Sturgeon and carp gasped in the shallow waters at Leadenhall, and small craft flung out of the Thames by its rising, perched like miniature arks on miniature Ararats, marooned and becalmed as the waters began to recede.
Jack found the rowboat, and rowed slowly and sadly downriver back to London Bridge. The Keeper of the Tides was leaning out of his poop, and he hailed Jack.
‘What ho, Jack? What ho?’
But Jack only shook his head and rowed on. He had lost Silver and he had lost Crispis. He had lost his mother. He had lost his fight. He felt that he had lost himself.
At length he reached the water-gate of The Level on the Strand. By now the cold of the barrel had turned the whole boat to white ice. Jack didn’t care; he shouldered the barrel once more and took it straight upstairs to Roger Rover’s chamber, where he found his old master, and the great alchemist, John Dee.
‘I have failed,’ he said simply, and two tears fell down his face and on to the floor. He stared at them; they were tiny drops of solid gold.
John Dee bent down and picked them up and put them on the table. ‘You are the Radiant Boy,’ he said.
‘And what of it?’ said Jack. ‘I have failed.’
John Dee shook his head. ‘The Battle of the Sun is not done, my good Jack; it has begun.’
THE CITY OF GOLD
Already it had begun.
‘It was my cart and it’s my cartwheel!’
‘Give that to me, it’s mine! Mine had the spoke missing!’
‘It’s a trick, whatever it is!’
‘No! It’s solid gold, I tell you!’
The city was changing colour. And texture. And form. And matter. The city was turning into gold.
The first report was when two carters were hauled to the bench for fighting in the street over a cartwheel. But when the magistrate saw the cartwheel, he confiscated it as evidence, and neither the magistrate nor the wheel were ever seen again.
It began with ordinary objects: pokers, tongs, hammers, cups. No longer iron or copper, or forged or blasted – all solid gold.
And the fights – you should have seen the fights. Two people who had been friends for life had each other by the throat over a platter of meat, and not for the meat but for the platter.
A man kicking a stone saw it turn to a golden nugget.
A boy feeding his donkey saw the nosebag switch from coarse weave to shining woven threads of gold.
A woman drying her washing in Fynnesbury Fields found that all her master’s linen was stiff as armour and shining in the sun. When she tried to pick it up, she fell down. Half a dozen soldiers made off with it, and she was left with a pair of solid gold stockings; she ran with them all the way home.
Gold. Everywhere gold.
No one slept. Men, women and children prowled the streets with lanterns searching for golden objects, for no one knew when it would happen or what it would be, and you could take a spoon and wish it to be gold and waste your breath, or you could go outside and trip straight over a solid gold ball of horse dung.
The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths had their best men testing and proving and weighing the matter that came through their doors. It was real gold.
No one went to work. Why mill flour or sweep floors, make clothes, mend saddles, shoe horses, twist iron for carts or plait ropes for ships? Why boil tar or tan leather, why drive cattle, why fish, why water, why sow or plant, why harvest, bake or cook?
If everything were gold, everyone would soon be rich. No need to do a thing!
There was a blacksmith shod a horse and, as he nailed the last shoe, he saw the horse’s hoof gleaming. Straight away he pulled off the shoe and left the horse where it stood, and went and sold the horseshoe and took himself to an inn and drank so much that he fell in the Thames and was drowned.
There was a man, and the roof of his house turned to gold overnight while he slept, and he was woken at dawn by the sound of tearing and pulling and banging and shouting, and all his neighbours were on his roof stripping off the gold tiles, and because the man was old, by the time his son came to save him, there was no roof left, so that he was poorer when he woke than when he went to sleep, in spite of his roof being gold, for what is the good of a golden roof if it is no roof at all?
There was a woman rocking her baby in its cradle, and as she rocked and sang a lullaby, the cradle turned to solid gold, so heavy that it fell through the floorboards, the baby with it, and when the mother ran downstairs, she found a mob of men dragging the cradle away, and her babe thrown out and left by the road. She picked up the child and soothed it, and to her the child seemed better than gold, but as she soothed and walked and walked and soothed, a man came by in a black cloak, and he asked her if she was poor, and she replied that she was, and he asked if she would rather be rich, and she said at what cost?
And the man in the cloak laughed and took her baby and held him up to the sun and the baby turned to gold.
Nothing was safe. Nothing was solid. Whatever you had might change its nature at any moment. The whole city was like a gambling den, where men and women waited and watched, betting with their lives and livelihoods that something near them soon would turn to gold.
And while they waited, idle, covetous, what they had rotted and wasted, withered and died.
As objects changed their nature, so did people. Honest men turned into thieves, boys went out in mobs, smashing houses, sinking boats. Women who had been friends all their lives stole from one another, and plotted how to be rich.
At the house on the Strand, all the servants had one by one left to seek their fortune, and so Jack and Roger Rover were left to cook the food and fetch the water for themselves. John Dee had moved himself into the house and was constructing a makeshift laboratory in Roger Rover’s study. He warned Jack and Sir Roger not to leave the house in case of attacks from the Magus.
‘Didn’t you tell me the man was an impostor?’ said Roger Rover.
‘I was mistaken,’ said John Dee. ‘And now I must protect us all as well as I am able.’
He was determined to free Silver from the barrel of mercury that stood frozen solid in Roger Rover’s study, and not fifty fires could warm it.
Every day Jack went down to where Sir Boris was guarding his mother – still stone but for her golden hair – and when he had talked to his mother a little while, although she could not answer, he asked the huge knight to help with the horses and the heavy work, and the Knight did.
And sometimes, in spite of John Dee’s warnings, Jack slipped out, unnoticed, into the teeming stirring bewildering city of lies and gold.
* * *
‘Gold! Gold! All gold! Golden turds for sale!’
A woman had discovered that her privy was stacked with golden turds; long ones, fat ones, short ones, clotted ones, some with golden fishbones sticking out the sides.
This trade in turds was so brisk and prosperous that a particular boy, whose turds all proved to be golden, was stuffed with treacle all day long, and his eliminations caught in a golden bucket and at once put up for sale.
Sadly, after a week, the poor child died of a surfeit of treacle and the woman was forced to close her booth.
A neighbour, seeing she had gone, and knowing how stupid people are where money is concerned, took all her own un-golden turds from her un-golden privy pot, and painted them with a mixture of white lead before rolling them in gold leaf. They sold as briskly as before, and the woman left the country before she was caught.
Leaving the country is one thing, leaving a husband behind is another, and he was buried up to his neck in a steaming heap of donkey dung by a furious mob of cheated gold-mongers.
As Jack walked among the restless crowds one day he saw Abel Darkwater haranguing a man at the riverside. The man was driving sheep on to a boat, but Jack could see that these sheep were different – they had golden fleeces.
Jack kept hidden until he had a chance to dart down nearer. As he watched, he saw each sheep, dirty and grey, come out
of its pen and pass on to the boat, and as it did so, its fleece turned to gold. Then, as Jack peered closer, he saw the animals themselves breathe their last breath as they became golden replicas of themselves.
Jack remembered the gold fish that the Keeper of the Tides had pulled out of the Thames.
Objects were one thing, but if animals were gold, then soon there would be nothing to eat, and if animals were gold – what about people?
The boat moved out, low in the water, under its heavy cargo. Was Abel Darkwater amassing his treasure, ready to leave London? And what of the Magus?
The Keeper of the Tides had noticed a man in a black cloak standing upright in a dull golden boat. The boat was rowed, oar by oar, by the Creature(s) the Keeper had seen before, and near the Female sat a dejected dog.
As the Keeper watched, the man in black pinned a something of some kind to the pier of London Bridge, and then motioned to his servants to row him away. Swiftly they did so.
‘Curious!’ said the Keeper of the Tides to himself, and thinking that no one should be pinning something of any kind to his bridge, he decided to investigate.
Jack, pushing his way through the thronged streets of avid faces, was puzzling with himself about the Magus’s true intentions. The Magus was only interested in power and in riches, but as the city turned to gold, its citizens were the ones running away with the treasure.
There was something here that Jack didn’t understand, and it had something to do with the golden sheep . . .
Jack made his way back to the house on the Strand, where he found John Dee and Roger Rover standing in the courtyard. A woman was with them – Jack didn’t know her, but she was carrying a golden baby.
‘Jack!’ said John Dee. ‘Matters are serious and we must speak together. But tell me, have you still those seeds that the Dragon gave you? The ones that rescued you and turned poor Crispis yellow?’
‘In my mother’s chamber,’ replied Jack, his heart sinking as he thought again of poor lost Crispis.
‘Then bring them at once!’ said John Dee.
Jack ran off, but when he got to the mantelpiece where he had left the three seeds in the cup, he found only two.
‘That’s odd,’ said Jack to himself, but he ran back and gave what he had to John Dee, without saying that one was missing.
‘We must plant these, one in each courtyard,’ said John Dee, ‘and they will give the house more protection than I can offer it, for these seeds contain in them a very ancient magic. If we do not use them, we, like everything else, may turn to gold!’
‘My baby!’ wailed the woman.
‘Wait,’ said John Dee. ‘Watch!’
And he planted the first sunflower in a patch of earth in the courtyard.
It grew. It grew. It grew. It grew.
When it was perhaps twenty feet tall and thick and strong, it turned its face to the sun and made a gigantic yellow and black fire, as wide across as a cartwheel. As its shadow fell into the courtyard, its shadow was yellow like the sun.
‘Stand with your baby in the shadow of the sunflower,’ commanded John Dee.
The woman did so, and immediately the baby that had been rigid gold began to soften, and then it began to cry, and then it curled its fists around its mother’s hair, and its mother laughed and cried all at once for her baby was more to her than a whole world of gold.
The only change that anyone could see was that the baby had golden hair.
‘Remarkable!’ said Roger Rover.
‘We will now plant the second sunflower in the same way,’ said John Dee, ‘and all about us will stay as it is – as it should be.’
‘I understand why the Magus wants gold,’ said Jack, ‘but I don’t understand why everything has to be gold; every nail, latch, fish and person!’
‘Very soon you will understand,’ said John Dee. ‘By tomorrow morning you will see for yourself why he is doing this. Now this night I must visit the Queen, for the very power of the throne is challenged by the Magus, but first, I believe that I can return Silver to you!’
‘But she is dissolved!’ said Jack.
‘The Dissolutio is not the end of the matter,’ said John Dee. ‘Come with me and I will show you a great wonder!’
A BARREL OF SILVERS
Jack went with John Dee to Roger Rover’s study that had become an alchemist’s laboratory. There were the familiar alembics and retorts, and a small furnace burning in the fireplace.
The barrel of mercury had been opened.
Jack looked inside. All he could see was thick liquid silver.
‘Observe!’ said John Dee, and with a cup he scooped out some of the mercury and poured it into a shallow bowl, where it splintered into a thousand tiny droplets.
Jack looked closely, and to his horror he saw that in each droplet was a miniature Silver.
‘There are millions of her!’ he cried.
‘And none at all,’ replied John Dee, ‘for while she is dissolved like this she is in a state of potentiality. Do you know what that means, Jack?’
Jack shook his head. John Dee smiled. ‘I will train you, Jack, after we have won this Battle of the Sun, and you shall learn what it is to be an alchemist.’
‘I am an ordinary boy,’ said Jack.
‘You are the Radiant Boy, and the power within you is great – yet you, like Silver, are in potential.’
‘There aren’t millions of me,’ objected Jack.
‘Are there not? You are young. Are there not many Jacks jostling inside you to see which will become the one Jack, the real Jack?’
Jack went back to look at the Silvers, each in their little ball. John Dee continued. ‘Potential comes from the Latin word potens, and that means power. To have potential is to have power that is not shaped into something evident and purposeful. To shape a life needs hard work and training – as well as power. In our great art of alchemy, to be in potential is to be ready and to able, yet more than that is needed. Silver must give up her present state of being endless Silvers and become one Silver. She must choose to be who she is.’
‘How can that be?’ asked Jack in wonder.
‘Heat the furnace!’ said John Dee. ‘I have everything at hand and you must assist me.’
Outside in the courtyard, Roger Rover was haggling with his groom over a jug of water and a pig. The jug of water was a jug of water, and Roger Rover had drawn it himself from the well. The pig was made of solid gold.
‘There’s no water to be had this side of London Bridge,’ said the groom. ‘I set off to seek my fortune – heard the streets were paved with gold, and they are. Gold wherever you look – gold, gold, gold, but what are we going to eat and what are we going to drink when the whole place is nothing but gold?’
Roger Rover gave his groom the jug and the man drank the lot in one greedy swallow.
‘Fill a barrel,’ said Roger Rover, ‘and roll it away as you please. But leave the pig.’
The groom touched his forehead, and while he busied himself Roger Rover walked thoughtfully down to the river.
The Thames was still the Thames, as bright and flowing as ever, but a man who drank the Thames would find himself swallowing all manner of infections. The very poor drank from it, but the very poor didn’t live long.
‘When everything is gold . . .’ said Roger Rover to himself, ‘yes, everything, every spoon, fork, cobblestone, crate, table and chair, hen and pig, then only what is not gold will have any value.’
‘’Tis a great evil,’ said a voice, from just below, on the river. It was a tall, elegant woman in a rich-worked gown, her face veiled, rowing her own boat, which was strange, and on a river that was nearly empty, which was stranger still.
‘’Tis a great wonder,’ said Roger Rover mildly, on his guard, for he had an apprehension that this might be the woman Jack had spoken of, the former Abbess of the Priory.
‘And yet, your own house here seems curiously unaffected,’ she said, looking at the sunflowers whose bright heads shone like sentinels
over the entire building.
‘No doubt my time is coming,’ said Roger Rover.
The Abbess nodded her head. ‘Time,’ she said, ‘is more valuable than gold.’
And in that instant Roger Rover knew who she was and where he had seen her before, when the clock that now lay in a thousand pieces in his study was ticking in her hands, in front of the Pope himself in Rome, and this woman had been bargaining for her life.
‘Maria Prophetessa!’ he said out loud, before he could stop himself.
The woman lifted her veil. Yes, it was she, neither old nor young – timeless was the word that filled his mind.
‘May I come in?’ she said, and tying her boat swiftly to a ring, she held out her hand and Roger Rover had no choice but to take it, and help her up the steps from the water-gate.
Jack had heated the furnace so hot that the room itself seemed to be wavering in the heat. The vapour from the mercury was making him feel dizzy and lightheaded, but John Dee seemed not to notice as he fitted the arms and legs on to what looked like a large wooden doll.
‘Pour the barrel of mercury into this mould,’ he commanded, ‘taking care not to spill even one drop!’
Jack did as he was told, and with his great strength swung the heavy barrel up on his shoulder, and poured the mercury carefully into the open neck of the doll.
‘Now we must fasten the head!’ said John Dee. ‘And when this part is done, if God wills it, Silver will become herself again.’
The head was fastened. Jack sat back on his heels, sweating with the heat and effort. John Dee was saying something in Latin. The room shook.
But nothing happened.
John Dee spoke again, and this time the doll shook.
Then the doll moved.
Then, as Jack watched, the doll’s blank face took on Silver’s face, and the doll’s stiff limbs began to assume the contours of Silver’s body.
But then, like those dolls cut out from a folded sheet of paper, not one Silver but seven appeared in the room.