—England, Kelley said. He turned, and raised a knight’s gauntlet; set out without looking back. John Dee never saw him again.
It is some twenty leagues from Teboa to Prague. At his new house in the castle precincts, Kelley found a man awaiting him: a man he knew slightly, a physician of the Emperor’s named Croll, or was it Kroll. All in black like a monk or. Kelley said he hoped he had not been waiting long.
—Waiting long? said Dr. Kroll. He was smiling with an odd intensity; his hands were clasped behind his back; there was a contingent of the Imperial guard come with him, and a sergeant at arms, who watched impassively.
—I hope you have not.
—Oh very long, the man said. Oh yes a very very long time indeed.
—Now, said John Dee. Now we have our carriages and their equipage, horses, fine horses, with harness; leathern bags aplenty; a Queen’s safe-conduct too. Let us go, go, go. Now while we may.
Now, while the gold he had accumulated could still be marked by a tooth, still color a touchstone; he filled the bags with it, and secured them in the new coach himself. The coach was enormous, oddly high-sided and heavy, Dee’s own design; the coach maker had shaken his head over it and huffed and muttered and turned the drawings upside down and right side up, and asked Dee why he had not gone to a boatwright with this. But now it was ready and its furnishings installed and its brightwork polished and its tack all creaking-new and odorous.
Now. One last communication though, left deliberately till last: in the midst of his servants and the Duke’s men carrying out his boxes and chests Doctor Dee sat down and wrote in Latin in a swift hand to the Emperor’s chamberlain. He told him how God through the medium of His holy angels had first brought him to Prague, and how the evil tongues of some close to the Emperor’s counsels had then driven him out; and how the Emperor’s commandment now prevented his going there again. He said that he could not himself return the one redeemed from the White Tower without violating that commandment. Also he feared the Nuncio and the Italians, who would not hesitate to take him if they could. He said he regretted the delay, but that the boy was now wholly cured, his present gentleness greater than his former ferocity; that he no longer needed restraints. Now, he said, he would give the boy over to those servants of the Emperor who continuously watched the comings and goings of John Dee’s household here, to be carried to His Sacred Majesty. The bearer would give SS Majestas all particulars.
This letter, folded sealed and addressed, John Dee tucked into his sleeve.
And as Jane and the children, the servants following with the last of their belongings, left the palace and piled into the interior of the coach, Doctor Dee climbed to the tower room to fetch the crystal sphere, the glass from which he had been spoken to. He had almost thought to leave it; he did leave the table with its signacula, all the beeswax candles, and the frame that had held it up. But he took the glass itself. He wrapped it in lambskin, placed it in a leather pouch, pouch in a strong box, box in the bottommost of the wagon. Safe as a cage of doves or a saint’s bones. He thought it likely, though, that it would never speak again; he thought it would from now on show nothing but the surrounding air and the world, strangely curved by its surface.
Nothing.
She had said, once, that a wind would bring in the time of passage wherein the new age was forged, and a second wind bear it out again; and of that new age she’d said, Look not for me, I will not be there. She had not said that in the new age she would not only be absent, but impossible: that whatever was possible, she would not be.
There were twelve young Hungarian horses to pull, and three Wallachees for saddle horses: Arthur begged to ride with the postilions and was allowed. Up to the coachman’s seat, to guide us in the country and the night he said with a smile, Dee sent the young Bohemian boy with the dreadful hobble, hatted and scarved for the cold. And when, as he expected, the eternal loiterers at the tavern leapt up to see this grumbling coach emerge from the Duke’s gates, Doctor Dee summoned one with a wave; he took the letter to the chamberlain from his sleeve, and gave it into the man’s astonished hands.
—Take this to Prague castle, he said. Be quick if you expect reward.
And he drew the curtain.
Next day at dawn a company of the Imperial guard rode out from Hradčany, clattering and clanking in their arms, their horses’ iron-shod hooves slipping on the cobbles and striking sparks. They were many hours and miles behind the fleeing wizard, but moving much faster. There was only one way he could have gone, the captain thought, through the southern passes of the Böhmerwald, making for Regens-burg, and he was right: after another night and day John Dee’s carriage stood at the top of a pass, his horses spent and weary and the sun going down far away at the end of a winding road.
—Now, said John Dee, who sensed the troop that pursued him; he could have spied it like Cæsar if he had had the Emperor’s mirrors. He climbed down from the coach, wetted a forefinger and held it up into the still air. Now we must make speed or we will be stopped. We must not stay the night.
He had them all disembark, and he and the stolid coachman set to work and stepped a light mast amidships (it had been carried underslung in three long pieces, fitted with iron cuffs and made to slip one into another; with a long hammer the coachman nailed them securely together). A bowsprit too reaching off the bow, which is what the carriage’s strange sharp nose could clearly be seen to be. They slung a yard across the mast and from it dropped a four-cornered lugsail, such as John Dee remembered the fishing keels of the River Humber at home to have, right for a heavy broad craft such as his; he ran a little topsail too, for the brave show of it, and a jib from the bowsprit.
The older children all helped to set a standing rigging of fore-and-aft stays to keep the mast steady. Stays from the bowsprit to the mast too, and stays to hold down the bowsprit from being lifted by the jib—the great grief of your lugsail, said the Doctor. Running rigging then to make and shorten sail, held by pins along the rail. The afternoon grew late. With the little ones Jane Dee sat by the roadside; the children sought for spring wildflowers under the forest mold and put them in her lap; she watched her husband, and when he caught her look he could read it well enough: you are a great fool, and that a Ship of Fools.
When it was rigged he stood off, clasped his hands behind his back and studied it. The air was still.
—Well, we must lighten our load. Come.
From down deep in the wagon’s hold he began to pull out the leathern bags that held their gold. Not those, not those, his children cried, but he kept on; when they were heaped on the ground he unbelted one and took from it a few great coins. They shone, but not with gold’s light; they seemed to have acquired a film of slime. They stank.
—Come, he said again; tossed those coins back and lifted the bag. Arthur and Katherine each took another and followed their father to where a little bridge crossed a rocky gullied place that fell sharply away; a roadside shrine was there, a cross, a Corpus. The leather bag was too heavy for the Doctor to lift high enough; Arthur came and pushed from below, and all the gold within poured out, coins slipping and sliding in a ringing rush down the slope. They looked down to see what they had done: gold enough to buy happiness twice over lay shining in the dark gulch, caught in cracks and crevices and flung over the ground like blossoms.
—Now the rest, said Dee. In the first hard rain it will be gone, or be so changed it will fool no one.
They tore open the others and poured them out too. Arthur laughed aloud: throwing it away was even more astonishing than making it had been.
When they returned to the carriage the Bohemian boy had climbed down, taking with him the small bundle that was his, shirts Jane Dee had sewn for him, herbals the Doctor had made, a Latin grammar of Arthur’s.
—I will lighten your load too.
—No, John Dee said.
—If you cannot go quick enough, the boy said, and they catch you, I should not be with you.
—We will be qui
ck. I promise you.
—No, said the boy. I will be gone.
—Home? asked the Doctor.
—I don’t know how to find it. They would not take me in. Anywhere is home enough.
—How will you live?
The boy smiled, and hooked his crutch beneath his arm. Beg, he said.
John Dee would have said more, wanted to say more, to know more too; he had thought to take the boy far with him, to Bremen, to England it might be, and find him a ship bound for Atlantis or the new-found-lands: but now a sharp wind had risen, and the wheels of the wagon creaked. John Dee clutched his hat, expostulated under his breath in Latin; the wind subsided, but only a little. He embraced the boy.
—May God bless you then, he said. And keep you from all harm. Wherever you go. In whatever land.
—Amen, said the boy, and kissed the old man, and turned away. The others did not see him go, for the quick little wind had changed its quarter; the children were watching it luff and belly the sails, the coachman hauling on the reins and calling to his frightened team and stamping on the brake. Arthur and Rowland were reminding each other how a lugsail is hauled into the wind.
—The wind! called Katherine as her mother pushed her aboard. Father! Is it Boreas the North Wind? Or Auster the South Wind? Or Angustes the Northwest Wind? Or?
—It is my very own wind, John Dee shouted over its cry, pulled aboard the moving coach by his sons. But God alone knows how long it will be mine. If it blow till the world’s end it may not be long enough.
The wolf went on, following a track he came upon, which grew clearer and broader as he walked along, until the roofs of woodcutters’ and charcoal-burners’ cottages appeared, and just when he thought he could walk no farther he reached a village, a church where he might be helped.
In that village he lived for a time, and then passed on to another village and then to another, gathering as he travelled a past around himself deep enough to satisfy questioners; and he would never again be caught, asleep or awake, in that land or this one. He would not ever see Atlantis, though he would sometimes dream of it. He would find work, and a wife, and father children, and his children and their children would be born without the destiny he suffered.
When he became a very old man he was brought to trial (the records exist) for saying that he had as a youth gone out in the form of a wolf to do battle with witches. The judges tried to make him confess that he had made a compact with the Devil, but he would not; what did he have to do with the Devil? He had fought the Devil’s witches at Hell’s door, and when he was dead his soul would go to heaven. The judges did not know what to do with him. The time was past when men of reason could be frightened by such stories; no witch had been burned in that diocese for a generation. The priest was brought in to scold him for his lies and his blasphemies, and he was given ten lashes and sent home.
By that time seams of coal had been discovered and opened all over those mountains. The people of the region became miners, the most famous in Europe, taught their trade (some said) by the old kobolds whom their picks and hammers had awakened. Take it and leave us in peace. And his children’s children mined, and raised their children to be miners. And their descendants did, at last, come to Atlantis, and indeed there were great forests there, and high mountains, and coal in the mountains that must be mined: a vast seam running down the gnarled backbone of the land.
They went south and west as more mines were opened; many more of them came from the old lands over time, and it was they who taught the mountain people how to mine, who before had only farmed and hunted and cut timber. They were called bohunks or Dutchmen by the people of those mountains; they went together with them down the deep shafts and did not see the day, and loaded the cars with the mountains’ heart. Black Gold one company called theirs; earth transformed to worth by time. They kept to themselves mostly, in their hunky towns, speaking their own language (less and less over time till only grandmas and babies shared it) and building churches for themselves of wood and clapboard like their neighbors’; priests brought saints’ bones all the way from Prague and Brno and Rome to put under the altar stones. And there, in those mountains, some of their children would again be born with the caul, and their mothers would look into their hooded faces and not remember what it foretold.
2
There are ways down into the land of Death: and there are also ways upward into the realms above, to which the same dead go.
There are the dark brotherhoods, the unknown ones, who go down into those lands that are not under the earth’s skin of soil but are nevertheless deep down; who give chase, who follow after those whom they are bound to pursue, to whom they are joined through time in an enmity that is not different from love. And there are also the light brotherhoods, who go the upward ways, and they are also unknown. Over their lifetimes—over many lifetimes, it might be—these have built for themselves, by thought and by works, a body of light: a body that beyond death can arise through all the spheres like an ark, and escape the jealous rulers. They know the right words to say, they don’t drink at the silver river and forget whence they have come and whither they go, and so they don’t need to turn back and do it all again.
And yet among them are a few who, knowing all this, nevertheless do return here below, for our sakes. How many? Only one in any age, whose name is known to all though not his nature? Or numbers of them, enough so that every one of us will one day be touched by one? Anyway they return, not once but many times, and they will go on returning—not recycled out of hylic ignorance and forgetfulness but turning back by choice from that shore, each time more reluctantly, with deeper pangs, and only because so many of us still remain behind.
Beau Brachman didn’t remember where he had first learned this story, on what continent or coast, or if he had maybe not learned it at all but simply recalled it, like Plato’s boy and the triangle. He didn’t know if, in the story, those who return to us with their aid and their knowledge are able to remember who they are and why they have come back: or if they act as they do without knowing. If that were so it made the heart almost stop for a moment in pity and love to think of—Beau’s anyway—before beating again more richly. Beau was himself on a journey of remembrance and recall, as well as of progress and discovery, if they’re different (they weren’t then); he was walking downtown through New York City and drawing, from the things and people that he saw, the city he had once lived in. Gautama, Pythagoras too, remembered each and every one of their past lives, and were not crushed by the weight of that measureless suffering; Beau worked to reassemble just the present one he was actually living, cleaning his house in search of the groat he had lost.
Midtown streets were full of the usual handers-out of flyers and offerings. Beau had always taken these, whether snapped briskly at him from the hands of men in dark glasses or held out hopelessly by the walking wounded or pressed on him as though for him alone, for he knew that those who are paid to hand them out only get their money when they’re all gone. He had at one time used to study each one too—not for anything he might want that they offered, only trying his luck, a sortilege or fortune cookie. There seemed to be more being proffered now than there had been then, which was maybe why Beau took no notice of the wraithlike boy with starveling’s arms bare in the cold who handed him one, his last or only one.
SOPHIA WISDOM
WITHOUT SOPHIA NO WORLD
WITHOUT SOPHIA NO SUFFERING
She is the Companion of God, the First Thought of His Mind, and without her was made nothing that was made. Springing forth from the Father she descended from the Highest Heavens, and by her descent created Angels and Archangels. And out of envy they captured her, because they did not want to think themselves anyone’s progeny; they dragged her down into the world of waters which they ruled; they imprisoned her in the body of death.
The page was so dim and crabbed, the type so small, that Beau had walked on half a block before he had got it right side up and read its heading; and w
hen he saw what it was and looked back, the child who had given it to him was “nowhere to be seen,” of course.
In countless ages she has passed through countless bodies; all the Powers strive with one another to possess her, and where she has appeared has come strife and warfare; she was Helen of Troy, she was Virgin Mary; she is both Wh-re and Holy, both Lost and Found, Child and Mother, helper and harmer. +JESUS+ came to this earth and the body to find her, his twin and parent, and saving her saves us. Go thou and do likewise (Luke 10:37).
Read and remember. Knowledge comes in 60 days. Pass it on.
PRAY TO/FOR SOPHIA SAVE HOLY WISDOM OPEN YOUR HEART
Beau folded the sordid sheet and pocketed it, thoughtful—not because of the story it told, which he actually knew, but because he remembered being handed this sheet or an almost identical one years before, and therefore guessed that this one pointed the right way (backwards).
Out on these streets, yes maybe on this very corner, a decade and more ago: Beau was recently back from Elsewhere and feeling that he had fetched up on the wrong coast, not to say the wrong continent, and this Sophia one was not the only paper he had got in the way of in those days, not the only news handed to him or blown up against his legs or bought for pennies that had altered his direction, handmade news borne out from underground printshops by troglodytes and sold all in an instant by bedizened children. A picture for instance (one of many, doubtless, but this the one that had remained with him) of four or six godlike persons, a band it was said, their thumbs in their belt loops and their jean cuffs turned up above their bootheels, American giants, he had forgotten during his time among the smaller older peoples how strong and tall humans could be; and their hair grown to fabulous lengths, fulfilling hair destinies previously unrealized for modern male humans, hair like Botticelli’s angels, hair like dandelion moons, hair like storm-tangled seaweed, a promise that if this was possible then nothing need ever be the same here again. Quicksilver Messenger Service. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Beau now, in this winter, going downtown on Madison, smiled to remember them.
DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle Page 43