21. Sam The Camera
Sam: The Camera
Escuchar : The human ear cannot be changed, but it is possible to encourage the mind to listen more attentively. Escuchar may be passed when concentration is paramount.
—Euphemia Parra, Encantos de palabra (translation mine)
Listening to Judge Richardson’s command, I felt myself overcome.
I understood that Clementine had purposely goaded him into the bargain, and I understood that she believed she would gain the upper hand.
I hoped, so fervently, that she was right.
But I could not hear the judge’s words without remembering my own, very similar bargain.
A bargain I hadn’t asked for. A bargain in which I didn’t gain the upper hand.
This is how the Cisneros Society brings about its complex ends.
By driving its hooks into the hopes and dreams of ordinary people—like me, like Clem.
By allowing them to believe that they have scored a deal, when in fact the only thing they have scored is a Pyrrhic victory.
I have no wish to describe more of what happened to me, of how I was tricked into doing the Society’s bidding. But I fear I must.
It all happened very quickly—after that visit home to see my mother and Cris.
I made a grievous error.
I was, in my defense, preoccupied. After that visit home, I began to worry: Could I even become an enchanter without also becoming one of them?
One of the odious young men all around me who left their muddy boots outside their doors and didn’t know the name of the person who cleaned them?
Who ate at the dining room and didn’t wonder who had made the food?
Who ignored and took for granted the mechanisms of care and maintenance around them, treating them like effortless magic rather than the painstaking work of people like my brother?
Cris, I understood now, believed that the answer was no.
He had always feared this transformation.
My attitude to Commonwealth changed. It had been a castle at the end of my quest, brimming with treasure; now it was a devious trap that I navigated with trepidation.
I shunned my former friends and turned all my attention to my studies.
I removed my tokens the moment I crossed the threshold of my room.
I wore them only because I had to wear them.
Perhaps in other ways my ability to dissemble was also compromised, for I didn’t carry myself with the easy insouciance that I had before.
I was, as I said, preoccupied, and this is what allowed such an error.
I was passing the Cabot Camera on that day in October, when I nearly tripped over a young man who was sitting on the Camera steps. “Excuse me!” I said, walking around him.
He looked up at me and smiled, his eyes searching my face with a kind of languid curiosity.
He didn’t say anything. I realized then that he was wearing the uniform of the university guard.
I meant to keep walking, for his silent staring was disconcerting, but then he spoke from beneath his thin blond mustache.
“Tour of the relics?” he offered casually.
I blinked, surprised. “Ah, perhaps another time,” I said.
“Come on,” he said, still smiling. “Aren’t you curious?”
The Cabot Camera housed the university relics, including the bones used for medical enchantment, and I’d walked by it many times without noticing that it was guarded.
I did know that the relics were priceless, the very heart of the university’s ancient power.
Why would a guard be offering an unsolicited viewing?
The young man discerned the source of my unease. “It’s quite aboveboard,” he said cheerfully. “They bring all the donors through. And wealthy parents.” He grinned and raised his pale eyebrows. “And anyone who knocks, frankly. Professor Hornsby’s up there. You can meet him.”
I had heard of Professor Hornsby, a practitioner of medical enchantment. Perhaps, if a professor was present, there could be no harm in seeing the relics.
The guard stood up. “Are you coming?”
If only I had walked on! His oddness was undeniable, but instead of feeling uneasy I felt intrigued by his friendly smile and the prospect of seeing the precious reliquary.
And, I now realize, I was also persuaded by the man’s appearance.
He was a good-looking fellow, and that counts for much at Commonwealth. “Why not?” I agreed.
Without another word, the guard pulled open the heavy door to the Camera.
It was solid oak, studded with brass medallions the size of my palm.
The handle was a long, polished bar of brass.
Inside the Camera was the ground-floor classroom used for medical enchantment.
To the right, a curving set of stairs led to the second floor.
The guard began climbing these at once, and I followed.
We had circled half the building before we reached the second floor.
The air was saturated with the heavy smell of incense.
The only windows were in the domed ceiling: triangular wedges of glass that allowed shafts of sunlight into the room.
They pierced the wafting smoke of the incense that burned in the censers.
In the center of the room was a stone table, low to the ground.
Its contents were protected by a brass-edged glass box that resembled a coffin.
Inside were the bones: a skull, part of an arm, several ribs, and a pelvis.
Sitting beside the glass box was a man with his back to us. “Juno?” he said as he turned in his chair, and then he saw me. He stood up slowly, his mouth frowning behind a graying beard, his deep-set eyes scrutinizing me. “Who is this?”
The guard, who I took to be named Juno, gave a small bow and did not answer the man’s question. Instead, he said to me, “This is Professor Orin Hornsby.”
“Hello,” I said uncertainly. “I just…”
“I invited him up,” Juno said to Hornsby.
Something unspoken passed between Juno and Hornsby, and suddenly the older man’s distrust seemed to vanish. He smiled broadly. “I’m so glad you did,” he said keenly. “Please,” he said to me. “Come in.”
Although I found their behavior extremely odd, I took another step forward.
Hornsby was a professor, after all, and I still imagined that this distinction ensured some degree of respectability.
He looked a fine man. He wore fine clothes and a pair of rings that seemed both ancient and costly.
His piercing stare and slightly hunched posture gave him the aspect of a bird of prey.
“Come see the relics,” Hornsby encouraged me again, gesturing toward the glass box.
I followed him across the floor, overcoming my hesitation.
“These are the bones of Reynaldo Murcia de Quintanilla,” he said in a practiced voice, gesturing toward the reliquary, “a crusader-turned-enchanter who lived in Toledo in the thirteenth century. Son of Hernán Murcia and Juana Quintanilla Romero. He is known as El Relámpago, for how he brought lightning storms to battle. His bones were housed in the chapel of his estate until they were acquired by Commonwealth in 1802. They were transported here by ship, and they have been preserved here since then.” As he spoke, he studied me with a sharp, penetrating curiosity.
But I was too distracted by the horrible bones to make much of this unwanted scrutiny. Juno asked, “You find the bones disturbing?”
“I do. I understand they are essential for the university, but I mistrust their influence.”
Juno gave a thin smile.
Hornsby had stepped around to the other side of the reliquary.
I noticed then that the stone walls behind him were plastered and painted with murals.
A series of panels depicted a narrative: a soldier on an open plain, a man on a pallet surrounded by spirits, a robed enchanter accompanied by a thew, a host of demonic figures, a sky filled with lightning over an ancient city, and a funeral procession with a profusion of flowers.
“It is Murcia’s life story,” Juno said, following my gaze.
“Murcia fell very ill as a young man, and he accused a woman he had once loved of using enchantment illicitly to sicken him. She was executed for the crime. Afterward he joined a military brotherhood and dedicated his life to the Crusades. Murcia declared that his monsters would return if ever another woman used enchantment against men.”
“What are the monsters?”
Hornsby answered me eagerly, walking to the mural and gesturing to each figure in turn.
“Five creatures of Iberian legend that Murcia created to lead the Crusades. The Urco, a horned wolf covered in chains that emerges from the sea; the Rabeno, a pale giant; the Carpia, ghostly birds that bring bad luck; the En Micó, a creature made of brine that turns everything to salt; and the Drago, the giant snake with the head and arms of a man, a creature of insatiable hunger that eats entire cities.” In the mural, the creatures were depicted facing the viewer, as if they would jump out of the wall and into the Camera itself.
Murcia and his thew, diminutive in the open window of a stone tower, observed them gravely.
Juno smiled. “I’ve always rather liked the Urco.” He turned back to the glass case. “Would you like to see the bones without the impediment of glass?”
I didn’t know what this might add to the experience, but I nodded willingly. Juno undid a catch that had been hidden in the brasswork, and the glass pane nearest to the skull opened like a lid. “Go ahead, lean forward,” Juno said.
I bent over the opening. Suddenly I was assailed by a pressure of sensations and sentiments that took my breath away; an unrelenting and vengeful fury; the aching burn of persistent pain; a steely force of will, steady and unyielding.
They were as overpowering and inescapable as a vile smell.
I gasped and stood back. “What—what is that?”
Juno smiled as he closed the compartment. “Those are the bones.”