My name is John de _____ and this is my story. Although this story is scarcely credible, even to myself, I swear that it is all true. As a younger man, I was the faithful servant of Henry, to become the greatest king in all Christendom. He was a strong virile man, full of wisdom beyond his years and with the strength of many men.
I am a soldier, a soldier in the service of God and in the service of his due representative on this earth, King Henry. A soldier pledges his life, and when he pledges his life, he knows that his life on this earth is but a short thing. Like the flowers in the field, there for a day and gone. To live is something, to die is a nothing. It comes to all, and it is better to die well, than to live badly.
I feel I must explain myself, lest I be thought a liar. Those papists with their Spondent quas non exhibent sought to outlaw all such things as transmutation, transubstantiation, alchemy and the multiplying of base metals. And there never was such a parcel of rogues and charlatans as the alchemists, all mad with their quicksilver and poisonous roots. But the Summa Perfectionis by Psuedo-Gerber and the Margarita preciosa novella by Petrus Bonus, held within their coded texts a truth that was only even suspected of by the most perceptive of adepts. The terms, Azoth, the balance of the four elements, the philosopher’s stone even. It was not about the conversion of base metal into gold, though I myself have seen aqua regia turn gold into nothing. No the adepts were not breaking that unseen fixed balance of the four basic qualities that make one metal as it is, and forcing it to become another. They were breaking that unseen fixed balance that chains us all like a cart behind the plodding horse that we call time.
They say that Petrus Bonus died a century ago, but I met him. He wore velvet gloves that stretched from his fingers to his elbows. His hands were fixed stiff by his side, like a stone effigy over a great man’s tomb. His skin was discoloured like I have never seen, save in plague victims. He told me to mix for him his alchemical compounds to make his Azoth, the universal medicine, and then I need never fear battle again. I did as he instructed. I kept one hand upon my dagger and my eyes upon him always. I did not trust him any more than all those other rogues with their mystical texts and dusty cells full of powders and roots. They are all too full of the heathen arab and the papist.
He drank a measure of the potion, and I drank the rest. He exclaimed that I had made it better than he could have himself, and I paid him well.
I am a knight of the greatest king in Christendom. There is gold aplenty to be found in soldiering and I know full well that I will never end my days in slumber with my dogs around me, in my own great hall. The money was ever nothing to me, but it would be an amusing story to tell when we were all in our ales, and merry with tall stories and bawdy rhymes.
X X X X X X X X X X
We fought long and hard that day, I fought on my armoured horse until it was felled by halberd after halberd. And as my pierced horse slumped to ground, I fought on. They were poorly armed and scrawny. It was easy enough to hack away at them until even my mighty arms were tired. The day went on and on, and I had slain very many, and there was no shame to it. I fought on back to back with my liege, until my liege too was felled, and then I fought on.
I hacked and stepped forward, pushing them back, and weakening their strokes. They were poor fighters, easily forced into the weaker position. Leave a man hungry for long enough and he will never amount to a real soldier. For soldiery is a hard living, and a soldier must be fed well.
There was no shame to it. I have killed many men, as many as the starlings in the sky when there is a great murmuration of them.
My foes surrounded me, my leg was wounded and I fought on killing many, but they still came. The battle was ending, and it seemed we had not won. The field was filled with the sounds of the dying, and of the wounded being put to the sword.
A man, large as I was myself, came through the melee. He smote me with an axe near as long as a man. I stumbled and fell to my knees. On my breath was the name of my lord and king. I pledged allegiance to him with my dying breath, and staggering forward my numbed hands shifted on my broadsword. I held it now like a knife to stab down upon something loathsome, and stabbed it down into the ground. My sword fixed in the ground, like the cross upon which our Lord Jesus was crucified. With my king’s name upon my bloodied lips I fell back, and I was dead.
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But Petrus Bonus had tricked me with his half truths and ways, that potion had done something else to me, so that I was no longer as other men. When that axe went though my breastplate, I fell upon my knees. As the life left my body, likewise that anchor which fixed me to that time was loosed. Like a vessel caught in a strong tide, my body was swept by strange currents beyond its control.
I woke from my death and found myself here. My armour broken and rusted, my broadsword still before me, like the cross of our Lord Redeemer. I was scarce more alive than I had been, not far from death. But I was no longer on that field of dying peasants where the crows tugged at the carrion that we had made of each other. I was here where no birds flew and no flowers bloomed. And my numbed hand was made of stone.
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