The Game of Kings (69 page)

“You are, sir, dammit,” said Sir Thomas with a polite snarl.

The whiskers twitched. “Just so. Man, you’re a devil for getting yourself hud by the neb. Ye were nippit in France as well, were ye not?”

Sir Thomas got redder.

“And had to pay your own way out?”

Sir Thomas swore, politely.

“I’m Wat Scott of Buccleuch,” said his captor courteously. “Just so’s your friends’ll know where to send the siller to. Man: you’ll like Edinburgh. It’s a fine town to be in jail in.”

Buccleuch detached half of his men to march Palmer and his companions to Edinburgh, and continued his ride with the rest, whistling.

Sir Wat was pleased with life; so pleased that he ignored the signs of flight all about him, and wished luck to the horse bands, both French and Scottish, who appeared and vanished like flying ants all through the blustering afternoon. After a while, disturbances became less frequent, and he was alone with his own dozen men, crossing rough moorland with no cover and chastened by a small, chilly wind.

Ahead on his right, a bird rose suddenly, vivid black and white, piping above the rustle of foxtail and club rush, and a moment later he saw two horsemen treading slowly where it had been, their faces to the north. He stopped and watched.

One of the figures, cloaked and hooded, he could make nothing of. The other, coatless, solid, unmistakable, was Richard Crawford of Culter.

Buccleuch rode over circumspectly, leaving his men behind without explanation, and brushing a thoughtful hand through his whiskers as he went. Culter turned, and deserting the other rider, trotted gently to meet him, his face brown and watchful above a dirty and ruinous white shirt. He spoke immediately they were within hearing. “Well, Wat. Still intent on appearing at the wrong time in the right place.”

He sounded temperately amused, but Wat’s experienced eye read the tilt of his right arm with accuracy. He cleared his throat. “Glad to
see you, my boy. Damned good job you all did at Hexham. Arran likes you again: that ought to make you cheery. They’re going to make the fool a Duke: did ye hear?”

“No. Erskine got back, then?”

“Dod, aye. He said you were taking your own time at his back, but we were beginning to think they’d jumped on you. The plan went off fine: just fine.” He paused again. The second horse was cropping grass, hocks nearest, and the rider, head bent, was sitting badly.

Culter didn’t move, so Wat said bluntly, “Are ye for Edinburgh?”

Richard shook his head.

“Oh.” A curious look came over Buccleuch’s face. He rubbed his nose, spat inelegantly and said, “It’s a sharp wind for July. I won’t say you’re wrong, either. That brat of mine’s a fool, but he’s not bad company now, at that.” He caught the guarded grey eye and cleared his throat again. “Well. I’m for the south. I hope you have a quiet trip. There’s a damned wheen of horsemen clipping about today. Some stramash up the way, I believe.”

“Thank you,” said Lord Culter, and hesitated. “Your men … ?”

“None of their business. Dod, Sybilla will be desperate glad to see you.”

Richard said suddenly, “Tell her …” and broke off and swore, angry alarm displacing the subdued and wary mask. Buccleuch, wheeling, had his own hand on his sword an instant later and then pushed it back, gesturing ferociously at Culter. “Ride, man, ride!”

On the hill behind, a party of Scots came whooping toward them. A second later, and they called Culter’s name. Richard, his horse already moving, twisted, saw the cock pennants and cursed again. “The Cockburns of Skirling. Devil take it. Wat: can you hold them while we run?”

They were too close. Buccleuch saw Culter’s choice only too clearly: either to hand over his companion, or to label himself accomplice by trying an ineffectual escape.

As once before, Buccleuch filled the notorious lungs, and bellowed.

Long before Richard reached him, Lymond turned and saw what was happening. He straightened and shook the hood from his face, exposing ruffled fair hair and Culter’s stained jacket below. Then he gathered his horse and stampeded artlessly across the moor, regardless of the slick, united hoofbeats of Sir William Cockburn’s troop overtaking, surrounding and closing in on him. He made no resistance.

Buccleuch, riding after with Culter, arrived to find himself the butt of a number of bad jokes and some friendly wrangling over whether he had forfeited his prisoner by allowing him to escape. Since Richard had relapsed into utter silence, Sir Wat dealt with it brusquely, neither admitting nor denying the credit Lymond seemed to have given him; and after a bit they stopped pestering him with questions and offered pleasantly enough to travel back to Edinburgh together.

After his own men had joined him, Buccleuch asked to look at the prisoner and was directed to the rear, where Lymond was lashed flat to a horse-stretcher. He was not conscious.

Sir Wat studied him in silence before making his way back to the Cockburn brothers. He jerked his head. “What’ll happen now?”

“Oh. Well, he’s at the horn, isn’t he? It’ll be the Castle then, I dare say, for a week or two; and then a sweet short trial and a swing in New Bigging Street. Nothing surer than that.”

And so Richard, after all, escorted his young brother to Edinburgh.

It was so long since the Dowager had broken into song that Mariotta and her two guests were surprised. Janet grinned, and Agnes Herries, who was half asleep, blinked and said, “Is it time yet?”

“Not quite,” said Sybilla. The smallest flush under the white skin was the only sign that she was excited: she was beautifully dressed and not at all frayed in manner as was Mariotta, who showed the effects of the three newsless weeks since Tom Erskine’s return from Hexham.

At midnight, in their presence, Johnnie Bullo was to turn a pound of lead into gold. Of the four women, Janet Buccleuch was deeply interested in Sybilla’s experiment. Propping her large green velvet slippers on a footstool, she said, “Did the gypsy want a lot of gold off you for this? I hope you were careful.”

The Dowager raised candid eyes over the rims of her glasses.
“Of course, dear. But the gold will have reached him only ten minutes before we do, which is just”—glancing at her enormous German clock—“about now. Shall we go?”

Mariotta, leaning over, touched Agnes Herries awake. She opened her eyes with a jerk, followed the others vaguely to the door, and then seized Mariotta in a vicelike grip. “What if he raises the devil?”

Mariotta laughed, and withdrawing her arm, put it reassuringly around the bride’s shoulders. “What if he does? Sybilla would simply exchange recipes for sulphur ointment and give him a bone for the dog. Come along …”

Outside it was cool and very dark. A wisp of straw, rolling over the cobbles in the light wind, caught the beam from the doorway and scuttled, spider-fashion, into the night; nothing else moved. Sybilla shut the big doors and in the darkness they walked over to where the small window of Johnnie Bullo’s laboratory glowed like a malign and bloodshot eye. The Dowager rapped on the pane; there was a pause; a stealthy rattle of heavy bolts, and the door to the laboratory swung open.

The heat buffeted their faces. The low, square building was lined with scarlet from the glow of the furnace, snoring hoarsely as the wind sucked at its funnel.

From floor to ceiling rose vessels and retorts and bottles, jars, pots and crucibles, matrasses and pelicans, balloons, serpents and mortars, aludels, funnels and beakers. The walls bobbed and winked and glimmered with vermilion eyes as if wattled with bloated and striking serpents, swaying with the flames.

There was a wooden bench, littered with tongs and iron filings and dirty dishes and knives and heaps of flour and sand for the lutes; an old athanors, unused; sundry pots, chipped and blackened, on the floor; and two different sizes of bellows hanging on nails beside an outburst of chalked inscriptions in some sign language firmly based on triangles. There was an old carpet on the stone floor and two wooden stools, beside which stood Johnnie.

Johnnie’s eyeballs shone like red glass. His face, swarthy and flushed, was running with perspiration and his short, wiry frame writhed darkly over the bottles and knives, coiling and disappearing in the leaping red light. He bowed without speaking and indicated the stools. The Dowager sat quickly on one and Janet on the other, with the two girls standing behind. Johnnie waited until they were settled
and then following his shadow to the door, shot the bolt. The furnace flared up.

“Let us begin,” said Johnnie and stood, in an odd, prayerful attitude by his bench, his brown, long-lashed eyes fiery and grave.

“Tonight we follow where only the greatest have led. Tonight we invoke the aid of those who have allowed us to penetrate to the Chamaman, the Tan, the great mystery. We honour Yeber-Abou-Moussah-Djafar-al-Sofi, the Master of Masters; Zosimus and Synesius; Trismegistus the Thrice Great; Olympiodorus, Philosopher to Petasius, King of Armenia; Nagarjuna who discovered distillation; and the blind Abu-Bakr-Muhammad-Ibn-Zakariyya-al-Razi himself.

“We ask them to lend power to our Stone, that the imperfect metal, the crude substance of Saturn, shall fall into corruption and in the flames of its passing generate the moisture of mercury and the smoke of sulphur until, refined, purified, perfected, the substance in our crucible will no longer have the attributes, the vices, the weakness of lead, but instead will be transmuted to perfect gold.”

He touched gently one of the bellied pots at his feet, swathed in cloths and with an iron clamp about its neck. “The gold is here; the chains and coins given me by Lady Culter, already melted down and ready to begin the reaction which compels the transformation to begin. Here”—he lifted a grey brick from the table—“is a pound of lead. Will you test it for me?”

Janet took it from him and examined it closely. It passed from hand to hand and returned to Bullo, who held it so that they could all see quite clearly, and placed it in the retort. “So. And now the Stone.”

He bent over his bench for a moment, and turned. In his tough brown palm lay a box, beautifully made in silver, with Arabic characters on the lid and a small mirror inset in the bottom. He opened it, holding it for them to see.

Inside, on a bed of white velvet, lay a dirty grey stone, flaked and powdery in texture and uneven in shape. Johnnie spoke gently. “The Stone of the Wise. The Magisterium. The Universal Essence.” He lifted it delicately and, opening another, clean box on his desk, he scraped gently at the soft skin of the stone. A little white dust, flushed in the rosy light, slipped into the box, and Bullo replaced the stone, keeping the box of dust in his hand.

“My lady. What we are doing is not without danger—to me. You
are quite safe. But I must ask you not to speak, and not to move, until the mystery is over.

“For myself, I confide my safety to the alchemists and the philosophers who watch us, and speak the words of the Emerald Table:
True it is, without falsehood: certain most true. That which is above is like to that which is below; and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as in all things whereby contemplation of one, so in all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adoption. The father thereof is the Sun; the mother, the Moon. The wind carries it in its womb: the earth is the source thereof. It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the world. The power thereof is perfect. Thus thou wilt possess the brightness of the world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee …”

With steady hands, he lifted the great jar and set it to its resting place over the fire. Next, withdrawing the clamp, he tilted the little box of powder so that its contents drifted within the neck of the crucible to join the metal inside.

For the space of a heartbeat there was silence.

Then with a waft and a roar, blue smoke lipped like cream from the mouth of the retort, folded, arched and rolled servilely through the hut. It thickened, dropping languid fingers to the floor and flattening itself against the wooden roof; it became dense, black and choking with the stink of sulphur; it yawned blindly in the senses and the fire, leaping as if freed of some monstrous birth, rent its thinnest layers with tongues of yellow and crimson.

Agnes screamed. Mariotta, after a single alarmed cry, held the girl tightly and stood still. Janet, gripping her stool, watched the Dowager until she could barely see her, close as she was, for the swirling fumes. They were enclosed, hot and foul and black as charcoal, they were defying panic when, sweet as a summer dawn, the smoke bloomed, and bright gold rising living from its roots flooded the dark curtain and turned it into the pure yellow of Easter sunshine.

The veil hung, fresh and precious for the space of ten seconds, and then, breaking like floss, melting, separating, sifting and dwindling through the air, it slowly vanished. Behind it, Johnnie Bullo appeared, a shadow, a monochrome, a flat and coloured impasto, and finally the vivid man, standing beside the furnace. In one hand was the clamp, and he was raising from the fire the heavy, blackened jar.

There was an iron plate on the floor in front of the Dowager. Bullo
set the crucible there, and the heat from it made them draw back. They watched in silence as Johnnie stepped up, an iron bar in his hands. He swung it, and the neck of the jar broke at its base.

In silence he proffered the Dowager his tongs. She bent, groping within the crucible. The instrument gripped; she raised it and lowered what it held to the floor. It was a small block of dull metal, unmistakably gold. There was nothing else in the jar at all.

Words could not contain their triumph and amazement. The bottles and jars chattered and clinked and the walls wept tears of strange emotion. Where there had been a block of lead, there was a block of gold. The Stone of the Wise was powerful indeed.

When she could hear herself speak, the Dowager, scarlet with pleasure, was also urgently pressing. “May we see it again? May we see the Stone again? Now we know it
is
the true Stone.”