Nightshade and Damnations (21 page)

“My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with digestive. His ankle got better,” said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, “—like
that
. I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Paré’s digestive. The Doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know how doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there I was, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he’d got what I had. So he poured some of his digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Paré believed he’d got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.

“I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said: ‘Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what
is
this digestive, or whatever your master calls it?’

“Jehan said: ‘Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine.’ (I don’t mind telling you that, bub, because it’s already been printed.)”

I said to Corporal Cuckoo; “I don’t know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they’re true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Paré’s digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in
1537
. Paré said at the time: ‘I dressed his wounds and God healed him’ . . . Well?”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. “Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, eggs. That’s right. You know the proportions?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“I know you don’t, bub. Well, I do. See? And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not just oil of roses, eggs, and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Paré slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is.”

I said: “Well, go on.”

“Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Paré was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a ‘unicorn’s horn.’ Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out—hell, everybody was having a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes.”

I said: “No doubt about that. What—”

“—What the hell,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “What the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn’t been for me? And where do you think I’d have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Paré and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.

“As soon as I thought I was safe, I went into a saloon, and drank some wine, and got into conversation with a girl. It seems somebody else was interested in this girl, and there was a fight. The other guy cut me in the face with a knife. I had a knife too. You know how it is—all of a sudden I felt something pulling my knife out of my hand, and I saw that I’d pushed it between this man’s ribs. He was one of those mean little guys, about a hundred and twenty pounds, with a screwed-up face. (She was a great big girl with yellow hair.) I could see that I’d killed him, so I ran for my life, and I left my knife where it was—stuck tight between his ribs. I hid out, expecting trouble. But they never found me. Most of that night I lay under a hedge. I was pretty sick. I mean, he’d cut me from just under the eye to the back of my head—and cut me deep. He’d cut the top of my right ear off, clean. It wasn’t only that it hurt like hell, but I knew I could be identified by that cut. I’d left half an ear behind me. It was me for the gallows, see? So I kept as quiet as I could, in a ditch, and went to sleep for a few hours before dawn. And then, when I woke up, that cut didn’t hurt at all, not even my ear—and I can tell you that a cut ear sure does hurt. I went and washed my face in a pond, and when the water got still enough so I could see myself, I saw that that cut and this ear had healed right up so that the marks looked five years old. All that in half a night! So I went on my way. About two days later, a farmer’s dog bit me in the leg—took a piece out. Well, a bite like that ought to take weeks to heal up. But mine didn’t. It was all healed over by next day, and there was hardly a scar. That stuff Paré poured into my head had made me so that any wound I might get, anywhere, anytime, would just heal right up—like magic. I knew I had something when I grabbed those papers of Paré’s. But this was terrific!”

“You had them still, Corporal Cuckoo?”

“What do you think? Sure I had them, wrapped up in a bit of linen and tied round my waist—four pieces of . . . not paper, the other stuff, parchment. That’s it, parchment. Folded across, and sewn up along the fold. The outside bit was blank, like a cover. But the six pages inside were all written over. The hell of it was, I couldn’t read. I’d never been learned. See? Well, I had the best part of my two gold pieces left, and I pushed on to Paris.”

I asked: “Didn’t Ambroise Paré say anything?”

Corporal Cuckoo sneered again. “What the hell could he say?” he asked. “Say what? Say he’d resurrected the dead with his digestive? That would have finished him for sure. Where was his evidence? And you can bet your life that kid Jehan kept
his
mouth shut: he wouldn’t want the doctor to know he’d squealed. See? No, nobody said a word. I got into Paris okay.”

“What did you do there?” I asked.

“My idea was to find somebody I could trust, to read those papers for me, see? If you want to know how I got my living, well, I did the best I could . . . never mind what. Well, one night, in a place where I was, I came across a student, mooching drinks, an educated man with no place to sleep. I showed him the doctor’s papers, and asked him what they meant. They made him think a bit, but he got the hang of them. The doctor had written down just how he’d mixed that digestive of his, and that only filled up one page. Four of the other pages were full of figures, and the only other writing was on the last page. It was all about me. And how he’d cured me.”

I said: “With the yolks of eggs, oil of roses, and turpentine?”

Corporal Cuckoo nodded, and said: “Yeahp. Them three and something else.”

I said: “I’ll bet you anything you like I know what the fourth ingredient is, in this digestive.”

“What’ll you bet?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

I said: “I’ll bet you a beehive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, Corporal, it stands to reason. You said you wanted to raise chickens, roses, and bees. You said you wanted to go south for turpentine. You accounted for egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine in Doctor Paré’s formula. What would a man like you want with bees? Obviously the fourth ingredient is honey.”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “You’re right, bub. The doctor slipped in some honey. . . .” He opened a jackknife, looked at me narrowly, then snapped the blade back again and pocketed the knife, saying: “You don’t know the proportions. You don’t know how to mix the stuff. You don’t know how hot it ought to be, or how slow you’ve got to let it cool.”

“So you have the secret of life?” I said. “You’re four hundred years old, and wounds can’t kill you. It only takes a certain mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. . . . Is that right?”

“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“Well, didn’t you think of buying the ingredients and mixing them yourself?”

“Well, yes, I did. The doctor had said in his notes how the digestive he’d given me and Captain Le Rat had been kept in a bottle in the dark for two years. So I made a wine bottle full of the stuff and kept it covered up away from the light for two years, wherever I went. Then me and some friends of mine got into a bit of trouble, and one of my friends, a guy called Pierre Solitude got a pistol bullet in the chest. I tried the stuff on him, but he died. At the same time I got a sword-thrust in the side. Believe me or not, that healed up in nine hours, inside and out, of its own accord. You can make what you like of that. . . . It all came out of something to do with robbing a church.

“I got out of France, and lived as best I could for about a year until I found myself in Salzburg. That was about four years after the battle in the Pass of Suze. Well, in Salzburg I came across some guy who told me that the greatest doctor in the world was in town. I remember that doctor’s name, because, well, who wouldn’t? It was Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He’d been a big shot in Basle a few years before. He was otherwise known as Paracelsus. He wasn’t doing much then.’ He hung around, most of the time, drinking himself crazy in a wine cellar called The Three Doves. I met him there one night—it must have been in
1541
—and said my piece when nobody else was listening.” Corporal Cuckoo laughed harshly.

I said: “Paracelsus was a very great man. He was one of the great doctors of the world.”

“Oh, hell, he was only a fat old drunk. Certainly was higher than a kite when I saw him. Yelling his head off, banging on the table with an empty can. When I told him about this stuff, in strict confidence, he got madder than ever, called me everything he could think of—and believe me, he could think of plenty—and bent the can over my head. Broke the skin just where the hair starts. I was going to take a poke at him, but then he calmed down a bit and said in Swiss-German, I think it was, ‘Experiment, experiment! A demonstration! A demonstration! If you come back tomorrow and show me that cut perfectly healed, charlatan, I’ll listen to you.’ Then he burst out laughing, and I thought to myself, I’ll give you something to laugh at, bub. So I took a walk, and that little cut healed up and was gone inside the hour. Then I went back to show him. I’d sort of taken a liking to the old soak, see? Well, when I get back to this tavern there’s Doctor von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, if you like, lying on his back dying of a dagger stab. He’d gotten into a fight with a woodcarver, and this woodcarver was as soused as he was, see? And so he let this Paracelsus have it. I never did have no luck, and I never will. We might have got along together, me and him: I only talked to him for half an hour, but so help me, you knew who was the boss when he was there, alright! Oh well, that was that.”

“And then?” I asked.

“I’m just giving you the outline, see? If you want the whole story it’s going to cost you plenty,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I bummed around Salzburg for a year, got whipped out of town for being a beggar, got the hell out of it to Switzerland, and signed on with a bunch of paid soldiers, what they called
condottieri
,
under a Swiss colonel, and did a bit of fighting in Italy. There was supposed to be good pickings there. But somebody stole my little bit of loot, and we never even got half our pay in the end. Then I went to France, and met a sea captain by the name of Bordelais who was carrying brandy to England and was short of a man. A fast little English pirate boat stopped us in the Channel, and grabbed the cargo, cut Bordelais’ throat and slung the crew overboard—all except me. The limey captain, Hawker, liked the look of me. I joined the crew, but I never was much of a sailor. That hooker—hell, she wasn’t bigger than one of the lifeboats on this ship—was called the
Harry
, after the King of England, Henry VIII, the one they made a movie about. Still, we did alright. We specialized in French brandy: stopped the froggy boats in mid-channel, grabbed the cargo, shoved the captain and crew overboard. ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ old Hawker always said. Well, I jumped the ship somewhere near Romney, with money in my pocket—I didn’t like the sea, see? I’d had half a dozen nasty wounds, but they couldn’t kill me. I was worried about what’d happen if I went overboard. You could shoot me through the head and not kill me, though it’d hurt like hell for a few days while the wound healed itself. But I just hated to think of what would happen if somebody tried to drown me. Get it? I’d have to wait under water till the fishes ate me, or till I just sort of naturally rotted away—alive all the time. And that’s not nice.

“Well, as I was saying, I quit at Romney and got to London. There was an oldish widow with a linen-draper’s business near London Bridge. She had a bit of dough, and she took a fancy to me. Well, what the hell? I got married to her. Lived with her about thirteen years. She was a holy terror, at first, but I corrected her. Her name was Rose, and she died just about when Queen Elizabeth got to be queen of England. That was around
1558
, I guess. She was scared of me—Rose, I mean, not Queen Elizabeth, because I was always playing around with honey, and eggs, and turpentine, and oil of roses. She got older and older, and I stayed exactly the same as I was when I married her, and she didn’t like that one little bit. She thought I was a witch. Said I had the philosophers’ stone, and knew the secret of perpetual youth. Hah, so help me, she wasn’t so damn far wrong. She wanted me to let her in on it. But, as I was saying, I kept working on those notes of Doctor Paré’s, and I mixed honey, turpentine, oil of roses, and yolks of eggs, just as he’d done, in the right proportions, at the proper temperature, and kept the mixture bottled in the dark for the right length of time . . . and still it didn’t work.”

I asked Corporal Cuckoo: “How did you find out that your mixture didn’t work?”

“Well, I tried it on Rose. She kept at me until I did. Every now and again we had kind of a lovers’ quarrel, and I tried the digestive on her afterwards. But she took as long to heal as any ordinary person would have taken. The interesting thing was, that I not only couldn’t be killed by a wound—
I couldn
’
t get any older! I couldn
’
t catch any diseases! I couldn
’
t die!
And you can figure this for yourself—if some stuff that cured any sort of wound was worth a fortune, what would it be worth to me if I had something that would make people stay young and healthy forever? Eh?” He paused.

I said: “Interesting speculation. You might have given some of the stuff, for example, to Shakespeare.
He
got better and better as he went on. I wonder what he would have arrived at by now? I don’t know, though. If Shakespeare had swallowed an elixir of life and perpetual youth when he was very young, he would have remained as he was; young and undeveloped. Maybe he might still be holding horses outside theatres . . . or whistling for taxis, a stage-struck country boy of undeveloped genius. If, on the other hand, he had taken the stuff when he wrote, say,
The Tempest
—there he’d be still, burnt up, worn out, world-weary, tied to death and unable to die. . . . On the other hand, of course, some debauched rake of the Elizabethan period could go on being a debauched rake at high pressure, for centuries and centuries. But, oh my God, how bored he would get after a hundred years or so, and how he’d long for death! That would be dangerous stuff, that stuff of yours, Corporal Cuckoo!”