by John Crowley
Perhaps it was only thus that angels speak to men; perhaps the angels that we hear are ours alone, hidden inside.
And he said aloud:
—Then I will do it myself.
As though a seedpod burst just then within him he felt a hot certainty—no, not certainty, possibility—fly through him to his fingertips and his hair roots, and pass, and leave him calm.
Myself. Like the red hen in the tale: I will do it myself, said the red hen: and she did.
He set down his candle and came closer to the ball. Did it shrink away from him, shy or afraid, no it could not. As he came closer he could see that on its silvery surface the whole room was reflected, walls and windows curving to touch one another and the floor and the ceiling. Closer and he could see his own face in the middle, swollen like a puncheon, his vast hand that reached out toward it.
How beautiful you are, he thought, beautiful. Bending to it open-eyed and gentle, as though he approached a tetchy pony or a newborn child of his own or an elemental spirit, one of those bumblebee-sized ones he used to catch in a jar among his roses: come I will have you.
He had not got very close, not even as close as Kelley had used to, when he felt taken: felt the cords of his throat tickled, his heart tugged. He knelt. Still he saw nothing but the stone, but now its deeps; his view opened and he looked not at but into. And he heard, faint but clear in his inward ear, a voice, not his own though it seemed to spring at once from the glass and from his throat.
—I am glad to see thee. Why hast thou forsaken me?
It was her voice, he knew it, he had never heard it before but it could be no other’s. Christ Jesus Lord God thanks be unto Thee for Thy great mercy unto Thy servant.
—I have not forsaken thee, he said.
The sound of his own speaking was loud and coarse, though he barely whispered. He heard no more. He supposed his speaking had frightened her away, and his heart went cold. Then she spoke again:
—You have not called me. Not these many months.
—Madam I could not. And he would not.
—Well let him go. He is a foul traitor, and treason will have his reward.
She said it teasingly, and yet it chilled him; Lord how she cursed, she always had, like a wicked child, and who was able to reprove her.
—Has my mother brought thee comfort? she asked. Hast had thy way with her? How many times?
—Thy mother, child? Who is thy mother?
—Who else but the great lady I brought thee unto?
—She.
—She is my mother; her other name Amphitrite. Her mother’s name is Night.
For a moment it was as though he could remember what he had not himself seen: that green mead, the woman coming to them, telling them she was Understanding; opening her garments. He shuddered hugely.
—She has given him what he asked, Madimi said. Know you that? He has gold now in overplus. He may eat and drink it if he likes.
—He is grown great, John Dee said. He is called Doctor, dominie; loved of all.
—He has not praised me. No matter. Let him enjoy it as he may.
—We were obedient unto thee, Madam, John Dee whispered. And now we are parted, and the rift cannot be made up; his wife is gone; my wife is given a hurt will be a long time mending.
—I know it. I know it and I am sorry for it. I am, in part.
—I would have done that and more for the great gift promised me, he said. Of knowledge of God, His purpose in this enterprise; true knowledge. I would have done all that was asked. I did do. And I, I have not been answered.
—For that, she said, in a small voice. I had not in my gift what thou asked of me.
—Hadst thou not?
—Not though I promised it. I gave what I had: Power. I had not Under standing to give.
A huge and indissoluble stone had arisen in his breast, like a cold precipitate in an alembic, it would never pass. He knew he should bear it and not ask why; but he could not bear it, he must ask.
—Then why did you set that duty upon us? he whispered. Tell me. Why did you ask that great sin of us, of having our wives in common? Which then we did, thinking it commanded by you for holy purposes. Why?
—For my delight only, she said. That I might witness it. I and my kin gathered here.
He felt himself falling as he knelt, the room tipped up like a dish from which he was to be spilled out, down, forever.
—Then you are fallen angels, he said. You are fallen, and I am damned.
—Old man, she said, almost gently, almost tenderly. Foolish old man. Hast not known? Hast not seen? All the angels are fallen angels.
—All? How, all?
—All the angels are fallen. It is in this that they are angels. Have no pity for us; it is so, and has ever been so.
—How is it then that you can praise God, and say prayers; bless; be wise?
—How? Cannot fallen man do these things? Enough. Listen now to me and I will prophesy: There is war in heaven, a war of all against all. That war will have its mirror on earth in a like war. It must have.
—A new war of religion, he guessed. Christ’s church divided. More blood spilled between the sects.
—Ha, she said. That is the less war. The great war is the war of all Christ’s churches against their enemies: those who invoke the gods dæmons and angels of heaven and earth from the places where they reside. They will burn all who do so. They will have them into the fire as paper.
—I invoked no wicked spirits, I.
—They will burn you too. Listen to me and write it in your heart: Fly, but do not fly from the powers into the arms of other powers. And beware: for the powers reside each inside all the others.
He was weeping now, hearing her voice through the tears that gathered in his throat.
—I know not what you mean, he said. I will do as you say if I can.
—Come, old man, she said. Come. I am off to the wars. You shall not see me more. How like you that?
—I do not like it. I would see you often, Madam.
—Do you weep? Do not weep. Come closer. Kiss my brow, tell me you love me. Do you not love me?
—I do. I do love thee, child.
—I will give thee a gift. Come closer.
—Madam, I fear your gifts.
—Sir, you are right to fear them. I have a kickshaws here in my pocket will bring down nations.
—I do not want it.
—Come close. Closer. My gift is for you alone.
He had drawn so close to the glass, and to the child somewhere inside, that he could have kissed her brow if he could have seen her; so close his breath clouded on the surface.
—Here it is, she said. May’st thou have joy in it.
He thought of his own children, how they came to him with treasures in their empty hands, that he must ask the name of before he could thank them (what is it, child? A gold ring? Why thankee then for this gold ring).
—What is it? he asked her.
—It is a wind I have in my power.
—Doth not the wind blow where it listeth? John Dee said. I know not how to command it.
—Speak sharply to it, that it obey thee. The gold I have given him is not good. But the wind is a good wind. There. Now it is thine. Farewell.
He felt, with a steely thrill of fear along his spine and scalp, a small cold hand take his. Then it was gone. As though a sinew or nerve were drawn out of his heart’s heart he felt her depart; and through the breach a cold wind blow in.
A house burns down, with all the movables, and reveals to the stricken family the place where the miser uncle long ago hid his money. An army tramples a poor farmer’s field, and takes his eldest son for a soldier; the boy rises to become a general, buys his father new fields as far as eye can see. Job had his flocks returned to him, new children given to him, and a new wisdom too: and did he never go to sit by his first children’s graves, and weep?
She had said to them long ago that a new age was to come, that many now alive wo
uld see it before their eyes were closed forever; it would steal upon many, and bewilder them. Much would be taken then, and much of value would be thrown away as trash; but nothing would be lost that would not be replaced with something of equal worth, somewhere, in some sphere, though far from here.
Not ten days after that midnight when she spoke to him from the glass for the first time—only to say Farewell—John Dee wrote in his diary: EK did open the great secret to me, God be thanked!
And it was a simple thing, as of course it should be; he had known it should be, all the books said it was. Kelley nearly laughed to speak it; it took but a moment to say. He gave them a powder to use, in a plain twist of paper as though it were an ounce of pepper or mustard. He lost nothing by parting with it, he said; nothing. Like a child’s riddle: What is it I give, and others take, yet I never part with it? Answer, my hand.
Once, he and Kelley had watched and prayed through a whole zodiacal year (two days and two nights, as it happened) to make a single convolute nugget of new gold; now, with what Kelley gave them and the secret he told them, it could be made in a few hours, and the process begun soon again, and more made the second time than the first, the projective powders growing not weaker but stronger through use, multiplying even as they generated: breeding, said John Dee, increasing like a lucky housewife’s hens from their own eggs. It was child’s play, and indeed Doctor Dee’s sons Arthur and Rowland soon learned to assist at the furnace and the alembic; nor did they pray and cleanse their hearts through fasting and reception of the Sacrament as Dee had always done in the (fruitless) former times, it was unnecessary, for clean or soiled their hands did as well. They rolled up their sleeves and like bakers or smiths they went to work, and at evening they were richer than they had been at morning. They cast the gold into half- and quarter-ingots, or made medallions or coins of their own devising, currency of their new republic, any goldsmith would after a quick test change them for coin of this realm. John Dee opened a bag of them and spilled them on the table before his wife, what he had promised, what the angels had promised them, they peeped up proud from where they lay as though saying Mistress, we told you so: and she smiled down on them, and laughed, and slipped her hands beneath her apron and would not touch them.
Gold: like the fairground magician who could seem to fill a basin with clinking coins, more and more snatched out of the air and ringing in the basin, the Miser’s Dream, Kelley and Dee in Prague that year produced more and then more. Many years later Arthur Dee would often tell his friend the physician Sir Thomas Browne how his father had made gold in Rudolf’s time; how the younger children had played with disks of it, how it lay about everywhere. Had they done so truly? asked Dr. Browne. Oh yes; heaps. Real gold? Oh yes, Arthur would say, with a sad smile; oh yes, real enough.
John Dee did not tell Jane of the other gift, the one he had himself been given by the angels, his own recompense, his tip.
Alone with it he learned its name, or the name of its name; he sat up with it all through one night, as a falconer must with a newly captured goshawk, to befriend it, and teach it to mind: to come to his hand, and go where he sent it.
In the day, like a shy ghost, it stayed shut up within him, but in the solitudes of the night he would feel it stir, touch his hair and beard, wind around him like a juggler’s tame serpent; it put out his candle sometimes, made his wife look up and seek for the crack where the draft she felt came in, and pull her (new, fur-trimmed) mantle closer.
Then toward dawn on the ides of June he slipped its jesses, and cast it.
Or did it simply escape from him?
Was it ever his to command?
It scattered the papers and dust in the tower room (having rushed at his summons, he felt it, from his gown’s pockets or from his bag or his fingertips); he heard laughter, a child’s, hers; it grew stronger in a moment, it blew the feather-pens about and made the hangings lift and quiver as though a spy were behind them. Then, before John Dee could shutter and bar the window, it was gone, out and away, little runagate, a lost hawk that might return and might not: and a stillness filled up the disordered chamber. The day was the last of the Ember Days following Whitsun, 1588. John Dee sat and waited, thinking that today or tomorrow or in a week’s time he might see the world grow suddenly worse, or better.
By evening a windstorm had already arisen in those parts, blowing the wrong way, from east to west around the world. Exhilarating at first, like a fast ride downhill, it grew alarming as the bloody sun went down amid flying clouds and night gathered too quickly. Through that day and night and the next day it went on. Horses would not brave it, oxen would not pull, only the patient asses were unafraid, braying back at the wind’s shrieking and closing their lashy eyes against the dust. Travellers hoping to take advantage of the long summer day and the night’s full moon to hurry their journeys shut themselves up instead in inns and monasteries, and even knocked on the barred doors of poor folks’ cottages when the storm grew huge and living. Once upon a time, on such groaning moaning sleep-banishing nights, innkeepers might have entertained travellers with local stories of the wilde Jagd, the Wild Hunt; might have told how the wind they heard crying was actually the clatter of the lady Diana or Perchta or Abundia and her followers beating their steeds through the air, on their way to the land of the dead. On certain days of the year, particularly the days between Christmas and Epiphany, certain of their neighbors went abroad under the moon: not, or not necessarily, in their own persons, which might remain fast asleep in their beds, but in some other form, the form of mice or horses or. And the wind that bore them up and away was also the wind of their own passage overhead, as they travelled to a place known only to themselves, where they did battle on behalf of the rest of us, who kept within doors: we whose duty was only to tell their tale, and bless them.
But those tales had become dangerous ones to tell.
For the protection of the souls of his people the Duke of Bavaria (and he not the only one) had lately instituted laws. No longer were these beliefs and practices of country people to be allowed, for it had been determined that they had all along been worshipping the Devil—perhaps without knowing it—by their superstitions. Ghosts, manikins, ogres, mountain giants, will-o’-the-wisps, the imps that combed sparks into cats’ fur and soured milk, all the small creatures of everyday and every-night life: either they had been suborned by the Enemy, or they had always been devils in disguise, working for men’s harm, but what was certain was that it was a sin, and worse than that it was now a crime, to leave a dish of milk for them, or laugh at tales of them, or invoke their help to find a lost calf, or to induce one of them to reverse the harm another had done. To do so would be prima facie evidence of witchcraft.
Best to make sure, then, that our neighbors and our guests saw us bless ourselves when we sneezed, or when nightwalking animals crossed our paths, or when we passed the churchyard. And when the wild wind blew from the wrong quarter, best to bolt our doors and shutters, and in silence (or better yet in prayer, for our husbands and our children are listening) to roll ourselves into our beds and pull up the blankets over our heads.
2
Something had happened in Hell.
A hundred years before, Alfonso de Spina had calculated the number of devils in Hell at 133,306,668. Most were confined forever there below, Padre Alfonso thought; only a few—those once worshipped as gods by the pagans—or perhaps only one, Satan, as we are told in Job, ever roamed our upper air, with perhaps a few attendants to run his errands.
No more, though. Since that time either Hell-mouth had opened wider, or more doors had been made, or the princes below had acquired new powers; or men’s (and women’s, particularly women’s) wickedness, pride, lust, and luxury had at last given those devils egress from their land (God shaking His head sadly in Heaven, Who had seen it coming) and access to our world and our days. Now it seemed they walked or flew over the earth in legions, herding the wicked like cattle toward their pens, contracting with the desperat
e and the proud for their immortal souls, their signatures in blood smoking on the parchment; or in female form hovering over men in the night to steal their seed as the men tossed and groaned in guilty dreams.
Once witches were few and isolated, and cases of maleficium—harm done by witchcraft or sorcery—rare; now witches gathered in Sabbaths, flying or somehow travelling great distances to worship the Devil, who was allowed to appear among them either in his own dreadful person or in some animal form, actual or illusory. There they performed obscene rituals unheard of in former times. Jean Bodin in his tract Dæmonomania asserted that “witches by the thousands are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as the worms in a garden.” In fact the witches had apparently formed a sect or heretical religion of their own, a rival or infernal Church subsisting and growing within the very body of Christendom itself, not as worms grow in a garden but as they grow in the body of a wasting child.
How long had this been going on? No one could say; little of it had been suspected until two Dominicans, Fathers Sprænger and Institoris, compiled a manual in the 1480s for investigators to use, the Malleus maleficarum or Hammer Against Witches, listing all the secret crimes the fathers had heard or read about or deemed to be possible, and all the methods that ought to be used to search them out. The suspects began to come before judges who had the Malleus open on the bench before them. And the confessions began to accumulate, and dovetail.
Did you go abroad at night and consort with others at a Sabbath?
I do go out at certain times, in certain seasons of the year, to fight the others. I have gone since childhood.
What others? Other witches?
They are witches. We go in the service of Christ to fight them.
Blaspheme not. Why do you go out? What reason?
Because I am summoned. I am one of those who is summoned.