Battle of the Sun (17 page)
Authors: Jeanette Winterson
J
ack was still lying like a stone under the altar. He heard the scrape of the tinderbox as the Magus lit the candles, and he could smell a strong incense.
‘The quicksilver . . .’ said the Magus, ‘the Aqua Mercurius.’
‘The barrel is prepared for the sacrifice,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and I shall open its mouth.’
Jack could hear him prising the top from the barrel. Then the Abbess came in, with news of the sacrifice, and soon afterwards, to his horror, Jack saw Silver’s feet being dragged towards the altar.
‘Let me go!’ she shouted.
‘This is not him,’ said the Magus angrily. ‘Where is the Radiant Boy?’
The Abbess smiled. ‘I promised you a sacrifice, yet I did not say what kind.’
‘We had a pact!’ said the Magus.
‘I want nothing from you,’ said the Abbess. ‘If I help you it is because I am helping myself.’
Abel Darkwater walked up to Silver. And he walked round and round her as though she were a fish in a bowl.
‘The Golden Maiden! The Girl with the Golden Face! Silver! You have many names, but one end, and it is now! We are well met here, for we shall never need meet again – not through continents of history or geographies of time. Do you remember me, Silver?’
‘How could she forget Abel Darkwater and his alembics?’ said the Abbess.
‘I have not forgotten Abel Darkwater,’ said Silver, ‘and I haven’t forgotten you either, Maria Prophetessa, for that is your true name.’
The Abbess inclined her head and said nothing.
‘You have betrayed me!’ cried the Magus. ‘You are in league together, you and this conjuring idiot, Darkwater, and you have both betrayed me!’
‘Childish!’ said the Abbess. ‘Betrayal assumes allegiance, and I have no allegiance to you. You have your sacrifice, and that is necessary for your Work. To destroy the Radiant Boy is a different matter, and no matter of mine.’
‘Nor mine,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and this Maiden was ever my price, as well you know.’
‘And I have no price, for I cannot be bought,’ said the Abbess, in her low and pleasant voice, ‘but you mistake me, Magus, if you imagine I have no interests. On this occasion, as far as the girl is concerned, my interests happen to be the same as those of Darkwater. That is all.’
Abel Darkwater picked up Silver against his strong boar-like chest. He seemed to bare his tusks at the Magus. ‘You shall get your City of Gold,’ he said, ‘but when this Maiden is gone I shall soon be Master of Time!’
‘The Timekeeper is mine,’ yelled Silver, ‘now and for ever!’
‘Such spirit,’ said the Abbess mildly. ‘In a strange way I shall be sorry to lose you so much sooner than expected, Silver.’
‘And I shall not be sorry!’ shouted Abel Darkwater. ‘Into the barrel with her!’ And he tossed Silver into the air like a fish that is caught.
The chapel was darkening. The Magus strode over to the Abbess, his face close against hers. ‘Again, I tell you, we had a pact, you serpent of the Nile! Where is the Boy?’
‘He is here,’ said Jack.
Jack came out from under the altar. He stood unafraid and still, and there was an authority about him, and a power, that made everyone hesitate.
The chapel was darkening. The moon was halfway across the sun.
‘Silver is not to be the sacrifice,’ said Jack, ‘the sacrifice of
blood most dear
, and neither am I. There is to be no sacrifice. You are defeated, Magus. By my presence here, you are defeated.’
It was a good try, and Jack nearly succeeded. The truth is, he was powerful, but he was untaught, and knew nothing of the magic arts, or what he should do. He simply trusted the power he felt in him, but the Magus was ancient and wily.
‘How so, Jack Snap?’ he said. ‘How so?’
But that was the Dragon’s voice. Jack felt a sudden confusion, and he faltered. Who was the Magus? Where was the Dragon? Were they the same? Were they separate? And had not the Dragon told him that any fear or anger or uncertainty would weight the power back to the Magus?
Jack was uncertain. He shifted his gaze. The Magus felt the moment and used it to spring at Jack with claws and teeth, no longer in human form, but some monstrous beast unknown.
In the darkening chapel they fought. The candlesticks on the altar were turned over, the cloth ripped to the floor. Jack saw that as the Magus fought him, his own body was shining like gold, but like living gold, and he lit the darkening chapel as though the sun that was eclipsed outside was bottled inside him.
They rolled and held, and were like creatures welded together; first the Magus had Jack with a claw at his throat, and then by a twist Jack had the Magus locked at the jaw.
But Abel Darkwater had plans of his own. No matter how Silver kicked and struggled she could not free herself. He carried Silver to the barrel of mercury. She was about to cry out, but as she saw Jack in mortal combat, she knew that for his sake she had to hold all her courage in her mouth, for if she distracted him now, even for a second, he would be killed by the hideous clawed beast that was the Magus.
The Abbess stood by. She watched everything. She said nothing.
Abel Darkwater lowered Silver feet-first into the barrel. As the mercury touched her feet, she felt its terrible cold that numbed her legs as she was dipped and dropped deeper and deeper. She was too cold to shiver, and it was as though she had become the cold moon, and the sun had gone out of her. She closed her eyes. The quicksilver covered her. Abel Darkwater closed the barrel.
Without a backward glance he quitted the chapel into the darkening noon, leapt on his horse, that shied at the loss of light, and galloped away.
As the last of the light left the chapel, in the fullness of the eclipse, there was a fearful cracking noise. Jack had the Magus pinned under him, and with his golden strength he saw the half-animal, half-human form begin to diminish and fade. He was utterly concentrated now, and wanted only that this moment should be his, and the Magus defeated for ever.
And then the Abbess said, in her low and pleasant voice, ‘Another has sacrificed herself in your place.’
Jack let go.
And his grip on the Magus loosened. And he stood up alone, in the dark, and he was dimmed, and he was lost, and he was nowhere, and he was no one, and he was nothing, scrap, whittle, ounce, speck, atom, dream. The battle was lost, and he had lost, and, and . . .
And the Magus was gone in his phoenix form through the open window.
Jack felt in his own body the emptiness of the universe.
Darkness
Silence
Despair
Jack went over to the barrel, which was freezing cold and covered in icicles. He stood in front of it, hanging his head like a broken beast.
‘It is called the Dissolutio,’ said the Abbess mildly. ‘It is a part of the alchemical process of transformation. Silver, like quicksilver, has dissolved into a million parts. There are millions of Silvers in the barrel, and none at all. Farewell, Jack.’
And the Abbess left the dark chapel.
Jack shouldered the barrel – and it was easy for him to do because of his strength, and he went outside and looked at the sun, and now the eclipse was passing, as the moon sped on, and the sun was beginning to light the earth again.
Heavy in his body like lead, with a heart that was dead as a stone that must feel nothing lest it break, Jack walked, upright and steady, out of the Priory, and down Bishopsgate Street towards the river. His shoulder and arm were frosted and frozen with the frozen frostedness of the barrel.
No one stopped him or challenged him. All the people were dazed by the eclipse, and the strange apparition of the strange boy and his barrel seemed part of the wonders they had seen. And as Jack reached the river, he understood why everyone was amazed, for he reached the river long before he reached the river; the waters had risen and broken their banks, as the Book of the Phoenix had foretold.
Sturgeon and carp gasped in the shallow waters at Leadenhall, and small craft flung out of the Thames by its rising, perched like miniature arks on miniature Ararats, marooned and becalmed as the waters began to recede.
Jack found the rowboat, and rowed slowly and sadly downriver back to London Bridge. The Keeper of the Tides was leaning out of his poop, and he hailed Jack.
‘What ho, Jack? What ho?’
But Jack only shook his head and rowed on. He had lost Silver and he had lost Crispis. He had lost his mother. He had lost his fight. He felt that he had lost himself.
At length he reached the water-gate of The Level on the Strand. By now the cold of the barrel had turned the whole boat to white ice. Jack didn’t care; he shouldered the barrel once more and took it straight upstairs to Roger Rover’s chamber, where he found his old master, and the great alchemist, John Dee.
‘I have failed,’ he said simply, and two tears fell down his face and on to the floor. He stared at them; they were tiny drops of solid gold.
John Dee bent down and picked them up and put them on the table. ‘You are the Radiant Boy,’ he said.
‘And what of it?’ said Jack. ‘I have failed.’
John Dee shook his head. ‘The Battle of the Sun is not done, my good Jack; it has begun.’
A
lready it had begun.
‘It was my cart and it’s my cartwheel!’
‘Give that to me, it’s mine! Mine had the spoke missing!’
‘It’s a trick, whatever it is!’
‘No! It’s solid gold, I tell you!’
The city was changing colour. And texture. And form. And matter. The city was turning into gold.
The first report was when two carters were hauled to the bench for fighting in the street over a cartwheel. But when the magistrate saw the cartwheel, he confiscated it as evidence, and neither the magistrate nor the wheel were ever seen again.
It began with ordinary objects: pokers, tongs, hammers, cups. No longer iron or copper, or forged or blasted – all solid gold.
And the fights – you should have seen the fights. Two people who had been friends for life had each other by the throat over a platter of meat, and not for the meat but for the platter.
A man kicking a stone saw it turn to a golden nugget.
A boy feeding his donkey saw the nosebag switch from coarse weave to shining woven threads of gold.
A woman drying her washing in Fynnesbury Fields found that all her master’s linen was stiff as armour and shining in the sun. When she tried to pick it up, she fell down. Half a dozen soldiers made off with it, and she was left with a pair of solid gold stockings; she ran with them all the way home.
Gold. Everywhere gold.
No one slept. Men, women and children prowled the streets with lanterns searching for golden objects, for no one knew when it would happen or what it would be, and you could take a spoon and wish it to be gold and waste your breath, or you could go outside and trip straight over a solid gold ball of horse dung.
The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths had their best men testing and proving and weighing the matter that came through their doors. It was real gold.
No one went to work. Why mill flour or sweep floors, make clothes, mend saddles, shoe horses, twist iron for carts or plait ropes for ships? Why boil tar or tan leather, why drive cattle, why fish, why water, why sow or plant, why harvest, bake or cook?
If everything were gold, everyone would soon be rich. No need to do a thing!
There was a blacksmith shod a horse and, as he nailed the last shoe, he saw the horse’s hoof gleaming. Straight away he pulled off the shoe and left the horse where it stood, and went and sold the horseshoe and took himself to an inn and drank so much that he fell in the Thames and was drowned.
There was a man, and the roof of his house turned to gold overnight while he slept, and he was woken at dawn by the sound of tearing and pulling and banging and shouting, and all his neighbours were on his roof stripping off the gold tiles, and because the man was old, by the time his son came to save him, there was no roof left, so that he was poorer when he woke than when he went to sleep, in spite of his roof being gold, for what is the good of a golden roof if it is no roof at all?
There was a woman rocking her baby in its cradle, and as she rocked and sang a lullaby, the cradle turned to solid gold, so heavy that it fell through the floorboards, the baby with it, and when the mother ran downstairs, she found a mob of men dragging the cradle away, and her babe thrown out and left by the road. She picked up the child and soothed it, and to her the child seemed better than gold, but as she soothed and walked and walked and soothed, a man came by in a black cloak, and he asked her if she was poor, and she replied that she was, and he asked if she would rather be rich, and she said at what cost?
And the man in the cloak laughed and took her baby and held him up to the sun and the baby turned to gold.
Nothing was safe. Nothing was solid. Whatever you had might change its nature at any moment. The whole city was like a gambling den, where men and women waited and watched, betting with their lives and livelihoods that something near them soon would turn to gold.
And while they waited, idle, covetous, what they had rotted and wasted, withered and died.
As objects changed their nature, so did people. Honest men turned into thieves, boys went out in mobs, smashing houses, sinking boats. Women who had been friends all their lives stole from one another, and plotted how to be rich.
At the house on the Strand, all the servants had one by one left to seek their fortune, and so Jack and Roger Rover were left to cook the food and fetch the water for themselves. John Dee had moved himself into the house and was constructing a makeshift laboratory in Roger Rover’s study. He warned Jack and Sir Roger not to leave the house in case of attacks from the Magus.
‘Didn’t you tell me the man was an impostor?’ said Roger Rover.
‘I was mistaken,’ said John Dee. ‘And now I must protect us all as well as I am able.’
He was determined to free Silver from the barrel of mercury that stood frozen solid in Roger Rover’s study, and not fifty fires could warm it.
Every day Jack went down to where Sir Boris was guarding his mother – still stone but for her golden hair – and when he had talked to his mother a little while, although she could not answer, he asked the huge knight to help with the horses and the heavy work, and the Knight did.
And sometimes, in spite of John Dee’s warnings, Jack slipped out, unnoticed, into the teeming stirring bewildering city of lies and gold.
* * *
‘Gold! Gold! All gold! Golden turds for sale!’
A woman had discovered that her privy was stacked with golden turds; long ones, fat ones, short ones, clotted ones, some with golden fishbones sticking out the sides.
This trade in turds was so brisk and prosperous that a particular boy, whose turds all proved to be golden, was stuffed with treacle all day long, and his eliminations caught in a golden bucket and at once put up for sale.
Sadly, after a week, the poor child died of a surfeit of treacle and the woman was forced to close her booth.
A neighbour, seeing she had gone, and knowing how stupid people are where money is concerned, took all her own un-golden turds from her un-golden privy pot, and painted them with a mixture of white lead before rolling them in gold leaf. They sold as briskly as before, and the woman left the country before she was caught.
Leaving the country is one thing, leaving a husband behind is another, and he was buried up to his neck in a steaming heap of donkey dung by a furious mob of cheated gold-mongers.
As Jack walked among the restless crowds one day he saw Abel Darkwater haranguing a man at the riverside. The man was driving sheep on to a boat, but Jack could see that these sheep were different – they had golden fleeces.
Jack kept hidden until he had a chance to dart down nearer. As he watched, he saw each sheep, dirty and grey, come out of its pen and pass on to the boat, and as it did so, its fleece turned to gold. Then, as Jack peered closer, he saw the animals themselves breathe their last breath as they became golden replicas of themselves.
Jack remembered the gold fish that the Keeper of the Tides had pulled out of the Thames.
Objects were one thing, but if animals were gold, then soon there would be nothing to eat, and if animals were gold – what about people?
The boat moved out, low in the water, under its heavy cargo. Was Abel Darkwater amassing his treasure, ready to leave London? And what of the Magus?
The Keeper of the Tides had noticed a man in a black cloak standing upright in a dull golden boat. The boat was rowed, oar by oar, by the Creature(s) the Keeper had seen before, and near the Female sat a dejected dog.
As the Keeper watched, the man in black pinned a something of some kind to the pier of London Bridge, and then motioned to his servants to row him away. Swiftly they did so.
‘Curious!’ said the Keeper of the Tides to himself, and thinking that no one should be pinning something of any kind to his bridge, he decided to investigate.
Jack, pushing his way through the thronged streets of avid faces, was puzzling with himself about the Magus’s true intentions. The Magus was only interested in power and in riches, but as the city turned to gold, its citizens were the ones running away with the treasure.
There was something here that Jack didn’t understand, and it had something to do with the golden sheep . . .
Jack made his way back to the house on the Strand, where he found John Dee and Roger Rover standing in the courtyard. A woman was with them – Jack didn’t know her, but she was carrying a golden baby.
‘Jack!’ said John Dee. ‘Matters are serious and we must speak together. But tell me, have you still those seeds that the Dragon gave you? The ones that rescued you and turned poor Crispis yellow?’
‘In my mother’s chamber,’ replied Jack, his heart sinking as he thought again of poor lost Crispis.
‘Then bring them at once!’ said John Dee.
Jack ran off, but when he got to the mantelpiece where he had left the three seeds in the cup, he found only two.
‘That’s odd,’ said Jack to himself, but he ran back and gave what he had to John Dee, without saying that one was missing.
‘We must plant these, one in each courtyard,’ said John Dee, ‘and they will give the house more protection than I can offer it, for these seeds contain in them a very ancient magic. If we do not use them, we, like everything else, may turn to gold!’
‘My baby!’ wailed the woman.
‘Wait,’ said John Dee. ‘Watch!’
And he planted the first sunflower in a patch of earth in the courtyard.
It grew. It grew. It grew. It grew.
When it was perhaps twenty feet tall and thick and strong, it turned its face to the sun and made a gigantic yellow and black fire, as wide across as a cartwheel. As its shadow fell into the courtyard, its shadow was yellow like the sun.
‘Stand with your baby in the shadow of the sunflower,’ commanded John Dee.
The woman did so, and immediately the baby that had been rigid gold began to soften, and then it began to cry, and then it curled its fists around its mother’s hair, and its mother laughed and cried all at once for her baby was more to her than a whole world of gold.
The only change that anyone could see was that the baby had golden hair.
‘Remarkable!’ said Roger Rover.
‘We will now plant the second sunflower in the same way,’ said John Dee, ‘and all about us will stay as it is – as it should be.’
‘I understand why the Magus wants gold,’ said Jack, ‘but I don’t understand why everything has to be gold; every nail, latch, fish and person!’
‘Very soon you will understand,’ said John Dee. ‘By tomorrow morning you will see for yourself why he is doing this. Now this night I must visit the Queen, for the very power of the throne is challenged by the Magus, but first, I believe that I can return Silver to you!’
‘But she is dissolved!’ said Jack.
‘The Dissolutio is not the end of the matter,’ said John Dee. ‘Come with me and I will show you a great wonder!’
