Academic Exercises Read online

  I’d never been forcibly washed before. I told them I was perfectly capable, but I guess they were reluctant to allow me full use of my limbs, in case I got away. The shave wasn’t so bad, in fact it brought back old memories. By no means the first time I’d had a blade pressed to my throat while four men held me down. They issued me with a plain, clean gown, slightly frayed cuffs, sort of beige colour. No pockets.

  The captain and his men took me as far as the great hall, where I was handed over to the Duty Chamberlain’s men. As he handed over the end of my rope, the captain nodded politely and wished me good luck. I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak.

  The first time I met Phocas, of course, he was nobody. In fact, he was less than nobody. He was twelfth in line to the throne, which meant he had no chance whatsoever, and his father had just been executed for treason. It was amazing how many people could look straight at him and not see he was there.

  I, by contrast, was the favoured nephew of a prosperous land speculator with important political connections, a rising academic star, and one of the inner circle of the inner circle of the in crowd. In fact, I was so central, you could have plotted the location of everybody else by sticking the point of a compass in the top of my head. By rights, I should never have wasted my precious time and attention on a negative quantity like Phocas. But I liked him, then.

  He was being thrown out of a party just as I was arriving. He was aggressive-drunk, and the reason for his expulsion, I later gathered, was that some of the puke missed his shoes and hit the hostess’s dress, which he’d been endeavouring to remove, regardless of her objections, when his digestive system betrayed him. Two footmen carried him out into the street, with his feet off the ground, kicking in air like a hanged man, and dropped him neatly in a big brown puddle. He sat there for, I don’t know, five seconds; then he stood up, a bit shaky but with a certain essential grace and dignity, like a cat; then swayed and flopped up against the wall.

  The people I was with marched past him, all don’t-look-at-him-you-don’t-know-where-he’s-been. But he smiled at me—I could see him clearly by the lantern light—and his face said, please don’t think too harshly of me, you’re not quite catching me at my best. I grinned back at him, and he fell over.

  Next time I met him was at one of Menestheus’ lectures on Stratylides. I’d been sitting patiently, formulating a question in my mind that’d demonstrate beyond doubt to any perceptive witness that I was ten times cleverer than Menestheus, and at least three times smarter that Stratylides. I was putting the finishing touches to it when the old fool stopped talking. Phocas promptly stood up and asked precisely the question I’d been planning.

  Well, not precisely the same. Not nearly as tersely or elegantly phrased. But he’d picked up on the same frayed end in the logic as I had. Menestheus gave him a look, then said, “Actually, that’s not quite as stupid a question as it sounds,” and went on to give an answer I’d have had great difficulty beating. I was grateful to Phocas for saving me, and impressed with the quiet, good-humoured grace with which he accepted the mincing he got. I asked some people I was with who the kid who asked the question was, and they told me. I arranged to have him invited to a party I was going to, and made a point of talking to him; we chatted for half an hour about ethical positivism, then slipped the party and went for a drink. He didn’t have any money, so I lent him half an angel.

  A year later, we had the plague. It killed off nine of Phocas’ eleven supervening cousins, and my uncle, who proved to have been on the edge of bankruptcy. He was, in fact, a conman of substantial ability but limited intelligence; he hadn’t foreseen the flaw in his scheme, which would’ve collapsed round his ears inside of a month if he hadn’t died first. I was six months off my final exams; I had a trunkful of clothes, which my landlord distrained on for arrears of rent, five dozen books and four angels cash.

  It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference. I couldn’t even get close enough to my old friends to ask them for money, and Phocas, newly rich, was out of town, up at the capital for the funerals. My tutor, who admired and loathed me, got me the porter’s job. I stayed on and became invisible.

  So what? Big deal. I learned an important lesson in alchemy, at any rate; the catalytic agency of gold in the process of conversion between precious-rare and dross, the mutability of all things. Other things I learned; how to shift heavy objects, how to sweep floors, clean up mess, stand perfectly still and quiet for three hours and not be noticed. All good stuff, much more use to me in later life than the course material. I take the view that we’re the sum of everything that happens to us, good and bad. It’s an alchemist’s interpretation, of course, seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even if, particularly if, it’s unstable or noxious, you get a different result. If the experiment comes out well, then you can’t say any one particular ingredient or process was bad. If you end up with a result like me—well, good and bad are by definition unscientific terms. What matters is the purpose of the experiment and whether or not you achieve it.

  By any reasonable criteria, Phocas was a successful experiment. He started off as garbage and came out of the crucible pure gold. A lesser man might’ve celebrated his sudden, unexpected transformation into heir apparent with a whirlwind massacre of everybody who’d derided and despised him when he was nobody; this would’ve entailed wiping out ninety per cent of the university of Elpis, but that was the sort of thing Phocas’ family had been doing for centuries, and nobody seemed to think any the less of them for it. But Phocas wasn’t like that. He forgave his enemies and rewarded his friends, except for me. Don’t get me wrong. He wanted to help. He tried quite hard to find out what had become of me. But by then my tutor was dead (the plague; we had it relatively easy at Elpis, but he was one of the victims) and nobody else knew or cared. I carried on portering and working in the library when the students were in bed or out drinking, without the faintest idea that Phocas was trying to find me, until I ran into a spot of trouble and had to leave town.

  History will have all manner of nice things to say about Phocas; how he checked the power of the provincial nobility, ended the war with the Ammagene, got the public finances under control. In fact, history will love him. No matter which side’s in the ascendancy, there’ll be a bit of Phocas they can grapple on to and make their own. The Optimates will admire the way he broke the power of the labour guilds and supported free trade, while the Tendency will worship him for his welfare provisions and land reforms. They’ll debate endlessly about what his real agenda was, which side he was actually on, and they’ll never get within a long spit of the truth, because history refuses to recognise the possibility that great events and changes of lasting significance could be brought about just because once upon a time there was an absolute ruler who simply couldn’t make up his mind. His intentions were always good. Where he was luckier than all his fellow altruists was in somehow contriving to pursue his good intentions without doing irreparable damage to everyone and everything around him. The truth is, he was a simple-minded, basically decent sort of a fellow, born well outside the dangerous confines of the purple, who did the best he could to keep things ticking over quietly so they wouldn’t distract him from his overriding mission in life; to discover, or more realistically sponsor the discovery, of the secret of turning base metal into gold. If ever I get around to finishing my Ideal Republic (started it ten years ago, paid in advance, spent the money), I’ll have to fit him in somewhere as a model autocrat; the man who rules well because he doesn’t really want to rule at all.

  “Hello, Phocas,” I said.

  He looked up at me from the papers he’d been reading. “What the hell was all that about?” he said.

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

  “No,” he sn
apped, “you didn’t, that’s the point. Damn it, I wrote you a letter. And you’re supposed to be smart.”

  I sat down. The guard didn’t like it, but Phocas didn’t notice. “You see,” I went on, “I had the idea that you might, well, blame me—”

  “Really.” He gave me a hurt, angry look. “How long have we known each other?”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I panicked, all right? It happened, and I just had to run, get out of there, as far away as I could. And then I thought, how suspicious does that look? I thought—”

  “You thought I’d assume that because you ran away, you’d killed her.” He shook his head, as though stunned that anybody could be so stupid. “Well, the main thing is, you’ve come to no harm. But really, for crying out loud, Nino, did you have to blow up a fucking wall?”

  I did my sheepish idiot grin. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

  “Amazing.” He smiled at me. “Someone could’ve been killed, you realise. And then you’d have been in the shit.”

  I hung my head. “Wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Just having the stuff’ll get you your neck stretched. There’s only so much I can do, you know.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “How did it happen?” he said.

  I told him. When I described how his sister died, he closed his eyes and turned his head away, just for a moment. Reminded me of me, when I was a kid and my mother killed a chicken. Thing was, I ate the chicken, even though I disapproved of death. Some things are ugly but necessary.

  Then he shook himself, like a wet dog, and said, “Why didn’t you warn her?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Not to drink the stuff.”

  I smiled weakly. “You think she’d have listened?”

  “No,” he conceded. “No, I guess not.”

  “Besides,” I went on, “it was all so fast. And I suppose I assumed she’d know better than to come in the lab and drink a beakerful of stuff without asking if it was safe.”

  He was interested. “She just—”

  “She asked me what it was. I told her the ingredients. Next thing I knew—”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “That makes sense. She’d have reckoned she knew what it was from what was in it. Always had a very high opinion of herself, my sister.”

  “She was a good scientist,” I said. “She’d learned a hell of a lot.”

  “Which killed her,” he said, quietly, like a man finally winning a chess game he’d lost interest in a quarter of an hour ago. “Excellent argument against the education of women, if you ask me. Thought she knew what it was, decided to swallow it before you told her she couldn’t. Impatient, you see. She was like it as a kid. Always snatched the honey-cakes as soon as the servants brought the plate in.”

  “If I’d had the faintest idea—”

  “Of course.” He raised his hand. Subject dead and buried. “Well,” he said, “I guess we can draw a line under all that. I’ll issue a statement saying my sister died of natural causes. We’ll have to have a state funeral, of course, I’ll need you there as chief mourner. Sorry,” he added. “I know you can’t be doing with official occasions.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “Least I can do.”

  “It’ll take a week to arrange,” he went on. “And in the meantime—”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Back to my bench, enough time wasted already. He really didn’t mean it as a punishment. He sincerely believed I enjoy doing all that stuff.

  I stood up. “Just one thing,” he said. “Not that it matters worth a damn, but somebody must’ve helped you. Else, how did you get all that gear? You know we’re just fine, but I’m going to have to ask you who helped you out. Got to give somebody to the Prefect, or my life’s going to be hell for months.”

  I sat down again. “I have contacts,” I said.

  “Yes, I’d gathered.” There was a cold core to his eyes. I knew that look. “I’m sorry, but I need some names.”

  “In the Thieves’ Guild,” I said.

  His eyes widened slightly. “So there really is a Thieves’ Guild,” he said.

  “Of course there is,” I lied. “And I’m very sorry, but—”

  He shrugged. “More than your life’s worth, right. Fine, forget about it. Now I know there actually is a Thieves’ Guild, the watch can take it from here. Thank you,” he added, “that’s a real help.” He frowned. “Have I just landed you in it?” he asked. “Only, if I have, I can forget what you just told me—”

  “It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “We assume you’ve known all about us for years.”

  (And I thought; curious. He’d asked about his sister’s death the way you ask about the health of a business associate’s invalid spouse, but verification of the existence of a Thieves Guild had been interesting. What would I have seen, I wondered, if I’d been there when they came to tell him Eudoxia was dead?)

  “How soon?” he asked.

  I’d just put my feet to the ground, ready to walk out. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Try.”

  I shrugged. It was the gesture of a man without a care in the world, fooling nobody. “Really, I can’t say. Could be six weeks, could be a month, could be—”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Or six years,” I replied, “it all depends on how lucky I get. If I’m lucky, this time tomorrow. If I’m unlucky, never. There’s always the possibility that it simply can’t be done.”

  He grinned at me. “I get the same from the highways contractors,” he said. “They know precisely how long it’ll take to build a road from the City to the docks, but when I ask them, they always add on two months. Then, when the job’s finished when they knew it would be, they ask for a bonus for early completion. Come on, Nino. When?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Thought so.” He smiled at me, and behind me, someone opened the door. “Six weeks, then. I’ll hold you to that,” he said.

  Yes, I’m the world’s greatest living alchemist. Foolish to deny it, a sort of reverse boasting. But please accord due emphasis to the word living.

  Consider, for example, Laelianus the Attagene. Brilliant man; refined lachrymae dei while he was still a student at Faenori, the first man to split silver into its four aspects—I knew him, for a short while, at Elpis. Or take Herennius, who completely reshaped the way we understand the reintegration of humours. If he was still alive today, I wouldn’t be worthy to carry his lecture notes. Not to mention Gordianus Secundus; now there’s a man I’d have liked to have known, but he was already dead by the time I came to Paraprosdocia. Codrinus—

  Well. Of interest only to members of the profession. Fact is, this is the golden age, no pun intended, of alchemy. There have been more epoch-making discoveries in the last fifteen years than in the preceding two centuries. And as for geniuses, truly exceptional minds; two dozen, at the most conservative reckoning. But here’s a curious thing. Of that two dozen, none of them survived past the age of thirty-three.

  At that time I was thirty-two. Thirty-two and eleven months.

  There was a craze a while ago for copies of famous paintings—you know the sort of thing; Judgement of Timaeus, The Battle of Sineo, Girl with a White Dove; exact copies, except for one thing left out; the jug in the Judgement, or the king’s shield in the battle-scene, or the Girl’s left earring. The idea was, you hung the painting directly over where you’d be sitting at your dinner party, and you got your fun watching the expressions on your guests’ faces as they tried to figure out what was wrong.

  Well; the missing article in Workshop of Saloninus the Alchemist was one corpse, female. I had no trouble at all spotting it. There might as well have been a hole in the world, through which you could see the stars beneath us.

  “Thanks, gents,” I said to the guards, as they ushered me in. “I can find my own way from here.”

  It’s a bad sign when you’re reduced to bouncing bon mots off the military. As the door closed, I sank down onto th
e floor and started to shake. Not the sort of thing I usually do. I think it must’ve been sharing an enclosed space with the thing that wasn’t there.

  After a while, I pulled myself together, somehow or other; stood up, managed to get the fire going. I’d lost track of when I’d last eaten, but I simply wasn’t hungry. While the fire caught, I went to the ingredients cabinet and fished out a bottle of acquavit. The pure colourless stuff. I only had it for fuel for the spirit burner. I swallowed three mouthfuls.

  Made me feel worse, if anything.

  Well, I thought, what the hell do I do now?

  The irony was, any alchemist who knew what he was doing would kill for a bench like mine. Every piece of equipment you could possibly think of, all the very best quality; a row of bottles and jars like soldiers on parade, every rare and obscure material—some of them a hundred angels an ounce, more on the black market (except they’re so rare, everybody in the trade would know in an instant where they’d come from). If there was a specialised item I wanted made up, all I had to do was bang on the door and give the guard a detailed specification, he’d take it off to the toolmakers or the glassblowers, and I’d have it in my hand the next day. Expense no object. Unlimited research funding. If there’s a hell, I truly believe, it’s getting exactly what you’ve always wanted.

  I had six weeks to find the secret of transmuting base material into gold. This is impossible. I reached up to the top shelf of the bookcase and pulled down Polycrates’ Diverse Arts. Chapter six, page nineteen, paragraph four. To turn base metal into gold.

  Ah well, I thought.

  First, take common salt (got that) and vitriol (plenty of that); mix well with a glass rod. Done that. Next, take aqua fortis (buckets of that). Combine the aqua fortis with the salt and vitriol to form aqua regia. The trouble with Polycrates, unlike me, is not so much what he includes, which is often true, but what he leaves out; trifles like incredibly volatile or will produce large volumes of toxic gas or for crying out loud, do this on a block of ice. Fortunately, Onesander of Phylae went through this procedure with me shortly after I left Elpis the second time, so I knew more or less what to do. A great man, Onesander, and it was a crime against science when he was hung for issuing fake six-angel bits. His coins were actually three points purer than the government issue, would you believe. I understand they’re eagerly sought after these days, by jewellers.