Something About Eve

    “For these reasons, O foolish painting of the Two Truths, I deny your fleshly significance. Whether I happen to be a sun god or a Savior or a culture hero or just another bull-headed Musgrave, I deny that you present to me any truth whatever. I snap my fingers at your materialism; I turn up my nose at your indecorous anatomical studies; and I send the divine foot of the Lord of the Third Truth smashing through your ancient canvas. These things I do to proclaim the majesty of the Third Truth. And I depart from this Peter and this Peter’s Tomb, to seek my appointed kingdom.”

    It was in this way that Gerald yet again put an affront upon Koleos Koleros and upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.

PART SIX THE BOOK OF TUROINE

20. Thaumaturgists in Labor

    “Weathercocks Turn more Easily when Placed very High.”

    GERALD passed on, still riding upon the silver stallion, which Evaine the Fox-Spirit had not, after all, demanded of him that morning as her promised honorarium. And the next place he came to, and where he got his breakfast, was Turoine. This was a small free city given to sorceries of two colors.

    To every side of him the inhabitants of Turoine were about their arts: and Gerald, as a former student of magic, quite naturally observed their various activities with interest.

    Now the first sorcerer that he encountered was making a figure out of pink wax with which was mixed baptismal oil and the ashes of a consecrated wafer. The next sorcerer was murmuring charms over a very fat toad which was imprisoned in a net rudely woven out of the golden hairs from the head of some luckless, unresponsive woman, who was now about to meet a not wholly desirable doom after that toad had been buried at her threshold. And the third sorcerer huddled over a small fire wherein burned cypress branches and broken crucifixes and portions of a gibbet. In his hand was a skull filled with dark wine which had been seasoned with hemp and with the fat of a girl child and with poppy seed: and his familiar, in the shape of a large dun-colored cat, was lapping up that bitter drink.

    No sorcerer anywhere in Turoine was idle upon this fine May morning. And in this small, ever-busy city—where all the buildings were quaintly marked with stars and pentagrams and the signs of the zodiac and the two kinds of triangles, and were cozily overgrown with honeysuckle and arum lilies and black poppies and deadly nightshade,—these sorcerers were about a bewildering variety of studies.

    “I,” one of them told Gerald, “am learning the secrets which proceed from Saturn, that ashy lord of the greater infortune. I have especial power over all husbandmen and beggars, over grandfathers and monks of every order and ministers of the gospel, over all potters, and miners, and gardeners, and cow-tenders. I have learned how to make men envious, covetous, slow of thought, suspicious, and stubborn. And I am also able to afflict whatsoever person I elect with toothache and dropsy and black jaundice and leprosy and hemorrhoids, either severally or in unison.”

    Another said: “I study to divine and to make smooth the approach of every evil fortune,—with smoke and arrows and wax, with an egg, with mice, and with the simulacra of dead persons;—but, above all, as you may perceive, I have been most successful with the head of an ass in a brazier of live coals. And my guide is not any bow-legged, swarthy eunuch, but Leonard, the Grand Master of the Sabbat.”

    “I,” said a third, “have found in Turoine the Great Juggle Bag, for my guide is Baalberith. So have I mastered all kinds of unheard-of, secret, merry feats and mysteries and inventions—”

    “But what,” asked Gerald, “what purpose does your knowledge serve?”

    “By means of it, sir, those who are favored by my lord Baalberith, the Master of Alliances, may make real the sin performed in a dream; may open the locked door of any jail or bedchamber or counting house; may smite a husband with embarrassing weakness; may inspire strange maids and married women with flaming desires; may increase his natural height here by seven ells and here by three inches; may make himself invisible or invulnerable; may change his form into that of a cat or a hare or a wolf; may control thunder and lightning; may collect and talk with snakes; and”—here the sorcerer coughed,—“and may perform five other advantageous, extravagant and authentic devices.”

    But Gerald shrugged. “These sciences are well enough for a sorcerer; and I perceive that the industrious may pick up much useful information in Turoine. But I am a god who travels toward his appointed kingdom, and toward the mastery of secrets rather more vital than any of these. For your arts are of that black magic which hurts but cannot help; your guides are devils; and you deal only in misfortune and destructiveness.”