—For now, he said, you are in my care. For now.
The moon had been waxing through those days; it blotted out the stars now, and ended the treatments, which were anyway unnecessary; they began to sleep in the nights again, staying aloft in their tower only because John Dee did not know what else to do. The Ember Days of autumn had come; here in the countryside the vintage would be gathered; in England they would be mourning John Barleycorn, dead that his countless sons might live.
On Friday midnight the moon would be full. Should they put chains on their wolf?
In the end they did not. The Emperor’s guards still slept outside the door. When the white moon crossed John Dee’s window and her light awoke him, he sat up thinking He is gone. And though he knew it was foolish, he must get up from his bed, pull his robe around him, and go to look into the chamber where Jan was kept. No of course he lay asleep there, the moon on his cheek too, his mouth open, breathing steadily in and out as though an unseen hand pressed the bellows of his lungs. A step closer: how strange: in the moon’s light Dee could see that beneath the thin white skin of his eyelids the balls of his eyes were moving, fitfully, rapidly, side to side, just as though they saw.
The land Death is very near, but very long to reach. Sometimes a whole night’s journey won’t bring you there, though you know always that it lies but one step from where you are.
There is, or often is, a river to cross, and it might be this one he had come to, fast-flowing in a nightwind, dark flocks of sleeping waterbirds, and the leap of a stone bridge to cross it by, greatest bridge he had ever seen or dreamed of, as daunting as the wide black water down below to enter on. He was far from home.
He had come down from the tower (after pausing wondering and confused on the sill of a window, unaware of having leapt to it, awaking there on hearing his name distinctly spoken) by turning himself around and with his claws slipping down, stone by rough stone, like a spider. Then he had made his way out of the castle district, which was as hard to leave as to get into, but he was not stopped, could not (it seemed) be seen, or believed in.
Now a great river. A river to cross, the old ones had used to say who had taught him the journey he must go. Often a river. Sometimes a little lame child who leads you.
No child, but a bridge. He saw walkers—belated souls, maybe, passing through the barbican to cross to the side where now they must stay, some with lights carried before them, but who would do the dead that service? He did not know where the bridge led; he thought that those who crossed it would flee from him if he entered onto it, but they took no notice of him, and at length, heart hard in his throat and drumming as his four feet did on the pudding-stone of the roadway, he went through the gate himself and crossed. The moon was high.
So many, so many more dead than living: he had known it but had not thought what a big and crowded city they would need for themselves, all those that had gone before. The black houses were tall and with no spaces between them, the streets narrow and twisting as though running to hide, to escape being built upon, and filled with the dead.
A drum called from on ahead, and the streets were filling with souls who followed it—stumblers, wanderers, laughing and wide-eyed and with surely nowhere to walk to. Not all poor men either; he saw a knot of wealthy ladies masked and in furred robes, a knight in armor, even what seemed to be a bishop by his cope and crook—except that his head was of a piece with his miter, he was a fish or lizard staring upward with open jaws.
For here, on this side, the Good Lady’s company becomes the beasts they ride. They were all here in the thickening crowd; Jan knew them instantly from processions and plays in his own village. There was Lucek, with his beak like a stork’s and feather cape and mincing gait. There was Bruna the goat and Klibna the horse, and Perchta their Queen in her ragged skins. In the buildings they passed the shutters of the windows were banged shut as the great-eyed beasts looked in, because if those inside were among the living they should not look upon this company, Death’s company.
Yes Death’s: for he was there, in the center of the throng where the drum-thumps were loudest, Smrtka, Death himself in his coat of moldy straw and his Totenkopf eyeless and white, his regal chain of broken eggshells wound around him. Those near him held him aloft, his horrid weak arms of dead lichenous twigs and his legs of rope unable to support him.
Jan chased along with the crying singing capering crowd, swept up among them and unable not to go the way they went; but where were his own company to take his side, and oppose Smrtka and Perchta’s legions, those who had stolen the life of things and must be made to give it back? Why was he alone here? Why did the swaying staggerers (drunk? One spewed into the gutter) not fall upon him, alone as he was here? No eye turned on him. No one saw.
So it must be that he was still among the living, after all. He could pass by them and among them unseen, as he had passed by the soldiers and porters and doorkeepers of the castle, for he was not as they were; they had merely put on their skins, and he had not. They were dressed for the festival of the Ember Days as the beasts who die but never die, they were Death’s celebrants and attendants and carried Death and beat drums to honor him, but they were alive; this city was after all only a dark city, not that crowded realm.
She, though. Ahead and alone, moving not with the throng but against them, as though they were not there—as though she could not see them, just as they evidently could not see her. A tall woman with feet bare and hair free, tangled black wings of hair, and her face dark, terribly dark, as though burned or scarred: facies nigra, that doctor of the Emperor’s had said, the melancholic’s black face.
She saw him. As he saw her. She seemed to awaken, or her eyes widened so that he could see the whites. She stopped, and turned away; she stepped off with a long stride, and just then from the crowd or from elsewhere there came a boy, a young pale boy, a naked beggar, hurt in his foot and pegging quickly on a cleft stick held under his arm. Gone from sight almost as soon as seen, but she had seen him too, and turned the way he had turned, down an alley. Gone.
Gone.
No they were there, far ahead, where a square opened at the alley’s end, and a tower stood up, with a clock mounted in it, which just then rang the first hour.
For a very long time he followed them. Night seemed to go on and on, or to have come to a stop and ceased to pass. Through city gates standing wide and unguarded (or the guards asleep in heaps, mouths wide like their gates, hugging their pikes like wives) and out onto moonstreak highways. The land smelled like his home. He saw the lame boy, far away, how could he go so fast. He saw her too, always soon after, saw her tall and long-armed in the moonlit wheat like a scarecrow or amid the heavy vines, gathering, gathering.
Another river at last: different from the river flowing through the city; lightless, the banks featureless, the far side invisible. This was that river: he knew.
When he came to it he found her stopped there too, loitering, bewildered; she had grown larger, her burdens around her beneath the muffling cloaks. When she became aware of him she turned to the water, but could not cross it, it lapped at her naked feet and darkened the hem of her skirt. She drew back and looked at him, her eye-whites big and her features mobile, afraid, or questioning, or hurt.
Why are we here alone?
She put this question, or he read it in her or he felt it arise in himself; and a flood of pain overcame him, and he remembered the wound to his own foot.
I’m hurt, he said. I can go no farther.
He sat or lay down on the river’s edge. Like a dog’s his long tongue lolled from his jaw as he panted; now and then he mopped with it the slaver from his chops, and panted again.
Where is the pretty lame boy?
She came to where he lay, and bent over him, and her scarred face and its wild undone hair came close and closer until it filled his sight.
Why are we here alone?
He didn’t know. Neither knew. They were like the last two left alive in a village through which the plagu
e has passed, who get up from their beds weak but not dead, and go out into the lanes and the fields, and find the ploughman dead, the priest dead, the baker dead, the miller dead, no village to be of, only they two, whose families have perhaps quarreled for generations, now all dead too; so they sit down side by side.
She sat down beside him where he lay. She was shaking, and drew up her knees to her chin, and put her arm around his neck. He could feel her cheek against the rough hair of his head. He had ceased to pant.
He must have slept: for when his eyes opened he saw her far away, in the middle of the river, following the bright lame boy; her burdens rocked side to side as she slid and slipped over the river’s billows as over ice, moving quickly, and the boy’s head alight before her like a candle in the fog.
Bereft, bereft as though split in two by a sword, he went breastdeep into the water and stood until he could see no more. He thought first: she has fooled me. Then he thought: I am hurt and can never go farther. And he thought: she is stronger than I am.
When he went out and turned away from the river, the river was no more. Now before him lay the way he had come: before first light he must go back that long way, over the roads and the highway, through the suburbs and the city gates, through the city to the castle, to the tower and the small window of his chamber. If he could not do that he would never awaken in his bed. The moon was down. He set out.
It was the same for all of them at that moment: through the world now they were all turning back from the land they had journeyed to, however far toward it they had gone, chaser and chased, afraid, belated, returning each by his own way, the land to which they had gone closing up behind them as they hurried home. In the cottages and in the narrow houses of the city some of those asleep in their beds may have dreamed of him as he passed; some of those awake might have given thought to his kind and their battle, for most folk knew of it, whether they believed it or not, and knew that it was on nights such as this one that it took place. But the only ones who saw him were a priest and his acolyte, bearing the Sacrament through the night streets to a dying man: saw the fleet dark shape of him start to cross their path, then, eyes aglow, stop and kneel to his elbows (he could not cross himself with these arms, though desperately he wished to) and reverently bow his long black head.
—We are alone, he would tell John Dee next day. Once we were many, and went together. And they were many, too. Now we are few and alone. So many gone, so many. Burned and hanged and. From now on we are alone and will be, till Judgment.
Trying to rise from his bed, weak and spent, the color absent again from his cheeks and his eyes black pissholes.
—Alone, he said. Alone.
John Dee held his shoulders as though he were a sick child of his own, and thought How large the world is, how numerous its creatures; how little of it I have known.
That day, while the boy slept, John Dee wrote in Latin to the Emperor’s chamberlain:
God, in His infinite wisdom, has provided to His children the remedies for their hurts, the first and greatest being our trust in Him. God be praised that through the actions of my Art and our prayers accompanying them, the one who was commanded into my care has passed again into a sort of health, and many of the symptomata we observed have been relieved. Still the work must be continued, and despite the care and solicitude of SS Majestas that all things necessary be provided here, only in my own quarters can that which was here begun be completed with certainty of success. I have begged leave of His Excellency Duke Petr of Romberk that he make room in his great house, and so on; knowing the dreadful chance he took and how short the time.
Nothing is taken away but something of equal value, or equal harm, is given: the Œconomy of hell and of heaven was disturbed, but because of it, on earth men heard news not known before, things never imagined. Great arts now perhaps failed, but little ones were for the moment more useful than ever. Using tricks he had neglected so long he had to knock on his brow to recall how to do them—tricks the common people thought devilish, but which were natural, natural—John Dee passed out of the tower room at evening, arm in arm with his wolf, and down and out: unseen by the Emperor’s guards at the doors, who thought that they heard a mousing cat in the corner, or a jackdaw at the window, and felt perhaps a guilty wonder.
4
On an August morning of that year, Giordano Bruno left his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Turnip (everything in Prague was golden, there were taverns and inns called Golden Angel, Golden Eyes, Golden Plough) and went down through the Old Town on his way to the castle across the river.
The bridge that led to the castle was as broad and long as the one he remembered at Avignon, the one the children sing about. Black-beaked gulls shrieked and battled around the cutwaters, bobbed on the foam: More spans—ten, twelve, sixteen—than the bridge at Regensburg. The Tower Bridge in London was small compared to it, and the bridges over the Seine, and over the Main at Frankfurt.
Giordano Bruno had crossed many bridges.
After he had slipped out of Paris, a penniless wandering scholar again, he’d come to Wittenberg, Luther’s city; for two years he lectured there, in safety and peace, and gratitude would induce in him a rare humility. I was a man of no name or authority among you, he wrote, dedicating a book to the university faculty; I had escaped from the tumults of France, sponsored by no prince, and you thought me worthy of welcome. Then a newly ascendant Calvinist party among the theological faculty decided that, when all is said and done, Scripture made it clear that the Sun really did go around the Earth (how otherwise could Joshua command it to stand still upon Gibeon, and lengthen the day?) and there was to be no more disputing this, so once again Bruno had made his farewells; in tears he parted from the young men who during his tenure there had attached themselves to him, disciples such as he would always have wherever he went, giordanisti, not many in any one place but loyal and brave, all of them; almost all. And he made his way to Prague.
He carried under his arm a new little book that he had dedicated to the Emperor, an argument against the pedant-mathematicians of the Mordente type, who liked their systems to refer to nothing and contain nothing but the operations of the numbers they used: striving to keep their systems closed, like a man struggling to keep his doors barred and his shutters shut in a storm. There was another way to use numbers and figures, an open and endless way, as variable as the world is, as chaotic even; a way to combine the heart-stirring sign (cross, star, rose) and the brain-teasing figure into one parable. They would never find such a thing, but he, Bruno, might.
Upward. He mounted the cobbled way up the hill to the castle-palace and its churches and cathedrals. At every gate, he opened and showed to the guards the crackling parchment that had been issued him, hung with seals and ribbons, inviting him to wait upon the Emperor’s pleasure this day; they looked at him not at it, and let him pass. It was harder to get by the crowds of beggars and whores who lived in tents, hovels and caves all along the narrow way. Up ahead he saw that they importuned other climbers, tugging at the gown of that whitebeard with the tall hat and staff who pressed strongly on past them.
That man. Somewhere in Giordano Bruno’s Memory Palace—where every person place and thing, mortal and immortal, concrete and abstract, that Giordano Bruno had encountered in his long wanderings had its place, among all the others whose nature and meaning it shared—in a disused wing or annex, something or someone stirred.
The man on the stair turned back to see Bruno following, and Giordano Bruno saw the face he expected to see, as though he had himself created it.
—Ave frater.
The old wizard started to see him: it was the look of a man who sees a ghost, the one ghost most likely to appear before him.
—The man of Nola, he said. The Oxford scholist.
They had met at John Dee’s house on the day of Bruno’s first lecture at Oxford, where the asses brayed so loud that Bruno, like the Titans, was silenced. (Those Oxford asses too were penned in Bruno’s Pal
ace, not forgotten, or forgiven either.)
—Quo vadis? John Dee asked, beginning again to mount the cobbles. Shortlegged Bruno hurried after. What do you do in this city?
—I am summoned, he said. I have been commanded into the Emperor’s presence. Today is the day, ante meridiem.
—Strange. I have myself been summoned to appear this day. This morning too.
The way here was not wide enough for two to walk together, or one to pass by another. John Dee’s steps quickened; Bruno kept pace just behind him.
—You have spoken to the Emperor before, Bruno said.
—Several times. I have been permitted to render him a service. I have had audiences. Promises were made me.
—Perhaps then, Bruno said, you will be good enough to let me pass. You have the entrée every day. I am newly arrived here and very much in need of, of.
—You are mistaken, Dee said, not slackening his pace. The Cardinal-Nuncio is my enemy. Lies have been told. I have lately been banished from this city and this castle. I have been issued a passport good for this one day only. I have come many leagues. The Emperor is not quick to meet those who wait upon him. If not today never.
They crossed a vast crowded courtyard. The gate was before them; whichever of them reached it first would be first into the Presence, for the many guards there and the clerks would be a long time examining papers and asking questions.
—Let me by, Bruno said. He was tempted to tug at the gown that filled like a sail with Dee’s progress.
—You will trip me up, Dee said. Stop.
For a moment they jostled; then without a word Dee whirled twice around widdershins, and Bruno cried out, for he faced not an elderly Englishman but a tall pillar of adamant.
But in a moment Bruno, fired by fear and need, had changed himself to a jug of red wine, and poured himself out and around the pillar’s base.
But the pillar became a flopping marble dolphin that drank the wine.
But Bruno became a net that entangled the fish, then a mouse that fled. But to escape the net, the fish had also become a mouse, and the upshot was that, their stocks of simulacra or phantasmic projections for the moment exhausted, they both found themselves at the same time before the incurious guards (who had of course seen nothing), both panting sharply and with disordered clothes, their papers held out.
DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle Page 26