The Serpent Papers (24 page)

There once was a man who could not speak and so was unable to confess his sins. Since birth he had been a hermit but upon hearing the calling of the sun he left the mountains to win his fortune. Travelling by rivers, he slept on the damp stream-beds, drinking from a cupped hand. Perched on the banks of an icy pool or a shady glade, he admired the dragonfly as she skimmed the water and traced the path of the peregrine falcon with his finger. He watched the sun rise from haystacks and dreamt of the glory of the Universe and every footstep brought him closer to his destiny.

But when he offered his calloused words to the guards at the gates of the city they jeered and threw rocks at him for he was a poor man, ugly and unkempt. Weeping, he wandered the graveyards, uttering incomprehensible sounds. He could not communicate his love or his pain or his suffering in any language understandable to man. The priests would not take him into their hearts as they saw this deficit as a sign of the Devil. The shopkeepers did not like his groaning and so beat him. The city dwellers threw him sweetmeats and scraps from their table and laughed as he foraged in the dust.

‘Get ye hence and sleep in the graveyard, on the stones of the deceased, for it is the closest you will come to heaven,’ they snarled, believing that if a man could not speak in a house of God, he could not confess, and if he could not confess he could not be rid of sin – a fact that ensured his certain passage unto hell upon his death. At night lamentations of the man filled the streets as he roamed the courtyard of the house of God. By day, he wove baskets filled with white lilies and peaches as gifts for the fallen, selling them for a penny to housewives and despondent lovers who came to weep on the graves. Soon the man died, and there was great debate as to where he should be buried. A priest stepped forward, arguing that though the man was damned, the graveyard had been his home in life and so should be his home in death. That evening they planted him without ceremony in the loose soil. They gave him no casket and no coffin because he had left them only his flowers and hoped that the worms would eat him away into nothing so that the saved would not have to share their bed with a sinner. For many days there was silence in the streets. The priests and the shopkeepers and the city dwellers gave thanks that their slumber was no longer disturbed by the moaning of the man who could not speak a proper word. A week passed and then another, with such quiet that all seemed peaceful and good until they awoke one evening to a magnificent song played in the golden notes of a flute loud as the trumpets of war. In the graveyard of the church the earth trembled and shook. The priests and shopkeepers and city dwellers rushed to their windows and doors and watched as a conifer erupted from the ground and grew in great leaps and plunges in the air, sprouting leaves of gold and silver and cones of ebony and pearl and still it grew – shooting into the sky – pressing up to the heavens with its golden branches. The pine towered over the church as a giant, its great roots heaving from the ground, tearing at the earth until a glorious golden cage emerged, formed by the roots of the tree, and there the body of the un-confessed man was preserved.

His skin was pale and washed and smelling of cinnamon and cloves. The sorrow had fallen away from his face and he was young and beautiful. His lips parted in a secret smile, his hair filled with the flowers he had sold for the graves, while each of the dead man’s prayers ripened into golden fruit inscribed with the letters of his secret, like the emanations of the sephiroth, and the priests ran out and crossed themselves and prayed as a Hand of God rearranged the letters in the tree so that it read in a scroll suspended in the golden leaves: ‘I understand all languages, even those incomprehensible to man, and if a prayer is made in good faith I hear it and love the creature who has uttered these words and will pave his way to heaven with gold.’

The tree of gold stayed illumined for twelve days and twelve nights, and when the gold faded it became a giant, living pine with brown bark and green leaves, roots firmly planted in the swampy earth. The deaf–mute departed to heaven and the church, feeling rightly that a miracle had graced their squalid grounds, rebuilt itself with Gothic fervour, taking the name Santa Maria del Pi or Our Lady of the Pine.

^{THE THIRD TALE}

Which treats of the Doctor’s return to the court

It is through this square that they paraded Doctor Illuminatus, a slow procession beneath the needles of the tree. The royal emissary, a dour-faced man with a hooked nose, took him to the Court of the Kings, el Palau Reial, where the noble captain of the ship told of this doctor’s triumph and of his fall from grace. At the appointed hour, a soldier arrived with a message from the House of Rossinyol, a gold coin with the Nightingale mark, which he passed into the Doctor’s mouth in a morsel of meat from the king’s table. The Doctor understood then that he had been purchased for the price of a good horse and seven gold effigies, and on the stage he bowed his head and declared:

‘My liege, I am the cursed Doctor Illuminatus who will live for a thousand years. You have plucked me from the shores of my fair island to please your citizens. Lords and ladies, courtiers and courtesans, ask me any question and I will tell you its answer, for there are no secrets from the living or the dead which are unknown in the secrets of another.’

With that the Alchemist embarked on the story of his first encounter with the Nightingale on the island of Mallorca.

THE FOURTH TALE

Which treats of the Nightingale

Many lifetimes ago, on the eve of Sant Joan, at the midsummer point in the year when the night is longest and the fern blossoms, the Doctor gathered in a bowl his medicinal plants from his field on Puig de Randa. He bathed them in the water from the nine springs that emerged from rocks below his hermit’s cave and left the bowl at the entrance of his cavern so that it would catch the morning dew as the sun rose over the eastern seas. That evening he lit a fire to banish the dark spirits, and sat beside the blaze looking out over the villages to the North, South, East and West. At midnight he put out his fire and went to bed. At dawn, when he rose and went to collect his water, he found, to his immense irritation, that the bowl had disappeared, and with it the dew and with it the plants. He scanned the fields, suspecting an errant sheep had come to steal his holy water. There he saw her! Over the small rise to his vegetable patch below. The culprit slept soundly!

At first he thought she was a wolf, her form was so thick with fur. But he looked closer – no, she was a black ewe who had curled up on his vegetable patch to die.
Peuuuu
, he whistled through his teeth. Scat!
Sheeu!
She did not move. With a deftness surprising for his age the alchemist scrambled down the rocky shale towards the sleeping creature. ‘Ewe! Ewe! Wake! Tell me what you have taken.’ As the animal moved, the wind rushed out of him! It was a girl wrapped in the cloak of a sheep pelt. Beneath this cloak she was naked, her hair and flesh dark as
la Moreneta
. My God! He turned his eyes to heaven. She was covered in wax burns! Her skin pierced with needles, they had made a mark on her breast like a teat . . .

The Doctor sat down on the damp earth.

‘Are you a witch?’ he asked. Her eyes rolled into her forehead and she collapsed in a faint.

Summoning his strength, Illuminatus picked the girl up, and brought her to his cave. He built a bed for her on the floor and devised a structure of birch panels to shield her privacy. Three days she slept without stirring. At the end of the third day a lord on horseback appeared at the gate of the hermitage. The lord travelled alone, his horse and carriage striking.

‘Good Doctor,’ the lord said. ‘I have lost my wife’s sister, who has run away. A girl of sixteen. She is deaf and mute and generally bad, but my wife is distraught and I am worried for her safety.’

When the Doctor opened his mouth to speak the voice of intuition rose in his mind:
Do not give the girl to him
.
This man is wicked. He wears her blood on his sleeve.
Not for the first time in his life Rex Illuminatus lied.

‘I have seen no girl. When did you lose her?’

‘On the night of John the Baptist,’ he replied.

‘I suggest you check the river to the south – I heard a human noise among my flock that night which passed towards the ravines before the flatlands . . .’

The lord thanked him cordially.

‘Be warned. She converses with the spirits of the Dead. We have tried to wash the Devil out of her, but he is rooted deep. You have heard the stories of the Ophites? This girl is of their blood.’

‘I know it well,’ Illuminatus said. ‘I will pray for her.’

‘Should you see any signs, please send word and I will come for her. We are fearing she will never be returned to us.’ With that the lord flexed the muscles of his legs and moved his horse to leave, but not before crying over his shoulder: ‘By the Grace of God, my wife is a converted heretic, but her sister is unrepentant. The girl is a witch!’

Rex Illuminatus returned to his cave full of worry. That evening the girl awoke and gestured for food. When she ate, the Doctor saw the cause of her muteness. A brutal hand had removed the tongue of the girl, leaving a horrid stump in her mouth. He brought her pen and paper and asked her what had happened, but the girl had no knowledge of writing. She pushed the ink away. Then, thinking swiftly, the Doctor retrieved a loom, and five colours of thread he made from the fleece of his flock. He asked her to weave a dress, and this she did gladly, growing more powerful in strength every day. In the mornings she tended his garden. Her bruises lightened. She helped Illuminatus with his esoteric studies, making the inks for his illuminations, and he taught her how to handle gold and the paints with which he wrote his books. One day Illuminatus spoke softly to the woman sitting on the stone of his cave.

‘Creation is an act of God,’ he mused. ‘The Act of Creation is holy. It is something from nothing. It is alchemy. In this Art we have been given nine letters of an alphabet from which you can answer any question, containing all the secrets of the natural world. The Artist should know the alphabet by heart, as well as the figures, definitions and rules – along with the arrangements before proceeding in their knowledge. The alchemy of which I speak is not that which is summarily conceived of as the practice.’

The Doctor wandered through his vials and instruments looking for a book.

‘In this is contained the mirror of the world,’ he said. ‘I have written it for this express purpose. And thus the world is a mirror of this book. It is my art, and as all art is an act of creation, all the universe is contained in the act of its doing and non-doing. As the lover loves the beloved, and the beginning seeks by the middle to the end, and all answers are connected to the questions by the ladder of the intellect and the subjects of the imagination and transmutation, this book will contain in its letters and numbers the answer to your curse. For if you have been touched by the brush of his love you cannot utter this devil’s name aloud. But with this book you may offer some clue of his enterprise so that you may be free of your silence.’

And he sighed from experience, for he too had known murder and he too had known love. With that the Doctor showed the woman the figures of his art and he taught her daily the languages of Latin, Catalan, Hebrew, Arabic and Mathematics, along with French and English, such that she could write in all. She read the Talmud, the Koran, as well as Plato and Aristotle. And when she was ready he taught her the language of his ancient art, and the means of transcribing it onto paper.

‘K and 9 both consist of two parts, which extend the reach of this true art,’ he added factually, running his finger down the illuminated page. ‘With these figures you may answer any question in the world. And with these numbers, you may amplify and extend their meaning.’

From the steps of the small house built of stone and the fallen branches of a tree, the woman turned. She felt the breeze on her cheeks and the warmth on her face where her tears had fallen. She entered his cave and emerged wearing the dress she had woven; on each pleat of the skirt there was a figure in black, like the patterns of a Grecian urn, and from this he understood that the girl had been forced upon by her sister’s husband, and refusing to lie with him, she had been locked into his hunting lodge beneath the mountain of the Doctor’s hermitage and been raped repeatedly; in being so, her sister’s marriage had been defiled and her own flower broken. Her brother-in-law grew wrathful when she threatened to escape. As punishment he cut out her tongue, and left her to die in the forest alone.