotten with age, marring the effect.
Erasmus smiled back, but alarm bells were ringing in his mind. His friend Malabrance had made no mistake. The professor had told him many times about his favorite pupil and the donkey, but he had also occasionally mentioned the close friend of his favorite pupil—an arrogant young Spanish Conde with a fearsome temper. Erasmus shot his host a nervous glance, but then a thought soothed his worries. His last conversation with Malabranche on the subject of the Conde had occurred almost forty years ago. No doubt the young Conde had matured much in the interim.
Erasmus gestured admiringly at the brilliance of the red wall hangings, the red tapestries, the red floor tiles, the red wall paint, and the red scarves wrapped about the overly-attentive dancing girls.
“Never have I seen so many brilliant reds in one place,” Erasmus said casually. “It is as if you have reproduced the very color of the rose in silk.”
The Conde puffed up like a cock on the approach of dawn. “Yes, splendid, is it not? Even the emperors of the Far East have trouble rivaling me for its splendor!”
“I recognize this particular shade. Vermilion, is it not? ” Erasmus gestured toward the wall hangings. He did not mention that it had been his friend Leonardo Da Vinci who introduced him to this pigment, over two hundred years ago. It was seldom wise to share with men the secrets of his family’s long life. “Vermilion dye is said to be exorbitantly expensive, derived from a rare ore. How did a poor scholar come to possess such wealth?”
Erasmus spoke of the red dye, but his eyes kept straying to the much greater treasure shimmering in the bowl before them or in the pool in the center of the chamber. Not since the caliph who first built Medina Azahara, back in the Tenth Century, had so much mercury been seen in one place. What might the Conde want for even a small portion of such a precious substance?
“Vermilion indeed comes from a rare ore called cinnabar, as does mercury. You see that I have plenty of both substances. I have in my possession a cinnabar mine as great as that in Almaden or those belonging to the Ming emperors.” The Conde smiled as he stroked his mustache and goatee. “Shall I tell you the tale of how I came by it?”
“Certainly, please.”
“It was after the wars.” The Conde gestured toward some of the nearer tapestries. Erasmus realized that the scenes of bravery and daring-do displayed must be from the Conde’s own past. If so, he must have once cut quite a dashing figure. “My parents had died when I was but a child and my family estate had been destroyed in the fighting. Nothing remained. All I had was my horse and my saddle, and those I soon lost in a wager, trying to gain enough to rebuild my family’s home.”
“With nothing left, I vowed to seek out the ruined palace of Medina Azahara, built in the tenth century by my ancestor, Abd-ar-Rahman III al-Nasir, the Caliph of Córdoba.”
“I have heard of him!” Erasmus nodded. “He, too, had pools of mercury. Bishop Racemundo claimed that the walls of Medina Azahara were gilded, and the pools of mercury could be shaken, so that light reflecting off the pools would glance off the walls, startling and stunning the caliph’s visitors.”
“Ah. I did not know about that.” The Conde eyed his walls and stroked his mustache speculatively.
Erasmus winced, imagining the volume of mercury that might be lost gilding the chamber.
“But how could Abd-ar-Rahman III be your ancestor,” asked Erasmus, “Weren’t all the Moors ejected from Andalusia, over a hundred years ago?”
“They were,” agreed the Conde. “We tried to live with them in peace, but they continued plotting with the Austrians to reconquer Spain. Finally, it was decided that they must leave. But, in each town, one Moorish family was constrained to remain behind, so as to teach the secrets of irrigating the high terraces to the Spanish families who were replacing them. My mother is descended from such a Moorish family, and her father insists that his family comes down from the first Caliph of Cordoba.
“As I was saying,” continued the Conde, “All I had left was Fernando, my loyal servant who raised me,” he gestured at the old man. “The two of us made our way south on foot. As we approached the ruins of Medina Azahara, parched and covered in dust, we saw a strange sight. A pillar of fire that extended many feet into the sky. The fire burned for hours, always before of us as we made our way across the dry, hot countryside.
“Then, just as suddenly, it winked out. And yet, we had spied where it lay, so we headed for the spot. Can you guess what we found?”
“I believe I can,” replied Erasmus confidently. “You found a large oval rock that looked much like an egg sitting in a nest of sweet-smelling twigs above a bed of cinnabar.”
The Conde gaped with astonishment. “A hundred times, nay, a thousand, I have told this tale, and no one has ever guessed what I found. How did you know?”
“I have seen many things,” replied Erasmus. “I am older than I look.”
“So I have heard.” The Conde had a cunning look in his eye that Erasmus did not much like.
“What did you do with the phoe… with the big oval rock?” Erasmus asked casually.
“I sold it to a very small man who came out of the north. He offered me its weight in gold and gems. I laughed and told him that if he could indeed accomplish such a feat, it was his. And he did!”
“Nibelung,” swore Erasmus under his breath.
He was disappointed to lose such a treasure to the dwarves. A phoenix had even more uses than the cinnabar upon which it nested.
“And under the rock was a large outcropping of cinnabar?” guessed Erasmus.
“Yes! Indeed. You know much.” The Conde looked impressed. “As I said, from cinnabar comes both the red dye called vermilion and the liquid metal we call quicksilver. And with so much gold and riches at my disposal, I can afford to keep as much of it as tickles my fancy. So I have restored my ancestor’s palace, even down to the pool of mercury.” The Conde paused, adding thoughtfully, “I did not know about the gold walls.”
“It is truly remarkable,” said Erasmus. “I must admit to being rather overwhelmed by the sight of it all. It is an alchemist’s paradise.”
“And you are an alchemist, am I right?” the Conde smiled graciously. “There are many things you could do with a treasure trove such as my little pool here, is there not?”
“Many things,” Erasmus’s mouth was dry. “Though even this bowl before us would be a treasure to me.”
“What sort of things?” asked the Conde. “Turn lead to gold?”
“Yes. Among others,” Erasmus nodded. “Mercury is the element of transformation. With this much mercury, I could turn all the lead I could acquire into gold. But I could also do other things even more amazing: create miraculous medicines, change the very essences of objects.”
“What sorts of objects?” asked the Conde, curiously.
“Metals, animals, even, it is whispered, the very soul,” mouthed Erasmus, who would have given all he had to transform his own soul, to free himself from the grief that had bound him like a prisoner’s chains these last hundred years, since the death of his wife?
“Then, you might be interested in taking some home?” asked the Conde, gesturing magnanimously at the pool.
Erasmus’s voice nearly failed. “More than I can say.”
