by John Crowley
The Emperor had his own furnace, at which he labored over the Work by himself in blackened gloves and apron while his counsellors shook their heads over him; and on the table in the Emperor’s bedroom, at the heart of the great castle from which he issued less and less frequently, lay the book of John Dee’s called Monas hieroglyphica, explicating the sign for the same process or action:
And on one summer’s day in 1586, while the Emperor stared at the seal, and the clocks in his chamber ticked away, counting out the new endless-ribbon style of time, John Dee and Edward Kelley had indeed made gold. Using a “powder of projection” that Kelley had carried for years, and following the angelic instructions they had received. They alone, among all those on that street of that city who spent their lives and fortunes attempting it. It was but a minim or two in the vessel’s bottom, not a thaler’s worth, but it was gold that had not existed in the world before; it shone up at them, a little twisted embryo, sophic, wonderful.
Too small though; fruitless little mass, sterile, unable to generate more, a masturbator’s vain squib. What was wrong?
Maybe this kingdom was, after all, a sterile one; or this old earth was, or this age. This Emperor who had never married, though his counsellors begged him; who had no heirs, no legitimate bed. He had produced children, though, many of them, with his many concubines.
Then maybe it was Kelley who was the sterile one.
Kelley had begged the spirits and Madimi to free him from these hard duties, if this was to be the upshot, this little gob of gold; and she refused him. Not for a short time have I yoked you two together. When he wept, beating his fists on the faldstool’s lip in impotent child’s resentment, she took him by the collar (a grown woman now, imperious in her gown of red and white, her breasts bare, her skirt parted) and stilled him. Whatever you want I have in my gift. Will you stop now, when the hart is fainting before you and the dogs are belling and the scent of blood is on the air? Come for me, for I will welcome you, I promise you, as I ever have. As I ever have.
John Dee kneeling with Kelley before the glass that night had bowed his head, abashed; but Edward in her grip laughed aloud gleeful and terrified, like a child snatched up by a laughing mighty captain astride a great horse, to ride along with him.
John Dee remembered how he had laughed.
—Ah Christ Jesus forgive me that I loved her, John Dee whispered to the empty globe in his study in his ransacked house in England. Forgive me, Jane, that I loved them both. And do so still.
He had given all he had, and got much, and given all that too: and he was here again where he’d begun.
He sat down amid the litter of papers and broken-backed books. He could hear Jane his wife, weeping, in the farther end of the house, coming on fresh villainies. Those who had broken into his house in his absence to destroy his works and smash his tools (sparing this glass but not his great astronomical staff, his sphere of the heavens, his stores of medicines and distillations, he had not reckoned it all up yet) had not shut the doors behind them when they departed, and the thieves who then came in stole his spoons and cups and even the crucifix from over the door.
She—Madimi—had told him his house would be safe in his absence, and she had not been able to protect it, not against her enemies, nor against his.
His enemies, his neighbors. It was his neighbors who in his absence had invaded his house and broken his instruments and despoiled his books: they had convinced themselves, as foolish unlearned people could do, that because he studied deep matters and the stars he served the Devil, and conjured.
Nor was it only the vulgar who thought in this way. The learned too saw damned spirits everywhere now; mad old women who muttered or cursed their neighbors for their unkindness were driven away from home or imprisoned and put to torture for being the Devil’s servants. Old Mother Godefroy, who lived near the stile by Richmond field, from whom John Dee had bought his herbs and simples—she was gone now, her small house fallen in, and when Doctor Dee asked after her, the Mortlake townspeople looked away, and said they knew nothing. She had kept a cat, and had a blind eye: it was enough.
The Queen herself, once his friend, whom he had taught, to whom he had opened mysteries: she could not now openly support her old physician and friend. Though her counsellors had sent him letters privily, in Prague and Tebo, it was unwise for a monarch in these times to be seen to favor one who might later be shown, or be believed, to have sold himself to the Enemy.
And John Dee, who had so often protested his innocence and the whiteness of his enterprises, who had never knelt before a stone—not this one or any one—without invoking the sacred Name of Christ Crucified, who had wanted knowledge of God’s creation only to increase thereby among men the glory of the Creator: John Dee did not any longer himself know if the spirits he had spoken to, whom he had loved and served as he had no human master, were wicked damned ones, or not.
11
Were wicked damned ones, or not.
The words were the last ones typed on a sheet of yellow copy paper, which lay atop a pile of other, similar sheets. The pile (a book, a novel) rose from the varnished plywood surface which the author of them had used as a desk, built in below the casement windows that looked out on his garden. The garden, which he had labored over as much as he had over any of his books, was neglected now and brown. Across the bottom of the yellow sheet, below the last words, were three hard-struck asterisks, indicating a chapter’s end. The author, or rather the author’s ghost (for the author was dead) could remember nothing at all of the book except what was on the page before him, which he could not turn, and which he stared at without satisfaction until there came the sound of a key turned in the lock of the back door, the only sound made in the house that morning; and with that he evanesced.
Pierce Moffett entering the cryptlike space of Fellowes Kraft’s library or sitting room was brisk and businesslike, as he had not been when first he had been admitted here, filled with apprehensive wonder then and not knowing what he would see. Now he knew the place, in all weathers too; the mildew he breathed in was familiar, and he sought for something to prop a window open with—this walking stick, he guessed that’s what it was, dog-headed and worn smooth. Done. The yellowed lace curtain lifted on a breath of October air. Piles of books rose from the dusty rug of the living room; the rifled shelves looked down upon him and the open drawers gaped.
He felt, as he stood there, something of the grave-robber’s awe, and some regret too at the upset he had wreaked. But he should not have; this is the best way, sometimes, to free the tenacious ghost of an old bachelor from his earthly entanglements. When alive he will often allow stuff to pile up untouched, having no reason particularly to disturb the accumulating papers and unheeded mail, or to change the resting places of his ancestors’ things which he’s acquired, no reason particularly to examine them either, no one to show them to; and so parts of his own disintegrating self remain behind after death, caught like dust or must in them.
So pull it all out, fill plastic bags with the worn shoes he had no reason to throw away, there being plenty of room in these closets; bang the old books together like erasers after school and watch the dust fly. You do him a favor: with every scrapbook opened, every ancient pile shifted, a little more of him is loosened, and gets away. Look, one pamphlet has lain here athwart another on this shelf untouched for so long that it has actually left a dark shadow on the one below.
What is it? Pierce lifted it. Not a pamphlet actually but a copy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, one of those yellow playbooks put out by Samuel French, marked up as though in preparation for a production, in what Pierce had come to recognize as Kraft’s own spidery hand.
Funny.
He replaced it more or less where it had lain.
Pierce had first come to this house in June, with Rosie Rasmussen. Her family foundation supported Kraft in his last years, and he left his house and papers to it, his (worthless) copyrights too. Pierce had been hired to go through the house
and catalogue Kraft’s literary remains, and even that limited task opened up odd corners of Kraft’s life. Once opening a chance book from the shelf (a life of Sir Thomas Gresham) he found it to be concealing about five hundred dollars in bills. Tucked away there in some moment of paranoia maybe, a lot more money then than now. He counted it all, and informed his superior, who was Rosie Rasmussen.
“Take it,” she said. “We’ll split it.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Finders keepers.”
“No one the wiser,” Pierce said.
“Absolutely.”
It was not all that Pierce would take from the dead man.
On his very first visit to the house, in Kraft’s little office, Pierce discovered on Kraft’s desk the long yellow typescript, corrected in dim pencil, still lying there beneath his study window. No one, until Pierce came upon it, had known that Kraft was at work on a final novel when he died; it had been years since he’d written anything.
Once, the world was not as it has since become. It had a different history and a different future, and even the laws that governed it were different from the ones we know.
So the sallow pages began, without title or preface, and in Kraft’s explication of that sentence or sententia over the course of hundreds of succeeding pages Pierce had found his own then-unbegun book encompassed, its heart explained to him, and himself commanded or at least permitted to begin—though whether he had seen his own thoughts reflected there, or had stolen those thoughts from Kraft, he couldn’t truly remember. When he observed himself now they seemed always to have been there.
Superstitious about moving it from the house, Pierce had nevertheless agreed with Rosie that the typescript ought to be taken away, and photocopied, and then stored somewhere safe. He had already taken from the shelves and cases here and in Kraft’s tiny office a selection of what he estimated were the most valuable of Kraft’s books, and stowed them in sturdy boxes, to bring them to Arcady to be kept there. For Kraft’s house was to be shut up for the winter, and they should not be left here with the mice and moths and mildew (though they had, some of them, survived centuries of such vicissitudes). And this work or thing of Kraft’s too, a page of which Pierce now perused again before inserting it into its box.
Peripatetic sages and wonder-workers, angel-summoners, gold-makers, were everywhere in those years, moving restlessly from capital to capital, crossing paths with one another in university hostels or city taverns, where they acknowledged one another’s books or fame in the tongue they shared, Latin, however weird or comical one’s national accent made it in the others’ ears. As vagabonds will trade news about where a day’s work can be had, or a night’s lodging, they exchanged news of courts that might be receptive to or at least not scandalized by studies such as theirs, princes who might take them in, protect them, at least for a while.
Paracelsus was one, who said that the Philosopher must study the codex Naturæ, the Book of Nature, in just this way, on foot, one country one page; he kept a familiar spirit in the pommel of his sword. Cornelius Agrippa too, moving restlessly across Europe with his black dog, pursued by rumor and suspicion. A little later Giordano Bruno, travelling from Naples to Rome, to Genoa, Geneva, Paris, London, teaching the three keys to power, Love, Memory, and Mathesis. In London Bruno would come upon John Dee, just as Dee was to set off on his own wanderings with his skryer and his angel band; and then Bruno (on his way to Italy and death) would meet Dee again in Prague, the golden city that drew them both, and others too. Ave, frater.
There had, of course, long been wandering scholars, itinerant doctors, learned pilgrims, hunted necromancers; but now they began to feel themselves to be something more than wanderers. The idea came to them (to each of them separately or to many at once, passed on then to others) that perhaps together they were—what? A Brotherhood; a League; a College. Not one that any of them had founded or set in motion, not at least in this age; if anyone had begun it, it was wandering Hermes, in Ægypt long ago.
Pierce’s idea too, discovered or inherited by him in childhood, as he’d told Boney. Hadn’t he? Something about this house, stopped like a clock in abandonment, seemed to reverse the order of events in his thoughts, put effect before cause. Boney had suggested that Pierce himself might finish this book of Kraft’s: add the remaining touches, bring it to an end, see it through the press. Had even urged him, on several occasions, and named a fee, not small either. Even now, when Boney was as dead as Kraft, his patronage continued: a Rasmussen Foundation grant awaited Pierce, if he wanted it—a research grant, supposedly, that would set him out from here to Europe in search of.
Of what? Life everlasting; the Ægyptian medicine that the old new brotherhood passed down from age to age, the one that Rudolf sought, that he died for lack of. A stone, a crystal ball like the one that Kraft had given to Boney, claiming it to be John Dee’s own, tease the old man with hopeless hopes. Or something better. Something, the one and only thing maybe, that had not lost its former efficacy, growing even more potent on its journey down through the centuries into a colder age than the one it had been born in. Now able to be found again in the twilight, morning or evening, of the world. Believe it or not.
For thus it is in the passage times, times such as they began to understand they were living in. In those times we come to understand our membership in certain long-established—in fact horribly ancient—groups, sodalities, brotherhoods or armies, of whose existence we had not before been aware. Indeed our coming to understand that we are brothers or comrades in them is not different from our sudden discovery that they exist: an excitement, a euphoria, a fear even of what we are about to be called upon to do, or perhaps fail to do.
There is war in Heaven, the angel Madimi told John Dee, speaking from within the globe of quartz where she was housed; a war of all against all. If you are not of one party they will make you of another; whom you are not for, you are against.
Pierce felt steal over him in the little room a species of dread, a feeling not wholly different from the wonder that had filled him the first time he had come into it. This typescript, and his own book; the book’s notes he had compiled, Kraft’s old novels he had once read, these old books that he was taking away from Kraft’s shelves, the crystal ball Rosie said was still there in Boney’s house, the letters Kraft had written to Boney from Prague and Vienna and Rome still piled on Boney’s desk at Arcady, the Foundation’s money awaiting him in the bank—they seemed for a moment to be items in a single list, compiled deliberately over the years; one of those huge and lengthy black-magic spells that can only be got out of by reversing them, step by step.
Put it all back then, cover it again, quick bind the box with a pair of red rubber bands that Kraft’s desk afforded; place it in the liquor carton with the rest. Take it away. Out of the house and across the drifting and ungathered leaves of the lawn.
The load of old books was damn heavy, and heaviest of all, resistant perhaps, tugging him backwards toward its resting place, was the typescript. Scotty—Fellowes Kraft’s malamute-Lab mutt, who was buried there in the swale—relaxed at last as it passed by him in Pierce’s arms; his great breast fell in and eased as though in a sigh, his duties to watch and ward now done at last, all done.
12
Al-Kindi—the great Arabian philosopher whose work circulated in Latin in Europe and was known to every well-read person—showed how every entity in the universe emitted radiation, or rays: radii. Not only the stars and the planets and the denizens of the heavens but the four elements too, and everything made of them, which meant everything there was. The rays proceeding from each existent thing reached to the ends of the universe, the rays of the sun and the feeble rays of every stone and leaf and water drop, every wave forming on the sea’s incoming edge, every fleck of spume thrown up by those waves as they curl and fall. All these rays intersected in all directions with the rays produced by all other things in a shifting geometry of mutual influence that made everything the way it was,
caused it to continue or to change.
Everything. Pluck a dandelion and in its death you tore a small, an infinitesimal hole in the fabric of universal radiation, a hole resolved almost as soon as it was made—but in that instant an answering hole opened in the heart of the sun; on the Libyan desert a sleeping lion might open his eye and look up at his Father Sun, then sleep again; no harm done. But when a butterfly alighting on a flower in the Antipodes moved its wings, the rays produced extended out from it to intersect with the rays produced by other things, and those deflected rays with the rays of still other things, until eventually by multiplication of effects those collisions produced a hurricane in Thule.
In that world there was no chance: if the strength and angle of every ray could have been charted, and its intersection with every other ray predicted, the future could have been known precisely: but that was impossible, the complexity of the world was so great that its perfectly logical and regular production of effects, though wholly determined, might just as well have been due to chance.