The Smell of Telescopes (37 page)

An answer came in the feast in the ruin, when Morgan returned from his affair to kiss his favourite followers. Five were selected; barber, sailmaker, cook, carpenter, navigator. Yet it was not a kiss; rather it was a secret told to lips, a surer way of entrusting it than against an ear. La Santa Roja had gained the secret of immortality and given it to Morgan. Now he was passing it to his friends. One sentence of ineffable worth, for so long as it was remembered without flaw the body would not die. A mantra of gorgeous tone, simple but profound. Of his crew, these five alone were immune to death; all would see centuries wilt away like weeks. Morgan tapped his nose. His mistress stole it from a squonk, who took it from a man on an island, who had it from a magician. Repeat the chant once a day for eternal life.

His explanation was obscure, but she followed his instructions. It worked, but there were unforeseen consequences. The human mind is large but not bottomless; there are a finite number of memories it can carry. This number is enormous, inexhaustible in a normal lifespan, but for an immortal there comes a time when the brain is saturated with experience and each new event or notion pushes out something old. It is impossible to choose what is to be discarded; the process is automatic. Trivial or treasured memories are equally likely to be jettisoned. All are ballast cast out to keep an identity afloat in the present. When full, the mind starts to leak, to overflow from every point of its circumference. This process may not be regretted because the lost reminiscence has no value outside the skull. It is annulled.

Mortals can live with each other, even in misery, but the prospect of sharing forever is abhorrent. Morgan and his converts experienced an overwhelming urge to divide. Panama was the last adventure. They sailed for Jamaica, a fine place to say farewell. Juanita stood on the deck on a mound of salted meat; as it shrank in the sun, the men joked that she was feeding her ankles. But her view of the horizon was excellent. What was this thrashing toward them? A dozen horses! She shouted for Morgan, who raised his spyglass and lowered it again, but not before running it under his nose. The telescope had an odour: stars and coffee. The first steed crashed against the side of the ship, went under, drowned. With a carbine, the Welshman ended such suffering. Bridles surfaced in the red wake, and the rovers netted these.

Morgan said: “These are the Horse Latitudes. The Spanish transport animals between the islands, but if their ships are trapped in a period of calm, by weed or eels, they push them overboard to save the price of feeding them. It is a sad ritual.”

“I offer half my booty for that saddlebag.”

She did not dare open her prize until they reached Port Royal. The book was still inside, undamaged for its ordeal. The warty covering had repelled all water like wax. Jamaica saw little of her money spent. Off she went, on a passenger vessel bound for Italy. She decided to keep in touch with the sailmaker and cook, whose creased, steamy friendship she quite enjoyed. Naples held her for a week, then north to Venice. But it was too noisy; she wished to ponder on magic. Into Carniola and a quiet village called Smarje. Here she read and began to understand the obtuse shapes and language of the grimoire. And time passed quickly, for years were expendable and there was no need to hold them back. The deeper she delved into the text, the more she felt that a puzzle was being solved, that a riddle was being undressed.

Already she was several lifetimes beyond her ordained span. It was a cool morning when her mind finally reached the point of saturation. A delicious breeze played the leaves outside the window of her house, and she suddenly realised she had forgotten the name of these trees. Smarje was sheltered by them from the dust which whipped from the factories of Maribor to the north and the vapours from the mercury pits of Idrija to the west. But what were they? Cedars? No, it was hopeless; the name had gone. Her brain was full and any new experience, such as noting the way the leaves rustled, pushed out something already there to make room, in this case the type of tree the foliage belonged to. Forgetting facts no longer meant diluting them, but utterly losing them, so they might only be relearned with still more loss.

Information now used her skull as an alley rather than a jug. Care must be taken with fresh events, to prevent the mundane present shoving precious nuggets of the past into the void. Routine was thus desirable, a quiet existence until her studies were complete. She wrote to her two best friends, sailmaker and cook, and was about to sign her name on the letters when she realised she did not know what it was. The very act of dipping quill in ink, and enjoying the rainbow caught in the droplet on the tip of the nib, had ejected the word of her identity! A fundamental truth had spilled and smashed. But her confidence was intact; she chose a nickname, recalling what the men had whispered about the meat and her feet. Omophagia Ankles she became, and it seemed right, familiar, older than Jamaica, an echo in her ears.

When her friends wrote back, she hoped to read her genuine name on the envelopes as part of her address; it would be returned. But she was frustrated. They had also forgotten it, employing her nickname instead. Worse: they signed themselves with pseudonyms also, having undergone an identical amnesia, and the surprise of this revelation knocked the same knowledge out of her. So the sailmaker was Thanatology Spleen, the cook Muscovado Lashes, words taken from personal episodes, to her as well as to them. She had no idea what they had been called afloat. Only Morgan, the stubborn soak, refused to evacuate from her consciousness. Her mind liked this not, nor that immortality should be responsible for the doom of facts, and she almost deluded herself that the traumas of Panama had charred away their names for them.

The others presumed this. ’Tology was fond of her, but also of the carpenter, who was now Lanolin Brows. And ’Vado liked her friendship in tandem with that of the barber, reformed as Spermaceti Whiskers. As for ’Lin, he thought mostly of ’Ceti and ’Tology, whereas ’Ceti matched his affection for ’Lin with heartiness for ’Vado. Each of the five immortal crewmen knew two others, a different pair. This was interesting. Wheels span in her mind. She forgot the taste of parsley, the sparkle of wine, the smell of telescopes. Slow, slow! There was a profound significance, a complex pattern, to this arrangement. Work it out rigorously. Able to flirt with geometrical shapes until they confessed their sines, she saw an emotional polygon strung above lands. It had firmed for centuries as the love of its angles grew stale.

It was high summer in the modern age and she had finally completed her book. She slammed it and stretched. Then excited cries from outside prompted her to investigate. The streets of Smarje were thronged with a mob of children and adults even younger. A travelling fair was in town, bright wagons and stalls gathered in a circle in the square. Fat men in gaudy costumes were selling balloons, offering prizes for games, frying pancakes in honey. She strolled the tents. On the edge of the carnival, where the crowd was thinnest, she encountered a carriage with a strange creature yoked to the axle. A sign announced: Billy Barnett’s Circus Of Cruelty! And she gasped, for the horns of the beast swivelled and a low moan issued from a metal throat, summoning a man from behind a flap who dryly listened to her exclamation.

“Rutilicus Azelfafage! A load of bull.”

“It is a machine, my good fellow, which rose out of the sea on the coast of Maryland. I was strolling on the shore when it came out, rusty and damaged, as if it had walked the bed of the Atlantic from Europe to America! The skeleton of a dwarf was transfixed on the horns. I cleaned it up and employed it for a mule.”

“And you, I assume, are Billy Barnett?”

“None other. Come inside and view the show. I have hired thespians to adopt the roles of famous rascals from the past. Yes, walk this way! The light is dim, but your eyes will quickly adjust. Mind the step! The man who stands before you is Caligula, drunk on gore. And this is Nero, fiddling with himself while rum burns; in tune, ham! Shrink from Attila the Hun, stifled in ambition and fur, both diseased! This recess houses corrupt officials and sadistic slavers. Behold Señor Alonzo and Captain Guzmán! And here is Oswald, the winking troubadour, a vampire who sucks notes not necks. Who else? Ah yes, the Wilson Twins, from a Hyperborean glacier: Snoo, Brian and William.”

“Twins? But there are three of them!”

Billy shuddered. “That is precisely what makes them so wicked. Let us hurry past to another display.”

“The smell of gunpowder and ship is extreme.”

“You are now in the section which contains the buccaneers. Look at Black Grippo and Roche Braziliano arguing over dice! Here are Alex- ander Exquemelin, François l’Olonnais and Bartolomeo Portugues. What is Coeur de Gris saying to Edward Mansveldt? Stylish limes and hats! Gape at the beauty of Charlotte Gallon, more lethal than a cutlass! These are cheap actors, unable to match the archetypes. Here is an adept: Henry Morgan, his high boots stained with grog.”

She stood before the figure, who winked.

Laughter convulsed her. “Ah, such a perfect place to hide! To play oneself! Nobody may suspect that.”

He bowed, while Billy rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It was her old master for sure, looking even more romantic than under Panama suns, but with a tinge of gloom in his dashing, eyes lowered, pocket bulging with air, not gold. So she spoke first.

“You should call me ’Phagia Ankles now.”

“So I will. Do you know what it is to fall on poor times, my loyal navigator? I buried my treasure in a Welsh village, under a black stone bridge, planning to dig it up for my retirement. But I forgot the exact location of the cursed place! Penniless I wandered, until I met my fine accomplice, Mister Barnett, whose business was in shreds. There were no more hides to trade; squonks had become extinct. Together we invented a new profession, touring the world as a circus. The authorities searched for me everywhere but here, for my disguise was too natural to fail. As myself I am secure and do not have to pay for my crimes. We make enough money to survive, but it is hard.”

Juanita grimaced. “You have forgotten things? Then both our brains are full and we will turn mortal.”

“I do not comprehend you. Provided we repeat the mantra once a day there is nothing to fear. I have passed the gift to others since I last saw you. I kissed Billy here, for I was lonely. You may do the same now your monkeybreath has cleared up.”

“A chapter in a grimoire provided the cure. Knickers stitched from banana skins killed the bacteria.”

“Knickers? We were at sea too long, ’Phagia! What is this book you mention? Do you believe in magic?”

She took his hand. “I must show you.”

As they walked back along the corridor to the outside, a figure in rags jumped up at them from a trapdoor and mumbled a cascade of flowery curses. Billy snatched its rotting collar in one giant hand, dealt it a tremendous blow on the chin with the other and bundled it down into the darkness from whence it came, sliding the bolt on the trap and scowling at the absurdity of the situation.

“A few of these thespians are regular brats. I purchased them at a discount from the Theatre de l’Orotund. There is too little room to use all of them at once, so I keep the most unconvincing ones in storage in the basement, just in case something happens to the proper exhibits. He was Humberto von Gibbon, a man who committed crimes against literature. He tried to grope my pistol once.”

“I knew the real fool. The likeness is superb.”

They walked on and emerged from the wagon, squinting in the Smarje noon. Billy sat on the steps and yawned as Morgan and Juanita sauntered back to her abode. He would wait here to greet more customers. His bull copied his yawn, and before she was out of earshot, he called: “You had a name for my beast. What was it?”

She clutched her head. “I do not remember!”

Morgan followed her into her house and sat at the wide table while she stood at his shoulder and opened the grimoire before him. He pouted at the peculiar words and symbols.

“This is quite meaningless to me, ’Phagia!”

“Let me share my ideas with you. Numerous factors have been fusing in my mind these past three hundred years. Do you know a bald ghoul who is called Xelucha Dowson Laocoön?”

“Not unless I toasted him anonymously.”

“That is unlikely. He is a sort of archfiend who roams space, time and fiction looking for recruits to his criminal society. It was almost certain he would eventually try to enlist a handful of buccaneers. That is what he did in Panama. We did not spy him because we were completely drunk on sherry after months of enforced sobriety. But the story begins elsewhere, in Asturias, when the chief of the Cadiz clan played a trick on a poet, drifting him out to sea on a floating island, prevented from rescue by ancient flying lizards.”

“I shall listen better without my hat.”

“This book is the most powerful grimoire of Ugolino Cadiz. And the middle chapter concerns the secret of immortality, the words which must be chanted daily to preserve the flesh from decay. The poet was trapped in a castle which contained a machine that spoke the mantra for him, so eternal life was part of his punishment. It was somehow passed from him to La Santa Roja in Pennsylvania, probably by an agency which wept, for it was moist with tears, not spit, when she offered it to you. Then you presented it to us. Immortals feel uncomfortable in close proximity, so when you stood in the middle of the crowd and dispensed drink, the five crewmen kissed by you moved to the edges of the gathering, as far apart from each other as they might be.”

“Yes, I wondered why you all fell out.”

“Five equally spaced nodes on the circumference of a circle, which is what we were at that moment, form the points of a pentagon. When the sherry lulled us to sleep, Laocoön arrived on the scene, scouting for a brace of buccaneers. He did not care to blunder into the mass of dozing men, in case he woke us, so he skirted the rim, choosing the five outer villains. The way he works is by using a symbolic stick and carrot. The stick always comes first. He slipped a coconut under the skull of ’Ceti Whiskers, so that the barber confused the nut with comfort. He pushed a puppet of himself in the leg of ’Tology Spleen, to lead the sailmaker’s knee astray. He hired a group of Indians to butcher vegetables in front of ’Vado Lashes, the squeamish cook. Then he carved his triple initials on the teak helmet of ’Lin Brows.”