I thought of Nicholas and the tower of Babel. The sin God punished was not ambition but overambition.
Tristan was a humourless and petulant collaborator, neither master nor friend. I did not care. I was back in my element. All I thought of was unravelling Flamel’s riddles. The fever I had felt in Cologne was returning – and with it came other feelings, harder to resist. I disliked Tristan; sometimes I hated him. But on sweaty nights when we worked the furnace half-naked together, or when his hand brushed mine as I held the pestle for him to grind our powders, the worm inside me thrilled with perverse lust. The tower became my prison, then my world. Flamel’s paintings were my horizons, the dark roof my heaven, the bats and swallows who nested in the rafters its angels.
One day, very excited, Tristan brought a stooped old man back to our workshop. He had white hair down to his shoulders and a white beard that touched his chest; he hobbled on a stick, poling himself like a barge. Blindness clouded his eyes, yet still there was something vigorous and watchful in his bearing.
Tristan sat him on a bench amid our apparatus and fetched him wine.
‘This is Master Anselme,’ he said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seventy-eight.’ His voice was thin, but he smiled when he spoke.
‘Tell my friend what you told me in the churchyard at St Innocent’s.’
‘Many years ago – before my father died, God rest his soul – when I was young and eager, I delved into the secrets of the Art. As you yourselves do. And so it pleased God that I met the greatest adept of this age – of any age – a man who blazed over the rest of us as the sun vanquishes the moon. Nicholas Flamel.’
I sat bolt upright. Even the figures in the paintings seemed to straighten. ‘You knew Flamel?’
‘I sat in his workshop as I sit with you now.’
‘For how long?’
‘Many years. He died, God rest him, fifteen winters ago.’
‘And were you there when he produced the gold?’
The old man shook his head. Wine stained the hairs around his mouth like a gash. ‘Perenella, his beloved wife. She was the only one.’
‘But afterwards,’ Tristan prompted him, ‘he told you his secret?’
Master Anselme held out his glass for more wine. Tristan waited.
‘The Art is not magic. Do you know what the Stone really is? It is medicine, a tonic for all the diseased matter of this world.’
He lifted his left arm, which I saw was stunted and withered, quite useless. ‘This limb is still a part of me, however frail it becomes. The soul that unites my being runs through it as much as anywhere else. So with metal. What you call lead or tin are no different from gold and silver, except in the degree of their perfection.
‘There is one perfect substance in this universe – ether, quintessence, first matter, call it what you like. In its truest state it is without form. Only when it allies with the material of this world does it take shape. It is a principle, an idea that animates. It runs purest in the noble metals, and weakest in the base. You do not transmute lead into gold like a street magician changing an egg into a kitten. You purify it. You alloy it with the Stone, so that the seeds imprisoned in the metal blossom, until in the unity of perfection it can take any shape you command. Not for wealth or riches, but to perfect the universe.’
Tristan, whose interest could blaze and cool like air over coals, looked suspiciously at Anselme’s limp arm. ‘I heard that the Stone could also cure men. If you knew Flamel so well, why did you not heal yourself?’
The old man coughed. ‘I am a feeble vessel. The Stone is valuable beyond measure. I would not waste it on such humble flesh. Flamel himself believed that – used correctly – the Stone might work on our human forms so profoundly as to render us immortal. But he never discovered that art.’
‘Obviously,’ said Tristan. ‘But how did he find the Stone?’ I rubbed the blisters on my hands where I had been too eager to pick up vessels fresh from the fire. ‘I have read that it can be extracted from gold.’
‘Yes. Yes, precisely.’ Spittle flew from his mouth. He regathered some of it by licking his lips prodigiously. His tongue was truly enormous. ‘Gold is where it is most abundant. But even gold is filthy as mud when set against the Stone. It must be purified in the three furnaces. You must extract the seeds of sulphur and mercury, then combine them in the Hermetic Stream. That is what Flamel did.’
‘But how-’
‘You must watch the colour. In the fire it will change seven times, until in the moment of perfection it casts a light like a rainbow. That is the sign.’
Tristan leaped to his feet. Master Anselme glanced around fearfully.
‘You are a liar. Get out.’ Tristan kicked the table; the jars, bottles and flasks arrayed on it shivered and chattered. ‘Did you think you could come here and recite half-remembered lies you picked up from Flamel’s gutter – if you ever knew him? Get out of my house.’
He grabbed the old man by his shoulder and flung him halfway to the door. If I had not been standing there to catch him he might have broken his neck.
The incident with Master Anselme put Tristan in a strange mood for the next fortnight. Once when I came back into the tower I found him standing over shards of a broken bottle. Blood was beading around his wrist, and when I tried to bind it he shook me off angrily. His nights with the whores became more frequent. Sometimes he invited me to join them – at first half-heartedly, when he thought I might accept, then with malicious pleasure when he realised I would not. He called me ‘monk’ when he was kind or ‘eunuch’ when he was not, though he never guessed the real reason for my abstinence.
Perhaps Master Anselme was a fraud, haunting St Innocent’s churchyard and preying on the dreams of those who came to study Flamel’s figures. But something in his babble had struck home, a thread through the labyrinth. I followed it day after day, sometimes stretching it almost to breaking, sometimes tangling my mind in knots. And I began to understand.
All my life I had been captivated by gold. In the depths of my fall I had scrabbled to claw a few precious grains out of the river mud; even in Basle I had defined myself by the renunciation of my obsession. Yet now I saw it was not its glitter that bewitched me, as it did other men. Even in my ignorance I had seen through its surface, had sensed something of the divine universal housed within. I had felt it in the perfection of the gulden, in the gold leaf we hammered out in Konrad Schmidt’s workshop and in the wisdom of Nicholas Cusanus.
I knew why these things had obsessed me. It was because I could imagine perfection, as real as a dream, and the world would not be whole until I had grasped it.
I redoubled my efforts. While Tristan gave himself over to his dubious pleasures, I took Flamel’s book back to St Innocent’s. ‘In the churchyard in which I put these Hieroglyphical Figures,’ wrote Flamel, ‘I have also set on the wall a Procession, in which are represented by order all the colours of the Stone as they come and go.’ The wall paintings in Tristan’s tower showed the seven panels from the arch, the same seven pictures as were drawn in the book. But there were others he had not bothered to have copied, the women on either side of the arch processing towards the centre.
I studied them in the light of what Master Anselme had said. ‘You must extract the seeds of sulphur and mercury.’ By then I knew that sulphur and mercury were not the substances commonly called such, but wise names for mystic elements, the two opposing principles of heat and cold.
‘You must watch the colour. In the fire it will change seven times.’ I counted the women in the processions: seven on each side. As I looked at them, I began to realise they were all the same. Artfully painted so that no two seemed exactly alike – some turned to face the churchyard, others looking away or staring straight ahead, smiling, frowning, laughing, desolate – but all incarnations of the same woman, differing only in the colour and length of their hair. Sometimes it was white as the moon, sometimes black as night; brown, bronze, amber, honey-yellow or steel-grey. And at the front of each procession, where two identical women with knowing smiles faced each other across the open arch, red like cedar bark. The colour of the Stone.