Immortal (13 page)

I went back for another body. Near the boy lay two corpses, a withered old woman whose white head rested on a middle-aged man’s belly, a similar cast to their faces: mother and son. One of his hands gripped one of hers. If it hadn’t been so awkward, I would have dragged them together to the bier, to preserve their intimacy, which I envied. If the plague took me this day, no one would clasp my hand and accompany me. Was my birth similar, attended by some blemish that caused my parents to want to lose me, as Silvano had taunted? If I really was the lost son of foreign nobles with pure blood, why hadn’t they found me long before now? I stood out; I was not being arrogant when I acknowledged that. My striking looks were unusual, the shade of my hair rare.

Had my parents, indeed, known their blood to be spoilt in me? Had they ever loved me as Sforno and Rosso loved their children? Over the years, I had wondered only rarely about my parents this way. On the streets I was too busy securing food. Marco had piqued my interest in my parents, but at Silvano’s, I was occupied with the ignominy of the work, with the ecstasy of the paintings that saved me, and, above all, with the knowledge that if I attempted to escape, as I surely would have if I’d discovered my parents, other children would have paid for my deeds with their lives. I could not let that happen. Now I was free and I could explore my origins and find out about myself, learn why I was different from other people. I would fulfill my other dreams, too: earning money, learning to read, even marrying. Above all, I would avoid the attention of the evil God who sent children into slavery, prospered murderers and rapists, and cursed the earth with lethal plagues. I didn’t know how I would accomplish this, I was just determined to do so.

I was ruminating on this when a soft tapping caught my attention. I looked up; a man whose face was obscured behind a gauzy, billowy curtain in a second-floor window was waving. His hand like an imp called me to him. I glanced around for ufficiali. When I saw none, I gently laid down the bubboni-crusted twin toddlers hoisted upon my shoulders. I went to the door under his window. Inside I saw a small hallway which led to spiral stairs. I climbed to the second floor, where a door swung open for me. A finger of saffron smoke poked out of the door and curled, as if beckoning. Curious, I entered.

Inside the room were several tables set with wondrous equipment: flasks and alembics and small pots breathing up flames that licked the bottoms of bubbling flasks. There was a profusion of objects whose names and functions I did not know. I looked around in wonderment.

“You’re intrigued by the appurtenances of my art,” the man said softly, from his seat on a bench by the window. “That’s a start. You’ve the minimal intelligence to be curious.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I responded, and turned my attention to him. He was of middle age, short, slim, and lithe, with coarse black-and-white hair and a narrow, beardless face. He wore a black tunic, and the slits in his sleeves revealed a black camicia underneath. Across his lively eyes stretched some apparatus that sat on his nose—another marvel. He saw me staring and tapped the thing on its side, by the outside edge of his thick black eyebrow.

“Don’t stare, boy, speak up and ask. These are eyeglasses. Invented more than sixty years ago, but not yet worn by the
popolo.
They enhance the vision.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“An alchemist. You may call me Geber,” he said. “The hand of fate is upon you, and it commanded me to speak to you. Otherwise I would not have taken the time from my work; I must have done something wrong to be so afflicted.”

“How could you tell that about me from up here?” I circled the room, staring at the moving sea of objects washing over the tables as if by some magical tide. Little implements for poking and cutting and stirring lay alongside mortars and pestles, vials of dye, lumps of clay, needles and thread, books with illuminated pages, parchment and quills and ink pots, small tin boxes filled with powders both coarse and fine, stones of all colors, bottles of colored liquids, a bag of salt, and jars full of oils. The scents of sweet clove and anise mixed in with the acrid odor of sulfur, which still smelled better than the dead. A beheaded rat lay on one table, a cloth-covered jar of beetles on another, and on yet another was a pigeon with its wings neatly cut off. I stopped to stare at the pigeon because the cuts were so precise and the body was neatly sewn up where the wings had been removed. One of the wings was fanned out alongside the body.

“Distance is no obstacle to knowing,” he said with a sly smile. “Distance is just a fabric that dissolves in the acid of merging. You know. You’ve traveled great distances to see things.”

I started. His words seemed to allude to the traveling I did when I worked at Silvano’s, but I had never spoken of that to anyone. I would not have confessed it to God, if I were the kind to confess, for fear that He would end my journeys for His own private amusement. It simply wasn’t possible that this Geber could have guessed about them. I gave him a sharp look. “Is magic your art?”

“Nature is my art, and it will reveal everything to one who looks with the eyes and sees with the heart,” he replied obscurely. “Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it. Nor, of course, do minimally intelligent boys.”

“Hell is spread upon the earth now, with plague-stricken bodies everywhere.” I shuffled over to another table. On this one lay an open book, a heap of dried violets, the furry brown paw of some small animal, an earthenware cup filled with white eggshells and another filled with blue shards, and a bowl with a translucent triangular stone soaking in cloudy water.

Geber sighed. “This is an evil plague. But so are all things of the earth.” I had begun to finger a device of three interconnected glass vessels, when he barked, “Careful! That’s a three-beaked still, exactly to the specifications of Zosimos himself. It’s for distillation…the release of the spirit from the matter which has entrapped it.”

“Like death,” I commented.

He nodded. “Death isn’t the end of the story in alchemy. The spirit, the pneuma, can be reintegrated into the body after purification. On that table, I have built Zosimos’s
kerotakis,
for sublimation…Come, let me look at you. Even with this wondrous invention, my eyes are weak.” I hesitated, running my fingers over the delicately colored pages of a book, and he beckoned impatiently. “Come, boy. I’m ill, but it will take the plague some months to kill me. And you are immune to it, as you know.”

He seemed to know so much about me that I obeyed, warily crossing over to him. He examined me with thoughtful blue-green eyes. I reached out to touch the things that rested on his nose. A round piece of glass, secured by metal wire, hovered in front of each eye. “How do you know I’m immune to the plague?”

“You wouldn’t be working as a becchino if you weren’t,” Geber said, pulling down the lower lid of my left eye, then my right. He stuck his index finger into the corner of my mouth and I opened it. He inspected my teeth and then picked up my hand and looked at my nails. He turned my hands over and traced some of the lines on my palm. He laughed shortly and tapped on the mount of my thumb. He seemed satisfied as he crossed his arms over his middle.

“There are many becchini,” I noted, stepping back uneasily. What had he seen in his examination? What secrets of mine did his eyeglasses reveal to him? I spoke to distract him. “Many becchini will get the plague.” I thought of Rosso. “Some of them want to die.”

“Not me,” he said shortly. “I’ve spent years laboring to cheat death. Only to find the plague cheating me of the fruits of my hard work.”

“None of us can cheat death.”

“You’ll make a grand effort, though,” he said, with another short laugh. “Your parents were magicians of the second race of men. You’ve inherited their talents, though you’ve not had anyone to guide their development. It’ll take some effort on your part to earn them.”

I jumped back, shocked and confused. “How do you know about my parents?” I cried. Had he met them? Did he know secrets about my origins, and if so, would he tell them to me?

“There is a light that pours forth from people, and that light is who we are,” Geber said fiercely, leaning toward me. “This is what alchemy is about, truly. Ignorant folk think it is about turning base metal into gold, or perhaps manufacturing the elixir of life. But these are the grossest veneer. Alchemy is the search for what not yet is, the art of change, the quest for the divine powers hidden in things! The divine powers reveal themselves as light…he who properly cultivates himself will see the yellow light shine forth as it should!”

I didn’t know how to respond to his strange and passionate words. It seemed to me that few things could be more important than turning base metal into gold, which sustained life. I could believe in a light that poured out of people, because didn’t Giotto paint people thus, luminous? I looked away. I said, “You don’t look ill.”

“Don’t judge by first appearances, it makes you seem common,” Geber said sharply. He raised a lean arm and indicated his armpit. “Go on, feel for yourself. Direct experience is always the highest!” So I reached out and felt a squishy lump under his black tunic. “The plague’s just beset me. I can resist it, but not forever. I will succumb.” He spoke calmly, without fear.

“Maybe not. Some people recover, you could be one of them.”

“I won’t recover. I’ve seen it.” He shrugged. “My own light has been tainted, weakened. As the light from within goes, so the body inevitably follows. You can see it, too, son of magicians, and so verify my words with direct experience. Look around my arm and head.” He spoke softly and with elegant command. I found myself gazing almost sleepily at the outline of his outstretched arm and the roll of his shoulder into his neck, and then there was a pulse of blue light out from his head. He was murmuring, “As above, so below; as within, so without.” Another blue pulse traveled along his arm and then the light widened into a yellow umbra shimmering out from his form, but the yellow luminosity was speckled with black spots—

“Stop!” I cried. “I don’t want this, it makes me stranger than I already am!” I stumbled backward against a table. Geber brought up too many odd topics, most disturbingly, my parents. I blinked at the mist rising above a bubbling pot. The mist flowed into soft shapes like a river. My eyes followed the little pipes draining off into a closed flask. I wondered if this alchemical boiling was part of changing lead into gold, and if I could get this Geber to teach me how to do that. It would be a useful skill. Geber didn’t seem to value it, but I knew the importance of gold in a man’s life. If I could persuade Geber to teach it to me, I would never again have to fear hunger or being indentured into a corrupt life. Geber had to be saved, he had secrets to teach me. I said, “I know a physician, a good man. I can bring him to examine you.”

“No physician can help me.”

“You can let him examine you. You have to try to live,” I argued.

“Because life is valuable even with hell spreading itself upon the earth?” he asked. He shook his head. “I won’t waste your good doctor’s time. I’ve stretched my allotted years long enough. But I will talk more with you. Come again tomorrow. Bring me something.”

“Bring you what?” I asked.

He smiled. “You’ll think of something.” Dismissing me, he looked at the door with eyes which I did not believe to be weak. I fled.

LATER, SCRUBBING MYSELF IN SFORNO’S BARN
by the weak light of a single oil lamp, I looked up to find the Wanderer watching me. I knew immediately that he wasn’t titillated, but still, I didn’t want him there. I had had enough of men watching me perform ablutions. I’d only been free of Silvano’s for one day, after all.

“I’d like to be alone,” I said. My head was full of sensuously textured and richly colored fabrics, raised black welts, the yellow light around Geber’s body, the sickening odor that seeped out from corpses, and the raggedness of the row of bodies we’d laid in trenches, sprinkled over with quicklime, and then covered over with another row of the dead. My arms, back, and shoulders ached from carrying, dragging, digging. My stomach roiled and I wasn’t sure I could eat, though I was famished in a way I hadn’t been in years, and I could smell Mrs. Sforno’s good cooking from out here. But this was a refuge: the dark barn with a milky scrim of starlight flowing into its windows, the golden bubble of light radiating outward to blend into the stars, and the bleatings of warm-blooded animals around me. I didn’t want the fragile peace disturbed.

“You stink,” the Wanderer said, combing his long beard with his fingers.

I gestured with the chunk of lye soap in my hand. “I’m scrubbing.”

“No.” He leaned against the stall of the gray donkey, for whom he seemed to have a fondness. “You smell like sorcery and immortality.” He grinned wolfishly at me as he stroked the animal’s ears. “You reek of splendor and the hidden way, like someone who has crashed into the tree of life and knocked down an apple. Do you have a bump on your head, lucky cub?”

“Today there was anything but life and immortality around me,” I replied wearily. “And nothing fell on my head. See, no bumps.” I ran one lye-greasy palm over my scalp.