Prosper's Demon Read online

  I dipped my head slightly in acknowledgment. One must be polite.

  “Do you suspect that I . . . ?”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Big surprise. The one thing everybody knows about Master Prosper, he never finishes anything. Why should he? Completions are for assistants and apprentices; genius needs only to make the incredible, inspired start.

  “It did cross my mind,” I said.

  He looked at me. Or at least, part of him did. At a rough guess, say 40 percent. “And?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  It hit me like a fist in the mouth. Forty percent of him was very scared indeed. “You wouldn’t have come here, gone to all this trouble, if you didn’t have reason to believe— Well?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. You’re a skeptic. You think it’s all garbage.”

  “Am I or am I not?”

  I counted to three under my breath, and said, “No.”

  He closed his eyes, just for a moment. Then he leaned back in his Imperial chair and he wept.

  And while he was preoccupied, I looked past him. I know you’re in there, I said.

  No answer.

  Was that entirely necessary? I asked.

  Playing games. So I reached in—taking very great care that the cuff of my sleeve didn’t brush against anything, like the curator of the Imperial porcelain, or the Imperial scorpion collection—and prodded very gently. She bit me.

  That’s rude, She said.

  What was all that in aid of?

  Twinkle. He’s smart, She said. He’s been thinking. It’s gradually starting to dawn on him that he couldn’t have done all that clever stuff on his own. Of course, if it hadn’t been for me, he’d never have been smart enough to get that far, but that’s the thanks you get for helping. So, anyway, you’ve just set his mind at rest. Thank you.

  If I’d told him the truth—

  She sighed. I’d have had to kill him and then I’d have had the whole tedious job to do all over again, with someone else. Setting the grand design back a hundred years, and depriving humanity of its homegrown god. Not to mention the bronze horse, which is going to be gorgeous, trust me. Though I don’t suppose you like art.

  Not much, no.

  Barbarian. She sighed. I’m going to let him make his horse, She said. In fact, I’m going to encourage him, and tell him how to do it. Not because it’s part of the grand design, or at least it’s only a tiny peripheral part, and something far more mundane would do just as well. Simply for the joy of it. You know—a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Something I can point to, a thousand years from now, and say, I did that. Just because it’s beautiful.

  I was sick and tired of the sight of Her. It can’t be done, I told Her. Not without magic, at any rate.

  No such thing as magic. You should know that, better than anyone.

  Delighted to hear it. In that case, it can’t be done. He knows why. Ask him.

  He’s a smart boy. She sounded like a proud mother. He’ll think of something.

  * * *

  There’s smart, and there’s smart enough.

  I went away and did some reading in the Temple library; starting (of course) with Principles of Mathematics and moving onward and outward—Numerian, Otkel the Stammerer, Saloninus on the properties of materials, Carnifex’s Mirror of Various Arts. They confirmed what I already vaguely knew and what Master Prosper himself had told me. Couldn’t be done.

  There are limits, said the consensus of a thousand years of learning and research. They may seem arbitrary—they are arbitrary—but there are limits to what you can do with wax and clay and molten bronze. Even if you were a giant, twenty feet tall, strong enough to pick up small islands one-handed, there would still be limits. These limits were thoroughly tested by Aimo of Boll, seven hundred years ago; he was commissioned by the Emperor to make the biggest possible bronze statue of his eldest son, who had just died of venereal disease at the age of twenty. Expense no object; the full resources of the Empire at his beck and whim. So Aimo started with the biggest statue he thought he could get away with, and that worked just fine; then he made one 5 percent bigger, and that was fine; the next one 5 percent bigger still, and so on. As he progressed, he figured out a series of the most amazingly ingenious fixes, work-arounds, and cheats to cope with various insuperable problems as they arose, learning whole bookfuls of valuable, undreamed-of new stuff about breaking strains and shearing forces and sectional densities and tensile strengths with each successful augmentation, until eventually he reached the point when there were no more fixes, work-arounds, or cheats (like a man on a rock in the middle of the sea, finding he’s run out of higher ground to retreat to) and declared, for all time: this is as far as you can go, and no further. And then he set to with his logarithmic tables and his abacus and figured out the ratios and wrote them down; and when I read them, I understood why Master Prosper had arrived at the dimensions of his Great Horse. Aimo’s maxima, plus 5 percent.

  * * *

  He was too busy to see me, so I wrote him a letter. I said: If you make your Great Horse 5 percent smaller, it’ll still be a very big horse indeed, and it’ll be possible. I didn’t expect a reply but I got one. A single word: Exactly. And a postscript: Come and see me, anytime you like.

  Valid point. For a man like Prosper of Schanz, if something’s possible, why bother doing it?

  Fine. But, for reasons of my own—

  Why have you suddenly decided to help me? She said.

  I shrugged. You convinced me. Well, he convinced me. Both of you together. You’re right, of course.

  Are we?

  I nodded. I think so. It’s a matter of perspective.

  Perspective.

  Ask him about it, he’s an artist. It’s about what’s close, what’s a very long way away, and all the stuff in between. Also the old saying about birds in hands and bushes.

  I’m not sure I follow.

  That’s because you’re not very good at taking yes for an answer. All right. Granted, I told Her, that your grand design is undoubtedly something very nasty and bad, eventually, in the long term. But you’re immortal and I’m not, so if I stop you now, you’ll just wait till I’m dead and start all over again, so really, what’s the point in me interfering?

  She gave me the look I deserved. Immortal, yes. Also, not born yesterday.

  I’m not saying I’m happy about it, I told Her. Or reconciled to it, even. But I’ve just read a very interesting book about what is and isn’t possible. And stopping you isn’t possible. Making life difficult, yes. Stopping, no.

  She didn’t say anything. I blundered on, like a blind man on a cliff edge. I can’t see a thousand years into the future, I told Her, so I can’t see the nasty, evil outcome. What I can see is Master Prosper’s horse, which is going to be amazingly beautiful. And thousands and millions of people who haven’t even been born yet will look at that horse and hear about how it was made, even though it was impossible, and maybe it’ll give them that little extra bit of strength and hope they need to persevere with scrambling up this shit heap we call life. And—I don’t know. I really can’t imagine what you’ve got up your sleeve that’s so incredibly bad and horrible that Prosper’s horse wouldn’t have been worth it. From our perspective, I mean.

  Twinkle. I do believe you’ve actually been listening to what I’ve been telling you, She said.

  Don’t sound so surprised. After all, we’re the same in so many things, it’s our differences that matter. The only real difference is duration. And, given that difference, why can’t we both win? Since our definitions of what constitutes victory—

  Ah! She purred like a cat. Exactly.

  Short-term and long-term, I said. Who says a thousand years of enlightened peace isn’t worth the inevitable smash that comes after it? We both win.

  Also, She said, you can’t stop me. You already admitted it.

  There is that. And you’ve never actually won anything. Have you?

&n
bsp; She didn’t answer that. Sore point.

  Like the famous general in the Revolutionary War, I went on tactlessly. Fought twenty-seven battles, got beaten twenty-seven times. But he won the war. Every time we catch up with you, we stop you and throw you out, and it hurts, and you’re back to square one. Guess what, I said. I’m not unique. After I’m dead, there’ll be another one like me, just as powerful. But he won’t be prepared to break Rule One.

  Rule One.

  Never negotiate with the enemy.

  Oh, that’s Rule One. No, I see what you mean. And you would?

  Rules are made to be broken, I said. If it’s the right thing to do.

  I’d given Her a lot to think about, and Master Prosper was starting to wake up from his after-dinner snooze. So, She said, you want to help me.

  Yes, I said. I suppose I do.

  A sort of collaboration. Twinkle twinkle. No offense, She said, but how can you help, exactly? He’s a genius. You’re—

  Yes, I said. But there’s something that’s holding you back that I don’t have.

  Really? What?

  I gave Her my very, very best grin. Scruples.

  * * *

  So I went to a foundry, where they showed me how you cast things in bronze.

  You start with a slab of beeswax, which looks like stale cheese and smells like honey. You carve the wax, and you warm up bits till they’re soft and mold them like clay, and squidge them on until you’ve got what you want, only made of wax instead of bronze. Then you pack the right sort of fine-grained clay all around the wax and fire it in a kiln to make it hard, like brick; this melts out the wax, and you’re left with a hollow mold.

  Then you get molten wax and you dribble it into the mold and swirl it round, until the sides of the mold are covered in a thick layer of wax. Then you break the mold—very, very carefully; and guess what, you’ve now got more or less what you started off with (a wax statue), only it’s hollow. This is important, because all bronze statues are hollow, to save expensive metal and horribly inconvenient weight. You fill your hollow wax with a sort of soup made of plaster mixed with fine sand, which sets hard; that’s called the core. It’s brittle, so when the statue’s finished, you can smash it into lumps and powder with a thin metal rod and get it out again. To keep the core from shifting during the casting process, you drive little nails through the wax into the plaster.

  Next, you warm up some extra wax and roll it out like pastry into thin rods, which you stick at strategic points to your waxwork. These will be the channels, through which the hot metal will flow in and the displaced air will be pushed out. (That’s very important; otherwise, you get air pockets and bubbles, which are disastrous.)

  Next, you get a whole lot of exactly the right kind of clay and you pack it round the waxwork and very carefully round the wax channels, packing it very thick indeed, and then you put it in a kiln and fire it, melting out the wax, leaving you with a hollow brick mold with an inner plaster core pinned to the mold with nails. The gap between the mold and the core is where you pour the bronze, and that’ll be your sculpture. Melt a load of scrap bronze in a crucible, being very careful not to let the sweat from your face fall in the melt (water and hot metal, very bad; a small explosion, and your eyes full of white-hot shrapnel); grip the crucible in a pair of long tongs and slowly and carefully pour the bronze into the upside-down mold. Go away for twelve hours, come back, smash the mold, and there’s your statue, plus strange-looking ivy growing up it (that’s the bronze-filled channels, called runners or sprues), which you cut off with a hacksaw and smooth off with a file. Then a quick rubdown with sharp sand, and you’re done.

  That’s a small statue, something you can lift with one hand; a paperweight. Now imagine doing it with a mold the size of a house.

  Master Prosper had mentioned some of the problems—the sheer weight of the metal being too much for the mold, differential cooling. There were others. Shoring up the mold internally, with beams like house rafters, so it wouldn’t pull apart under its own weight before it set. Or how about balance? The horse would, of course, be rearing on its hind legs, front legs pawing the air. The weight of the front end would be far more than the back legs could bear; they’d either bend or snap like carrots, unless you had an ugly great, big prop to support the front, off-the-ground end. And how do you lift up, swirl round, and upend a brick as big as the White Feather Temple?

  * * *

  I remember one time when I woke up and found myself surrounded by men I didn’t know. Two of them had axes, and one had a sledgehammer. They looked terrified. “Don’t try anything,” one of them said.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Who are you? I don’t understand.”

  They were looking at my hands. I looked at my hands.

  “Don’t try anything,” one of them said. A different one, I think.

  They tied my hands behind my back, real tight, then tied my feet together with a rope just shorter than my stride, as people do with horses. Don’t try anything, they told me, and led me across the street to the Brother’s house.

  “Ecclesiastical jurisdiction,” the Brother explained, looking slightly past rather than at me. “Technically you have benefit of clergy, so civil authority can’t try you.”

  “What did I do?”

  My hands were behind my back, but I’d seen what they looked like. I couldn’t remember anything; my memory was soft and raw, like the socket where a tooth’s been pulled out. But I guessed I’d done something more than cut myself shaving.

  He didn’t answer in words. Instead he pulled a sheet off something lying on the table—a girl, about twelve; most of her, anyway. I recognized her. I’d evicted an old acquaintance from her brother three days earlier.

  “I plead benefit of clergy,” I said.

  The Brother gave me a sad look. “I’m a clergyman,” he said. “I have jurisdiction.”

  “Not over my order.”

  Which was, of course, completely untrue, but did he know that? Turned out he didn’t.

  “You’ll have to write to Headquarters at the White Feather Temple,” I told him. “They’ll send down a duly accredited arbitrator. It’ll take about a month.”

  That why - does - it - have - to - be - me look—I know it so well. The town council held a brief discussion, which the charcoal merchant lost. He had a cellar, with only one door and no window, only a hatch with bolts on the outside and a padlock. He wasn’t happy about it, but what can you do?

  One of my colleagues turned up six weeks later. I have no idea what he said to the Brother, but I was back outside in the light before his horse had finished its nosebag.

  “You clown,” my colleague said, once we were out of town.

  “You don’t understand,” I told him. “There was nothing I could’ve done. It got inside me while I was asleep. The first thing I knew about it was when they showed me the body.”

  He didn’t answer. At the crossroads, he took the left fork, indicating with his hand that I should take the right.

  Four months later, I caught up with my old acquaintance.

  You should be dead, He said.

  I pulled Him out, but not before I’d given Him a few experiences to remember me by. We’ll meet again, I told Him, and by then I’ll have thought of something even better. Lots of better things. I’m looking forward to it, I told him quite truthfully.

  It was self-defense, he mumbled when eventually I let him go. You’re always so vicious, I can’t stand it anymore. So I tried to get rid of you. And whose fault was that?

  Yours, I told Him. For existing.

  You haven’t heard the last of this.

  Almost certainly not.

  He’s persistent but not imaginative. I’m remorseless and my imagination is prodigious. And so it goes, on and on.

  * * *

  The young Prince, Master Prosper told me, was coming along very nicely. Very clever, very clever indeed. A prodigy.

  Master Prosper had taken a liking to me. Whenever he
had a spare moment, he liked to walk with me in the cloister. Before the first Duke overthrew the old Republic, the palace had been a monastery. At the center was half an acre of herb gardens, with cloisters running round three sides. Partly, he said, he enjoyed my company; it wasn’t often that he had a chance to talk to someone whose mind was so little cluttered with education or accepted opinions—

  (“You mean I’m stupid.”

  “Good heavens, no. Just ignorant.”)

  Partly, he confessed, he wanted to have me near him, because he was scared. Not that he believed in that sort of thing. (He had a sort of intellectual integrity, I’ll give him that.) He had proved beyond any reasonable doubt that gods and devils were simply myth and superstition, but deep in his unruly peasant heart (“My father was a village apothecary and my mother was a goatherd’s daughter. Can you imagine?”) he believed. . . . And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can’t do anything about. You can’t make it come if you want it, and you can’t make it go if you don’t.

  “It’s stupid of me,” he told me, in a low voice, “but I’m worried. I don’t feel right, somehow. Recently I feel as though something is trying to peer inside me. Yes, I know. Me, of all people. But having you close to me reassures me. So, indulge an old fool.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day,” I said, a few days later. She was glaring at me but I ignored Her. “This anxious feeling you’ve been getting.”

  He laughed. “Oh, that’s all right. Superstition. Just my inner goatherd getting above himself.”

  Many a true word. “Humor me,” I said. “I happen to be a professional. Tell me, this feeling. When did you first notice it?”

  He frowned. “I don’t really know.”

  “Might it have been,” I said, “shortly after the Prince was born?”

  He stopped dead and stared at me. He wasn’t the only one. She was yelling at me, but I tuned Her out.

  “I think it might have been,” he said. “You don’t think—”

  “I try not to theorize without data,” I said. “You taught me that.”

  “But the Prince. A newborn child—”