The Marechal Chronicles: Volume V, The Tower of the Alchemist (12 page)

“But when he roused himself at last winter’s end, my mother saw that his eyes gleamed with a purpose awakened.  She saw that he would begin again his endless searching and that if I did not follow in his wake, then blameless lives would be lost.”

Etienne felt the light touch of a hand upon his shoulder and forced himself to stand up.

He forced himself to look away from the tracks of a beast that lived in legend and to look instead into the limpid gaze of a woman who implored him with each word that passed her lips.

“He has come here in search of something, alchemist’s son.”

Etienne shook his head.

“You are completely mad.”

He seized the basket of strawberries, then turned away from the blue beauty of eyes that shined like gemstones.

“We have no talisman, I tell you.  There is nothing for you, or for an overgrown pig to ferret out like some buried truffle.”

He stormed away.  Away from the woman at his back ... away from the proof of something that could not possibly be real.

“Madness,” he said again as he stomped his way home without a second look behind him.

Chapter Seven

“Madness.”

Bellamere’s father looked at him, then looked away again just as quickly.

“‘Tis the madness that you try to hide and the madness that drives you to speak to things that h’aint there, Bellamere.”

The smith sat down heavily on a stout bench just beside the kitchen door, then bent to unlace his boots.

His hands were blackened, his fingers thick and strong in the way that a lifetime at the forge had made them.

“And ‘tis because of your madness that I’ve coddled you and yer books fer far too long.”

He looked up, his laces only half undone.

Bellamere shook his head.

“I don’t understand, Father.”

The smith shook his own head in answer.

“Don’t understand, or don’t want to understand?  Either one won’t change things fer I’ve made my decision.”

The smith sighed and gestured to the small sack that he had placed on the table separating him from his son.

“Take it and then take yer things.  Yer a grown man now and have been fer some time.  ‘Tis well past the time that you be on your way in the world fer ‘tis a certainty that I’ll never make a smith of you.”

Bellamere stared at the sack before him.  He had seen it before, only then it had been in the hands of his friend Etienne when he had come to pay for his most recent order of tools.

It had fairly bulged with coin and still did, looking only slightly diminished as if his father had only taken what was necessary to buy raw materials for the hammers and perhaps just a bit more.

“’Twill last a fair while, I reckon.  As long as yer careful and stay away from brigands on the road and pickpockets in the city.”

Bellamere turned away from his father and went to stir the stew bubbling at the kitchen’s hearth.

After the episode with Harki appearing to renounce their friendship to disappear, perhaps forever more, a deep melancholy had stolen over the smith’s son.

And, as was probably too often the case, he knew of no better cure for a low spirit than that of good food.

He had set a healthy fire and put one of their largest pots to boil.  Bellamere had thrown in goodly portions of dried peas and barley, then wished he had some leeks to go with it.  Instead, a patch of bear’s garlic not far from the house yielded a thick handful of aromatic leaves to season the stew nicely.

To finish, he had taken up the small saw set aside for the purpose and hacked away at a terribly dry, terribly tough shank of salt beef.  At least, what his father had told him was salt beef.

Once in a while, a villager or some other local folk would come calling at the smith’s forge and it would not be for iron work.

Instead, Bellamere’s father would go off with a hammer not unlike those he had made for Etienne and when he came back some time later, it was Bellamere’s task to wash the blood away from the hammer’s head.

He knew what it meant.  Some poor old beast had come to its last days.  A milk cow that had run dry.  Or a mule gone blind.

Bellamere suspected that this last was the case, for he knew most of the animals in the environs and there was, he was sure, an old mule that seemed to have disappeared.

A month earlier, a woman had come to the smith and he had gone off with that same hammer only to return with it bloodied.  Then, a month later, a boy had come up the road, pushing a wheelbarrow.  Within had been that piece of salted meat, and Bellamere doubted he had ever tasted anything so stringy in all his life.

Salt beef his father had told him.  But if they both had taken to heehawing after eating it that first time, Bellamere would not have been surprised.

“Why now?” Bellamere asked as he kept his back turned.  He stirred the stew and tried to pretend the heat he felt on his face came from the cook fire and not from what his father had come to tell him.

Why is the world suddenly conspiring against me?

“Yer not the only who’s grown.  Simon’s found himself a woman and they’re going to set up in the garret over the smithy.  I suppose a child won’t be long to follow, and that’s to say there’ll be too many mouths to feed.”

Bellamere waited, but for once his father did not go on to say that his son’s mouth was not the smallest of these.

“Time’s come fer it as we both always knew it would.  I tried to make you a smith like we’ve always been in the family.  You know it and so do I.  But we both know yer’ll never manage the thing and whatever yer supposed to do in the world h’aint here.  You can have the week to think it through.”

Bellamere could see the stew was done.

Without speaking, he filled a deep pewter dish for his father and the man tucked in without further explanation. The only sounds were those of somewhat stale bread being broken and the smith blowing on hot stew ... a stew that Bellamere had thought would have been a pleasure for his father after a hard day’s work.

He could never have guessed how unsavory a dish it would turn out to be.

Chapter Eight

Etienne listened to the night sounds.

The tower was as impregnable as a fortress, but that did not stop the alchemist’s son from stirring at every creak and groan that made its way to his ears.

The walls that rose up from far beneath the surface of the ground were built of solid stone blocks so cunningly fitted from one to another that their joints were practically invisible.

However, the various floors within the tower were built upon wooden beams, themselves ensconced into cutouts in the interior walls that had been conceived for the purpose.

And it was upon these that wooden planks had been laid in centuries past to form the floorboards that now creaked and knocked in the otherwise silent night hours.

The sounds were familiar to him.  He had known them all his life and never before had Etienne given them any thought. 

Yet, as he turned first to one side, then to the other, sleep would not come and each noise, so slight as they were, made him toss in his bed like a child who had played too much and too long and for whom sleep held no charms.

With a sigh, he threw his coverlet back and climbed out of bed.  Etienne stretched and then pulled on his trousers, boots, and a loose fitting shirt before making his way down the long flight of stairs to the front door of the tower.

A hooded cloak hung upon a wooden dowel next to the door, and he donned it and pulled the hood up against the dewy air of the outside world.

He opened the door slowly, willing it not to creak, and when it obliged him, he stepped through and closed it behind him just as carefully.

The way forward was as well known to him as anything else in his life, only in the past few days it had taken on a new dimension that he could have never guessed would be the case one day.

Etienne did not spare a single glance to either side of him for his eyes were fixed on the path that had led him unerringly each time to a young woman in the forest beyond the limits of the tower grounds.

She annoyed him with every word that danced upon her tongue, yet he was helpless as he watched her exquisite lips persuade him that the substance of what she said was not the real message.  Instead, hers was a message that flew like an envenomed arrow to his soul and for which he had become hopelessly avid.

On each occasion, he had insisted to himself that it would be the last and on each occasion, he did not stop and turn back to the stones that lay waiting for him and his hammers, nor to his father who worked endlessly far overhead.

All that he could think of was a woman who exasperated him to no end and who fascinated him endlessly.

This night the stars were obscured by a bright moon and the way before him was clear.

There was no misstep, no doubt or hesitation as Etienne’s restless legs carried him to the forest’s edge.

He halted there, his breathing deep and steady.

It was as if he knew what would happen next ... as if he had read of it in a well-worn book that he never grew tired of reading.

Without surprise, Etienne watched as a woman walked into view.  She was at some distance and as she passed behind one tree after another, the effect made of her a phantom that disappeared and reappeared, and each time she was a feast for his starving eyes.

Rich chestnut hair, so dark it appeared black in daylight, while nuances of brass and honey waited to show themselves under dark skies.

She was dangerously beautiful, and he felt his heart lurch in his chest as her bright eyes flashed in his direction.

That bright blue gaze was a frightening thing, and Etienne knew that it could cut like a knife if a woman like her willed it. 

Yet the power of her scrutiny passed over him and left the alchemist’s son unscathed.

Only he knew that it was not entirely true. 

Myri and her insufferable ways had opened his chest wide and laid his heart bare.

For this he could find no sleep this evening and for this he suffered without her at his side.

Shadows trailed behind her as she walked, an elegant bride to the night and Etienne understood, at last, that what he saw was from behind closed eyes.  The cold ground underfoot, the moss covered bark of a tree beneath his hand, the way that his heart beat with each step Myri took, none of it was really happening as he lay safe and warm in the tower of his ancestors.

Yet it felt real.  He wanted it to be real.  Most of all, he wished that before she would go beyond the limits of his sight in that dark place, he wished that she would turn to him and see him and smile for him so that the ache he felt in his chest might break for once and all and end his pain at last.

Beautiful, beautiful lady of the forest.

He shuddered, unsure if this was a dream or a nightmare.

You have ensnared me...my heart is ensorceled. 

And he knew that even if it remained within his power to change, he would have it no other way.

Then the mists that trailed upon the ground lifted up languorous arms that filled in to obscure all that he saw.

Beautiful,
he had time to think before grey fog covered over the last of his thoughts and Etienne knew no more.

Chapter Nine

There was a low thud and the entire edifice shook as dust sifted down in the first light of the day.

“Etienne!  Son!  Come quick!”

His entire body jumped at the sound, then before he could even be certain his eyes were truly open, the alchemist’s son was bounding out of his bed to race across the room.

He took the tower stairs up three at a time, but his heart was pounding before he had taken the first one.

His father never cried out for him.  Never.  And for the first time that he ever had, Etienne had heard not just alarm but veritable panic in the old man’s voice.

The alchemist’s laboratory door hung open and askew. Etienne barely had time to notice that all but one of its hinges had been broken, for his vision was filled by the sight of a pair of hands clinging to the wrong side of a blown out windowsill.

He knew those hands and thanked the powers that be that he had arrived in time as he seized his father’s arms at the wrists then leaned out to see him looking steadily back at him.

“Ah, that’s a good boy.”

Etienne nodded, then gritted his teeth and lifted his father up, knowing full well that the old man’s belly was scraping hard against the rough stone face of the tower’s exterior wall.

He grunted, the pulled back as he saw his father set an unsteady knee on the windowsill, then breathed a sigh of relief as the other knee came to join the first.

Without waiting, he wrapped his arms around his father’s midsection, then lifted him up again only to set him down safely within the confines of the laboratory walls.

The Alchemist alchemist’sbreathed heavily and stayed where he was, crouched on the floor.  Etienne surveyed the laboratory and what he had seen in a momentary blur of meaningless disarray came leaping back at him in crystal clear detail.

The place had come nigh to being leveled as if a giant had passed by only to pause as an afterthought and blow the Alchemist and all his work out the window and into the void of the early morning air.

“Father, what is this?”

The old man took another deep, shuddering breath.

“What have you done?”

There was broken glass everywhere he looked.  Most of it was in tiny fragments, while scattered among the debris, there were pieces of his father’s latest achievement, his beloved lenses now shattered with their gold wire frames lying bent and broken.

There was paper and parchment, too.  Countless sheaves of book pages had been ripped from between their leather covers and now lay amongst the broken glass as if in testimony to the violence of whatever had just transpired while Etienne lay below dreaming of strawberry kisses and of dark beasts lying in wait in the forest.