Belle's Song (14 page)

Sir Leather Strap’s lips dried even as his mouth watered. “But at this moment you can make gold?” The spark flickered back to life.

Luke nodded.

“If you’re lying …”

Luke blinked and his cheek twitched. Sir Leather Strap observed him closely. The spark had now lit a fire that flared out of his belly and into his veins. He could see the gold. He could smell it. He had a terror of losing it. He gestured to one of the men. “Bring the girl here and open her mouth, because if you
are
lying, boy, I’ll have everybody’s teeth, whether gold, bone or plain enamel, and I’ll start by plucking out this creature’s little treasures one at a time with the farrier’s nail pullers and have them made into a necklace.”

I was dragged over and forced to kneel. I remember Sir Knight calling out “For shame!” and beating his hands together. I remember Walter surging forward and being thrust back. I remember clammy, prying fingers crushing my tongue and making my lips bleed.
Most of all, though, I remember the blankness that is a fear beyond terror, because I alone amongst this company knew that making gold was one trick Luke had refused to learn.

“Don’t hurt her.” Luke couldn’t keep his voice even.

Sir Leather Strap shrugged. “That’s up to you and you’d better hurry. We need to see gold before nightfall, and it’s already beginning to get dark.”

Luke swallowed, shrank, then, with a small jerk, was alive with movement. “Light every torch, every lamp there is,” he ordered, moving swiftly toward the baggage carts. “I’ll get what I need. You get kindling and twigs. We need a fire and a bowl of cold water.”

The men looked to their leader. “Well, get on then,” cried Sir Leather Strap, running after Luke. “Yes,” Luke said, not slowing his step, “you stay close. I’ll need an assistant.” He brushed past me. It was the only comfort he could give.

By the time a fire was lit, Luke had returned with his own pack and a brown leather box big enough for a child’s armor. Using two broad tree stumps as tables, he opened the box and set out two dozen unlabeled vials, half a dozen bottles, and several twists of paper. My guard, now more interested in Luke than in me, relaxed his hold. I closed my mouth. The filth on my tongue was sickening but I didn’t dare spit.

“You must tell us what everything is.” Sir Leather
Strap peered at the vials by lantern light. Luke took a lantern too, and without looking at the vials or bottles, slowly began to recite in a hypnotic voice: “Borax, verdigris, bullock’s gall, arsenic, brimstone, sal ammoniac. I’ve chalk and quicklime and ashes and of course the white of eggs, and alkali, tartar, salt and saltpeter, iron for Mars, quicksilver for Mercury, lead for Saturn, and tin for Jupiter.” It was a litany, just like my mother’s bell litany, but though it reassured Sir Leather Strap, it did not satisfy him. “Where’s the elixir?”

“Be patient!” Luke admonished. He delved into his own pack and brought out a crucible, a retort, a pan for boiling water, and a small drab bag. Sir Leather Strap tried to grab the bag but Luke raised it above his head and the thief had to make do with the crucible. “I should have been an alchemist,” he said, running his hands lovingly all over it. “I’ve a real feel for it.”

“I’m sure you have,” said Luke, secreting the pouch in his sleeve. “How’s the fire? I’m ready to begin.” His skin gleamed. Beneath his eyeglasses his pupils were molten lapis. I think only I could sense that he didn’t dare pause, even for a moment, lest he lose his nerve. “Take an ounce of mercury from this vial and place it in the crucible,” he ordered Sir Leather Strap. This was done. There was utter silence now save for the grazing of the horses, the crackle of twigs, and Luke’s voice. His twitch had returned. “Place the crucible in the
hottest spot.” Sir Leather Strap sweated and swore as he burned his fingers in his haste to obey.

With a great flourish, the small drab bag reappeared. Luke extracted a snatch of powder between finger and thumb and dropped the powder into the crucible. A puff of steam escaped as he clapped on the lid and threw the bag onto one of the tree stumps. “Poke the fire,” he said. “It must be hot as hell.” He seized a branch himself, pronging it purposefully amongst the embers. Flames shot up. “That’s better.” He let go of his stick. For several minutes, he did nothing but observe. Then suddenly he cried, “This is the moment!” and with a pair of tongs seized the crucible, withdrew it from the flames, and poured a bubbling flash of tawny liquid into a mold, which he at once dropped into a bowl of cold water. It hissed and spat. He stood back. His twitch was wild. Dropping the tongs, he put his hand into the water.

“Not so fast,” Sir Leather Strap snarled. “I’ll do it.”

Luke shrugged. “As you like.”

Without even rolling up his sleeves, Sir Leather Strap plunged both hands into the bowl, brought out the mold and tipped it over. Into his hand fell a dull-colored ball about the size of a marble. He held it up. Everybody gazed at it. It didn’t glint. It didn’t gleam. It looked like something you might find on the road and kick into the ditch.

Luke backed away. Sir Leather Strap’s neck bulged
and his face flushed purple. He was sobbing with disappointment. “A dirty trick! Nothing but a dirty trick! Fetch the nail pullers! I’ll have that girl’s teeth and I’ll have them now.”

At once, my captor thrust both his hands back into my mouth, and seconds later I tasted the sourness of cold steel. I couldn’t scream but I heard Walter shouting and Luke cursing and the prioress’s dogs breaking their silence and yapping, yapping, yapping. There was blood on my tongue. Then, above the gurgle, another voice. “What are you doing, man? Let me see that!” Merchant Beaverhat thrust himself forward. He took the discolored ball. The steel in my mouth was suspended.

“Have you ever seen raw gold?” the merchant asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Gold’s my business, and believe me, I’ve been offered enough imitations in my time to know the difference. May I?”

Sir Leather Strap nodded dumbly. The merchant produced a magnifying glass and rolled the ball very slowly back and forth.

“Well?” Sir Leather Strap couldn’t keep still.

Merchant Beaverhat continued rolling the ball, then rubbed it on his sleeve, and, as he rubbed, like a princess shedding a beggar’s cloak, the ball shed its tarnish. When he held it up again, it shone like the moon. The silence that greeted it was the silence of reverence. Luke stepped toward me.

“Not so fast!” Sir Leather Strap seized his arm. “It’s proper gold?” he asked the merchant. “You’re absolutely sure?”

“As sure as I’m a pilgrim.”

“You swear it on your life?”

“On my life.”

I could have kissed the merchant. I never thought he’d lie so beautifully on our behalf. I was doubly sorry I’d ever been rude to him. “God’s blood, boy!” Sir Leather Strap reclaimed the ball quickly and kissed it with awestruck amazement. “You’ve really done it.”

Luke let out a long breath. His skin was ghost white though his pulse was racing. He had something else to say, a splash of truth as penance for the success of his deceit. “Nothing in this world is quite as it seems. Be in no doubt that what you have now will destroy you. When you’re at the devil’s gate, sir, don’t cry out against me. Do you understand?” He stood tall and brave and slightly spooky.

“Oh, I understand all right!” crowed Sir Leather Strap. “You’re trying to frighten me into not taking the elixir. You won’t succeed.” Backing away, he bumped against the tree stumps, and with one swift arm, he snatched up the powder bag, sealed it carefully, and dropped it into his pouch. Then he swept everything else onto the ground, stamping on the vials and
containers until they and their contents were nothing but mud. The leather box itself he kicked until it split. “There’ll be no elixir for anybody else.” He wagged his finger at Luke. “There’ll be just what I have here, and I’d say that makes me the richest man not just in England but in the world!”

“
Us
,” his fellows echoed, just beginning to move again. “Makes
us
the richest men in the world.”

Sir Leather Strap had quite forgotten his men and now that he had his prize was not pleased to be reminded. Quicker than a rat, he scuttled to his horse, swung himself on, and galloped off. There was an immediate outcry. The nail pullers were dropped as his men rushed for their horses, then rushed back to us, then back to their horses, until, finding the lure of the elixir too great, they also sped off, alternately begging Sir Leather Strap to wait for them and damning him to hell. Before they’d even all gone, I found myself swept up and enclosed in Luke’s arms, our hearts hammering in unison, the smell of sulfur more welcome at that moment than the smell of jasmine.

Walter broke us apart. “Superbly done, Luke,” he said. Forced to let go of me, Luke gave a tiny groan. I can still hear that groan. It was sweet as a song.

Master Chaucer was congratulatory but anxious. “A performance worthy of a more discerning audience
than those dimwits, my boy. We shall learn in time how you did it, but now we must move along. If the men return, they mustn’t find us here.”

“What do you mean, a performance? The gold wasn’t real?” The merchant couldn’t help himself. He had been gazing at Luke with more respect than he’d ever shown any man. “But it
was
real. I felt it. I tasted it.”

Luke blinked, and, like an actor stepping off the stage, became himself again. “It was real,” he said simply, “but not through alchemy. Gold balls are easily secreted in an alchemist’s bag. It’s a trick, a sleight of hand.” He reached his hand into his pouch and flicked something into the air. At once a tiny cloud appeared, a miniature of the one he had created when Dulcie bolted. “Like that,” Luke said.

Everybody gaped, then laughed nervously. The merchant’s face fell and my estimation of him fell correspondingly. He’d not been acting on our behalf after all. I felt less sorry that I’d been rude to him.

“Come on,” Master Chaucer urged again. “We must get out of here. Sir Knight, gather your wits!” Sir Knight could not, so in the end it was Luke, Master Chaucer, and Master Reeve who chivvied us into some kind of order.

After an anxious half hour, we found shelter in a village. The inn wasn’t big enough to accommodate us all, so we pitched camp in a pasture behind its back
wall. As the ale flowed, we relaxed a little and Luke was pressed to reveal more alchemists’ tricks. I slipped in beside him.

“Not nothing and nobody now. You’re a hero.”

“So it would seem,” he said, and added with a slightly bitter stab, “my father would have been proud.”

“You saved me from those men,” I said. He raised his cup and offered it to me, and as my lips touched where his lips had been, I imagined what it would be like to kiss him.

I had only a moment to wonder, for Master Summoner, half ironically and half sincerely, chose that moment to raise his own cup in a toast, and the Master, who was holding a piece of bread in his right hand, raised his own cup with his left. It was the absence that shrieked. Where once the king’s ring had sat solid, there was now only emptiness. Master Summoner’s gaze fixed on this emptiness. He frowned at first, not quite comprehending why an emptiness should have caught his eye. Then suddenly he understood and his toast, when it came, was triumphant.

8

I know the service of my love is vain,
My recompense is but a bursting heart.

It’s odd how two lives can run simultaneously. On the one hand, once you’ve begun to think about kissing somebody, it’s quite difficult to stop. On the other, Master Chaucer, the summoner, and myself were now caught in an odd triangular standoff to which the rest of the party, whose only anxiety was to reach Canterbury as quickly as possible, was completely oblivious. I never asked Master Chaucer where the ring was. I didn’t want to know.

Luke and I rode together. Making gold had blown away all the chemical pastiness from his skin, and the hint of sulfur too, leaving him smelling of ordinary things like soap and warm leather, horse and earth. But his effect on me was far from ordinary: now, his every movement and every expression began to burn itself into my soul, making it harder and harder for me to behave naturally. I knew I’d fallen in love. I found this curiously upsetting. As you may imagine, I’d been in love before, but in the past my beloved had always been a mythical hero and I was always in control. Now
I’d fallen in love with a real person, I wasn’t in control at all. How my legs itched. How my heart twisted and turned. How I longed for an elegant nonchalance that completely eluded me. I wanted to speak easily; every word seemed clumsy.

Nevertheless, there was something I wanted to do. When we stopped for refreshment near a small river, I was determined. “Luke,” I said, hoping my voice sounded more normal to him than it did to me.

“What?”

“Can I cut your hair?”

His eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

“It gets in your way, and look,” I held up a lock, ignoring his flushes, “it’s good hair really, only you’ve let it grow so long it’s gone all lank and reedy. Let me cut it! Do!”

Though he took some persuading, I sensed he was not really unwilling. If I found a stool, he would sit down. I found one. He sat. I was used to cutting my father’s hair, and Dame Alison, while winking at Walter at what she called my “youthful fickleness,” lent me some scissors. I didn’t look at Walter myself. I was too busy measuring and cutting until Luke’s rat’s tails were around his feet and he was left with a thick, tidy mop. He got up. “Wait,” I said, “I haven’t finished.” I fetched a few things. “Follow me.” He obeyed and I led him to the river, made him kneel down, and removed his eyeglasses.