How to Slay a Dragon Page 13
STRATEGY #3: STOP AFTER TWO WISHES
Genies only start twisting your words after you’ve made all three wishes, right? So all you have to do is narrow your list down to two, and make sure you never again say something like, “Ugh, I wish they would stop.”
On the other hand, you’re traveling with a bard. You will, at some point, wish they would stop.
Just imagine how a self-respecting genie would twist that request.
STRATEGY #4: BEAT THE GENIE AT ITS OWN GAME
Writing down your deal with the genie sounds like the worst idea possible. You don’t want a record for the genie to consult when determining the best way to twist your words. And yet, putting your wishes in writing is—finally—a foolproof way to prevent the genie from twisting your words. With proper medieval guidance, you can draw up a contract whose words the genie will twist, as a genie does. Just, with the help of the Empress of Hell, they won’t be your words.
Oh, right. This is a good time to mention that in medieval Christianity, the mild, loving Mother of God is also a sword-swinging demon slayer.
And I don’t mean just metaphorically, by bringing into this world the Son of God who would die on a cross, descend into hell, defeat death, and resurrect himself. No, I mean with an actual sword and actual demons. It was the stuff of books, plays, and stained glass windows—the comic books of the Middle Ages.
For your goal of outwitting a genie, you’ll want to turn to Mary’s rescue of Theophilus. The legend of the beleaguered Anatolian bishop has taken many forms over the millennium and a half since its apparent origins in… Anatolia, so we’ll just use the version most popular in the Middle Ages.
Theophilus was a bishop or other Church official who suddenly found himself summarily dismissed from his office—thus, from his influence and his income. The wisdom of his subsequent actions suggests the dismissal was not entirely unfounded. To regain his power and his wealth, Theophilus summoned a demon and sold the only thing he had left: his soul.
The devil was crafty. He made sure Theophilus signed, sealed, and gave him a charter that promised Theophilus’s soul after death in exchange for riches during life. The devil slid back down the muddy slide to hell with the physical document.
The story then splits briefly into two versions. If priests are telling the story, Theophilus immediately fell into spiritual despair. If nonpriests are telling it, Theophilus rose uncommonly fast through the ranks of the Church and acquired (and spent) the money to match, then fell into spiritual despair.
He mustered up the energy to pray to Mary for help, since she was the ultimate intercessor between God and sinful humans. (Essentially, a superpowered saint.) And Mary, the Mother of God and the mother of mercy, naturally took the self-damned man’s side. She recognized that the materiality of Theophilus’s charter set the terms. To put it simply, Theophilus’s soul had become a physical object in a physical location, guarded by a physical entity.
So Mary—not her savior son, but Mary herself—descended to the physical location of hell, fought the devil in single combat, and stole back the charter. Theophilus’s soul was saved, and the Queen of Heaven earned her excellent late medieval title of Empress of Hell.
When priests told the story, the point was a prim lesson about the power of Mary as “mediatrix” and how you should turn to God in times of despair. When nonpriests told the story, the point was that Mary—the Queen of Heaven, the mother of mildness and mercy—grabbed a sword, descended to hell, stole back Theophilus’s charter, and then beat up the devil. (Again: stained glass windows, the comic books of the Middle Ages.)
By turning your wishes into a written contract, therefore, you essentially trap their power within a small, delineated space. You shift the means of outwitting away from twisting words to the arena of physical strength. You’ll still have to fight the genie for possession of the document. But you’re a hero with a sword. Fighting a literal battle instead of a battle over the literal is your territory, not some ephemeral spirit’s. Even if you don’t have the Empress of Hell on your side.
STRATEGY #5: MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A PLAN B
The best part about using the written charter strategy is that unlike basically everything else heroes must do to succeed in their quest, it has its own, nearly built-in fallback strategy.
The devil taught you how to read, sure, but his instruction was only necessary because literacy rates among medieval peasants very nearly did not exist. But by the late Middle Ages, bureaucratic documentation was widespread, and peasants had plenty of occasion to sign various things their landlords and lords presented. Instead of signing their names, illiterate people would substitute an X.
So when you draw up that charter with the genie, make sure you hire a scribe to write it, and make sure you hearken back to the days of your prediabolical-literacy youth. You sign your “name” as a big, bold X. An X that could have been written by anyone.
Now you don’t even have to wish that nobody will recognize your handwriting.
Because that kind of wish could go very, very wrong.
HOW to FIND a UNICORN
There comes a point in every hero’s quest when most hope seems lost.
Not all hope. That part always comes later, and it’s going to require a lot more than an injection of good fortune. But if you are losing hope, and are looking for a little bit of good fortune—might I interest you in a slight detour to seek a unicorn?
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately. Medieval Christian theologians were very clear that the unicorn is so powerful and wild, you don’t find it—it finds you. Specifically, it walks up to a virgin and rests its head in their lap.
But you and your party don’t have time to sit around waiting for a unicorn, or to set a trap so you can mock the village bully for lying about his sexual exploits. And you don’t have the villainy to follow through on the next part of the theologians’ legend—namely, the part where the gentle unicorn falls asleep in the virgin’s lap, and the virgin leads the tame, snuggling unicorn to the nearest castle to be slaughtered.
Really, it’s best for everyone if you find the unicorn instead.
You’ll need to keep in mind three principles on your happy-ending unicorn hunt.
1. KNOW WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR
“Uni-cornus” is the semirecognizable Latin term for “one horn.” And indeed, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew texts about unicorns describe an animal with one horn that tapers up to a point. From there, though…
Natural philosophers in western Europe envisioned unicorns with the body of a goat. (It’s the beards.) Some Near Eastern writers described the unicorn as a prematurely born camel, the horn being the result of its mother giving birth before the fetus had solidified. (It’s medieval science—just go with it.) One Hebrew pamphlet mentioned a bull-like animal with a horn on its chin and on its nose. (It’s sort of like a beard, just without the rest of the goat.)
So much for zoological theory. You need someone who saw a unicorn for himself. You need Marco Polo.
Polo, who was indeed a real person and most likely really took the journey he and his ghostwriter Rusticello claimed, made it from Italy to (among other places) the island of Sumatra and back home again. On Sumatra he saw his unicorn. And thought it was disgusting.
According to Polo and Rusticello, the unicorn is almost the size of an elephant, as ugly as a water buffalo, has a short and thick horn, and likes nothing more than wallowing in swamp and mud. But that sounds like a…
Rhinoceros. He’s describing a rhinoceros.
Or, one might say—and medieval writers did say—he is describing a rhinoceros, also known as a monoceros. Which is Greek for one-horn. Well, then.
The good news is that Bertrandon’s worldbuilding of Syrian and Armenian goats is as extraneous as you thought. The bad news is that if you throw out Polo’s testimony, you’re going to need some different evidence to be sure that unicorns exist for you to find.
2. DON’T BE FOOLED BY IMITATIONS
Thus, since unicorns as such did not actually exist in the Middle Ages but medieval people believed they owned real unicorn horns, you’ll have to be on your guard against… being fooled by the same imitators.
Okay, fine, powdered unicorn horn is easy enough to avoid because its chances of not being ground-up rock are essentially zero. In fact, because you’re the hero, the hordes of evil are actively trying to kill you, so the percentage chance of the powder being the poison instead of the antidote is one hundred.
But Lorenzo owned something that had to look like a unicorn horn. If you’re a Thule expert whaler from Greenland, you already know exactly what: a narwhal tusk.
Technically a narwhal tooth (really), these tusks are long, thin, taper to a point, and are spiraled like a helix. In other words, exactly how western European artists depicted the horns atop unicorns’ heads. And if you’re a Thule hunter, you could do quite well for yourself trading narwhal tusks to Norse traders.
If you’re not a Thule hunter, you should just keep in mind that somewhere between Baffin Bay and Lorenzo’s Florence, someone bought a narwhal tusk and sold a unicorn horn.
(No, you can’t be that someone.)
3. LOOK IN THE RIGHT PLACES
On the other hand, unicorn horn–owning Lorenzo de Medici did survive an assassination attempt while his tightfisted brother died. Even if it’s essentially the magical version of the placebo effect, perhaps narwhals and rhinos are close enough to unicorns to count.
There’s still one problem: good luck approaching them safely. Especially the part where you swim in the Arctic to get to said narwhal.
So after crossing Greenland and Sumatra off your list of nonviolent hunting grounds, it’s time to look to the other edges of the world. Specifically, to the royal court of Ming-era China after 1414, when the sultan of Bengal gave the emperor a giraffe.
Bengal—the future northeastern India and western Bangladesh—was not exactly known for its expansive African savannas. But its sultan had gone to great literal lengths (possibly to a royal menagerie in Arabia; more likely to one of the Swahili city-states in southeastern Africa) to obtain such a special diplomatic gift for China.
The enthusiastic Chinese reception justified Bengal’s effort. The giraffe was still showing up in luxury art a century later, and multiple nobles wrote poetry about it. To find out why it was such a prize, you’ll want to page through the Ming Shi-lu, essentially a galactic-scale scrapbook compiled over nearly three centuries of medieval and early modern Chinese history. The giraffe receives only a prim mention as part of a list of other 1414 Bengalese gifts: horses, beautiful fabrics, local delicacies. Except the imperial bureaucrat doesn’t say zulafa (the Chinese equivalent of Arabic’s zurafa—giraffe). He writes qi-lin.
A qi-lin is a mythical animal associated with good fortune in Chinese folklore. (Sound familiar?) Descriptions vary (sound familiar?), but might include the body of a deer, the feet of a horse, the tail of a cow, the scales of a fish… oh, and one horn.
True, qi-lin is not literally “one horned” in the sense of uni-cornus. From ancient Chinese poetry, the name seems to have the meaningful etymology of “a female lin.” But description-wise, it’s a whole lot closer to a unicorn than the rhino.
The first lesson here is to feel sympathy for the poor, misunderstood rhino. (Sympathy from a safe distance, mind you.) The second lesson is the recognition that the Chinese saw a new-to-them animal and translated it into a unicorn.
Were they convinced the giraffe was a true qi-lin? Or were they trying to make sense of a foreign animal they didn’t recognize?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. (More to the point: the sources don’t tell you.) You’re looking for good fortune and a good distraction. And you know perfectly well that there are few things better than a giraffe in medieval China.
WHERE to DIG for BURIED TREASURE
Augsburg, May 1544. The tall woman drew a circle in the dirt with a sword as a priest read out loud from a book and swung a censer. Regina Koch, the owner of the house and yard, who knew full well what was happening, watched from inside with a friend. The woman walked around the circle bearing a candle and sprinkling holy water onto the ground. She walked over to a different spot and scratched lines in the earth with her sword, then sat down next to it.
The woman read out loud from her own little book, made the sign of the cross repeatedly, then turned to the group of men standing behind her and told them it was time. They recited several Bible verses—and started digging.
Some context. Augsburg, May 1544: Split between Catholics and Protestants, Augsburg seethed with religious fervor like few other places. Just ahead loomed one of the city’s fiercest witch panics, which ended with 150 people executed. When Koch and her co-conspirators were betrayed to civic authorities by a nosy neighbor, what terrible fate could await them?
The unknown woman was named as Sophia Voit of Nuremberg and sent home, Koch was sent to jail but pardoned, and the diggers were ordered to confine themselves for four to eight days. The judges could condemn the events as superstitious and demonic all they wanted, but the punishments told a very different tale.
Throughout the medieval world, the idea of buried treasure lived in the twilight lands between religion and magic, science and ritual, hopeful dreams and devoured souls. And, of course, between mystical lore and straight-up greed. In other words, exactly the kind of thing that made you want to be a hero in the first place.
The lure of treasure knows no boundaries, even for heroes who would never mess with straight-up greed, including you. Never. Bourgeois widow Regina Koch, who was nothing at all like you, let magicians dig in her backyard, the party swearing to split any discoveries. A voyager all the way from India supposedly delved into the Great Pyramid in search of riches he never found. (This voyager was also nothing at all like you, especially because he was probably not a real person.) Desperate impoverished men (real men) begged wealthy Cairenes to fund their expeditions.
Scholars safely ensconced in monasteries and madrasas couldn’t resist, either. Jewish writers from Iberia to Egypt copied treasure-hunting manuals from Arabic letters into Hebrew ones. (Did I mention there were treasure-hunting manuals?) English priest Robert of Ketton (c. 1110–1160) translated multiple astrological treasure-hunting manuals (see?) into Latin. Then there were the Egyptian nobles who hired illiterate day laborers to do their pyramid-plundering for them.
Did I mention that treasure-hunting became an organized profession in medieval Egypt?
The concept of government-sanctioned grave desecration, already popular in later ancient Egyptian dynasties, gained new life in the Middle Ages. Tenth-century leaders turned it into a guild of sorts called “the seekers,” and by “a guild of sorts” I mean “so the government could tax the profits.”
For medieval seekers, ancient buried treasure was certainly not limited to gold. Long-plundered tombs—for those who dared disturb the dead—could yield profits with scrapings of mummies; European Christians were as wild for mummia as they were for the spices of the Far East. Books of ancient magic, on the other hand, could point the way to exponentially more treasure hoards.
Nor was ancient buried treasured limited to, well, being ancient or buried. The Egyptian elite of all religions lavished each other with sparkling gifts and displayed even more in their homes. It didn’t take much for people to start whispering about the origins of such stunnin
g wealth.
Treasure-hunting in the Middle Ages nevertheless had a low success rate and a high death rate. Even for those who scoffed at demons, there might be traps made by very human hands. Baghdadi skeptic Abu Bakr al-Jassas told the story of a temple and tomb guarded first by a staircase. To climb it would trigger, through a series of levers, hidden blades that whipped out at the unfortunate seeker and beheaded him.
So, when it’s time to find the buried treasure, choose wisely among the available astrological calculations or magical amulets. You can go the quick (and pious!) route to cross potentially cursed water, as Ibn Al-Haj Al-Tilmsani al-Maghrabi suggests. Write out a specific verse from the Qur’an into a magic table, one word in each of its squares: “Say, ‘Just think: if all your water were to sink deep into the earth, who could give you flowing water in its place?’ ”9
Or, if you’re really committed, follow one of al-Maghrabi’s other suggestions: After praying for forty-seven days and dealing with a ghost accompanied by a lion, a human ghost with a dog’s head, and seventy ghosts wearing green, you will see a white city shining on a hilltop. You must then go to the green silk tent at the castle gates and find the golden throne inside.
At that point, a man named al-Taous will appear, with seventy men dressed in white beside him, and both good and evil jinn above him. Offer him incense, which he will burn, and the men dressed in white will eat. Finally, you can ask al-Taous for the secret knowledge you seek. Be sure to use the precise words: “O King al-Taous, I request from you the secret of turning rocks and opening caves and homes and whatever more I want.”10
From that moment on, the king will order his good and evil jinn to open anything you want any time you read the spell, as long as there is incense burning to feed them. The hidden things of the world are yours to possess. Only one question remains: At what cost?