The Alchemist
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Alchemist Copyright © 2010 by Paolo Bacigalupi.
All rights reserved.
Cover art Copyright © 2011
by J. K. Drummond. All rights reserved.
Cover design Copyright © 2011
by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
www.windupstories.com
1
It’s difficult to sell your last bed to a neighbor. More difficult still when your only child clings like a spider monkey to its frame, and screams as if you were chopping off her arms with an axe every time you try to remove her.
The four men from Alacan had already arrived, hungry and happy to make copper from the use of their muscles, and Lizca Sharma was there as well, her skirts glittering with diamond wealth, there to supervise the four-poster’s removal and make sure it wasn’t damaged in the transfer.
The bed was a massive piece of furniture. For a child, ridiculous. Jiala’s small limbs had no need to sprawl across such a vast expanse. But the frame had been carved with images of the floating palaces of Jhandpara. Cloud dragons of old twined up its posts to the canopy where wooden claws clutched rolled nets and, with a clever copper clasp, opened on hinges to let the nets come tumbling down during the hot times to keep out mosquitoes. A beautiful bed. A fanciful bed. Imbued with the vitality of Jhandpara’s lost glory. An antique made of kestrel-wood—that fine red grain so long choked under bramble—and triply valuable because of it.
We would eat for months on its sale.
But to Jiala, six years old and deeply attached, who had already watched every other piece of our household furniture disappear, it was another matter.
She had watched our servants and nannies evaporate as water droplets hiss to mist on a hot griddle. She had watched draperies tumble, seen the geometries of our carpets rolled and carried out on Alacaner backs, a train of men like linked sausages marching from our marbled halls. The bed was too much. These days, our halls echoed with only our few remaining footfalls. The porticos carried no sound of music from our pianoforte, and the last bit of warmth in the house could only be found in the sulphurous stink of my workshop, where a lone fire yet blazed.
For Jiala, the disappearance of her vast and beautiful bed was her last chance to make a stand.
“NOOOOOOOO!”
I tried to cajole her, and then to drag her. But she’d grown since her days as a babe, and desperation gave her strength. As I hauled her from the mattress, she grabbed hold of one huge post and locked her arms around it. She pressed her cheek against the cloud dragon’s scales and screamed again. “NOOOOOOOO!”
We all covered our ears as she hit a new crystal-shattering octave.
“NOOOOOOOO!”
“Please, Jiala,” I begged. “I’ll buy you a new one. As soon as we have money.”
“I don’t want a new one!” she screamed. “I want this one!” Tears ran down her reddening face.
I tugged at her, embarrassed under the judging gaze of Mistress Lizca and the workmen behind me. I liked Lizca. And now she saw me at my most reduced. As if the empty house wasn’t enough. As if this sale of my child’s last belonging was not humiliating in the extreme, I now begged a child for cooperation.
“Jiala. It’s only for a little while. And it will just be down the narrows at Mistress Lizca’s. You can visit if you like.” I looked to Lizca, hoping desperately that she wouldn’t contradict. “It will be just next door.”
“I can’t sleep next door! This is mine! You sold everything! We don’t have anything! This is mine!” Jiala’s shrieks rose to new levels, and this brought on her coughing, which alternated with her screams as I tried to pry her arms free.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said. “One fit for a princess.”
But she only screamed louder.
The workmen kept their hands over their ears as the gryphon shrieks continued. I cast about, desperate for a solution to her heartbreak. Desperate to stop the coughing that she was inflicting on herself with this tantrum.
Stupid. I’d been stupid. I should have asked Pila to take her out, and then ordered the workmen to come stealthy like thieves. I cast about the room, and there on the workmen’s faces, I saw something unexpected. Unlike Lizca, who stood stonily irritated, the workmen showed nothing of the sort.
No impatience.
No anger.
No superiority nor disgust.
Pity.
These refugee workmen, come across the river from Lesser Khaim to do a bit of labor for a few coppers, pitied me. Soiled linen shirts draped off their stooped shoulders and broken leather shoes showed cold mudcaked winter toes, and yet they pitied me.
They had lost everything fleeing their own city, their last portable belongings clanking on their backs, their hounds and children squalling and snot-nosed, tangled around their ankles. Flotsam in a river of refugees come from Alacan when their Mayor and Majisters accepted that the city could not be held and that they must, in fact, fall back—and quickly—if they wished to escape the bramble onslaught.
Alacan men, men who had lost everything, looked at me with pity. And it filled me with rage.
I shouted at Jiala. “Well, what should I do? Should I have you starve? Should I stop feeding you and Pila? Should we all sit in the straw and gnaw mice bones through the winter so that you can have a kestrel-wood bed?”
Of course, she only screamed louder. But now it was out of fear. And yet I continued to shout, my voice increasing, overwhelming hers, an animal roar, seeking to frighten and intimidate that which I could not cajole. Using my size and power to crush something small and desperate.
“Shut up!” I screamed. “We have nothing! Do you understand? Nothing! We have no choices left!”
Jiala collapsed into sobbing misery, which turned to deeper coughing, which frightened me even more, because if the coughing continued I would have to cast a spell to keep it down. Everything I did led only to something worse.
The fight went out of Jiala. I pried her away from the bed.
Lizca motioned to the Alacaners and they began the process of disassembling the great thing.
I held Jiala close, feeling her shaking and sobbing, still loud but without a fight now. I had broken her will. An ugly solution that reduced us both into something less than what the Three Faces of Mara hoped for us. Not father and daughter. Not protector and sacred charge. Monster and victim. I clutched my child to me, hating what had been conjured between us. That I had bullied her down. That she had forced me to this point.
But hating myself, most of all, for I had placed us in this position.
That was the true sickness. I had dragged us into danger and want. Our house had once been so very fine. In our glory days, when Merali was still alive, I made copper pots for rich households, designed metal and glass mirrors of exquisite inlay. Blew glass bargaining bulbs for the great mustached merchants of Diamond Street to drink from as they made their contracts. I engraved vases with the Three Faces of Mara: woman, man, and child, dancing. I etched designs of cloud dragons and floating palaces. I cast gryphons in gold and bronze and copper. I inlaid forest hunts of stags and unicorns in the towering kestrel forests of the East and sculpted representations of the three hundred and thirty-three arches of Jhandpara’s glorious waterfront. I traded in the nostalgic dreams of empire’s many lost wonders.
And we had been rich.
Now, instead of adornments for rich households, strange devices squatted and bubbled and clanked in my workroom, and not a single one of them for sale. Curving copper tubes twisted like kraken tentacles. Our impoverished faces reflected from the brass bells of delivery nozzles. Glass bulbs glowed blue with the et
hereal stamens of the lora flower, which can only be gathered in summer twilight when ember beetles beckon them open and mate within their satin petals.
And now, all day and all night, my workroom hissed and steamed with the sulphurous residues of bramble.
Burned branches and seeds and sleep-inducing spines passed through my equipment’s bowels. Instead of Jhandpara’s many dreams, I worked now with its singular nightmare. The plant that had destroyed an empire and now threatened to destroy us as well. Our whole house stank day and night with the smell of burning bramble and the workings of my balanthast. That was the true cause of my daughter’s pitched defense of her kestrel-wood bed.
I was the one at fault. Not the girl. I had impoverished us with every decision I had made, over fifteen years. Jiala was too young to even know what the household had looked like in its true glory days. She had arrived too late for that. Never saw its flowering rose gardens and lupine beds. Didn’t remember when the halls rang with servants’ laughter and activity, when Pila, Saema and Traz all lived with us, and Niaz and Romara and—some other servant whose name even I have now forgotten—swept every corner of the place for dust and kept the mice at bay. It was my fault.
I clutched my sobbing child to my breast, because I knew she was right, and I was wrong, but still I let Mistress Lizca and her Alacan workmen break the bed apart, and carry it out, piece by piece, until we were alone in an empty and cold marble room.
I had no choice. Or, more precisely, I had stripped us of our choices. I had gone too far, and circumstances were closing upon us both.
2
Jiala kept from me for several days after I sold her bed. She went out, and disappeared for hours at a time. She was resentful, but she spoke no more to me, and seemed willing to let me bribe her back to forgiveness with syrup crackers from Sugar Alley. She disappeared into the cobbled streets of Khaim, and I took advantage of the peaceful time to work.
The sale of the bed, even if it was a fabulously rare piece of art, even if it did come from kestrel-wood which no one had been able to harvest in more than five decades as the bramble sprawl overwhelmed its cathedral forests, would only last so long. And after the money ran out, I would have no more options.
I felt as if I was trapped in the famous torture room of Majister Halizak, who liked to magic his victims into a closed cell, without door or window, and then slowly spell the whole room down from the size of an elephant to the size of a mouse. It was said that Halizak took great pleasure listening to people’s screams. And then, as their prison shrank beyond their ability to bear, he would place a goblet below the tiny stone box, to catch the juices of his dying enemies and drink to his own long health.
But I was close.
Halizak’s Prison was closing down on me. But unlike Halizak’s victims, I now spied a door. A gap in my squeezing prison. We would not go without a home. Jiala and I would not be forced across the river to Lesser Khaim to live with the refugees of bramble spread.
I would be a hero. Recognized through the ages. I was going to be a hero.
Once again, I primed my balanthast.
Pila, my last faithful servant, watched from beside the fireplace. She had gone from a smiling young girl to a grown woman who now looked at me with a cocked head and a thoughtful expression as if I was already mad. She had brought in the final bits of my refashioned device, and my workshop was a new disaster of brass nails, armatures, and iron filings. The debris of inspiration.
I smiled at Pila. “This time it will work,” I said.
The reek of burnt neem and mint filled the air. In the glass chamber atop the balanthast, a few sprigs of mint lay with bay and lora flower and the woody shavings of the neem.
I struck a match. Its flame gleamed. I was close. So very close. But Pila had seen other failures…
Pounding on the door interrupted my preparation.
I turned, annoyed. “Go answer,” I told Pila. “Tell them I am busy.”
I prepared again to ignite the balanthast, but premonition stayed my hand. Instead, I listened. A moment passed. And then a shriek echoed through the halls. Anguish and loss. I dropped the match and ran for the door.
Falzi the butcher stood at the threshold, cradling Jiala in his huge arms. She dangled limp, head lolling.
“I found her in a bramble,” he said. “Deep in. I had to use a hook to pull her out, it was closing on her.” Pila and I both reached for her, but Falzi pulled away from us. “You don’t have the clothes for it.” And indeed, his own leather shirt and apron were covered in pale thready bramble hairs. They fairly seemed to quiver with wormy malevolence. Even a few were dangerous, and Jiala’s body was furred with them.
I stared, horrified. “But what was she doing there?” Jiala knew enough of bramble from my own work to avoid its beckoning vines. “She shouldn’t have been anywhere near bramble.”
“Street urchins…” Falzi looked away, embarrassed at the implication, but plunged on. “The Mayor offers a reward for bramble seeds collected in the city. To prevent the spread. A copper for a sack. Better pay than catching rats. Some children… if they are hungry enough, will go to the big brambles in the fields and burn it back. Then gather the seeds when the pods explode.”
“My workshop,” I said. “Quickly!”
Falzi carried Jiala’s small body easily. Set her on the stones by the fire. “What will you do?” he asked. “The poison’s already in her.”
I shook my head as I used a brush to push away the bramble threads that clung to her. Redness stained her flesh wherever they touched. Poison and sleep, coursing beneath her skin. When I’d cleared a place on her throat, I pressed my fingers to her pulse, feeling for the echo of her heart.
Slow. So very slow.
“I have supplies that may help,” I said. “Go. Thank you. But go!”
Falzi touched his heart in farewell. Shaking his head, he left us alone.
“Close the doors, Pila.” I said. “And the windows.”
“But—”
“Do it! And don’t come within. Lock the doors.”
When I first thought that I might have a method of killing bramble, it was because I noticed how it never grew around the copper mines of Kesh. Even as Alacan fell and landholders retreated all along the line of bramble’s encroach, the copper mines remained pristine.
Of course, over time it became impossible to get to the mines. Bramble surrounded that strange island of immunity and continued its long march west into Alacan. The delicate strand of road that led through the bramble forest to the copper mines became impossible to defend.
But the copper mines remained safe, long after everything else was swallowed. I noticed the phenomenon on my trips there to secure new materials for my business. Keshian copper made fine urns that were much in demand from my patrons and so I made the journey often. I remember making my careful way down that long bramble tunnel when workers still fought to keep the road to the mines open. Remember the worker’s faces sooty and sweaty with the constant chopping and burning, their leather bladder sacks and brass-nozzled burners always alight and smoking as they spread flaming paste upon the poisonous plant.
And then the copper mines, opening before me. The deep holes and scrapings of mine work, but also grasslands and trees—the huge bramble growing all around its perimeter, but none inside. An oasis.
A few majisters and scholars also noticed the Keshian copper mines’ unique qualities, but by the time anyone sought the cause of the place’s survival, the bramble was coming strong, and soon no one could hack their way back to that isolated place of mining tools and tailings ponds for more investigation.
Of course, people experimented.
A few people thought to beat copper into our roads, or created copper knives to cut through the bramble, thinking that the metal was bramble’s bane. And certainly some people even started to call it that. Copper charms sold well for a brief time. I admit that I even trafficked in such baubles, casting amulets and beating fine urns to ward off
its encroach. But soon enough, people discovered that copper gave root to bramble as easily as a farmer’s tilled field and the mortar of Alacan’s massive city walls. Granite was better at warding off the plant, but even that gave root eventually.
Even so, the Keshian copper mines remained in my mind, much as they likely remained in the deep bramble forest, a dream of survival, if only we could puzzle it out. And so now, from memory, I sought to reconstruct the conditions of Kesh in the environs of my workshop, experimenting with the natural interactions of flora and ore, seeking that singular formula which had stalled bramble in its march.
The door closed behind Pila. I felt again for Jiala’s pulse. It was nearly gone. The drug of bramble has been used by assassins and thwarted lovers. Its poison produces an overwhelming sleep that succumbs to deeper darkness. It squeezes the heart and slows it until blood flows like cold syrup, and then stops entirely, frozen, preserving a body, sometimes for years, until rats and mice and flies burrow deep and tear the body apart from within.
And now bramble’s poisonous threads covered Jiala’s skin. I took a copper rod and ran it over her arms. Then touched mint to her flesh. With a pair of brass pincers, I began plucking the threads from her skin. Setting them in a pottery bowl beside me so that I wouldn’t carelessly touch them myself. Working as quickly as I could. Knowing that I couldn’t work fast enough. There were dozens of them, dozens and dozens. More coated her clothing but they didn’t matter. Her skin was covered. Too many, and yet still I plucked.
Jiala’s eyelids fluttered. She gazed up from under heavy lashes, dark eyes thick with bramble’s influence.
“Do I have enough?” she murmured.
“Enough what, child?” I continued plucking threads from her skin.
“Enough… seeds… to buy back my bed.”
I tried to answer, but no words came. My heart felt as if it was squeezed by Halizak’s Prison, running out liquid and dead.