Goblin Moon (9 page)

Jenk eyed the bloated contents of the jar with
extreme distaste. The hand was losing its shape; the brine had
acquired a yellowish tinge. Either it was very old, or it had been
inadequately preserved. “Thank you, but I have no use—“

“It don’t matter,” said the shopkeeper, with
unimpaired good humor. “Just take a look at this.” He returned to
the cabinet, replaced the jar, and came out holding something
shriveled and leathery, about the color and size of a dried
apricot. “The mummified ear of an Yndean prince. Forty wives, this
one had, and two hundred little ‘uns.”

“Mr. Prodromus!” The bookseller could not contain his
outrage. “I am a widower these seven and thirty years, and a man of
sober habits. If you cannot provide what I ask, I must bid you good
day.”

Jenk left the building in some little haste; he was
not sorry to emerge into the light and air. He made several more
calls that afternoon, and a few small purchases—as could be seen by
the odd bundles, wrapped in brown paper, which distorted the
pockets of his full-skirted coat—but his energy dissipated as the
day wore on and he trudged back to the bookshop in the early
evening with a grey face and a discouraged step.

As Jenk walked through the door, a silver bell
tinkled to announce his presence. The shop was dimly lit. The
diamond-paned windows were filled with glass so old and dark they
permitted no light to enter from without, and the smoky old
lanthorns hanging from the beamed ceiling did little to penetrate
the gloom. In a corner at the back of the shop, in a chair tipped
backward against the wall, sat Caleb Braun, with his cloth cap
pulled down over his eyes and his stubbled chin resting on his
breast, snoring lustily.

Jenk stood for a moment looking down at him. In his
faded and patched blue coat, with his bearded cheek and his
grizzled pigtail, Caleb little resembled the brisk, ambitious young
footman who had entered the Jenk household fifty years before.
Memories of that younger Caleb made the bookseller gentle as he
touched the old river man on the shoulder and softly spoke his
name.

Caleb pushed back his cap, opened his bleary eyes.
“Had ye any luck in obtaining the tinctures?”

Jenk shook his head, drew up a high stool, and sat
down with a weary sigh. “No, Caleb, I had no luck today. The prices
Koblenz and Jakob demanded were beyond all reason, and Mistress
Sancreedi—who might have lowered her prices had I offered a
convincing plea of poverty—was unwilling to sell me the tinctures
at any price, unless I would reveal to her my entire purpose.”

At the name of Sancreedi, Caleb shuddered
elaborately. “I’d as soon we had no dealings with that woman.
There’s sommat uncanny about her . . . them big yellow eyes like a
cat or an owl, and never a sound when she enters a room.”

“Uncanny indeed; ‘tis said the Sancreedi’s have
Farisee blood,” Jenk agreed. “And yet they are not to be despised
on that account—far otherwise. Like all fairies, they have an
exaggerated sense of justice. And it is just because Mistress
Sancreedi is so painstakingly scrupulous in all her dealings that I
was unwilling to confide in her now.”

Caleb removed his cap and rubbed his grizzled head.
“We’re in too far to back out now.”

Jenk took a watch out of a pocket in his waistcoat,
opened it up with a flick of his thumb, and stared numbly at the
time. The watch case was skull-shaped, done in white enamel, with
pansies and Spagnish lilies painted on the dial. It was one of the
few fine and fanciful things Jenk still owned; he expected to be
buried with it. “I have no desire to beggar myself a second time,
either by ill-conceived actions or by a failure of nerve. I have
considered (and really, I do not know why I should be so
reluctant—for pride is a vice I can ill afford), I have considered
writing to the Duke. His antiquarian leanings are as well-known as
his generosity. The books from the river are old, and the mysteries
they treat of even older; I believe they might serve to pique his
interest. In truth, had I not been too proud and too secretive to
accept his help before, I might be a wealthy man today.”

Caleb grunted. “Zar-Wildungen? I thought him dead and
buried these ten years or more “

Jenk smiled thinly. “Buried, in a manner of speaking,
but not yet dead. He lives much retired at the Wichtelberg, his
country estate, having abandoned all but the quietest and most
scholarly pursuits, for his health is not good—indeed, I believe he
must be well past ninety—while his Duchess remains in town leading
a life of fashionable excess. Yet even Marella Carleon could not
exhaust the Zar-Wildungen fortune, and if we can gain her lord’s
patronage, why then . . . we should have no difficulty meeting
Jakob’s price.”

Jenk closed his watch, put it back in his waistcoat
pocket. “It grows late,” he said. “You may close up shop if you
wish. And when you are done you may join me in the laboratory. I
have something to show you which may prove of interest.”

While Caleb barred the front door and shuttered the
windows, Jenk took down one of the lanthorns, went to a low door at
the back of the shop, and drew out his iron ring of keys. The door
was padlocked with an ancient brass lock. Jenk sorted through his
keys, found the one that he wanted, and opened the door.

The airless room on the other side boasted but a
single window set high in one wall, and that was shuttered and
barred. The furnishings were sparse: a chair, a bench, a stool, and
two long tables constructed of scarred planks. A fireplace in one
corner had been bricked in to form an athenor, or alchemical
furnace, and a copper still was joined to the furnace by a bulb and
a glass pipe. The rest of Jenk’s laboratory equipment was arranged
on one of the tables: flasks and retorts; aludels, crucibles; and
balaenium, and the monstrous bronze mortar in which the alchemist
ground his herbs and his powders with a great iron pestle. On the
second table rested the long ebonwood coffin.

Jenk hung his lanthorn from a hook in the beamed
ceiling and lifted the lid of the casket. When the coffin first
arrived, it had smelled of the river, damp and weedy, but as the
wood dried the river odor faded, to be replaced by another that was
dark and pungent, like a mixture of camphor and hemp. The odor was
not precisely unpleasant, but it was pervasive, clinging to Jenk’s
skin and to his clothes long after he left the room.

But the body in the casket did not change, not in any
particular—as many times as he examined the corpse, Jenk was
surprised anew by the incorruptibility of the flesh, and by the
uncanny preservation of cloth, leather, and paper which pertained
to the corpse’s immediate vicinity.

For the sake of experiment he had placed certain
items in the bottom of the coffin: a bouquet of violets, a loaf of
bread, and a bowl of fruit. Each was just as sweet and fresh, when
Jenk came to remove it, days or weeks later, as when it first
entered the coffin. As another experiment, he cut a small square of
velvet from the sorceror’s tunic—the cloth had decayed and fallen
into dust in a matter of hours.

And yet . . . to what end had the body been
preserved? What value did it possess, once the spirit of the former
occupant had fled? Was the spell one of the sorcerer’s own
devising, or was he the subject of an experiment initiated by an
even mightier magician? These and other questions continued to
puzzle and excite Jenk. The only clue (and he could not be certain
that it
was
a clue) was a little piece of
narwhal ivory he had discovered clutched in the corpse’s left
hand.

But it was the books, not the body, that drew Jenk to
the coffin now. The books were old, older by far than the body,
most of them written in an archaic hand and a dead language. They
were so fragile that their pages disintegrated rapidly if removed
from the coffin. To make use of them, Jenk always did as he did
now: he took up the volume he wanted and placed it open on the
chest of the corpse.

He opened to a page near the middle of the book, took
a pair of spectacles out of his pocket, and placed them on the end
of his nose.

“
There
is a Stone called Seramarias which does not occur in Nature,”
Jenk read.
“Its properties are Marvelous, for
it neutralizes Poisons, attracts other Gem-Stones as a Lodestone
attracts Iron, and gifts the One who wears it with the power of
Prophecy. Many other Applications, equally Remarkable, have been
ascribed . . .”
He shook his head. To compound the stone
Seramarias had been his dream for many years, but without the
tinctures he was helpless.

He turned another leaf, scanning the page until he
came to the proper passage. Then he walked over to the other table,
unloaded the contents of his pockets, and unwrapped the brown paper
parcels.

Caleb shambled into the room and glanced inside the
coffin. He paused to examine the open book.
“To
Make an Homunculus or Little Man . . .”
he read aloud.
“Blister me! That ain’t what you’re about now—tell me I’m
mistaken.”

“It is,” Jenk replied. “Why should I not attempt it,
after all?”

Caleb shook his head. “But you tried it afore those
long year past—again and again you tried it, and never had no luck.
Doomed to failure, you said. It can’t be done no way at all. A
fable, you said. A mad fancy. You said all that, and I don’t forget
it, even if you do.”

“I wonder that you should remember words spoken so
carelessly, so resentfully,” said Jenk. “I spoke out of
disappointment because I could not effect what other men had
effected before.”

“Not nobody we ever knew . . . no, not one of ‘em
could ever boast of that,” Caleb reminded him.

“But the Ancients possessed the art—we have that on
the very best authority,” Jenk insisted. “The formulas I attempted
before were faulty, they were all of them incomplete, though many
of them hinted at a process . . . Well, well, you will remember how
it was: I believed I might divine that process, that the answer to
the riddle, while not explicit, was at least implicit in the
formulas themselves. I had many theories, but all of them failed
me.”

He gestured in the direction of the coffin. “Imagine,
then, my astonishment on opening that volume, to find the whole art
written out in careful detail. Naturally, I was skeptical at first,
just as you are now, but you shall see how far I have
succeeded.”

He directed Caleb’s attention to a curious
construction at one end of the table: an object draped in black
cloth, resting on an iron tripod. A lighted candle in a glass
chimney (evidently meant to direct the heat of the flame upward)
stood under the tripod. Jenk removed the black cloth, revealing a
glass vessel about the size and shape of an ostrich egg.

Caleb leaned forward to examine the egg. It was
filled with a viscous fluid, a dull clouded liquor, but Caleb was
just able to make out a tiny, doll-like figure suspended in that
fluid. It appeared to be a perfectly proportioned little man, no
more than six inches high, accurate in every detail right down to
the fingernails and eyelashes, utterly realistic but for his
minuscule size and the grey-green pallor of his skin.

“Six and thirty days ago,” said Jenk, “this was a
mandrake root, crudely fashioned to resemble a man: rudimentary
arms and legs, no more than a suggestion of the other features. I
washed it in blood, in milk, and in honey. I made a slit in what
might be termed the belly and inserted the white of a boiled egg
treated with
sperma viri
, whale oil, and
other—rather more arcane—ingredients. Then I sealed it in this
glass egg, where I have been incubating it over a gentle but steady
heat ever since. During that time, it has slowly increased in size,
becoming what you see now.”

Caleb took a deep breath, then exhaled it slowly.
“You’re telling me . . . this little poppet you done carved out of
a root . . . is alive? That it’s agrowing and achanging right there
in your crystal egg, like a seed in the earth or a babby in the
womb? You’re telling me you done fathered a
child
?”

“It is certainly alive,” said Jenk, “though beyond
that . . . you perceive it does not move, it shows no signs of a
heartbeat or respiration, it has not quickened. As we see it now,
it has no more life than a plant—which indeed, it was from the
beginning.”

He readjusted the spectacles on the end of his nose,
the better to view his own creation. “What it may yet become, I do
not know—beyond the fact that it will certainly not be a human
infant, not in the sense that we would define the term. You can see
it more closely resembles a tiny mannikin. Should it eventually
become a sentient being, I believe it will emerge from its egg
fully mature—ignorant, certainly, in need of tutoring—but mentally
and spiritually mature.”

Caleb put out a shaking hand to touch the crystal
egg, then drew back again, as if regretting the impulse. “You’re
mighty cool, Gottfried. Think you’d be excited . . . and mor’n a
little afraid.”

“But you see, I have been watching the process
develop for many weeks now,” Jenk replied, with a shrug. “I have
had ample opportunity to temper my elation . . . and my
apprehension. I admit that sometimes, in the watches of the night,
I still wake and wonder what terrible thing I am creating here. But
that is vanity, Caleb, sheer sinful vanity, for I am not creating a
new thing at all, only following in the footsteps of the
Ancients.”

Turning his back on the marvel he had created, Jenk
went back to his brown paper parcels. But Caleb could not tear his
fascinated gaze from the tiny figure in the glass egg.

“It is too early, of course, to term this experiment
a success,” Jenk was saying. “The creature, if one might term it
such, may never be more than what we see now. Yet no man living has
carried the process even so far. So today I purchased a second
mandrake root, in order to repeat the experiment. Perhaps I shall
send the result to the Duke, along with my plea for funds. I can’t
but think he will be suitably impressed, and respond most
generously.”