“We were all fairly well pleased with ourselves, as you can imagine, what with suddenly being made immortal and having five thousand gold pistoles. At first, we couldn’t see beyond the immediate benefits, such as being able to clean up on extremely dangerous wagers involving tall buildings, loaded firearms and ravenous bears; but even after the first wave of euphoria had worn off and nobody would bet us any more, we reckoned that we had done all right for ourselves, all things considered. For example, being immortal we were incapable of starving to death, which meant a tremendous saving on food; we could drink as much as we liked without the slightest danger of damaging our health; and since we were completely immune from what was then described as the Pox…Anyway, we felt we had every reason to be cheerful, one way or another. My only regret was that the morning before we left Cadiz I had wasted five pistoles taking out a life assurance policy, which was no obviously of no use whatsoever.”
As the stranger stopped speaking again the young German caught sight of his face. It was a terrible sight, completely indescribable, and the young German looked away quickly. He could still see it behind his eyelids days later. He felt a sudden urge to discuss the career of Charlemagne, but before he could do this the stranger resumed his narrative.
“However,” said the stranger, “there were side-effects. Shall I tell you about the side-effects? Do please say if you’d rather I didn’t. We could talk about Gustavus Adolphus if you like.”
“Tell me,” said the young German, “about the side effects.”
“We spent a fortnight in Bristol drinking to excess and laying up a cargo—wool, I think, and tin ore, and a bit of salt fish, definitely no jute—and then we left. We would have liked to stay longer, but we had somehow made ourselves unpopular in Bristol and most of the taverns had banned us—and that took some doing in Bristol, even then. So we set sail for Flanders, and we made good headway for a day or two, until the wind dropped again. But we didn’t care; we had plenty of beer now, and no killjoy alchemist on board. It was then we noticed it.”
“Noticed what?”
“The smell. The nastiest, most sordid, least pleasant smell you ever came across in all your born days. Nothing more unlike the scent of dewy roses could ever exist this side of Plato’s Republic. And the smell was coming from us.”
The stranger finished his drink and looked through the empty glass at something the young German couldn’t see. The young German decided that that was probably just as well.
“After a day of frantic and hysterical washing,” continued the stranger, “which only seemed to make it worse, one of us hit on the idea of consulting the alchemist’s notebooks, which he had left behind on the ship when he got arrested. Sure enough, we found the answer, in a passage where our old buddy Fortunatus was describing his experiments on the cat in Cadiz. He had done his best to get round the problem by fiddling the recipe here and there, and he was pretty positive he had fixed it, which I suppose explains why he drank it himself after we’d done his guinea-pig work for him.”
“Well,” said the young German, “that was fascinating. I really ought to be getting…”
“I really wish,” said the stranger, “I could describe that smell for you now. Try to imagine, if you possibly can, a muck-heap on which someone has placed the decomposing bodies of three hundred and thirty-three dead foxes. Next to this muck-heap try and picture an open sewer. Not just an ordinary open sewer, mind—this one collects the effluent from an ammonia works on the way. The muck-heap is, of course, in the back yard of a cholera hospital…No, don’t bother. Just take it from me, it was an absolute zinger of a smell.”
“Anyway, it soon became painfully obvious that unless and until we found some way of toning this odour down a bit, the only place we could be was as far out in the middle of the ocean as we could possibly get. So we set sail for nowhere in particular, rationed the beer, and waited. We waited and we waited and we waited. Occasionally something would happen to relieve the monotony. A Barbary corsair would creep up on us and attempt to board us, which was good for a laugh. One of us would go for a swim, and an hour later you couldn’t see the surface of the water for dead fish. Not to mention the run-in we had with what you would know as the Spanish Armada; boy, did we have some fun with them! Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were the occasional highlights. But most of the time it was dead boring.”
