The Apothecary's Curse (6 page)

Young Timothy Gray entered behind him, kindling a fire in the hearth while Gaelan lit glass orbs about the room. Their phosphorescence subdued the shadows and bathed the workbench in luminous daylight.

“Ah, much better than candlelight, Timothy. You would do well to remember that! Now, off to bed with you, lad, and take with you my pharmacopeia to study before you fall to sleep—and do not neglect your Latin verbs either. I shall be quizzing you on them tomorrow!”

Timothy was a good lad, an able apprentice. A fast learner, too, knowing when to inquire—and when to hold his tongue. Gaelan listened for Timothy's footfalls on the back stairs, then the clang of the door to his rooms behind the shop.

Gaelan ran his hand over the hawthorn tree engraved into the book's cover, the leather smooth as velvet beneath his fingers. As he opened the volume, the fragrances of antiquity wafted up: grass newly shorn and the tang of acid mingled with the mustiness of aged paper and vanilla soaked through him, evoking memories of childhood and family long forgotten. He breathed it in, the finest brandy sneaked from his father's chalice. The illuminations glimmered above the page to which he'd opened—an illusion, its colors a kaleidoscopic bending and merging.

Fanciful script framed and formed the images, curling into shadows and tucking into the spaces between illuminations. Gaelan turned one page to the next, pausing occasionally to take in the beauty of the drawings, the colors of the inks, the sense of history, of memory . . . of family, nearly causing him to weep.

Ah, there you are. Karkinos. The crab.
Its claws reached out, tentacle-like, grabbing hold and never letting go of its prey.

His father's voice whispered into the shell of his ear; Gaelan could nearly feel his presence at his shoulder. “The crab possesses a kinship with this most tenacious of diseases . . . cancer, it be called.”

A woman shimmering in silver and black, holding no weapon but an emerald tree branch, vanquished the crab's claws, which faded into a trail of pewter dust to the edge of the page. A ruby and gold-leafed ouroboros bordered the entire image.

The text was as difficult to navigate as the North Sea, only partially in recognizable English. Latin and Greek, Gaelic in a florid hand, and other languages barely remembered rendered the interpretation thorny at best. But he must get this right. Perfect.

The hour grew later, and Gaelan nearly had it, squinting past burning eyes to match the bottles lining his bench to markings and glyphs in the manuscript text: quicksilver, antimony, lead, nitrates, chromates, sulfates, crystal salts, and viscous liquids. Simple enough, but what of the glyphs in the manuscript for which he could find no match among the assortment of chemical compounds? These must be referencing fine herbs, for the medicines were not only made of elements but of botanics. Gaelan possessed many, used daily in his trade, but these symbols were unfamiliar. Perhaps at one time he'd understood, but it had been too many years. . . .

The glint of a rounded flask flickered in the periphery of Gaelan's vision, the light reflecting and bending around its shape. The glassblower's art of molten lead, fine ground oxides, amorphous and unknowable liquids formed like magic to crystal, to glass. Elements and heat, chemistry and physics, art and science in perfect harmony, so like the creation of medicines conjured from nothing even remotely recognizable to the end result—strong and fragile.

Then it came to him; Gaelan remembered where he had seen those glyphs before. It had been in his father's apothecary case, hidden away on that same shelf, its rotted wood suddenly catching Gaelan's eye through the convex form of a beaker.

Eighteen amber glass jars, each bearing a symbol matching those on the Karkinos page of the manuscript, rested in the rotting velvet-lined box. Beneath the jars lay several animal skin pouches tucked away and knotted securely . . . more glyphs.

Text to ingredient, instruction to symbol, the process was slow and arduous, careful and tedious. Embers of splintered sleep burned sharp as broken glass in Gaelan's eyes as the sky turned from black to the dusky pink of predawn. He needed to be quick; time grew short until Bell would return.

Gaelan tapped the ingredients into a large stone vessel, grinding them anew at each step—the pestle a magician's wand in his skilled hand. Candle flame would do well to heat the spacious crucible, and Gaelan's hands trembled as he watched it brew and bubble, sputter and flare. Finally he added the common salt and water.
Finished!

Dawn's first dim awakening bled red-orange through the windows, the wood in the fireplace long since turned to ash, the globes of light paled to dull amber. Breathless from hours of concentration, Gaelan waited a moment for the elixir to rest before decanting it into a small cobalt bottle, stoppering it with a ground glass bung.

Running his index finger along the curves of text on the page, he identified the dosing guidance. Inked in scarlet and set apart from the other text, in Latin, “Once prepared, bottled and sealed, do not open until prepared to administer, lest the contents be oxidized and altered prematurely, irrevocably, thus rendering the contents hazardous to life and limb.”

With a skilled hand, Gaelan copied the words onto a parchment, carefully rolling it before affixing it to the bottle with glue. On a separate label, and with scarlet ink, he drew the skull and crossbones, and below that, “POISON.”

CHAPTER 6

Timothy Gray was already about, dusting the shelves, when Gaelan finally found his bed. An hour's rest and he would be revitalized for the day. Weariness tugged at him, dragging him toward sleep.

A noise broke through his drowsy haze. A rat skittering across the floor? No, the distinct crackle of fire pricked his ears.
Was the shop ablaze?

Gaelan could not see; he was surrounded by blackness, when only a moment before, the night had been brightening into dawn. And now it was not exhaustion that blurred his vision, but thick smoke.

No flame scorched his skin, yet he recognized the pungent, sickly sweet stink of burning flesh. He retched thin bile.

A whisper ricocheted against the walls and echoed through the distance of time. He well knew that voice, and it terrified him. No longer an adult, Gaelan was but a frightened eleven-year-old boy.

“You are to come with us, young Erceldoune. His Majesty demands your presence.” Gloved hands, brutal as a cur's jaws, gripped Gaelan's arms; already he could feel the bruise arise, purple and tender.

At last accustomed to the dark, he saw them—palace guards, two of them towering over him. Black mail covered their faces beneath iron helms that could not keep from his nostrils the reek of their rotting teeth.

The bright light of the palace courtyard blinded him, but he well knew this place, this time. And the disquiet of sickening anticipation prickled at the back of Gaelan's neck.

Edinburgh Castle. A fleeting thought of happier times there as a lad at play and study quickly shattered in the midst of the yard. Gaelan tried to look away from the platform, which arose like an altar from the center. Where was his mother? Where were his sisters, Isobel and Margaret? He could not see them for the crowd.

With all his heart he wanted to scream for them, to cry out, but Father had told him he must have courage, no matter what he might be asked to do or say.

“You must watch, lad. It is His Majesty's desire—his command.” Gaelan's head jerked up as one of the guards pulled back on his hair and the other braced his narrow shoulders, forcing him to gaze upward. King James glowered upon the scene from a high window, no longer friend and benefactor to his family, but executioner.

Shouts arose—his father's name cursed as rotting fruit sailed over Gaelan's head toward the wagon upon which his father stood, upright and still, searching the crowd. “Father!” he heard himself shout before the guards yanked harder on his hair. The crowd swam in and out of Gaelan's vision as his scalp burned.

“Silence!” they growled.

Gaelan shouted again, ignoring the pain in his arms and head, hoping his father would know he was there. No longer courtier and alchemist, physician and friend to the king, Lord Thomas Erceldoune, stripped now of title, lands all forfeit to the Crown, looked down from the back of a wood cart, his gaze fixed on his son. Relief flooded briefly through Gaelan's veins as Thomas nodded once in his direction. But Gaelan could neither forestall the tears nor the terror, knowing what lay ahead for his dear papa—for them all.

Had it been only a fortnight ago they had celebrated his eleventh birthday right above this courtyard, in the palace nursery?

Thomas was shoved, bound and shackled, onto the platform, but he did not fall, remaining upright, proud, and defiant as his accusers addressed him.

“How the mighty have fallen, Erceldoune—sorcerer, betrayer of the very one who has been for these years both sovereign and protector. Do ye not know the magical arts are outlawed?”

Gaelan's father only stared ahead.

“You have been condemned to die for magical healing, a capital crime against the Crown. Witness upon witness has testified to ‘miraculous' recoveries after the touch of your hand and the potions of your cauldron. What say you, Erceldoune?”

Gaelan's father stood unmoving, defiance, not fear, in his countenance.

“Answer, prisoner!” The executioners, dressed in black from head to toe, bound Thomas to a lone pike in the midst of the platform, surrounded by bales of straw.

Gaelan tried to pull away from the guards, run to his father, do something to help him. He searched the crowd again for his mother, his sisters, but could not find them as the guards forced his face forward toward his father. The crowd grew precipitously louder, more insistent in its taunts. Finally, his father spoke, and Gaelan knew he was speaking directly to him, voice even and calm as ever it was.

“It is for all men that come into the world to die, and after death the judgment! Death be a debt all must pay; it is but a matter of small moment what way it be done. And aye, I am come hither to die. Providence having brought me hither, it is upon me to clear myself of some aspersions laid upon my name for the sake of my children—my young son and his sisters, and for my goodly wife and my father's good name.

“It was the king called me to such vaunted estate, to be his physician and counselor. But I have offended my prince, for which I humbly ask him heartfelt forgiveness. I beseech you, my sovereign, and pray to God Almighty that he will forgive me my offenses. Ne'er it was my intent to commit offense, magical or otherwise, as it has been my sole purpose to serve His Majesty, my Lord, and see to his well-being. Many have called me a purveyor of magical healing, sorcery, and I say here that this is untrue. Yet I am not without sin, and I am ready to die and go to my Lord God. But as I do so, I desire with a full heart for my son, my daughters, my wife, and all who gather here today to witness this death, pray as do I for the king's grace, that he may long live with you, may long reign over you.”

Gaelan did not understand his father's words. Why was he begging the king's pardon, asking for forgiveness? Confessing guilt? His father was guilty of nothing.

He heard the shout from the platform. “Enough of this!”

Gaelan fought again to pull himself from the guards' grasp, clamp shut his eyes as torches appeared from nowhere, fierce orange banners of flame as they bent to touch the pallet of straw and wood. Now the inferno filled his vision; the crackle and spit of the fire drowned out all else as his father melted into it, indistinct from the hellfire that consumed him whole. . . .

Gaelan gasped as he focused on the familiar quiet of his bedchamber, no longer in the palace courtyard. The orange of the flames faded, replaced by beams of yellow sunlight snaking through window blinds. It had been a dream . . . 
that
dream.

Fighting for air, he tried to still the trembling in his hands. Cold beads of sweat skated down his back, and Gaelan pulled the bedcovers higher. It had been many years since those images had plagued him, yet they were vivid and fresh, seeming but days, not long centuries since . . .

The book must have resurrected that accursed day from the farthest regions of his mind.

When he was burned, Thomas had only just begun tutoring Gaelan on the peculiar ouroboros book. “It is your legacy, my son,” his father had told him with great seriousness and pride. “We shall turn it and turn it, and turn again until you know it as I do, as did my father and his before that. In it are held all the laws of medicine and nature, and only when you are ready, you shall use it. But it will require of you years of study, perhaps five, perhaps ten, perhaps a lifetime.”

Thomas turned the pages slowly, not reading—not yet, he'd explained—but pointing out the images, their significance, the languages, and the weight of their history. And then his father was ripped from them with a summons to the palace brought by two of the king's guard.

It was not uncommon for Thomas to be called, even late at night, to King James's study. But this time had been different, leaving his mother trembling, his sisters weeping and gripping Gaelan's hands so tightly he could feel it even now if he concentrated.

“You must go, Gaelan, to my father's house,” Mama sobbed, holding him to her bosom. “It is the only way. Quickly. You know how to get there, and he will take you where it is safe.”

He'd not wanted to leave them; he did not understand at all. “But, Mama—”

“Wait. Take this book; show it to no one, not even my father, who will seize it from you and burn it. Say no more, my lovely son. Your grandfather will keep you until—”

She placed the ouroboros book in a satchel along with his clothing and his study books, shepherding him from the door and into the night. It was the last time he had seen any of them safe.