Mary C. Pangborn’s first published story, “The Back Road,” appeared in Universe 9. Here is her second, a wry story of rogues and magic, coshes and sorcery . . . and a surprising curse.
Set down all I tell you, Brother Albertus, and may the devil fly away with you if you bend any of my words from their true meaning. Give them a better sound if you will, you with your book learning, but the truth is strange enough; let there be none of your clerkly twistings and turnings to make either more or less of it. Forty days I’ll be here in sanctuary; we have plenty of time.
Yes, I confess myself guilty of taking a life, though I do not admit it was murder, no, for I never meant to hurt that silly fat merchant, only to relieve him of part of his superfluity. How was I to know he had a skull as frail as an egg? But it was robbery on the highway, and so they would hang me. I’ve no mind to yield myself to that. When my forty days are gone, happen I’ll abjure the realm as the law commands, and wade out into salt water each day until there’s a ship to take me away. Time enough.
You see no need for my words to be written down? Ah, you will see, sir, I promise you. For I have that to tell which might be scoffed at for an idle tale were there only my word for it, yet when it is written soberly in ink on good parchment, it will be known for truth. More, good father: there is a very dreadful sin weighing on me, the telling of which I must approach in fear and trembling; bear with me then, for it may need many words to make all clear.
I’m told I was born in the same year as our valiant King Harry, who killed so many Frenchmen at the great battle of Agincourt some three years past. And they say the King’s grace was some eight and twenty years of age when he fought that battle—now God forbid I should name my poor self in the same breath as the King, yet I call myself a true freeborn Englishman even as he is, the saints preserve him. So there is time ahead of me before I can count two score winters; I’m not ready to let them take me and hang me by the neck. And it may be you can feel with me in this, for you cannot be so many years older than I, though you are somewhat fatter.
Where was I? Oh aye, I was born. Hamo of York they call me, and sometimes Hamo the Red, for my hair. I was some twelve years old when my mother died, and I wearied of the kitchen service in my lord’s household and ran away. I doubt they ever thought me worth the chasing—a weazened bony snippet of a boy, idler and troublemaker. Here’s a handful of sins at the beginning: idleness and mischief, that’s sloth, and disobedience, running away from my rightful lord. Eh well, there’s worse to come.
Not much to be said of my early years on the road, before I met with Tom—begging, a bit of thieving, lending a hand to the jugglers at fairs —sometimes I’d even work, if my belly was empty enough. It wasn’t a bad life. I’d tramped the length of the realm before I was twenty, Lands End to Berwick, and found warm welcome all along the way, from young wenches and honest wives both. . . .
Now, with respect, Brother, that is a foolish question. How could I know? Was I ever in one place so much as two months, to say nothing of nine? How can a man guess how many bairns he may have sired? I’d not be surprised if England is well peppered with my redheads. But I will swear by any godly oath you like, I never took a wench against her will and liking. Willing they were, and pleased with me. I’ll not tell you about one or another. I do hereby confess myself guilty of the sin of lechery—mea maxima culpa—let one confession stand for all of them.
But this is not what your abbot is hoping I may tell you.
Most kindly the noble abbot received me, when I knelt before him begging for sanctuary; most patiently he heard me as I confessed my crime of robbery. Of that he said nothing; he stroked his holy chin, and eyed me thoughtfully, and he said, “I am told you spent some time journeying with a man known as Moses the Mage.” And I said this was true, for how should I deny my friend? Then he said, “It is rumored that this so-called mage has made a study of the art of alchemy, the search for the Elixir, called by some the Philosopher’s Stone.” And again I said, this rumor is true. Then he said no more except to promise I should receive sanctuary, and that he would send me a confessor to assist me in cleansing my soul of sin. And for this grace, and especially for his sending you to me, I am most deeply and humbly grateful. Now it would be presumptuous in me to suppose I could read the abbot’s saintly thoughts, yet it did seem to me he felt that any knowledge of the secret work of alchemy might be too heavy a burden for such a simple soul as mine, and only by divesting myself of that burden, yielding it up to one too holy to be corrupted by it, might I hope to save myself. Wherefore, if you will but hear my confession and write as I bid you, I will reveal to you—for the abbot’s ear—all that I know of the making of gold.
Let me first tell you about Moses the Mage.
He had already taken that name when I met him first, but he was baptized Thomas—Tom o’ Fowey, a Cornishman. Maybe you know they have a language of their own, not like any other; it would make you wonder if you were in any part of England. When I joined him he was mostly making weather magic, and a marvel it was to hear him lashing out in his strange tongue, all the folk gowking at him—he could switch to priestly Latin fast enough if anyone smelling like a bailiff came near. He’d been raised for a priest, until he decided the life would not suit him, and he had more clerkly learning than many of them, saving your presence. Now the spirits that bring wind and rain surely understood Cornish, for Tom’s weather sayings were usually right.
He could make an awesome figure of himself: tall and thin he is, with a mighty beak of a nose, and when he appeared as Moses he wore a black patch over one eye. Folk whispered he had sacrificed that eye in a pact with some evil spirit, in exchange for secret knowledge. Times we’d be in peril of a charge of sorcery, and the bailiff’s men would be looking for a tall dark one-eyed man; when they’d find us, I’d be sitting there with the black patch on me, a harmless little redheaded beggar, and Tom with his two great solemn dark eyes whole and sound, a holy pilgrim fingering his rosary; so the fellows who described him would be put to shame. Once it was a near thing, when the sheriff’s man pulled off my eye patch, but he backed away fast, terrified and cursing, seeing my eye horribly red and dangerous. We never traveled without an onion.
Weather magic wasn’t our only business; we also traded in drugs and herbal mixtures, and sometimes we’d have a stock of the rare alicorn, which is the powdered horn of the unicorn, as you know—a strong cure for all poisons. Now there are rogues without bowels or conscience who will sell you a mess of powdered chalk and call it alicom. We never did such a thing, though I’ll not deny we might have mixed the true stuff with other matters, so as to have enough for everyone. One market day we had our stall set up and Tom was crying our wares in his big voice while I went among the people to take their money: “Here it is,” he cries, “the only true alicorn, the one remedy for all poisons, that brave sailors bring you at great peril from strange and far places!” and he gives them a generous earful of Cornish to show how far and strange it was. “Here you see a piece of the horn itself—come close, friends, handle it, see for yourselves!” And then I saw a little man off at the edge of the crowd laughing to himself. Tom saw him too, and flung his Cornish speech at him, and when next I looked that way the man was gone. Scared off, I thought
Alicorn fetches a good price, and we’d sold all we had, so we were enjoying a good hot supper at the inn when here comes that same little man sidling up to us, grinning and ducking his head at Tom. “Give ye good den, Master Moses,” says he, “and will you not drink with me?”
Tom was scowling at him, and I held my breath, for Tom can be a fearsome man in a rage—the gust of his anger will blow you as high as the church steeple, till the sun comes out sudden and he’s your good friend again. But this time he only growled a bit. “You’ll be a Cornish-man?” he says, begrudging it. The fellow lays a finger to his nose and puts his head to one side, as though he had to think about the answer. “Not exactly,” says he, “but some of the words I know, yes. Black Jamie I am called, at your service.”
Dressed all in black he was, and black-haired he might have been once, but the trifle of hair he had left was all white, only a bit of it sticking up over each ear; a small sharp face with the nose and chin pointing at you like knives, and little no-colored eyes watching from ambush. Still, he spoke us quiet and friendly-like; Tom offered him our salt, and he made a ceremony of taking some of it to show he meant us no harm. So bit by bit we fell to talking easily, the good ale warming us; we could tell he was one of us, of the company of the road.
Jamie said, “You’ll be somewhat of a scholar, Master Moses?”
“Now how would you know that?” says Tom.
“Why, you’re too modest, man, you’re better known along the road than you think,” and Jamie winked at him. Fumbling at his pouch, he got out a little book, a shabby dirty old thing, no more than a dozen pages sewed together. Held it out in his left hand. “I’ll warrant you can read this,” he says.
Tom took the book over to the light of the torch by the fireplace, grumbling and grunting over it. “Aye, I can read the words,” says he. “It is alchemy, I can see that much.” We knew about alchemy; we had friends on the road who made a good living at the art, in the way I’ll be telling you.
“Words,” says Jamie. “Strong magic in grand long words, Master Moses, none knows it better than yourself.”
We did know. Tom was trying over the big words on his tongue, tasting and liking them, and Black Jamie watching his face. “I’ll be honest with you, my friends,” says Jamie (now surely we ought to have been on our guard when he said that!). “I’ve learned all the words in that book, I do not need it, and if you like, I will sell it to you for one silver penny. And you can lose nothing, for if you do not find you have a good bargain of it, I will buy it back from you for two pennies the next time we meet.”
“So you’re thinking we’ll meet again?” I asked him.
“That shall be as God wills,” says he—said it solemn enough, but I did notice he never made the sign of the cross. Tom gave him a penny for the book, and I don’t remember that we took leave of him; the next time we gave a thought to him, he was gone.
We spent some days studying the book, Tom reading out the words and I putting them all away in my memory, and true enough there never was a book with finer treasure of long words in it, far more than a penny’s worth. Yet they would not be sufficient, as we knew, and I said, ‘This is all very well, Tom, but it takes gold to make gold.”
“I know,” he said, and sighed. “Ah, I do wish we had a bit of gold.”
Now everyone knows you ought to have a care how you speak those words I wish, for there is no knowing who or what may be listening. Yet I will swear Tom spoke no more than those innocent words, so there is no explaining what happened, unless maybe Black Jamie had a hand in it. For it was the very next day we came upon a man dead by the side of the road. A holy pilgrim, by his dress, lying there most peaceful, his hands folded on his breast, never a mark on him; you could tell it was only that his time had come to die, there where he was. His pouch was empty; he had a plain gold cross on a chain around his neck.
I did not like to take the cross off him. Tom said, “Surely ‘tis the holiness that matters, not the gold,” and he took off his own little wooden cross that had been blessed by Our Lady of Walsingham, and put that on the dead man instead of the gold one; and we went our way. It seemed an honest exchange, and we had done the man no harm. And I will swear neither of us had harbored any sinful thought of calling on the dark powers to help us—not then. . . .
Whatever, we made a good livelihood out of those mighty words in our book, as long as the pilgrim’s gold lasted.
Now, Brother, I’d not be surprised if you have heard something of the way this is done. You must find yourself a patron, someone who is well endowed with the world’s goods, yet feels he has not enough; a fat burgess is good, or the bailiff of a great lord—but you had best stay clear of the lord himself, he can too easily crush you like a louse between thumb and finger if you do not satisfy him. So, when you have found your man, you converse with him softly, slowly, at length, until you see he is enchanted; you discourse on lunification, on tincture, on fixation, on dealbation; on the secret names of Jupiter and Saturn, on the Black Crow, the White Eagle, the King and his Son, the Serpent who swallows his tail, and much more; thus it is beyond doubt that you are an adept, skilled in the lore of the mysterious East. We had an advantage, d’ye see, for if there was danger of being too clearly understood Tom would just speak a bit in Cornish.
Next, your man must build his furnace and supply himself with alembics and crucibles and many rare substances; meanwhile you are living at ease in his house, sleeping soft and eating well, and if you cannot put by somewhat when you go on errands to purchase his materials, you had better choose some other trade.
But you cannot let this go on too long; there will come a day when you must prove your work. You will let him place a bit of lead in his crucible, and throw in a bit of this and some of that, whatever; and finally you bring forth your magic powder. A black powder is good; you can use charcoal, with a sufficiency of powder of lead, and maybe the dried blood of a white cock. You should have him put it in with his own hand, making sure he tips it all in quickly, and then without delay you seal the crucible with moistened clay and place it in the furnace, for as long as you like. After the vessel has been well heated and the molten dross skimmed away, there will be a nugget of gold in the bottom, and why not?—for in your magic powder there was a fragment of gold covered with blackened wax.
Well now, your patron is happy, and so are you. You may decide to make another trial, and the second lump of gold will be a trifle larger than the first. But then, alas, you have only a little of the magic powder left, and you must make a long and costly journey to find the ingredients necessary to make more. He will eagerly help you on your way, and you will generously give him all the powder you have left, with many difficult instructions on the use of it, so that you shall be long gone before he despairs of success.
Yes, I know this is not the sort of gold-making your abbot wishes to learn, but remember it is said: Blessed are the meek, for they shall he patient until the end of the story. You would not have me omit any of my misdeeds from my confession? And before you lay a heavy penance on me, Brother, bethink you: this worthy patron I speak of has enjoyed a rare and strange adventure, and had great pleasure in it; has he not received good value for his money?
Well; so it went. The time came when all our stock of gold was gone, and we sat together by our campfire at the edge of a lonely road, considering what we might do next. We did not see Black Jamie come, maybe just out of the shadow of the trees; there he was.
“Well met, friends,” says he, and sat down by our fire without any by-your-leave, the dancing shadows making horn shapes out of his two tufts of hair, and spread his left hand to the warmth of the fire—only that one hand, and I remembered he was left-handed, a mischancy thing. We were not wholly pleased to see him, but we did not like to be unfriendly, so presently we were passing our ale flask back and forth, and making small talk about the ways of the road; we were two stout young fellows to one old one, we saw no reason to fear him. After a while he said, “You’ll have had good profit out of your book, I’m thinking. You’ll not be wanting to sell it back to me?”
Tom says, “Nay, that we’re not.”
“Ah, you’ve used it well, I’ll warrant! But, friends, have you not sometimes thought of the true art that lies concealed behind all that writing?”
“We might have put our minds to it,” I said, and Tom frowned. But it needed no warlock to guess that such a thought would have come to us. For who would labor so mightily at all those mysteries, only to provide a few fellows like us with a chance of trickery? No, we knew there must be some truth in it When we had argued this, Tom always said the secret was buried too deep for us. I was not so sure.
Black Jamie said, “Whatever, you’ll be needing more gold.”
“Who doesn’t?” says Tom, a bit short, and Jamie laughed, a rusty-screechy noise with no mirth in it, a sound I did not care for. “Ah, a true word!” says he. “And there’s more nor one way of getting it, am I not right?”
“I’ve heard so,” says Tom.
Black Jamie yawned, like a man having no more to say and thinking of naught but sleep, and he says, tossing it out careless-like—”Well, there’s the ancient mounds, and the red gold in them.”
Now some folk will tell you those places are entrances into faerie, and if you know the spell you may go in and spend one day in delight at the court of a beautiful elfin queen, but when you come out you will find a hundred years have passed and all your friends are dead. Others say these are only the burial grounds of old-time pagans, not to be feared by anyone who can say his paternoster, and men have broken into such mounds with pick and shovel, finding old bones and sometimes the red gold. You never do hear it told that those men have lived long and happy lives thereafter. I said, “It’s known that such gold is accursed.”
Jamie yawned again, and stretched out on the grass with his back to the fire. “Ah,” says he, “that’s because the folk do not know how to get it safely. You will please yourselves, friends, but I am going near one of those places tomorrow, and if you care to walk with me I can show it to you.”
Then he was snoring, and it made us feel easier to hear him. A snore is a natural and homely thing; you cannot be afeard of a little bald wisp of a man who makes comical noises in his sleep.
So the next day we went along the road together, and Black Jamie kept us merry with songs and tales of old time, but never a word of himself or his own doings, and we somehow forgot to ask ourselves what manner of man he was. Near dusk he turned off the road into a great moor spreading westward, and we said nothing, but followed him. I will not tell you where the place was. We had lost sight of the highway when we came to the mound.
“Yonder it is,” said Jamie, “and I’ve a notion to camp here for the night. You could join me and welcome, if you cared to.”
It was only a hillock rising from the moor; you would think it a natural hill except for the smooth even shape of it. No tree or bush grew there, only the sheep-cropped grass, brighter and greener than common. Nothing fearsome about it Tom says, “I’ve spent nights in worse places.”
We built ourselves a bit of a fire.
“Ah, there is pleasant,” says Black Jamie. The dark was sifting down around us. “It would maybe surprise you,” says he, “the things I know that I would not be telling to everyone. But since you have been so friendly as to give me your comradeship, why, here is a secret you will not find in your book of alchemy. You will have heard that the gold found in the barrows is softer and redder than the common metal from the mines. Know, then, that this red gold of the ancient kings is not merely metal such as the goldsmiths use, but the very essence and spirit of gold. It is itself the Elixir.”
I asked him, “Why then have the men who found this ancient gold not discovered what it was?”
“Ah, there is the heart of the matter. They have gone in roughly as mere grave robbers, d’ye see, and when the gold is stolen that way, the virtue goes out of it. You must enter the mound gently, humbly, and let the gold be given you as a free gift.”
Tom said, “Are you telling us a mortal living man can do that?”
“It is not easy,” says Jamie, “but I am the man who can tell you the way of it. Share and share alike, if you can get it.”
We sat looking at him, thinking he mocked us, and he went on more urgently, “Of course, there is only one night in the whole month when it can be done,” and even while he spoke the great silver circle was rising and peering over the lip of the moor at us. Night of the full moon.
I said, “If you know the way, why do you not get it for yourself?”
“That is why,” he said, and thrust out his right hand at us, that he’d been keeping hidden. Half a hand it was, thumb and forefinger, three fingers gone. He said, “No one can enter the mound except he be a whole man.”
It would have been childish to ask why not. ‘Well then,” Tom was beginning, but Jamie put up that lonesome finger and shook it at him. “Not you.” Now Tom had hurt his foot when he was a bairn and had lost the little toe off it: such a small old-time thing he’d nigh forgotten it himself. And Jamie had surely never seen him with his boots off, yet he knew. And now Jamie was studying me.
Let him look, I thought, and I began trying to remember my fights and beatings—scars enough I had for them, but nothing lost. I might now and then have stood in peril of losing an ear or so to the law, for this or that misdoing; still, it had not happened, for they never caught me. “Scars!” said Jamie impatiently. “Nay, how can anyone grow to manhood’s years without scars? That is nothing. You could do it.”
“I will, then,” I said.
Now you see, Brother Albertus, here is that most deadly sin of which I spoke to you. For well I knew this was a trafficking with evil spirits, to the peril of my immortal soul, and yet I did knowingly enter upon it. Wherefore I will gladly suffer penance and go on pilgrimage if I may cleanse my soul of this thing. —Well; you must hear me out, to know how it was.
A black cross was to be set upside down, Jamie said, and he would teach me a spell in ancient Gaelic, and then—halfway through the telling of it he broke off and cocked his head sidewise at me. Smiling, if you could call it that. “There’s a thing you ought to know, laddie, before you go on with this,” says he. “You’ll go in there a whole man, but you’ll not come out without leaving some part of yourself in their hands. Whatever they choose to take.”
I did not like the sound of that I could imagine giving up a finger or a toe or two, even an ear, the red gold would be worth it; but there’s other parts a man would not like to find missing off him, and I said as much to Black Jamie. “Never fear,” said he, “they will play fair with you, they will take no more than you can spare. Even if they take one, they will leave you one,” says he, and he let out that screech noise of his, laughter you might call it.
I’ll be frank with you, Brother, I did not find much comfort in that reassurance, hut it was too late for faint-heartedness. I came back at him cold and quick, the first words I found in my mouth: “Did they take your three fingers, then?”
He said nothing, said it in his ancient Gaelic, the little cold eyes freezing into me, and the silence might have gone on until we had all turned to blocks of ice where we sat, if Tom had not spoken. “Eh, well, get on with it man,” he says, “tell us what more we need to do.” And so he did.
I had first to learn the words of the old Gaelic spell, and while the moon was climbing the sky Jamie strove most patiently with me to be sure I could say them right. I’d not have ventured to ask him what they meant, and surely he would not have told me—no need for me to know, only to speak them correctly. And at last he was satisfied I could do it So I went up to the top of the mound and set that unholy cross in the earth, and walked three times widdershins around it saying the words I had learned; and I could not tell them to you now if I would, for as soon as they had served their purpose they went clean out of my head. Then I lay down on my back beside the black cross, and held my eyes open to the full light of the moon. And whether time passed while I lay there, or whether it stopped entirely, I do not know; I was not aware of anything happening, only that I found myself in another place.
I could feel walls enclosing space, and yet there was great distance, and no walls to be seen, nor any roof or sky; there was light—soft, not bright—you could not tell where it came from. Whisper of clean moving air; somewhere a darkness of trees, and a smell of old forest growing more thickly over the land than it does now. And there were men in the forest, though I could not see or hear them.
Then a man was standing in front of me, where there had been no one. He was no giant, but broad and thick, powerfully made, with a great gray beard and fierce old eyes frowning at me. He wore a short kirtle and a wolfskin flung over one shoulder, and held in his hand a bright sword; and around his neck and on either arm he wore heavy circles of red gold. So I knew he was a king.
He spoke, and his voice was a deep rumble like the noise of drums; his words were strange to me, but the air of that place caught them up and twisted them around, the way sunlight spatters through leaves, making new patterns, and I knew what they meant. He said, “Is it time?”
I must have been gaping stupidly, for he moved impatiently, and there was a ringing sound from his sword. “Have you no ears, clod? Have you come at last to fetch me against the enemies of the Land?”
Now in the first breath I thought of great King Arthur, who is to return one day and fight for us; but everyone knows that Arthur is buried at Glastonbury, and moreover he was a chivalrous Christian knight, not a savage clad in the hide of a wolf. Then I saw how there might well be more than one ancient king standing guard over the Land. And at last I found my tongue, and answered him, “Sire, I thank you for your kindness, but I can tell you we’ve gotten the better of our enemies, for we have a strong warrior as king.”
“Ah,” he said, and nodded. ‘That is good. You have driven them back from the beaches?”
“Why, they never came so far,” I told him. “It would glad your heart to see it, sir, the way our good King Harry went over the water after them to kill them, and came home to a great triumph.”
“Good, very good. Then I may sleep awhile longer.” His men had been coming out of the forest behind him; there was a gleam of eyes and a shadow of hands on clubs. He motioned them back. “You must be sure to keep a strong guard on the beaches,” he said sternly. “That is the way they always come. . . .”
“We keep guard,” I promised him. And then I bethought me one must mind one’s manners in speaking to a king, so I went down on my knee and swept off my cap, as I should have done sooner. All this did not take as much courage as you might think, for something about that place made it seem right and proper for me to be there; it was all a part of the enchantment. “Great King,” I said, “I have come here boldly to bring you word that the Land is safe, and you may rest in peace. Now in my time, sire, we hold that the bringer of good news merits a reward, and if it should please your lordship to think thus, I would only ask most humbly for a small token of your royal gold.”
He smiled; and oh, Brother Albertus, you have never seen such a smile! you could see the naked skull grinning behind the flesh, and I knew that all my secret thoughts and my desires for the gold were transparent to him. Yet it seemed he was not angry. “Be it so,” he said, and he drew the gold band from his left arm and gave it to me. The first touch of it burned my fingers like ice; then I felt the living warmth of my hand flowing into it, and it was no more fiercely cold than metal ought to be. I said, “Sire, with all my heart I humbly thank you.”
My voice was flat and dull, and I was alone in a small dim space with barely enough light to see what lay before me in the dust, where I was still kneeling: clean old bones, undisturbed, arms straight at the sides; around the neck and the right arm were circlets of gold, but on the left arm nothing—only a fresh scar in the earth under the long arm bone, as though something had been taken away.
Then I was lying on top of the mound in the moonlight, and I would have thought the whole thing a mere vision, but that I held a golden armband in my hands: bright and clean-shining, not like a thing dug out of old earth, and now I could see a swirl of markings on it, like a sort of writing. Down yonder by a fire were the shapes of two men, waiting. In a little, I remembered who they were. I went down to them and said, “Here is the gold,” and fell flat on my face.
There was a while I don’t remember, and then I was sitting beside the fire with Tom holding the flask so I could drink, and the gold circle on the ground in the firelight
Black Jamie put out a hand toward it, moving slow and easy, the both of us watching him, Tom with his knife out and ready.
“Given as a free gift, it was,” I said.
Black Jamie said, “Yes, I know.” He took it into his hands, turning it over as though he could read the old writing. It seemed a long time until he laid it down, carefully, never letting his eyes shift toward the gleam of Tom’s knife. “Now,” says he, “we must divide it in three pieces.”
Not so easy; it was a lovely thing, we did not like to hammer it roughly with stones. Jamie picked up an ordinary-looking pebble and scratched a couple of lines with it on the gold, muttering some of his Gaelic words, and passed it once quickly through the fire. “Now strike it with your stone,” he said. I struck it, and there it lay, split cleanly into three pieces. One piece, a trifle smaller than the others, had the greater part of the writing on it Tom and I sat still, not touching the gold, waiting.
Jamie picked up the smallest piece and tucked it into his pouch. Then he leaped suddenly in the air and clacked his heels together, thumbing his nose at us, and psst! like that, he was gone.
We both crossed ourselves quickly, all ashiver, fearing we had dealt with the devil himself. But then I said, “He is maybe a Welshman, or even a Scot, but I think he is not a demon, for then why would he have needed our help? And you must remember how he snored, like any natural man.”
“Eh well,” says Tom, “we knew he was a warlock.”
Whatever he was, we were free of him, and now I told Tom everything that had happened, just as I have been telling it to you. He shook his head and sighed, “Ah, Hamo, Hamo! what a marvelous adventure! Could I but have gone with you!”
Then I remembered why he could not go, and the rest of it, and now my fingers were shaking with impatience to get all my clothes off, Tom helping me. I could scarce breathe till I might discover what had been taken from me. We looked carefully, both of us, and there was no part of me lacking, nothing, not so much as a toenail. Tom laughed. “Ah, I’ll warrant he was mocking you—it would seem a merry sort of jest to him, the black-hearted bastard he is, man or demon.”
But I could not help wondering: if they had stolen nothing from my outward and visible body, what had they taken instead? I considered myself—not an easy matter, Brother, though easily said—and I felt myself to be the same man I had always been. Ah well; I was accursed, but I did not know it; not yet.
Tom heaved another great sigh, deep out of his guts, and he said, “Think now, Hamo, what a marvelous song it would make! To speak with an old dead king, and win the red gold. . . .”
I knew what was in his heart. It was always his deepest longing to be a bard, a minstrel; not to wrench a livelihood out of the folk by clever trickery, but to win it with praise and joy, as a singer of tales. He could not do it; he had no gift for it, no more than I have myself. What do you think, Brother Albertus? Does everyone cherish some deep unhealing sorrow for the one splendid thing he can never do?
We could not make the song; we only sat quietly there together until it grew light enough for us to see each other’s faces, and the two broken pieces of the red gold lying there on the ground between us.
Neither of us moved to touch it. The light grew, and the sun rose, and a finger of sunlight reached down along the mound, pointing at the gold. We’d not have been surprised if it had crumbled into a bit of dust, as they say faery gold does at the touch of morning. But no: it brightened in the sun, it soaked up the light and gave it back in glory, you might think it was a living thing that had suffered from darkness all those years under the earth and now sang with joy. It was ours, the true red gold. . . .
Now am I come to the sad and sorry part of my tale, Brother Albertus, and I ask you to hear me with compassion.
We lost no time in finding ourselves a snug place where we set up our furnaces and crucibles, and we labored earnestly to do all that was said in the book, employing our red gold as the Elixir, of which a tiny bit should suffice to change all the melt into its own pure nature, into true gold. Well. In a word, we could never get back more gold than we put in.
One day I found Tom sitting with his head in his hands, nigh to weeping, and he said, “I am greatly to blame, Hamo, I have made you think me a greater scholar than I am. I can read the secret words in our book, saying Seize and slay the dragon, lift out his entrails, bring the green lion to the current of the Nile, and so on, but I do confess to you I have no notion at all what these things mean, nor what the old masters are telling us to do.”
I had been wondering about it myself, but it grieved me to see my poor friend taking the whole weight of our failure on himself, and I said, “Tom, I am thinking we ought not to have been so ready to trust yon fellow Jamie.”
“Why, did he not have a potent spell? Did it not get you into the mound as he said it would? And surely he knew the value of the red gold, for he desired it for himself.”
“He did,” I said, “but I am not sure he wanted the gold as much as he did the secret writing on it. Most likely that was some excellent ancient magic.”
“Do you mean—? Are you saying—?” Tom was swelling slowly to full fury, his face turning red. “When he told us that the red gold was the Elixir-?”
“I would not say he was lying,” says I, “I was only wondering about it”
Tom was not wondering. He crashed his great fist on the table so the spoons jumped to the floor. “Why, that misbegotten limb of Satan! That—that creature—he to cozen us? I will have the heart out of him with my bare hands, by God’s bowels I will! I will hang him up by the heels and cut out his tripes to feed him—I will . . .”
I don’t know what more he planned; the rest was in Cornish. I waited until he grew weary and then I said, “We have no power to hunt him down, Tom, well you know it. Here we be two simple fellows trying to make an honest living, and him a warlock.”
He did know it, and he sat drained and spent, the way he does when the anger has run out of him, and he said, “So, then, we must go back to our old trade. We have gold. . . .”
And so we did. I cannot bear to spend many words on this, Brother, for the horror is still with me. We found a patron, we sat at drink with him, and Tom spoke with him learnedly, as we had so often done; I, the humble assistant, waited until Tom should turn to me and say, “Now my good man here has somewhat to show you,” and I was to unwrap the little bar of red gold and say, “Look you, master, a small bit of the gold we have made.”
And I could not do it. I felt the words fighting each other in my throat, and knew what would happen if I spoke; I had just enough wits to fall on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and I heard Tom say, “Poor fellow, he’s not had one of these fits for a month,” and somehow he got me away. Truly feared for me he was, thinking of poison or some dread illness, for well he knew I never had fits.
Ah, the case was far worse than he thought! For I was accursed; I knew now what dire mutilation the old King had wrought on me. He had taken away my power to lie.
Better, far better, he had stolen an ear or even an eye! Only think, Brother, how easily your welfare or even your life may depend on your ability to lie! Never tell me the monastery is different from the rest of the world in that way, I would not believe it. Could you face even one day in which you knew that you could utter no word other than the truth, however great the need? Would you not be forced to a vow of silence? Can you not pity me, Brother Albertus? Yes, I see you do, I thank you for your tears. I could not have wept better in my evil old days, no, not even with the best of onions. . . .
I have striven against my fate, hoping to find the curse weakening with time. Often, while I have been speaking with you, I have tried to cheat just a little, not wishing to deceive you but merely as one might test a wounded arm to see if it has healed enough for use. All to no avail; the words I sought to bend have come out of my mouth straight, I have not been able to tell you anything except the exact truth. —You shake your head, you think such a thing impossible? But consider, Brother, you have the best possible reason to believe it. Am I not the one who is telling you? And I am Hamo the Accursed, who cannot lie.
Now when I had made Tom understand what had happened to me, I begged him to let me go my separate way, for I was surely no use to him. “My poor friend,” said he, “you could never make your way alone in the world under such a curse. Let us think what we can do.”
I will not spin you a long tale of those dreary days. In our despair, we thought of setting up an honest mercer’s shop, but we had not the gift for it; nothing went right, in no time at all we were deep in debt, and my poor Tom whisked off to the debtors’ prison. We still had our red gold, buried in a safe place, but it would not have been enough, and anyway we could not let them have it. There’s much virtue in it, even if it may not be the Elixir.
So I gave the sheriff’s men the slip, and whispered Tom that I’d make the money to set him free, and then I took to the greenwood, as we ought to have done in the first place. I had almost enough for his needs when I had the misfortune to kill that merchant on the highway, and there, but for the holiness and kindness of your sanctuary, would have been the end of my pitiful tale.
You might think that for a man who has seen such adventures as mine it would be tedious merely to go on living from day to day, but I do not find it so; I am truly grateful for this enchanted world God has given us, and who knows what further joys and wonders I may find in it? So I have decided not to wait out my whole forty days in sanctuary. My good friend Tom is out of prison now—never ask me how it was arranged—and he is waiting for me. We’ll try our luck with our comrades in the greenwood, or maybe on the high seas; there’s Tom’s cousin, captain of his own ship, a free trader—I suppose some folk would call him a pirate.
It’s useless to struggle, Brother Albertus, I am stronger than you. I do not wish to hurt you; have we not enjoyed these days and hours of friendly converse? However, I must win time to leave this place quietly, you see, and so I must tie your hands and feet—I hope that is not too tight? Yes, your habit fits me quite well, I knew it would. I am sorry I cannot leave you my breeches, but you may have this old coat to keep you warm until your brothers find you. It will not be long.
Oh aye, the abbot. You say I promised to tell him how he could make gold from lead?
With respect, Brother, that is not what I said. Look back at your writings; you will find my words were: I will tell you all I know of the making of gold—and is not this just what I have been confessing to you? One moment; I must tie this cloth over your mouth. I cannot have you crying out too soon. —Very well, you shall learn the final secret. Tell your abbot to take all his silver plate and jewels and his tools of whatever metal, and all his papers that tell of the wealth of the abbey in land and in sheep, and he shall go to the master goldsmith in London town and say, Give me gold enough for these things. Thus he may transmute any object whatever into gold. This is the exact and perfect truth: I, Hamo, have said it.
Does something trouble you, Brother Albertus? Nay then, do not fret your kind heart with fears for my safety, I shall be well away before any pursuit can set out. Farewell; remember me in your prayers. Pax tecum.