Sky's Dark Labyrinth

by Stuart Clark

  ‘God’s witness!’ Spittle flew from Tycho’s mouth.

  ‘Without me, your observations are worthless!’ shouted Kepler. ‘No more than paper and ink!’

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ growled Tycho.

  Kepler stood his ground.

  ‘Go, I tell you!’ Tycho lurched forwards, his giant body wobbling on small feet. Kepler glowered at the Dane, but a powerful hand seized his upper arm. It was Tengnagel pulling him from the room.

  That night, incapacitated by fever, Kepler dreamed that Jepp entered his room. Powerless to act, the astronomer watched from some distant shore as the sinister dwarf leafed through his papers, taking a sheet with him when he left.

  The next morning Kepler awoke to the whirling clatter of a carriage in the courtyard. He lurched to the window to see who was arriving. A stout man descended from the vehicle and was ushered inside.

  Thank the Lord!

  It was Jessenius, doubtless sent for by Tycho to sort out this fiasco. Kepler straightened his clothing in readiness but had to wait for an hour before anyone came to get him. All this time he listened to the throb of blood in his ears and his laboured breathing.

  When the thump on his door came, it made him jump. Tengnagel was waiting outside. ‘This way.’

  Kepler was led to the study again. Tycho’s round bulk was lodged behind the desk. Jessenius sat opposite. Both rose as Kepler entered. Jessenius greeted him stiffly, avoiding his gaze. Kepler could only guess at the version of events he had been told.

  By contrast, Tycho was all smiles. ‘Johannes, please, let us solve these silly problems between us … You can go,’ he said to Tengnagel, who left the room with obvious reluctance. ‘Now then …’

  Kepler saw something familiar resting on top of the papers that littered the desk, a sheet of paper in his own handwriting. His stomach fell away. It was his list of demands for employment.

  Tycho picked it up and started to read. ‘You want me to rent a separate house in the surrounding village for you.’

  ‘That’s correct. If you insist I stay at Benátky, then I need a separate apartment, well away from your … court.’

  ‘You want me to provide meat, fish, wine, bread and beer, so that you do not need to eat with us. And also firewood.’

  ‘You provide food and warmth for your other assistants, but, in order for me to work efficiently, I need peace and quiet. I must be detached from the chaos.’

  Tycho looked at Jessenius. ‘All of this I might agree to, but then we come to Herr Kepler’s terms of work … He refuses to take part in the observations and states that he will only conduct research in areas of mutual benefit. He should be free to set his own timetable, rising late if he has worked far into the previous night …’

  ‘I need no spur to make my work, rather a brake to restrain me,’ protested Kepler.

  ‘… and for this magnanimous service he demands that I obtain a salary from the Emperor of fifty thaler a quarter.’

  ‘There is nothing extravagant about my claims. I have heard, sir, that your great brass globe cost five thousand thaler. Such a sum would keep my family and me for the rest of our lives. I think my terms are modest in comparison.’

  ‘If it were up to me, these terms would be met and you’d be the happiest man alive. But patience is required. I cannot simply expect the Emperor to agree to this. You must show willing.’

  ‘How can I do that when my concentration is repeatedly broken by your unruly house? The understanding of nature cannot be shaped in the middle of a mob. Once the observations are taken, the interpretation is a solitary affair. My mind must be still, my thoughts free from all distraction, filled only with the numbers that represent nature. Then, with nothing but those numbers in my mind’s eye I will see the grain of truth, the gleaming gem of reality that God has placed in us all but few know how to access.’

  Something in Tycho’s face changed. ‘You talk of mutually beneficial research yet in reality you wish to purloin my observations for your own gain.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Really? Tell me, Herr Kepler, do you believe in my system of the planets?’

  ‘I do not. You have the planets going around the Sun, but the Sun continuing to go around the Earth. It is not an elegant solution.’

  ‘Have you no respect? I have dedicated my life to the collection of these measurements. Do you deny me the right to interpret them?’

  ‘Just because you have taken the measurements, does not mean that you can choose which conclusions to draw.’

  ‘But you yourself choose to ignore the observations that run against you.’

  ‘You refer to the parallax?’

  Tycho gave a curt nod.

  ‘It is my belief that the stars are further away than we first imagined.’ Kepler knew his next words would wound Tycho and uttered them with pleasure. ‘Not even you can build a sufficiently precise quadrant to see the parallax. God has beaten you.’

  Tycho stood up.

  Kepler rose too and set his head swimming with the sudden movement.

  ‘Gentlemen …’ began Jessenius, also rising.

  ‘And you have a problem,’ continued Kepler. ‘Longomontanus calculated the distance to Mars incorrectly. I’ve found the error, but it is not in the calculation, it is the observation that has been taken incorrectly.’

  ‘There are no errors in my observations.’ Tycho said. ‘My assistants are too highly skilled for that. It is your mathematics that lets you down.’

  Kepler felt himself begin to sway. ‘I would offer to show you, though I fear your own inadequacy with numbers would prevent you from seeing the truth. The Bear was right. You will squander your life’s work rather than have someone else transform it. All because you want to control that final transformation, like you control your menagerie of freaks.’ His legs suddenly felt weak. The room smeared into a wash of pastel shades and his last conscious thought was of crashing to the ground.

  When he came round he found himself propped in a chair near the front door. Around him, the craftsmen continued their renovations. How he got here, or how long he had been here, he did not know. He must have looked like some weird statue awaiting refurbishment, or more likely some piece of rubbish ready to be taken away.

  ‘You’re not dead then.’ Tycho peered at him with those unfathomable hazel eyes.

  ‘Forgive me, sir.’

  Tycho grumbled something and waddled away. He spoke quietly to Jessenius and disappeared into the bowels of the castle.

  ‘Come along,’ said the anatomist, arriving at Kepler’s side. ‘Let us get you to Prague. Your things are already packed. Can you stand?’

  With Jessenius’s help, Kepler limped to the waiting carriage and slumped, exhausted, on the small bench seat. Again, he felt his mind depart from his surroundings, yet this time it never fully arrived at unconsciousness. Instead, it wheeled in black circles, seemingly immense turns of thought, yet never really straying far from what had just happened in Benátky.

  What would he do now? How would he feed his family?

  In the fog of his thinking, one name shone out.

  His only hope was Mästlin, his old tutor. He must surely have received Kepler’s letter by now.

  9

  Tübingen, Swabia

  Kepler! Mästlin’s stomach lurched as he was handed the letter and glimpsed the handwriting. Yet even before the flash of annoyance could subside, another emotion arose in its place: curiosity. It was six years since Kepler had left the university here, and in all that time he had written often but never returned. By all tallies that should have been long enough for Mästlin to rid himself of the troublesome man.

  He should have simply dropped each letter, unopened, onto the kitchen fire and let its heat make broth, or crisp the skin on a hog. That would have been useful. Yet without fail he found himself teasing open the wax seal, unable to resist learning the next instalment.

  Perhaps that was what annoyed him so much about Kepler; no matter whe
re the young man was in Europe, he could still force Mästlin to ebb and flow, as if some tidal force linked their two minds.

  This latest letter was another plea for help, and he read it with the usual mix of impatience and admiration. Pathetic and brilliant in equal measure, it was the long-dreaded application for a position at Tübingen and a request for the price of wine, bread and meat in the city, as his wife would not be content to live on pulses.

  Sensing the tidewaters rising, Mästlin willed himself to head for the kitchen fire but found himself in the corridor. Even as he walked, he knew what the response to Kepler’s application would be. It was madness even to pass on the contents of the letter.

  The University’s Chancellor was not in his office, but the smell of a recently snuffed candle hung in the air. Mästlin checked the neighbouring rooms. Those too were mostly deserted now that the afternoon was sliding into evening. Next, he stopped at the chapel. The boys were praying, enveloped in balloons of condensing breath that allowed the minister to check for miming. It brought back a memory of Kepler, hunched in devotion, always the last to release himself from prayer.

  Mästlin entered the gardens, where the grass was heavy with dew and just beginning to sparkle as the chill evening turned it to frost.

  The Chancellor was walking barefoot across the grass, eyes closed. Wearing nothing heavier than his usual gown, he was a spectre drifting aimlessly across the mortal world.

  ‘Sir, you will catch your death.’ Mästlin trotted over.

  ‘On the contrary, Magister Mästlin, I find the sensation makes me feel alive. Quite something at my age.’

  Mästlin regarded the shrunken man. Despite the white hair, the Chancellor was as permanent as the university’s foundation stone and it was easy to forget that he was now in his eighties. Mästlin opened his mouth to broach his subject but could coax nothing at first. At last, he found the courage. ‘Sir, Johannes Kepler is upon hard circumstances. He is asking whether there is a small professorship for him here?’

  The Chancellor nodded curtly and resumed his walk. ‘When it comes to Kepler, what astounds me most is that you continue your correspondence.’

  ‘He may be unconventional, Chancellor, but he is also brilliant. I believe he may truly have found the secret plan that God worked to when creating the heavens.’

  ‘By advocating the view of a Catholic?’ Derision laced the Chancellor’s voice.

  ‘Copernicus only published his ideas because the Lutheran Rheticus visited him – and no doubt improved upon his work. The canon himself was too blind to see his own achievement. The new astronomy is Lutheran to the core. Kepler’s Mysterium was the next step.’

  ‘I seem to remember that you spent so much time seeing his book through the printers that you neglected your own studies. We can ill afford to lose your concentration again, especially with this abominable Roman calendar to fight. We will celebrate Easter when we choose to, not when the Vatican tells us. You are our sharpest voice against it.’

  There was no accusation in the old voice, just a calculated disappointment that humbled Mästlin more than anger ever could. ‘I will oppose the introduction of Pope Gregory’s new calendar in these lands to my last breath,’ he said. It was a transparent attempt to chain Europe to Catholic timekeepers and had to be resisted on those grounds, although Mästlin was secretly impressed by the quality of the Jesuit mathematicians under Rome’s command.

  He followed the Chancellor deep into the gardens, losing the university buildings behind the tall hedges. The lustre on the plants signalled the deepening freeze. They continued into the silhouettes of the box-cut rosemary, the old man apparently oblivious to the temperature of his bare feet crunching on the gravel path.

  ‘The remarkable thing about age is that you learn what’s important, and what can be ignored,’ he told Mästlin with a faint smile.

  The only light around them was coming from the sinking yellow crescent of the Moon, its illumination rendered dimmer still by its passage through the tangle of bare branches.

  ‘I have nearly completed a new tract against the calendar, sir.’ Mästlin thought of the two chapters and the scribbled notes in his bottom drawer, and was glad of the shadows to hide his face. What he needed was help from a mathematician as skilled as the Jesuits, and there was only one Lutheran who fitted that bill. ‘Sir, when Kepler was here, he began theology. Entering the ministry was all he cared about …’

  ‘Why did he not complete his studies?’

  ‘You made me send him to Graz when they needed a new mathematician.’

  ‘Did I? That was cunning of me. Ah, yes, I remember. I didn’t trust him.’

  ‘He’s a grown man now. Could he at least return to finish his degree? We need men in the pulpits. The Jesuits are everywhere; founding their schools and spreading their intrigues in towns that we had long since considered our own.’

  The Chancellor raised an arthritic finger. ‘We need good men in the pulpits, Magister Mästlin. Not just any men. He was small, shuffled about a lot, used to play a woman in the university plays.’

  ‘He is as God made him, sir.’

  Something in the Chancellor’s posture stiffened. ‘Why must he insist on questioning our beliefs at every turn?’

  ‘It is his nature; he means no harm. He believes, as Luther did, that to question and to reform is the foundation of our faith.’

  The older man huffed, sending a balloon of expanding vapour into the night. ‘Then he was born a century too late. Now is not the time for change. Our faith is minted in the currency of Wittenberg, and we cannot risk division on the whim of interpretation. Those devils in Rome will exploit any weakness.’

  ‘On that we are agreed,’ said Mästlin.

  ‘So, the question remains: could we trust him to deliver what we tell him to preach?’

  ‘He removed the prologue of theological justification from the Mysterium as requested, Chancellor. His book stands now simply as a matter of geometrical calculation, free of religious connotation and with no assertion that the Earth actually moves around the Sun.’

  ‘I hear that Hewart von Hohenburg’s personal courier handles his letters these days. The Chancellor of Bavaria is a powerful friend to have – a powerful Catholic friend.’

  The night closed in on Mästlin. He stopped, the sound of their footfall replaced by the surge of blood in his ears. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he stammered.

  The moonlight sparkled in the Chancellor’s eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who keeps an eye on Herr Kepler. There’s no place for him and his heresies here, as you well know. There may be no place for him anywhere in Lutheran lands. Quite beside his useless astronomy, his dissension over the ubiquity doctrine is enough to have him excommunicated. Cut from us, he would run to whoever opened their arms.’

  ‘Yes, Chancellor.’

  ‘Distance yourself from him, Magister Mästlin, and brace yourself. We are at war with the whores of Rome and the bastard hoards of Jesuits swarming across our lands. If – when – Kepler converts, you cannot afford to be associated with him.’

  10

  Prague, Bohemia

  1601

  It was one of Barbara’s favourite games: to unpack another trunk of possessions and lament how good their life had been in Graz. Kepler hated and avoided it whenever possible. If it were daytime, Regina would be the target, although she soaked up her mother’s stories about the paradise they had left behind. But tonight there was no one else, save Frau Bezold, the old housekeeper.

  How long would that pairing last before one of them raised their voice at the other? Ten minutes? Five? Kepler found that, for once, he would actually prefer to play the nostalgia game himself.

  Barbara was pulling out a stack of pewter plates and piling them on the table.

  ‘I’ve missed these,’ she said.

  ‘We have new plates.’

  ‘Yes, but these remind me of our suppers in Graz. Do you remember when Ole knocked over his wine and stood up so fast tha
t he turned over his dinner?’

  ‘I remember the mess.’

  ‘And the Bimeks were there, too. I wonder if his dancing has improved?’

  Kepler hated this game especially, because most of the people she talked about had once been Protestants, mostly Lutheran. One by one, they had all bowed to the pressure from the Archduke and converted, just so they could remain in Graz to live out their puny mortal existence. Inside Kepler a single word was carved across his memory of each of them: traitor. He was glad to have left them behind.

  The Keplers had moved into their own home in Prague in the spring. Hoffman had sheltered them for the duration of Kepler’s illness, including the darkest days in November, when everyone had been convinced that the astronomer was dying. His decline had been hastened by the letter from Mästlin. It had arrived soon after Kepler’s return from Benátky Castle.

  ‘We’re saved!’ Kepler had cried as he pulled open the letter in Hoffman’s grand hallway, bringing Barbara and the Baron running to join the celebration.

  However, at the sight of the words, Kepler dropped the letter and reached for a nearby chair. Hoffman called for some beer to revive him as Barbara dived for the fluttering sheet. She read it with tears in her eyes.

  I can offer you nothing but prayers. If only you had sought the advice of men wiser and more experienced in politics than I. I am, I confess, as inexperienced in such matters as a child.

  ‘We are finished,’ Kepler had whispered, feeling the strength slip from his body. Yet, somehow, his soul had remained intact. Hoffman had sent his staff skidding along the frosty cobbles into the markets earlier and earlier each week, to buy the dwindling winter supplies of Guinea spice and ginger that Kepler’s fever required. Barbara fed her husband the specially prepared soups in the hope that they would purge his body. His nightly voiding of putrescence convinced them all of the treatment’s efficacy and, as he shivered uncontrollably in the wake of these violent bouts, bedroom windows wide to remove the stench, so Barbara kneeled by his bed and prayed. Eventually, coinciding with the arrival of the first lily of the valley in the nearby forests, Mercury took hold of the reins and Kepler’s strength slowly recovered.