Blue and Gold (5 page)

A mistake; I can
see that now. It was a bit like falling in love with your wife after you’ve
been married three years. Warps your judgement, puts you at a disadvantage. I
should know. Done both.

Talking of which;
Eudoxia never gave a damn about me. I genuinely believe she was incapable of
any kind of affection. And she was terrified—real, tangible,
wake-up-in-the-night-sweating fear—of getting old. Not death, which she never
thought about, as far as I know. But being old; she said once that age was
alchemy in reverse, turns gold into shit. I couldn’t really understand that,
but I can reconstruct what led her there. At nineteen she was exceptionally
beautiful. At twenty-five, she was starting to coarsen up a little, as though
someone had subtly defaced a beautiful painting. She used to stand in front of
the mirror staring at a new line or wrinkle nobody else could see, and I could
practically smell the fear. So; once she’d reached the conclusion that I was
the best alchemist in the world, it wasn’t enough that I was working for her
brother, under contract and practically a prisoner in the wing of the palace
he’d had converted into a laboratory for me. She had to make sure, which meant
I had to be in love with her; with her beauty, to give me the strongest
possible incentive. I came to hate her, the same way I came to hate alchemy,
and for roughly the same reason. Even now, I find it hard to forgive her for
that.

It’s a central
paradox that love and rape both find expression in the same act. For two years,
I raped science, trying to give Phocas and Eudoxia what they wanted, gold and
youth. Couldn’t be done, of course. Not possible. But they both had blind,
unlimited faith in me; like being in love, or believing in God. I think I
could’ve endured that. I might just possibly have been able to keep going,
trusting that sooner or later the faith would start to crack and break up,
they’d realise I wasn’t nearly as clever as they thought I was, and they’d
eventually let me go, or kill me. What ruined that was the other thing; the
discovery, or the faint possibility of it; my one and only truly worthwhile
achievement, if only I could achieve it, that would bring me wealth, fame and
maybe—just maybe—happiness.

*

Thanks to Laodicus
, I had everything I
needed; the last remaining supplies and bits of equipment, and ten angels cash,
which he kindly embezzled for me from the Social Fund, of which he was trustee.
With my wooden box under my arm, I walked briskly back to my cellar, thinking
only about the experiment I was about to conduct, anticipating problems,
working through each step in my mind. I can’t actually remember reaching the
cellar, setting up the new apparatus, lighting the fire, drawing the water.
Time melts in the presence of intense concentration. It expands, so that a pot
of water takes forever to come to the boil, and contracts as you work through
each step of a procedure, trying to get seven things done at the same time
without rushing. I’d organised my mind so carefully that I didn’t waste a
second, but either there wasn’t enough, or there was far too much.

The blue and the
green. I heated lacrimae dei and flowers of strong metal in a crucible while
the compounds were reducing, then mixed the blue and the green in a stone
beaker and added the solids to the liquid. No effervescence this time, but a
dense white vapour, which made me realise that a windowless cellar wasn’t
entirely ideal for my purpose after all. I added vis cer-ulea, a scruple at a
time. The corner of a clean rag, dipped in the beaker, came up sky blue. Once
step closer to genuine immortality.

Trouble with
concentrating on one thing, you neglect other stuff. I had my back to the door;
they walked in quietly. First thing I knew about it was when they grabbed me.

*

The captain told
me it hadn’t been all
that difficult. He’d sent out patrols with orders to report strange and unusual
smells. Apparently, you could smell me halfway down the street. As simple as
that.

I had a short ride
in a closed carriage, wedged in between the captain and a sergeant, with a rope
tied to my ankle. When we reached the junction of Whitegate and Long Row, I
waited to see which way we’d turn; left to the Station House, or right to the
palace. We turned right.

“We’d better get
you cleaned up,” the captain said, as we drove through the main gate. “Can’t go
and meet the prince in the state you’re in.”

I pointed out that
we’d been students together, living in self-induced squalor and degradation.
First time I met Phocas, I told him, he hadn’t shaved for a week and he had
vomit on his shoes. The captain smiled at me, and said that he hadn’t gone to
university. He’d have liked to, but his father was a clockmaker with six
children. That, apparently, was me put in my place.

I’d never been
forcibly washed before. I told them I was perfectly capable, but I guess they
were reluctant to allow me full use of my limbs, in case I got away. The shave
wasn’t so bad, in fact it brought back old memories. By no means the first time
I’d had a blade pressed to my throat while four men held me down. They issued
me with a plain, clean gown, slightly frayed cuffs, sort of beige colour. No
pockets.

The captain and
his men took me as far as the great hall, where I was handed over to the Duty
Chamberlain’s men. As he handed over the end of my rope, the captain nodded
politely and wished me good luck. I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak.

*

The first time
I met Phocas, of course,
he was nobody. In fact, he was less than nobody. He was twelfth in line to the
throne, which meant he had no chance whatsoever, and his father had just been
executed for treason. It was amazing how many people could look straight at him
and not see he was there.

I, by contrast,
was the favoured nephew of a prosperous land speculator with important
political connections, a rising academic star, and one of the inner circle of
the inner circle of the in crowd. In fact, I was so central, you could have
plotted the location of everybody else by sticking the point of a compass in
the top of my head. By rights, I should never have wasted my precious time and
attention on a negative quantity like Phocas. But I liked him, then.

He was being
thrown out of a party just as I was arriving. He was aggressive-drunk, and the
reason for his expulsion, I later gathered, was that some of the puke missed
his shoes and hit the hostess’s dress, which he’d been endeavouring to remove,
regardless of her objections, when his digestive system betrayed him. Two
footmen carried him out into the street, with his feet off the ground, kicking
in air like a hanged man, and dropped him neatly in a big brown puddle. He sat
there for, I don’t know, five seconds; then he stood up, a bit shaky but with a
certain essential grace and dignity like a cat; then swayed and flopped up
against the wall.

The people I was
with marched past him, all don’t-look-at-him-you-don’t-know-where-he’s-been.
But he smiled at me—I could see him clearly by the lantern light—and his face
said,
please don’t think too harshly of me, you’re not quite catching me at
my best.
I grinned back at him, and he fell over.

Next time I met
him was at one of Menestheus’ lectures on Stratylides. I’d been sitting
patiently, formulating a question in my mind that’d demonstrate beyond doubt to
any perceptive witness that I was ten times cleverer than Menestheus, and at
least three times smarter that Stratylides. I was putting the finishing touches
to it when the old fool stopped talking. Phocas promptly stood up and asked
precisely the question I’d been planning.

Well, not
precisely the same. Not nearly as tersely or elegantly phrased. But he’d picked
up on the same frayed end in the logic as I had. Menestheus gave him a look,
then said, “Actually, that’s not quite as stupid a question as it sounds”, and
went on to give an answer I’d have had great difficulty beating. I was grateful
to Phocas for saving me, and impressed with the quiet, good-humoured grace with
which he accepted the mincing he got. I asked some people I was with who the
kid who asked the question was, and they told me. I arranged to have him
invited to a party I was going to, and made a point of talking to him; we
chatted for half an hour about ethical positivism, then slipped the party and
went for a drink. He didn’t have any money, so I lent him half an angel.

A year later, we
had the plague. It killed off nine of Phocas’ eleven supervening cousins, and
my uncle, who proved to have been on the edge of bankruptcy. He was, in fact, a
conman of substantial ability but limited intelligence; he hadn’t foreseen the
flaw in his scheme, which would’ve collapsed round his ears inside of a month
if he hadn’t died first. I was six months off my final exams; I had a trunkful
of clothes, which my landlord distrained on for arrears of rent, five dozen
books and four angels cash.

It never ceases to
amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went
from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference.
I couldn’t even get close enough to my old friends to ask them for money, and
Phocas, newly rich, was out of town, up at the capital for the funerals. My
tutor, who admired and loathed me, got me the porter’s job. I stayed on and
became invisible.

So what? Big deal.
I learned an important lesson in alchemy, at any rate; the catalytic agency of
gold in the process of conversion between precious-rare and dross, the
mutability of all things. Other things I learned; how to shift heavy objects,
how to sweep floors, clean up mess, stand perfectly still and quiet for three
hours and not be noticed. All good stuff, much more use to me in later life
than the course material. I take the view that we’re the sum of everything that
happens to us, good and bad. It’s an alchemist’s interpretation, of course,
seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by
processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even
if, particularly if, it’s unstable or noxious, you get a different result. If
the experiment comes out well, then you can’t say any one particular ingredient
or process was bad. If you end up with a result like me—well, good and bad are
by definition unscientific terms. What matters is the purpose of the experiment
and whether or not you achieve it.

By any reasonable
criteria, Phocas was a successful experiment. He started off as garbage and
came out of the crucible pure gold. A lesser man might’ve celebrated his
sudden, unexpected transformation into heir apparent with a whirlwind massacre
of everybody who’d derided and despised him when he was nobody; this would’ve
entailed wiping out ninety per cent of the university of Elpis, but that was
the sort of thing Phocas’ family had been doing for centuries, and nobody
seemed to think any the less of them for it. But Phocas wasn’t like that. He
forgave his enemies and rewarded his friends, except for me. Don’t get me
wrong. He wanted to help. He tried quite hard to find out what had become of
me. But by then my tutor was dead (the plague; we had it relatively easy at
Elpis, but he was one of the victims) and nobody else knew or cared. I carried
on portering and working in the library when the students were in bed or out
drinking, without the faintest idea that Phocas was trying to find me, until I
ran into a spot of trouble and had to leave town.

History will have
all manner of nice things to say about Phocas; how he checked the power of the
provincial nobility, ended the war with the Ammagene, got the public finances under
control. In fact, history will love him. No matter which side’s in the
ascendancy, there’ll be a bit of Phocas they can grapple on to and make their
own. The Optimates will admire the way he broke the power of the labour guilds
and supported free trade, while the Tendency will worship him for his welfare
provisions and land reforms. They’ll debate endlessly about what his real
agenda was, which side he was actually on, and they’ll never get within a long
spit of the truth, because history refuses to recognise the possibility that
great events and changes of lasting significance could be brought about just
because once upon a time there was an absolute ruler who simply couldn’t make
up his mind. His intentions were always good. Where he was luckier than all his
fellow altruists was in somehow contriving to pursue his good intentions
without doing irreparable damage to everyone and everything around him. The
truth is, he was a simple-minded, basically decent sort of a fellow, born well
outside the dangerous confines of the purple, who did the best he could to keep
things ticking over quietly so they wouldn’t distract him from his overriding
mission in life; to discover, or more realistically sponsor the discovery, of
the secret of turning base metal into gold. If ever I get around to finishing
my
Ideal Republic
(started it ten years ago, paid in advance, spent the
money), I’ll have to fit him in somewhere as a model autocrat; the man who
rules well because he doesn’t really want to rule at all.

*

“Hello, Phocas,” I
said.

He looked up at me
from the papers he’d been reading. “What the hell was all that about?” he said.

I shrugged. “I’m
sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“No,” he snapped,
“you didn’t, that’s the point. Damn it, I wrote you a letter. And you’re supposed
to be smart.”

I sat down. The
guard didn’t like it, but Phocas didn’t notice. “You see,” I went on, “I had
the idea that you might, well, blame me—”

“Really.” He gave
me a hurt, angry look. “How long have we known each other?”

“I’m sorry,” I
repeated. “I panicked, all right? It happened, and I just had to run, get out
of there, as far away as I could. And then I thought, how suspicious does that
look? I thought—”