Blue and Gold (7 page)

The guard stuck
his head round the doorframe. “What?” he said, and I hit him with the hammer.
He went down like an apple from a tree. I waited, counting up to six, then
carefully opened the door; there’d never been more than two guards on the door
before, but there’s a first time for everything. Fortunately, not this time. I
dragged the guard inside, slipped out into the passageway, gently pulled the
door shut and turned the key. An hour, my best guess; maybe a bit more,
unlikely to be much less. Just how far could I get in an hour?

*

Scholars are proverbially
celibate, and
the life of the professional criminal doesn’t leave much time for romance, so
it won’t surprise you to learn that I was only in love really and truly the one
time.

Which would’ve
been enough, if things had worked out a little better. She was perfect;
beautiful, clever, kind, funny, gentle; a joy to be with, under any
circumstances. And she loved me, almost as much as I loved her; but what she
loved most of all (which was better than her loving me) was philosophy. If it
hadn’t been for her, I’d never have written
On Form
&
Substance.
She had this way of making me think; just the slightest of frowns, or a tiny
upwards movement of an eyebrow, and suddenly I could see past the certainties
to the real questions behind them. She made me realise that, up till then, all
I’d cared about was making it so my enemies couldn’t prove me wrong; in other
words, winning. Then she came along, and the world changed, and what actually
mattered wasn’t beating some opponent but
getting it right—

Perfect. Almost
perfect. Just one thing about her that I’d have changed, if I could. She was
married. To prince Phocas.

Which led, I’m
sorry to say, to a falling-out between my old college chum and me. Not the first,
and certainly not the last. He took the view that it was a betrayal of trust,
not to mention criminal adultery and treason. I could see his point, and I also
accept that under the circumstances, given his position of head of state and
fountain of all justice, he had no option but to allow the law to take its
course. What I couldn’t forgive, still can’t, is that it wasn’t me he put on
trial.

To his credit, he
entered a special plea for clemency on her behalf. Unfortunately, in the
political climate prevailing at that time, he couldn’t have made things worse
if he’d tried; the six judges were all Popular Tendency, and that was that.
There have been times, in my darker moments, when I’ve wondered whether he made
that plea deliberately, knowing it’d prompt the judges to order the death
penalty out of sheer spite; but no, I don’t think so. He loved her, no doubt
about it, and losing her, especially that way, tore him apart. Didn’t exactly
cheer me up, either. By loving her, I’d killed her, simple as that. Phocas was
just the weapon I used.

So; she died, I
lived. Phocas had his chief investigator swear on oath, by the majesty of the
Invincible Sun, that he hadn’t been able to discover the identity of the
adulterer. The judges (two of them are dead now; the other four will have to
wait till I’ve got a little free time) offered to grant him permission to put
the accused to torture to extract the name, if he thought that would do it; I
remember, he went white as a sheet and mumbled no, he didn’t believe torture would
be effective in this case. And the judges shrugged, as if to say, well, if
you’re sure, and moved smoothly on to passing sentence.

I watched, from a
high window. I remember how she stayed calm and controlled right up to the
moment they started roping her to the stake. Then, when they grabbed her wrist,
she screamed and went all to pieces, she was terrified, it took four strong men
to hold her still while they tied the knots. They put a lot of green wood in,
so the smoke killed her before the flames reached her. Standard practice, I
gather. It’s one of those small mercies we’re supposed to be grateful for.

I’m a terror for
not wasting anything useful, so when it was my turn to deliver the Onesander
Memorial Lecture at the Studium, I used her death as a paradigm of alchemical
theory. She was, I said, made up, like everything else, of earth, air, water
and fire, in due proportion, held in equilibrium by the vis minor, which
Philosthenes argues is ultimately derived from the movement of the Invincible
Sun in orbit around the Earth. When she was put to death, the addition by an
external agency of additional fire broke the vis minor, allowing the external
fire to encounter and react with her component elements. Her earth was consumed
and transmuted into res iners Polycratis. Her water was evaporated, and joined
the greater external. Her air was expelled by vis major and dissipated, while
her internal fire was subsumed by and joined with the external fire to produce
ignis nobilis, the assimilatory or communicative process, analogous to the
extraction of quicksilver from amalgam. What, I asked, do we learn from this?
In transmutation, in this case her flesh and bone to ash, there is exchange
through loss, since the ashes weighed considerably less than the unburnt tissue,
and communication through change, in that flesh (a soft material) and bone (a
hard material) are converted by an agency and a process into ash (an
impermanent, brittle material soluble in water and easily dissipated in a
draught of air); thereby, we can see that earth is essentially a donor element,
weak, suitable for conversion. In the evaporation of water, by contrast, there
is communication through continuity, in that her water became steam and
migrated, ultimately to join with other vapours in the clouds, in due course to
return to the lower levels through the medium of rain; therefore continuity, in
that water is never lost and, though capable of transformation, ultimately
defies transmutation through the agency of memory. Turning to her air, being
the breath in her lungs and other hollow parts at the moment of death, simple
expulsion through the action of heat removed it, essentially unchanged in form
(though arguably in structure; see Brunellus on the forms of air), so that
communication consisted of nothing more than a removal from one place and a
relocation in another; which is why we call air the elemens invicta, because it
is untouched by mere process. As to her fire, I argued, that was a different
matter entirely. In the consummation of the process (my voice was a little
shaky at this point), there was a coming together of the external and the
internal to form one, a process akin to the act of love, a union or true
combination, in that as the process took its course, inner and outer fire combined
into an indissoluble whole, burning from without and from within, and where
there were two there was now only one. Hence, I went on, fire is the agent
among the elements, and it is to fire we must look. In fire all things have
their origin (the ignis genitiva of Marcellus) and their ending (ignis feralia,
as postulated by Caesura; but see Ammianus for a conflicting interpretation),
only through fire can the other processes operate, only through fire in its
aspects as destroyer and refiner can we achieve our objective; transmutatio
vera, the genuine transmutation, transmigration of one element into another.

Not everybody
agreed, needless to say; but I think I had something there. Where I messed up
was going on to associate the vis mutationis with the human emotion of love,
and the process of burning with the transmutation of love into hate, or guilt,
or misery, or pain, analogous to the refining of the noble metals from base
ores by the agency of quicksilver. What can I say? It’s one of those intuitive connections
you feel but can’t really prove, and once you get a reputation for intuition in
academic circles, you’re screwed. Not that it mattered particularly, in this
instance. Three months after I gave the lecture I got caught trying to stow
away on the stupid bloody avocado freighter, and that was that; no more public
appearances, ejected from my Chair, back to the laboratory with two guards on
the door. Story of my life, really.

*

So
there
I was in the passageway. Right
or left? I went left. Good idea at the time.

Left led past the
minor state apartments (where they dump lesser ambassadors, trade attaches,
counsel for appellants in civil cases, unimportant dependents and poor
relations) to the back or kitchen stairs, which go down two flights to the
stable yard, from which it’s possible, if you’re agile enough, to climb the
curtain wall and sneak out onto the leads of the chapel roof; then down the
waterspout into the cloister garden, pinch a gown from the vestment room, and
then you’re just another Brother milling about in the chapel forecourt. That
was how I got out the time before last, and on that occasion I got no further
than the Chapter yard before the scuttlehats grabbed me and hauled me back in.
Therefore, they’d argue, I wouldn’t go that way again.

The important
thing is, not to run. It’s hard. The temptation is to move as quickly as
possible while unimpeded movement is feasible. But running sounds like nothing
else, and in the palace, nobody runs. So I walked, hands in pockets, down the
corridor, trying to sound like some minor functionary, in no particular hurry,
waddling from office to archive or one duty station to another. Authenticity is
the key. Learnt that the hard way.

I was three
quarters of the way along when I heard footsteps coming the other way. The
corridor floors are ancient oak boards; you can’t help making a racket, unless
you’re wearing slippers. Only one thing I could do. I pushed open the first
door I came to and slipped inside.

It turned out to
be a bathroom. Phocas has a minor fetish about cleanliness, so there’s
bathrooms everywhere in the residential areas. Lucky for me, I thought. I
ducked down behind the bath and crouched on the floor, waiting for the
footsteps to go away.

There was this
smell; really strong (it’d have to be, or I wouldn’t have noticed it. You can’t
spend a large slice of your life in close association with oil of hartshorn and
similar noxious substances and expect to keep your sense of smell). Familiar.
It was a hell of a time to be struck down with scientific curiosity but I
couldn’t resist. Why had somebody filled a whole bath full of honey?

So I looked.

She lay on her
back, naked, with the meniscus of the honey just covering the tip of her nose.
Her eyes were open, and her face still had that look of mild bewilderment that
I’d seen the last time I saw her, as the beaker slipped through her fingers and
smashed on the floor. Her hair was trapped in the stuff; she reminded me
irresistibly of a fly caught in amber, and that, of course, was the general
idea. Honey, as is well known, is of all the soft materials the least prone to
corruption, which is why it’s such a good preservative. Immerse a piece of
meat— which was what Eudoxia was, now—in pure, clear honey, and it’ll stay good
almost indefinitely.

Good is a comparative
term, and not one I’d ever be in a hurry to apply to my late wife. But, lying
there submerged in the liquid gold, she was fighting decay and winning, no
doubt about that. There was none of the shrinking of the flesh, withering of
the lips, puffing and poaching of the ears and fingertips that you generally
get with a dead body at that stage of the process. If there was a distortion,
it was only the effect of light refracted in slow, golden liquid, adjusting
rather than bending the line of her jaw, the angle of her nose to her brow. She
was, I have to say, as beautiful as ever, and likely to remain so; exactly what
she always wanted, frozen in her youth in her golden bath, finally safe from
the vis mutationis, the weakness of earth, the spite of water, the gnawing of
air and the irresistible compulsion of fire. I guess it comes down to what you
want and what you’re prepared to pay in order to get it. In her case, death;
but she’d never really got much out of being alive, because of the constant terror
of loss, change, deterioration, decay. It was enough to make me want to sit
down and write a paper then and there. I’d finally given her what she wanted,
the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the
catalyst of change) through the agency of death. She’d have been so pleased, if
only she’d been there to see it. Still, you can’t have everything, and her body
always mattered more to her than her soul, for want of a better word. I
couldn’t help smiling. Now that’s alchemy, I thought.

I stood there
looking at her for quite some time, until an observation eventually filtered
its way through my thick skull. The footsteps I’d heard in the corridor had got
gradually louder until they reached more or less where I was, and then they’d
stopped. Which meant that the stepper of those steps must have stopped too,
directly outside the door of this bathroom. Factor in the presence of the
prince’s dead sister—not something you’d leave lying about unguarded—and I was
forced to a painful and humiliating conclusion. I could only suppose that the
scuttlehat detailed to guard the body of the princess had gone away for a short
while—call of nature or whatever—during which time I’d slipped in and closed
the door. Now the guard was back, and I’d trapped myself in there, with no
realistic chance of getting out.

Idiot, I thought.

Well, there was
nothing for it. I went to the door and belted it with my fist.

Wish I could’ve
been on the other side of that door and seen the poor bugger’s face. The guard would’ve
been aware that he was standing outside a room containing one dead woman.
Forcible knocking from inside the room, therefore—Well, he must’ve pulled
himself together by the time he opened the door, because he had that scuttlehat
look on his face; dead, stuffed and mounted. He recognised me, of course. They
all know me.

“Sorry,” I said.
“Must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Do you think you could show me the way
to the back door?”