Alys Clare: The Way Between the Worlds

For what remained of the night, I lay worrying at the problem. Then a faint glimmer of light penetrated into my little room around the edge of the leather blinds, and somewhere in the town I heard a cock crow. I slipped out of bed, drew my gown on over my shift, tidied my hair and put on a clean white coif and, my shoes in my hand, went backwards down the ladder and crept along the dark hall to the passage that led down to the crypt. Gurdyman, I knew, was an early riser; that is, on days when he slept at all.

I found him standing before his workbench, quite still, his arms crossed and a look of intense concentration on his face. On the bench, a glass vessel rested on an iron tripod and beneath it a flame burned. Some liquid in the vessel was giving off pale blue steam and it smelt vaguely of irises.

I said tentatively, ‘Gurdyman? May I speak to you?’

He spun round, and for a moment his bright blue eyes gazed blankly at me as if he had quite forgotten who I was and what I was doing there. I was used to this and simply waited. Then he shook his head a couple of times as if to clear away whatever had been preoccupying him and said, ‘Of course, Lassair.’ Taking in the fact that I was dressed ready for the day, he added, ‘Morning already!’

‘Have you been up all night?’ I was sure he had and, even as I asked the question, I was moving over to the small table where he habitually kept a flagon of small beer and a little food. I spread butter on a piece of rather dry bread, cutting a slice of rich cheese and adding it to the bread. Handing it to him, I watched as absently he took a bite and began to chew.

‘I almost have it,’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘Today I shall try one or two further variations to the formula, then we shall see.’ Turning to me, he gave me a brilliant smile and said, ‘Oh, yes, we shall see!’

I smiled back. I was glad to see him eating, for I knew that he often neglected himself. I did not expect him to tell me what he was trying to do. He was, after all, the master; I was only the young and very inexperienced pupil.

‘I thought that today we could begin on our study of the rudiments of alchemy,’ he said, still chewing. ‘I plan to begin by showing you some of the materials that are employed and the symbols that represent them, proceeding to a demonstration of a simple purification process.’

‘Oh-’ Half-excited, half-alarmed, I did not know how to respond.

‘But you have come to me on another matter, I see,’ he went on. ‘You asked to speak to me; please, go ahead.’

I had already decided on what to say, and now, as quickly and succinctly as I could, I told him about my dreams and the summoning words that I had received the previous night. He did not interrupt and when I had finished, he said thoughtfully, ‘Hmm.’

I waited. After a moment, he said, ‘You are afraid of whatever lurks in the mist.’

‘I am,’ I agreed.

He looked straight into my eyes. ‘Do you feel you must obey the summons, for all that you do not know from whom it comes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you do not believe that the fearsome entity in the mist spoke the words, for if you did you would not even contemplate replying to whoever is calling for you, never mind answering the summons.’

I had not thought of that. ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ I said slowly. I did not know who had put those words inside my head, but in my heart I knew it was someone close to me. As I heard them, it was almost like listening to my own thoughts.

Gurdyman finished his bread and cheese, drained his mug of beer and wiped his mouth and his fingers on a clean white napkin. Then he said decisively, ‘For the moment, let us put aside the dreams. If this message is as urgent as you believe, then it will come to you again.’

I did not like the thought of that. The three dreams I’d had so far had shown a distinct escalation in their power to frighten me, and I dreaded what might come next. But Gurdyman was still speaking, so I made myself listen.

‘.?.?. a list of those people who you think might have cause to ask you to help them,’ he was saying. ‘Your family, naturally, and your friends in Aelf Fen. Sibert, for example.’

Sibert was indeed my friend, and I could well believe that it was he who had summoned me. We had shared danger before and knew we could depend on each other.

‘Who else?’ Gurdyman had reached for a sharpened quill and a scrap of vellum, and was busy writing as he spoke. ‘You have healed many people, Lassair, and perhaps one who you treated successfully wishes to ask for your help once more.’ Watching over his shoulder, I saw him write, in beautiful, even letters, former patients , followed by a question mark.

I contributed one or two more suggestions, for I had relatives whom Gurdyman did not know about and it was always possible one of them needed me. Then, when his questioning expression elicited from me no further names, he rolled up the ragged piece of vellum, put it aside and said, ‘Now, to work.’

Even as I went wide-eyed into my first lesson in alchemy, I did not forget about the dreams and the summoning words, and I knew Gurdyman did not either. It was one of his habits, I was discovering, to outline a problem, note down all the details and then turn his mind to something quite different. He had an idea that the mind, given a problem to solve, was quite happy to get on with it while the body was engaged in other tasks. I spent the day taking from his hands bottles of strange liquid, fragments of various metals, hunks and chunks of materials, repeating after him their strange names: caustic lime, nitre oil, vitriol, borax, burned alum. Then came a bewildering assortment of receptacles and instruments: alembic, crucible, retort, receiver and even a skull. He unrolled a fresh piece of vellum and instructed me to write out the names and the corresponding symbols. Later, I knew, I would have to commit it all to memory.

Late in the day, Gurdyman consulted his astrological charts and announced that the Sun was in Aries in the Eleventh House and both the ascendant and Mars in Gemini in the First. He gave me a thoughtful look. ‘Your sun is in Gemini, as are your Mercury and Venus,’ he observed, ‘and your Mars and Jupiter in Aries. You are air and fire, and you totally lack earth and water.’ I wondered rather apprehensively how he knew. My aunt Edild had once cast my birth chart, but it was highly unlikely she’d ever shown it to Gurdyman. He stared at me thoughtfully for a few moments then, smiling, said softly, ‘I have just the thing.’

My first experiment in alchemy consisted of grinding some dried leaves and flowers in a pestle and mortar, mixing them with water and then heating the liquid in a still over the bright flame of an oil lamp that Gurdyman called a wick. I watched as the liquid turned to steam — Gurdyman said this process was known as vaporizing — and then, entranced, I saw tiny droplets begin to collect in a separate vessel that he called the receiver. Finally, when all was finished and the glass vessels had cooled down enough to touch, he extracted a drop of the new substance and held it out to me to sniff at. It smelt delicious; like summer flowers with the sun on them.

‘One becomes two, two becomes three and out of the third comes the one as the fourth,’ he intoned. Then, his distant expression softening into a smile, he said, ‘We took flowers and water, and we turned them into this sweet perfume.’

My mouth was open in surprise. I said, somewhat dimly, ‘Oh.’ Then, recovering a little wit, I added, ‘What did you mean about this being just the thing?’

‘You are air and fire. We used fire to harness water and the product of the earth.’

‘The flowers?’

‘The flowers. With our materials we made a substance — perfume — that belongs to the air. Do you see?’