The French Executioner (20 page)

And yet … Cibo raised his own hand to his lips, tried to cough. Nothing. No blood flowed unchecked through his lips, staining
his endless supply of handkerchiefs. He knew. It was not prayers, or his doctor’s ineffectual ministrations.

‘No!’ he screamed at the saddle bags. ‘No one has power over me. Not popes, not princes … and not the Witch Whore of England!’

The servants came again and this time he let them stay, rub him dry with soft linens, anoint him with oils to ease still
aching flesh, wrap him in clean robes. While they ministered to his body, his mind worked.

Perhaps he was looking at it wrong. The hand had power as a symbol, yes, but could not its true power lie
within
the strangely uncorrupted flesh? Just as gold lay within baser metals?

Of course! He had been ignoring the obvious. The answer lay in alchemy, the quest he passionately pursued to transform mere
metal into gold, which was itself only part of the true quest. If the Philosopher’s Stone were found, the ultimate substance
from which all other substance, flesh and form derived, it would give the finder untold riches. But what it would truly yield
was the quintessence of life itself, with the power to cure illness, restore youth.

Or bring the dead back to life.

The idea entranced him. God and his mind working in harmony. There was one man who could verify this for him. And he … existed,
would be the correct word, not very far away.

Dismissing the servants, Cibo seized the saddle bag and held it as far from his body as he could manage, with his other hand
plucking a torch from its socket on the wall. Its light surrounded and comforted him a little.

I’ll need it,
he thought,
for dungeons are always dark and the lowest levels the darkest of all.

There was the world and there was its shadow, and Abraham had long ago lost the ability to differentiate between the two.
When he was first imprisoned he used to struggle with it, striving to place an object on one of the planes, to grasp its form,
to quantify it with all the acuity of his scientific mind; but then something previously solid would lose all cohesion, or
an empty space would suddenly be colonised by a shape. This would distress him, for he was a man who had always needed to
know the world around him. Gradually, though, he realised just how fragile was this thing he used to think of as
reality. It no longer mattered that he could not subject the phenomenon he encountered to all the rigorous tests he would
have applied in his own laboratory. That was not the point. It was not why he was there. Rigid laws of science only applied
in the so-called real world outside. Not here, never here.

Some phenomena could still be felt though. He was always burning himself on the crucible because he would sit too close to
it, observing the shifting patterns on the melting metal surfaces, molten worlds created and destroyed in an instant, as Yahweh
had created, as Yahweh could destroy. There was a key there and sometimes he felt he could reach in and pluck it from the
bubbling depths, had almost done so on more than one occasion, until some little remnant of restraint stopped him. As it was,
his skin was traced with the scars gleaned from too curious reachings.

There was no time within this world, so now he sat back on a chair he had not realised was there. The lead was not near the
point where it could be useful, where he would be able to siphon off its essence in the form of its smoke, capture and distil
its emanations in his glass retort. Waiting was easy though, for he had only to look up and once more see the kaleidoscope.

Cascades of colour, greens plucked from a forest, magentas and blues hauled from an ocean’s depths, fired Tuscan umbers and
ochres, more vibrant than any seen in the country outside, shifting constantly and not just in the reflection of crucible
heat nor the flickering of reed torches placed beyond the translucent walls. Shifting of themselves, glass taking breath and
moving, now a steady pulse, now a ripple of falling shards. As his world turned, the petals of a rose realigned themselves
into a butterfly’s wings, into a crimson angel now bearing apples, now the helms of fallen warriors from whose eye sockets
poured streams of river pearls. Droplets of silver, lozenges of emerald and agate. The jeweller Abraham had been linking the
tumbling stones into a necklace of flame.

The ceiling revolved above him, bringing new riches. He knew beyond the torchlight was a great darkness, but he was not to
dwell on that, he had been told it no longer concerned him. His whole world was within the shimmering kaleidoscope, bounded
by glass without and the bubbling contents of the crucible within. Only these should occupy him. He had no other wants, not
food nor drink, of which there was plenty, though he had little appetite. Above all there was the pipe that so smoothed over
the inconsistencies of his life with its sweet smoke, blurring the false line, showing him the lie of existence as it seemed,
enabling him to focus on the real truths within this kaleidoscopic world.

The secrets were apparent to him with every turn of his head. His task was to make them manifest to the man who had placed
him there. The man who even now descended the dank stairwells under his palace, a reed torch in one hand, a saddle bag held
carefully away from his body in the other.

The final stairs were especially treacherous, crumbling and damp, and Cibo took his time. The slow pace allowed his breathing
to calm, his mind to turn slowly inwards, as it always did on the descent to this netherworld where the usual laws of time
and space, and perceived truth, simply failed to apply. His torchlight flared off dripping walls, off the seams of agate within
the harder rock from which this special place had been carved.

A masked gaoler struggled with keys to the first of two doors. When it finally creaked open Cibo entered another ill-lit corridor
with three cells lining each side. There was rustling from within them as he strode past, but whether of man or beast he could
not tell. Both, probably, and a mix, for the enemies who occupied these dank regions had been hidden from the light long enough
to have become half-beast. He couldn’t even remember who they were or why he’d condemned them. Good, prudent reasons, he felt
sure.

He glanced to each side and feral eyes glimmered back
through bars in the flicker of his torch. Something slammed hard against the cell door furthest along and a growling was heard
as he waited for another faceless guard to open the second iron-studded barrier.

At least they do not lack for water.
The idea amused him. He’d ordered an underground stream to be diverted to flow through his dungeons. It was so wearisome
to carry tortured bodies up the stairs and get them away from the palace with no one seeing or raising an alarm. Now, a trap-door
lifted and a mangled corpse was dumped; it would career through the subterranean waterways that criss-crossed Siena and fetch
up leagues away, on river bank or pondside, and no one could tell where it had come from.

He laughed, and the guard, thinking it was impatience, muttered something apologetic and fumbled with another key. Then the
second door screeched on its rusty hinges and admitted him into a world that was very much his own invention. He never failed
to feel the pride of the creator when he returned to it after an absence and looking around now, he smiled.

The geometry of the vaulted chamber was flawless. Yet the aesthetics were incidental, the light from the dozen reed torches
failing even to illuminate the ceiling. It was the astrological alignment that mattered far more, a hard trick to get right
so far below the surface of the earth. The apex of the vaulted roof was both a chimney to bear fumes away and a funnel of
power to draw down the forces of the heavens. Directly beneath its centre, aligned to the accuracy of a hair, lay a glass
room.

Layer upon layer of glass rose above this centre, with chambers the width of a hand in between, filled with fragments of coloured
glass in every shape from diamond to lozenge, arrow head to star. Each chamber was connected to a water wheel, and each moved
with the rising and falling of liquid levels in glass amphorae positioned at each end. From the outside, it looked like a
random tumbling of misshapen
pieces. From the inside, it looked like what it was. A kaleidoscope.

Within the kaleidoscope lay the source of the heat whose glow could be made out through the shifting chambers. It came from
a huge cauldron whose lower half was buried in the floor, heated to a white intensity by unseen flames beneath.

Peering through the walls, Cibo made out the swaying figure of a man beside the cauldron.

The Archbishop felt within his robes for a piece of purple and yellow glass. Inserting it in a hidden vent, a portion of glass
swung upwards and he ducked underneath it and entered the translucent room.

‘Well, Abraham,’ he said, ‘Have you been making progress?’

The old man in the skull cap swung his head in the direction of the voice. He heard so many in the course of his day that
he wasn’t sure if this was just another golem sent to plague him or distract him from his work. But then he recognised the
man as his … patron was the only word he could come up with. When had he seen him last? That night? The day before? A month
ago? Time had little meaning for him in a world where the sun never rose and set. Time was just a scribble on the page of
his calculations. He was given the movements of sun and moon daily, for that was important; you couldn’t hope to track down
the Philosopher’s Stone without the most accurate of data.

Cibo looked down at his former colleague and present prisoner. It was ten years since he had changed Abraham’s status from
one to the other and they had not been kind to the Jew.

Cibo remembered the energetic young scientist he’d first met, experimenting with different metal fusions to create his wondrous
jewellery, using that to fund his real passion: delving into the mysteries of alchemy. How they had worked together at the
beginning, sharing the delights of discovery!
What progress they had made, eclipsing much of the work even of Paracelsus in Basle and Apollonius in Wittenberg. But one
day Abraham had wanted to take his daughter to their relatives in Venice, unhappy she was being raised outside their faith,
and Cibo could not be sure that he would ever return. He needed the Jew’s superior knowledge. So Cibo had imprisoned his body
in this glass world and his will with an opium pipe – necessary coercion after the daughter had somehow escaped and Abraham
had grown rebellious.

The drug had aged the Jew, together with the heat and fumes of the crucible he constantly attended, the lack of air and sunlight.
His world was only this kaleidoscope, devised by Cibo to combine with the narcotic and focus the power of his brilliant mind.
Amazing things had been seen and achieved inside this magical chamber, for Cibo knew alchemy to be far more than merely a
scientific process.

Which was why he dropped the saddle bag on the table now.

‘I’ve brought you something that might help,’ he said. ‘Go on. Open it.’

He wanted to turn away, couldn’t, managed a step backwards, then waited as the Jew slowly reached for the straps and just
as slowly undid each one. When he reached inside and paused, Cibo shuddered, expecting Abraham to recoil in horror from the
touch. Yet all he did was carefully pull out the velvet bag and place it before him on the one clear space on a table covered
in charts and instruments of calculation. He made no move to go further, just sat and stared at the object before him.

‘Go on,’ the Archbishop’s voice cracked, ‘take it out.’

He was obeyed. The six-fingered hand was brought into the light and the two men gasped for different reasons.

Anne Boleyn’s hand lay on the table. It did not move, as it had in the cabin of the ship, yet it did not seem completely still.
For Abraham, it was the shock of the six fingers; for Cibo, it was the look of it, changed from a mere four days
before. Then, there had been a bleeding gash, for an arrow had pierced leather to pierce flesh, leaving a wound that should
have taken weeks to heal in someone alive and even then left a jagged scar. Yet where the wound had been there was not a trace,
not the faintest hint of a blemish to mar the rosy sheen of the skin. It was the same at the wrist, where the sword had taken
it from the arm. Nothing there but pink and healthy flesh.

The gasps hung in the air and lengthened into silence. Finally, Abraham said, almost wearily, ‘Oh, Giancarlo, what have you
done now?’

The Archbishop did not tolerate criticism. He was always right and that was an end to it. Yet somehow here, in a world without
time, with a man who was the only equal he’d ever known, there was a need for some kind of explanation.

‘It is not what you think,’ he said. ‘It is beyond anything you could think, or even dream.’

‘You killed this person to take this hand?’

‘I did not. I saw her killed. Yes, it’s from a woman. A queen.’

‘Then how—’

‘The how does not matter. It’s the why of it. How long do you think it is since this hand was joined to the body?’

Abraham reached out to the hand, turning it to get a perspective. Cibo sucked in his breath when he saw that, but the hand
remained inert, a passive object, while the Jew examined it carefully. At last, he spoke.

‘It still feels almost warm to the touch, and no rigor mortis has set in. For those reasons I would say it was no less than
three hours since this unfortunate lost her hand. Yet …’

A great yawn swept over him, he seemed to lose focus, and Cibo had to wait impatiently. It was a part of the imprisonment
that was necessary, chaining him to the opium, bending the scholar to his will. It led to some huge imaginative leaps but
it also distracted him.

‘Yet?’ Cibo barked finally.

Abraham carried on as if there had been no pause. ‘Yet the severing wound shows signs of healing, indeed it looks like it
has healed entirely. That’s not possible.’