‘The Third Augustan,’ he says. His unit, bless his heart, not his home town.
‘Born to the legion,’ I say, before anyone can guffaw. ‘You ever met a girl?’
‘Oh, yes, Learnèd!’ He just wants to get something right. If I’m any judge, he has indeed met girls, but remains somewhat confused about where things go from there.
‘Watch this one,’ I tell Father Fishy, who looks utterly aghast. ‘He’s got fire in his eyes and the phallus of a drunken satyr under his belt. Given five minutes alone, he won’t just have mounted that thing, it’ll be pregnant, and then we’ll be in trouble. Isn’t that right, legionary?’
The boy from the Third Augustan is shaking his head vigorously, but the others have started to smile, and the weirding beauty of the Chamber is no longer the only thing in the room. Now there’s a legion post in here, and soon someone’ll be playing dice in the corner, between shifts. Good. One more thing to do, so that the ripples of this are only good.
‘Who’s in this man’s squad? You? Excellent. This is Carthage, soldier – take him out to meet some good-hearted artists’ models, or we’ll none of us be safe!’ More laughter, louder and more genuine. Familiar ground.
The student body – ho ho ho – will eat the boy alive, in the best possible way. And now we are all family, engaged in the family project of getting this lad his first girlfriend, and the room belongs to us. I wave the whole business away with a growl of ‘Carry on’, and they all get back to what they were about. The room lifts. In fairness to Fishy, he tumbles to what’s happened and looks just a little bit impressed.
We walk around the Chamber so that I can see it from all sides. It doesn’t look much like a breast, but you work with what you’ve got.
A channel in the perfect floor leads down beneath it to the entrance, and I realise belatedly that Scipio – this is, or was, his house – must have had a new deck laid at what would be chest high over the old one to accommodate his prize. We’re walking on a rostrum, like a stage, and our footsteps echo beneath us. My mind, always helpful in bad situations, makes haste to conjure an image of Egyptian burial architecture, poisons and spiked pits and crocodiles lurking in the dark, smashing up through the floor to eat.
‘Are you well, Learnèd?’ Father Fishy says.
‘There is something here,’ I tell him, which has the advantage of being both obviously true and potentially spiritual. Am I a fraud, then, or a scholar? I am both, of course, as we all are. Half of what I know I do not believe. Half of what I believe I cannot prove. For the rest, I hope to muddle through and my mistakes go without comment.
‘We were together in the Chamber,’ Fishy says, ‘discussing its marvels. The images and words. The … well, you will see. He was like a child with a toy, or a man meeting his bride. He was full of joy. Then … I heard no sound.’ He ducks his head against the recollection.
‘They were alone for the count of a minute,’ the big legionary says. ‘Not more. I went to get water for them to drink.’
Fishy nods. ‘It was swift. Without warning. I could taste the blood in the air, Learnèd. My gut knew it before my eyes beheld. Even then I was unprepared.’
‘You are prepared now,’ I tell him.
He looks and realises that I mean he has me, and that actually makes him feel better.
Alas, I can exorcise everyone else’s fear, but I can’t do anything about my own.
Father Fishy makes a little noise of affirmation, and – not without a quick check for any stray crocodiles – we duck down into the channel.
*
Most people call it the Chamber of Solomon, but in the story it wasn’t Solomon’s at all, it was his wife’s. Her name was Tarset, and she was the daughter of a pharaoh of Egypt. I imagine it would have been something of a jolt for Tarset to marry Solomon and be just one of hundreds of wives – let alone that in Egypt women had all the same rights as men, which was hardly the case under Solomon’s rule. She’s blamed for leading her husband into idolatry, but I rather think that just means she insisted he treat her with respect.
Comparative marriage traditions of the ancient world to one side: the Chamber itself was supposedly a gift to the women of Egypt from the mother goddess, Isis, and within its walls the flow of time itself is reputedly stilled, so that all manner of high magics are possible. Isis, of course, pre-dates Mary, the mother of Jesus, but God exists outside time, and in His palm Mary extends from her ascension backwards to the Creation just as surely as she does forwards into eternity, and loves her ancestors as if they were her own children, and her Son’s. Thus, Isis the pagan witch is transformed into Isis the veiled face of the Virgin, and all is well with the church politics of the Roman Empire in the East.
The Chamber, as described, is perfectly circular in plan, and domed. It is written that the supplicant enters from below to see the smiling face of the goddess drawn upon the ceiling in a tracery of silver against a midnight mosaic of lapis lazuli. Into this dome are set diamonds in the pattern of the constellations. Around the walls are the images of the four cardinal souls: two men, a woman and a fourth which might be either, and they are scattered across history. Along with the Goddess, they are the bridge between the divine world and the temporal one, and all of them, even her, are concealed in the shadow of the Pentemychos, itself concealed, so that this is the most invisible of pantheons. The divine Mother touches the other four with spirit, and they in turn give her: matter to be shaped as earth; the flow of time without which there is no life; harmony, lest the making unravel itself; and death, so that no one thing shall overrun the others. Here, in this place, angels can be birthed, demons shattered, and miracles made like loaves of bread for market. With the right knowledge, an alchemist working within the Chamber might produce an elixir to offset age and return youth to one who drinks it; transform sickness into abundance; heal any injury and even raise the dead; but the greatest gift of the Chamber is the eternal Alkahest, the Universal Solvent that will free any prisoner and dissolve not only all solid matter but also oaths, curses, kingdoms, years and centuries, even damnation itself. In a very real sense, the Alkahest is the power of God. Armed with it, one might undo the first sin and make the world a new heaven, pull down the sky, or seal the abyss forever and preserve What Is from What Is To Come. The Alkahest is the ink in which Isis writes the book of destiny. It is the tears that fell from the Virgin’s eyes on the day of the Crucifixion.
Since you’re not a fool, you may have wondered why I’m not happier to see it. Here am I: a woman who would do anything to turn back time to some perfect moment, heal my sick child, and preserve that instant, live in it with my love and our small family, and be forever content. Or perhaps only some of those things, for I realise I have come to value what I am far above what I was then. Perhaps just my son would be enough. That would be my heaven, and if I might have it I would drag every man, woman, child and angel to salvation, even the demons of hell I would redeem, and I would offer all this up to the God as tribute for the single life I clawed back.
If you’re better than merely ‘not a fool’ you may also have spotted the little logical flaw in this happy circumstance: if the Universal Solvent will dissolve anything, even clay and stone, even glass, even gold, even the soul, then how on earth do you put it in a bottle? How, having made it, do you prevent it from leaking away immediately and dissolving the whole world into smoke?
The Scroll of the Chamber, more formally the Quaerendo Invenietis, was discovered two decades ago in Carthage in a cache of documents themselves rescued from the burning of the Great Library by Aurelian, and it incidentally provides the answer. In fact, it was this answer that made the whole document credible to the faculty and in particular to the masters of alchemy at the time. It was elegant and anti-recursive: it provided a solution to the problem of infinite dissolution, and they were very impressed with it, not least because it pandered to their vanity. If the Chamber of Isis was needed to perform these legendary operations of the craft, then their fail
ure to perform them without it was not their fault, and if the difficulty of making the Alkahest could be overcome then their whole discipline was once again not only practical – if lacking a crucial ingredient – but also the highest field of military, theological, financial and philosophical endeavour imaginable. They went from being a fringe science to having a claim upon supremacy at the centre, and any court that could have found the Chamber would instantly have had at its disposal a host of learned men and a few women to make full use of its power.
In particular, the discovery of the Scroll of the Chamber saw the elevation of an old man – named, in Latin, Iacobus Amatus, but generally more derided than loved and more African than Roman – who had been until that time something of a joke among the faculty for his drinking and his occasional catastrophic experiments, but perhaps even more for his unfashionable sentimentality, because he was very kind. He was a shockingly poor alchemist, but he loved to tinker and it would have been a cold heart indeed to tell him he had no talent in that direction. In honesty, he was by no means the worst we had. He retired four years ago, into a delighted age, and he has no idea to this day that the document he validated and which precipitated his rise to fame was a ridiculous forgery.
Yes, indeed. The entire thing, the foundational document of what you might call Isisean studies, is a lie from beginning to end.
That bald lascivious eagle Hortensus was supposed to be the one. Hortensus would have jumped all over it, and when he’d made his bed I’d have had him lie in it and smothered him with his pillows. That was the idea, but once the thing was done there was no going back. I’d not have ruined Iacobus Amatus for all the world. Amatus was Augustine’s friend – his true father, almost, because the man life had cast in that role was unsuited: a bullying, coarse creature who relished copulation and despised affection, and who once, in a bathhouse, took note of his young son’s unanticipated erection and proclaimed to the room that such a member could only signify many children and a great future. I think – I know – Augustine took a great injury from that moment of intrusion and never forgave his father for it. That he also never forgave his body for an autonomous response to warmth and the memory of a pretty housegirl I think accounts for much of the rest of his life, and indeed for parts of mine.
Amatus was a good fellow. You could find sages and masters in Carthage then to crew a fleet of ships – though they’d all sink – but while you might without difficulty seek and receive tuition in art, literature, rhetoric (above all else, rhetoric), music, medicine and physical science, indeed you could walk a hundred miles around the city and still not find a fellow to teach you how to become a merely decent human being until you found Amatus. He had been some species of war hero for a while, and then tired of it. He lived, he gave of his love, and from time to time he unwisely exploded his rooms, but never very dangerously and never without some hopeful, fascinating reason. To expose him to the disdain of Carthage would have been monstrous. And by then, anyway, there were rice bowls aplenty which would have been broken by the revelation. I’m not sure I could have declared the truth and been believed, even if I’d been minded to do so.
There is no Chamber of Isis, and never was. It was not lost in the reign of Rehoboam, nor stolen back in pieces after the death of Tarset by a secret Egyptian order of sorcerers. It was not retrieved by the priestesses of Isis to a secret temple, nor taken after Zenobia’s rebellion as a trophy to Rome, nor given in turn to the King of Britain by an emperor ignorant of what he had. It was not carried back again in payment of a debt, nor sunk in the clear green sea off Neopolis. I have heard all these, and more, but the Chamber never existed. The name of Solomon’s pharaonic wife is lost to us, and always was, and she may or may not have given a rat’s arse about respect, but surely her attributes did not include a magical room which stopped time.
I should know. I am the author of the Scroll. I know of my own recollection and experience that there is no truth in it, however occult or oblique. It is a fiction plucked from the air while I was drunk and angry, realised over a fortnight of half-hearted fakery and laid out as a prank. There are half a dozen ways in which its mendacity should have been uncovered long ago. The gold leaf is not gold; the ink is the wrong colour, and not faded enough. The vellum comes from the wrong animal. The script is filled with errors, because I was only somewhat familiar with the Hebrew alphabet and language. The dyes and pigments are inappropriate. There is one glaring anachronism. There is no other work detailing the life of the Egyptian wife, and no supporting record of the Chamber – though one or two scrolls and codices, once you’ve been told it exists, seem to make reference to it in passing. That seeming is an illusion, a false pattern emerging from the spinning of a wheel. The Scroll is a ghost book, a summoner of phantasms and dreams. It is a dream itself, that I should never have written down.
They explain the flaws away. The leaf, we are now told, has been peeled off and replaced with dross in a time of need; the ink has been overwritten to preserve the manuscript; the vellum reveals the existence of a new trade route of which we were previously unaware; the writing evidently belongs to a young scribe perhaps fleeing some destruction, and this is his personal record of a story his masters told; he left spaces for the illustrations and copied them later, when he had access to different materials from those used in contemporary works; he came back subsequently and added text to give himself the appearance of foresight. There were other documents which told this story, but they were destroyed by fire.
The Scroll was supposed to fool one overfamiliar tutor and land him in hot water. That is all. The Chamber of Isis was never built, never designed, never contemplated until I conceived of it. God, certainly, could be reckoned its ultimate author, but then if we are to believe what we are taught then He is the author of everything, from the smell of hibiscus to frogspawn and taxes.
There is no hope here, in this place, of raising up my son. No more than in my dream of last night. The Chamber is a lie.
And yet here it is in this room, most immanently real and beautiful, and washed, already, in the blood of a sacrifice. It is nonsense given form and weight to work upon the world. The image of Isis is curved back against the dome, so that only from the stair does it look appropriately benign. I hadn’t considered the difficulty of that portrait when I described it. The face is huge and far too close, and the shape of it shifts as you move so that Isis appears to stand outside the world and be peering in, as if we are the ones who are trapped on a flat surface and she is trying to comprehend our smallness. Isis, or Mother Mary, or something else that is so much less kind: her eyes are stars, and perhaps she in turn is just a mask they wear so that we do not have the sense to hide.
The artist is very talented, and he or she has embellished my words, put symbols and secrets to unlock into the work. Whatever you might look for, you will find echoes of it, hints and allegations of occulted truths. Mystical texts are inscribed here almost profligately, offering their meanings like fruit trees in late summer. This panel is Pythagoras, that one is an Orphic text on the transmigration of souls. Over there is something that could be a source for Hermes Trismegistos, or a carefully adulterated quotation from his work. The words of the Avesta are here, and this is a palindrome from the Ginza Rabba. All genuine texts of religion, all deeply held and loved by their adherents, all bound together into a sublime flimflam. There is more than I ever imagined: more detail, more scholarship. My jest has outgrown me – and in that evolution has become something far more frightening. This is work and effort and scholarship: a grand design of state or theology. Someone is perpetrating a ruse, political or personal, into whose path dead Scipio and Father Fishy have fallen. Fishy, in turn, has settled on me – I suspect as the most discreet and most proximate alchemist to whom he could safely turn – to advise him on the murder in this distressing spiritual context. What he imagines I can achieve, I cannot think. Unless he knows, or someone does, that there is no greater expert than I. Was his eye guided in my direction?
Is it coincidence that draws me into this plot, who authored the lie on which it turns, or is it meant? Does the one behind this know that there is no Chamber at all, or is that the point, to smoke out the true crucible of the goddess by presenting a false one? That would be a grand enough purpose for a forgery of this magnitude. It is a paradox, otherwise: what possible benefit of building this Chamber could outweigh the cost? The materials alone are a nation’s ransom. And if a personal grudge were carried to such an extreme, the misperception of risk and reward is doubly insane. The death of Scipio, friend to the Eastern Emperor, Flavius Arcadius, will bring a harrowing far worse than any benefit might outweigh. Cicero said it, in another place: only an emperor could create such a thing, but one cannot imagine an emperor desiring it. A god, perhaps, might bid so high – or a Titan.
A cold whisper runs along my neck and arms, plucking my skin and raising the hairs.
As I look around at this gorgeous, awful, enormous thing made in the image that I wrote drunk and stupid, there is one last horror to be swallowed down. The four cardinal souls are painted in perfect balance around the Chamber. In the west is a prisoner held to a stone table by spiderwebs, and over that table stands the figure of an otherworldly gaoler whose body is made entirely out of eyes. Does the captive flinch from that scrutiny, or yearn for it? And which are we to identify as a friend? Perhaps they can no more be separated than Prometheus and his eagle.
North is a satyr surrounded by gold coins, each picked out from the wood of the Chamber in true gold so that looking at him is vertiginous, the wall projecting itself back and back into an endless dark. He stands on a pinnacle of emerald stone carved with nymphs and geometric signs, above an ocean full of shadow.