Tale of Birle (21 page)

The woman and her children paid no attention to Birle. They had been struck silent by the sight of Yul. Two little faces peered out from behind their mother's skirt, fascinated and afraid. Their mother looked up at him, then down, then up, and she didn't even hear Birle's question, so Birle repeated it. “What do I pay you?”

The woman opened her mouth to answer. Then she saw Birle's neck. “Why, you pay what you think they're worth,” she said.

This wasn't like any bartering Birle had ever done. How was she to know the value of three fresh fish? When the Inn purchased a fisherman's catch—if, for some reason, the Inn's morning haul wasn't enough to feed its tables—her father traded cheeses, wine, ale, or sometimes labor for the catch. If the fisherman wanted coins, then he named how many. “Is three copper coins enough?” Birle asked.

Now the woman seemed afraid of her, and her hands gathered her children closer to her side. This might be a city of madmen, Birle thought. Would madmen all gather together to have a city of their own? Corbel, with his love of fear; Joaquim, who seemed to attend more to what went on inside his head than what was happening around him; the people all around her with their busy buying and selling, as if the whole world hung on each transaction; and now this woman, who asked the buyer to choose the price; as if all the madmen of the whole world—which was larger than Birle had ever imagined—had come together here, to live in this city.

“Three coppers is fine.”

Birle had the feeling that if she had said three gold coins, the response would have been the same. Or if she had said one copper. She put the three coins into the woman's hand.

“Thank you.” The woman's tongue wet her lips. “Thank you kindly.”

But why should the woman be so afraid at selling Birle three fish? Birle asked where she might find a baker. The woman pointed in the direction of the center of the marketplace, where the thick spike rose up over the heads of the people.

“What is that?” Birle asked.

The woman shrugged, and did not answer.

With Yul close behind her, Birle moved through the crowd. The only people who moved more smoothly were the soldiers. People made way before a soldier, or a group of soldiers; they parted and fell silent. Yul's size had the same effect on them.

At the baker's table, Birle was again asked to name the price she would pay, and again the price she named was accepted without question. At the vintner's she finally protested. “I don't know the value of the coins. I don't know the value of your wines.”

The vintner was a man of ripe years, with a proud face and a richly colored shirt. There was bitterness in his voice when he answered, the bitterness of a man who thinks otherwise than he speaks. “The Prince's house names its own value for the goods it needs.” He spoke to her neck, and the gold band around it, and at last Birle understood. The metal at her throat marked her as clearly as a brand. “I would give fair value,” she said.

“It's Corbel to say what's fair value these days.”

He wouldn't help her, Birle thought crossly, so she put down two copper coins. If he wouldn't help her, then she couldn't be concerned about his fair profit for labor. She looked up to tell Yul to add the stoppered jug of wine to his basket, and her eye went beyond Yul's head to the even greater height of the spike. Then she saw what she hadn't noticed before: Placed where all must see and any who cared to mount the blocks of stone could reach it, a hand. A man's hand. The hand had been nailed to a board, the board like a shelf coming out from the spike. The hand stopped at the wrist, and it was black, and its blackened fingers curled up around the black palm, and the little shelf was stained black with blood. In the palm lay a gold coin.

Birle looked back to meet the vintner's eyes. His own hand, its living flesh browned with sunlight, fingered the woven silver chain that hung across his broad chest. “What is that?” she asked him.

“A hand.”

“Aye, I can see that. Whose hand is it? Why is it here—displayed like that?”

The vintner didn't wish to answer, and was not going to. Bells rang, first slowly, then gaining speed. The vintner gathered his jugs together.

“Vintner,” Birle said, “I would have my questions answered.” Although why she wanted to know she couldn't have said. In fact, she didn't wish to know; she wished she had never seen the thing placed there for all to see.

“Then ask your master.” He wished not to answer, but didn't dare risk silence.

“Vintner,” she said again. Fear rose in his eyes. For all his plumpness and prosperity, he feared her. The chain at her neck claimed Corbel's power. Aye, and she had no right to it, but she would still use it. It gave her pleasure to watch fear force this sullen man to her will.

“Whose hand it is, I can't say, not knowing the man's name. I know only his crime. There were two of them, and if you care to see the other's hand you have only to step around to the other side of the spike. There's a gold coin there too. Two men, who cheated Corbel. Their hands are here, and their heads one on each side of the slave market—until the birds finish with them. What they looked like before Corbel caught them—they had a ship and thought they'd make an escape by sea—that I don't know either. They were strangers, pirates likely, men more greedy than wise. I told you true, I don't know their names.”

Birle thought she did. Aye, and it satisfied her that the brothers had come to more harm out of this than she and Orien had. But the swift surety of Corbel's justice—

She turned, and hurried back to the twisting street where she had entered. The market was emptying now, as if the bells called the people away, buyers and sellers. The sun was high in the sky.

The most terrible thought of all was to know that the two gold coins would be left untouched in the hands that seemed to offer them to any who would climb up. So great was the fear of Corbel: and Corbel knew this. Even the beggars, who could move under the cloak of darkness, even the soldiers, who counted life less than coins, none would dare to mount the broad stones. They would cheat themselves at market before they would dare to cheat Corbel, or let Corbel think they might have cheated him.

Even if she could find Orien, somewhere in these twisting streets, there was nothing she could do. She couldn't escape. The same power that let her move so freely, and purchase what she would at the price she chose, held her helpless.

Birle and Yul joined the departing crowds, and the people stepped aside to let them pass as if they were two of Corbel's soldiers.

She had no trouble retracing her way, Yul now at her side. She kept her eyes on the street under her feet, winding up the hills and through the guarded gate, past the walled houses, to the Philosopher's house. Inside, before she could unload the basket, Joaquim summoned her from the doorway. “Come here.”

It was full midday under a warm southern sun. Grass sprang up greenly underfoot and the breeze carried the smell of the sea and of flowerings, but the sweetness of the day didn't penetrate Birle's heart.

Joaquim glared at her, and at Yul, as if they had displeased him. Birle studied her master's lined face, with the gray hair straggling down beside it to lie on the shoulders of his black robe, and waited. She didn't fear Joaquim's anger.

“A garden,” he said. “Placed here, a garden at least forty paces on all sides. You can keep a garden?”

“Yes, master,” Birle said.

“The land is level enough, it's close enough to the well for watering should the summer be dry. The grass grows so green, the soil must be good, and I will have a garden. Yul, you will turn the soil over, and break it up fine. Deep, as deep as to my knees. Do you understand?”

In a moment, Yul answered, “Yes.” As if afraid he might not be understood because the word, however plain, was distorted as it came out of his mouth, he also nodded his head eagerly, up and down.

“Right away,” Joqauim said. He seemed agitated, irritated.

“What will you plant?” Birle wondered.

“Herbs,” he answered, impatient. Then he took a deep breath, like a child at the end of its weeping, and smiled at them. “I shouldn't be cross, it's none of your doing. How can I expect you to understand when I haven't explained it to you?” He answered his own question, but no longer smiling. “My brother summoned me here, to this city, because he has his use for me. As if I were—he tells me to discover the secret law by means of which base metals can be transformed into gold.”

“But you said that was a tale, a story,” Birle reminded him.

“There are men who claim to have discovered it. Some other men believe it, Corbel among them. Alchemists—that's the name they call themselves, those who make the claim. There is a name also for those who believe what they say, my brother among them. Which I am too wise to speak, and you should follow my example.”

“Yes, master.”

“While Corbel uses me, as he thinks, I will make my own use of this place. I understand sickness, and the herbs to heal or ease. And I would . . . if I write down all I know, the appearance and use of each herb, that book will make life easier for all men, in all times. That book will be better than a child, to keep my name alive long after I have gone from the world. It will be greater than a string of conquered cities living in fear of my name. A greater greatness. I'll illustrate the appearance—the young plant, the plant in flower, the plant in full leaf, its roots. I'll write out how to prepare and how to apply it. However, Corbel must see me working on his alchemy or he'll—I never know what my brother will do, when the world doesn't go his way. He must think that I work to his purpose.”

“Even if it can't be done?” Birle asked.

“But maybe it can. Iron, stone—that's the marvel of the idea, that you can transmute the most common matter into the most precious. Whether the secret waits to be discovered,” he said, no longer looking at her, “is a question I can't answer. This world is rich in marvels that I can't understand. The sun circles overhead—did you never wonder? What hold the sun in the sky?”

Birle had never thought to wonder, although she thought Orien might have. Orien would have been a better choice for the Philosopher's house.

“You put a seed into the earth and a plant grows there, onion or rye, roses—how does that happen, onion or rye or rose from a tiny seed. A tree from an acorn. How can that be, something so tiny transformed into something so large? Think of a man and a woman—they come together and he places an infant into her belly. What makes that marvel? A man comes to the end of his days—through age or illness or accident—and when he dies, what becomes of that which made him the man he was? There is flesh and there is spirit, but I have seen the body of a dead man cut open, taken apart, and never his spirit to be seen in it. The principle of life, the living principle . . .”

Birle, with wonder growing in her, had nothing to say. She couldn't answer his questions.

“So you see, it might be that within every kind of matter there lies gold. It might well be that, could we understand, we might be able to release the gold within lead. Or,” Joaquim added, with a smile that was as much sad wisdom as laughter, “it might be that there is lead within each kind of matter, that the secret would reveal not the treasure within but the baseness within. I will make trial of the possibility of transmutation, at Corbel's will. I'll make fair trial, the best I can devise. But I will also,” he said, resolute, “make my book of herbs, and for that I need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yes, yes, that's what I've been talking about. Don't you understand? If you can read, and write, then you will be my amanuensis. Yul will be my arms in the garden, and you will be my hand to record and copy. Corbel may have his will of me, and his purposes, but we three—”

Birle felt then as she thought Yul must always feel, as if she couldn't understand enough, as if she could see but dimly what was clear to others. She knew what she did understand, however, and that was the simplest of things; that for whatever reasons of his own, Joaquim had given her luck when he chose her at the market. She knew what Yul had seemed instinctively to understand, that their master was a man whose use of them wouldn't be harsh, or hard. The middling man would not have used her so, and she had only hope for Orien. Birle had never heard of an amanuensis and couldn't have said what it might be, but she knew luck when she held it in her hand.

I
F SHE COULD HAVE FORGOTTEN
Orien, Birle might have been content with her fortune. But she could no more forget him than she could forget her own belly. How she might discover where Orien had been taken, she didn't know—except by searching every street in the city. What she might do, if she could find him—she had no idea. All she hungered for was the sight of him, to see his face again.

As spring ripened and then bloomed into summer, Birle wound her way down different streets as she went to the marketplace, as she returned from it. She had little time for the search. Labors awaited her return to the Philosopher's house, as labors had preceded her leaving it, keeping the house and the laboratory. Meanwhile, Yul dug up the garden and, with Birle's help, enriched the soil with manure the soldiers brought them in cartloads from Corbel's stables. Meanwhile, Birle laundered and mended; in the evenings, she practiced writing, under Joaquim's critical eye. In all else he was not a demanding master, but in the writing he required all to be as it might, at its best, be. He taught her how to make the thick black ink and how to cut a goose's feather so that it would draw the lines of the letters without blots. He gave her pages of his alchemy books to copy, odd configurations called formulae. He made her do them over and over until each page was perfect.

Birle welcomed the never-ending toil. It filled the many hours when she could not be, for however many minutes she could steal, walking down a street or alley, looking to right and left into doorways and passageways, marking fountains on her memory's rough map of the city.