Джералд Керш - Nightshade and Damnations

“You had them still, Corporal Cuckoo?”

“What do you think? Sure I had them, wrapped up in a bit of linen and tied round my waist—four pieces of . . . not paper, the other stuff, parchment. That’s it, parchment. Folded across, and sewn up along the fold. The outside bit was blank, like a cover. But the six pages inside were all written over. The hell of it was, I couldn’t read. I’d never been learned. See? Well, I had the best part of my two gold pieces left, and I pushed on to Paris.”

I asked: “Didn’t Ambroise Paré say anything?”

Corporal Cuckoo sneered again. “What the hell could he say?” he asked. “Say what? Say he’d resurrected the dead with his digestive? That would have finished him for sure. Where was his evidence? And you can bet your life that kid Jehan kept his mouth shut: he wouldn’t want the doctor to know he’d squealed. See? No, nobody said a word. I got into Paris okay.”

“What did you do there?” I asked.

“My idea was to find somebody I could trust, to read those papers for me, see? If you want to know how I got my living, well, I did the best I could . . . never mind what. Well, one night, in a place where I was, I came across a student, mooching drinks, an educated man with no place to sleep. I showed him the doctor’s papers, and asked him what they meant. They made him think a bit, but he got the hang of them. The doctor had written down just how he’d mixed that digestive of his, and that only filled up one page. Four of the other pages were full of figures, and the only other writing was on the last page. It was all about me. And how he’d cured me.”

I said: “With the yolks of eggs, oil of roses, and turpentine?”

Corporal Cuckoo nodded, and said: “Yeahp. Them three and something else.”

I said: “I’ll bet you anything you like I know what the fourth ingredient is, in this digestive.”

“What’ll you bet?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.

I said: “I’ll bet you a beehive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, Corporal, it stands to reason. You said you wanted to raise chickens, roses, and bees. You said you wanted to go south for turpentine. You accounted for egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine in Doctor Paré’s formula. What would a man like you want with bees? Obviously the fourth ingredient is honey.”

“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “You’re right, bub. The doctor slipped in some honey. . . .” He opened a jackknife, looked at me narrowly, then snapped the blade back again and pocketed the knife, saying: “You don’t know the proportions. You don’t know how to mix the stuff. You don’t know how hot it ought to be, or how slow you’ve got to let it cool.”

“So you have the secret of life?” I said. “You’re four hundred years old, and wounds can’t kill you. It only takes a certain mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. . . . Is that right?”

“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“Well, didn’t you think of buying the ingredients and mixing them yourself?”

“Well, yes, I did. The doctor had said in his notes how the digestive he’d given me and Captain Le Rat had been kept in a bottle in the dark for two years. So I made a wine bottle full of the stuff and kept it covered up away from the light for two years, wherever I went. Then me and some friends of mine got into a bit of trouble, and one of my friends, a guy called Pierre Solitude got a pistol bullet in the chest. I tried the stuff on him, but he died. At the same time I got a sword-thrust in the side. Believe me or not, that healed up in nine hours, inside and out, of its own accord. You can make what you like of that. . . . It all came out of something to do with robbing a church.

“I got out of France, and lived as best I could for about a year until I found myself in Salzburg. That was about four years after the battle in the Pass of Suze. Well, in Salzburg I came across some guy who told me that the greatest doctor in the world was in town. I remember that doctor’s name, because, well, who wouldn’t? It was Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He’d been a big shot in Basle a few years before. He was otherwise known as Paracelsus. He wasn’t doing much then.’ He hung around, most of the time, drinking himself crazy in a wine cellar called The Three Doves. I met him there one night—it must have been in 1541—and said my piece when nobody else was listening.” Corporal Cuckoo laughed harshly.

I said: “Paracelsus was a very great man. He was one of the great doctors of the world.”

“Oh, hell, he was only a fat old drunk. Certainly was higher than a kite when I saw him. Yelling his head off, banging on the table with an empty can. When I told him about this stuff, in strict confidence, he got madder than ever, called me everything he could think of—and believe me, he could think of plenty—and bent the can over my head. Broke the skin just where the hair starts. I was going to take a poke at him, but then he calmed down a bit and said in Swiss-German, I think it was, ‘Experiment, experiment! A demonstration! A demonstration! If you come back tomorrow and show me that cut perfectly healed, charlatan, I’ll listen to you.’ Then he burst out laughing, and I thought to myself, I’ll give you something to laugh at, bub. So I took a walk, and that little cut healed up and was gone inside the hour. Then I went back to show him. I’d sort of taken a liking to the old soak, see? Well, when I get back to this tavern there’s Doctor von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, if you like, lying on his back dying of a dagger stab. He’d gotten into a fight with a woodcarver, and this woodcarver was as soused as he was, see? And so he let this Paracelsus have it. I never did have no luck, and I never will. We might have got along together, me and him: I only talked to him for half an hour, but so help me, you knew who was the boss when he was there, alright! Oh well, that was that.”

“And then?” I asked.

“I’m just giving you the outline, see? If you want the whole story it’s going to cost you plenty,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I bummed around Salzburg for a year, got whipped out of town for being a beggar, got the hell out of it to Switzerland, and signed on with a bunch of paid soldiers, what they called condottieri , under a Swiss colonel, and did a bit of fighting in Italy. There was supposed to be good pickings there. But somebody stole my little bit of loot, and we never even got half our pay in the end. Then I went to France, and met a sea captain by the name of Bordelais who was carrying brandy to England and was short of a man. A fast little English pirate boat stopped us in the Channel, and grabbed the cargo, cut Bordelais’ throat and slung the crew overboard—all except me. The limey captain, Hawker, liked the look of me. I joined the crew, but I never was much of a sailor. That hooker—hell, she wasn’t bigger than one of the lifeboats on this ship—was called the Harry , after the King of England, Henry VIII, the one they made a movie about. Still, we did alright. We specialized in French brandy: stopped the froggy boats in mid-channel, grabbed the cargo, shoved the captain and crew overboard. ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ old Hawker always said. Well, I jumped the ship somewhere near Romney, with money in my pocket—I didn’t like the sea, see? I’d had half a dozen nasty wounds, but they couldn’t kill me. I was worried about what’d happen if I went overboard. You could shoot me through the head and not kill me, though it’d hurt like hell for a few days while the wound healed itself. But I just hated to think of what would happen if somebody tried to drown me. Get it? I’d have to wait under water till the fishes ate me, or till I just sort of naturally rotted away—alive all the time. And that’s not nice.