by John Crowley
Philip dismounted and threw his reins to the attendant, rubbing his hands, his narrow blue-clad buttocks clenched. When Hugh had climbed in too they pulled shut the curtains and huddled together under the rugs, each laughing at the other’s shivers. They talked of the Doctor, as they called Dee, with whom Philip already studied Latin and Greek and mathematics—Hugh, though the older of the two, had had no lessons as yet, though they’d been promised him. They talked of what they would do when they were grown up and were knights, reweaving with themselves as the heroes the stories of Arthur and Guy of Warwick and the rest.
When the two of them played at heroes on their ponies in the fields of Penshurst, Hugh could never bully Philip into taking the lesser part: I will be a wandering knight, and you must be my esquire. Philip Sidney knew the tales, and he knew (almost before he knew anything else of the world) that the son of an Irish chieftain could not have ascendancy even in play over the son of an English knight.
But whenever Philip had Hugh at stick-sword’s-point in a combat, utterly defeated, Hugh would leap up and summon from the hills and forests a sudden host of helpers who slew Philip’s merely mortal companions. Or he postulated a Crow who was a great princess he had long ago aided, whose feet he could grasp and be carried to safety, or an oak tree that would open and hide him away.
It wasn’t fair, Philip would cry, these sudden hosts that Hugh sang forth in harsh unmusical Irish. They didn’t fit any rules, they had nothing to do with the triumph of good knights over evil ones, and why anyway did they only help Hugh?
“Because my family once did them a great service,” Hugh said to Philip in the rocking wagon. The matter was never going to be resolved.
“Suppose my family had.”
“Guy of Warwick hasn’t any family.”
“I say now that he does, and so he does.”
“And there aren’t . . . fairy-folk in England.” That term carefully chosen.
“For sure there are.”
“No, there are not, and if there were how could you summon them? Do you think they understand English at all?”
“I will summon them in Latin. Veni, venite, spiritus sylvani, dives fluminarum . . .”
Hugh kicked at the covers and at Philip, laughing. Latin!
Once they’d taken the issue to the wisest man they knew, excepting Doctor Dee himself, whom they didn’t dare to ask: Buckle the Penshurst gamekeeper.
“There was fairies here,” he said to them. His enormous gnarled hands honed a long knife back and forth, back and forth on a whetstone. “But that was before King Harry’s time, when I was a boy and said the Ave-Mary.”
“See there!” said Philip.
“Gone,” said Hugh.
“My grandam saw them,” said Buckle. “Saw one sucking on the goat’s pap like any kid, and so the goat was dry when she came to milk it. But not now in this new age.” Back and forth went the blade, and Buckle tested it on the dark and ridgy pad of his thumb.
“Where did they go?” Philip asked.
“Away,” Buckle said. “Gone away with the friars and the Mass and the Holy Blood of Hailes.”
“But where?” Hugh said.
A smile altered all the deep crags and lines of Buckle’s face. “Tell me,” he said, “young master, where your lap goes when you stand up.”
Doctor Dee’s wife Jane gave the boys a posset of ale and hot milk to warm them, and when they had drunk it he offered them a choice: they might read in whatever books of his they liked, or work with his mathematical tools and study his maps, which he had unrolled on a long table, with compass and square laid on them. Philip chose a book, a rhymed romance that Doctor Dee chuckled at; the boy nested himself in cushions, opened his book, and was soon asleep “like a mouse in cotton-wool” Jane Dee said. Hugh bent over the maps with the Doctor, whose round spectacles enlarged his eyes weirdly, his long beard nearly trailing across the sheets.
What Hugh had first to learn was that the maps showed the world, not as a man walking in it sees it, but as a bird flying high over it. High, high: Doctor Dee showed him on a map of England the length of the journey from Penshurst to Mortlake, and it was no longer than the joint of his thumb. And then England and Ireland too grew small and insignificant when Doctor Dee unrolled a map of the whole wide world. Or half of it: the world, he told Hugh, is round as a ball, and this was a picture of but one half. A ball! Hung by God in the middle of the firmament, the great stars going around it in their spheres and the fixed stars in theirs.
“This,” the Doctor said, “is the Irish island, across St. George’s Channel. Birds may fly across from there to here in the half-part of a day.”
Hugh thought: the children of Lir.
“All these lands of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland”—his long finger showed them—“are the estate of the British Crown, of our Imperial Queen, whose sworn servant you are.” He smiled warmly, looking down upon Hugh.
“So also am I,” said Philip, who’d awakened and come behind them.
“And so you are.” He turned again to his maps. “But look you. It is not only these Isles Britannicae that belong to her. In right, these lands to the North, of the Danes and the Norwayans, they are hers too, by virtue of their old kings her ancestors—though it were inadvisable to lay claim to them now. And farther too, beyond the ocean sea.”
He began to tell them of the lands far to the west, of Estotiland and Groenland, of Atlantis. He talked of King Malgo and King Arthur, of Lord Madoc and Saint Brendan the Great; of Sebastian Caboto and John Caboto, who reached the shores of Atlantis a hundred years before Columbus sailed. They, and others long before, had set foot upon those lands and claimed them for kings from whom Elizabeth descended; and so they adhere to the British Crown. And to resume them under her rule the Queen need ask no leave of Spaniard or of Portingale.
“I will find new lands too, for the Queen,” Philip said. “And you shall come too, to guide me. And Hugh shall be my esquire!”
Hugh O’Neill was silent, thinking: the kings of Ireland did not yield their lands to the English. The Irish lands were held by other kings, and other peoples altogether, from time before time. And if a new true king could be crowned at Tara, that king would win those lands again.
It was time now for the boys to return to Kent. Outside, the serving men could be heard mounting up, their spurs and trappings jingling.
“Now give my love and duty to your father,” Doctor Dee said to Philip, “and take this gift from me, to guide you when you are grown, and set out upon those adventures you seek.” He took from his table a small book, unbound and sewn with heavy thread. It was not printed but written in the Doctor’s own fine hand, and the title said General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. Philip took it in his hands with a sort of baffled awe, aware of the honor, uncertain of the use.
“And for my new friend of Hibernia,” he said. “Come with me.” He took Hugh away to a corner of his astonishingly crowded room, pushed aside a glowing globe of pale brown crystal in a stand, lifted a dish of gems, and with an Ah! he picked up something that Hugh did not at first see.
“This,” Doctor Dee said, “I will give you as my gift, in memorial of this day, if you will but promise me one thing. That you will keep it, always, on your person, and part with it never nor to no one.” Hugh didn’t know what to say to this, but the Doctor went on speaking as though Hugh had indeed promised. “This, young master, is a thing of which there is but one in the world. The uses of it will be borne in upon you when the need for them is great.”
What he then put into Hugh’s hand was an oval of black glass, glass more black than any he had ever seen, black too black to look right at, yet he could see that it reflected back to him his own face, as though he had come upon a stranger in the dark. It was bound in gold, and hung from a gold chain. On the back the surface of the gold was marked with a sign Hugh had ne
ver seen before: he touched the engraved lines with a finger.
“Monas hieroglyphica,” said Doctor Dee. He lifted the little obsidian mirror from Hugh’s hand by its brittle chain, hung it around the boy’s neck. When Hugh again looked into the black sheen of it he saw neither himself nor any other thing; but his skin burned and his heart was hot. He looked to the Doctor, who only tucked the thing away within Hugh’s doublet.
When he was at Penshurst again and alone—it was not an easy thing to be alone in the Sidney house, with the lords and ladies and officers of the Queen coming and going, and Philip’s beautiful sister teasing, and the servants coming and passing—Hugh opened his shirt and took in his fingers the thing the Doctor had given him. The privy (where he sat) was cold and dim. He touched the raised figure in the gold of the back, which looked a little like a crowned mannikin but likely was not, and turned it over. In the mirror was a face, but now not his own; for it wasn’t like looking into a mirror at all, but like looking through a spy-hole and into another place, a spy-hole through which someone in that place looked back at him. The person looking at him was the Queen of England.
On the Impregnation of Mirrors was not a book or a treatise or a Work; it wouldn’t survive the wandering life that John Dee was to embark upon as the times and the heavens turned. It was just a few sheets, folded octavo and written in the Doctor’s scribble hand, and no one not the Doctor would have been able to practice what it laid out, for certain necessary elements and motions went unwritten except in the Doctor’s breast. It exists now but as name in a list of his papers and goods drawn up for an application to her Majesty’s government for recompense, after his library and workshop had been despoiled by his enemies at court during his long absence abroad. Only one mirror of those that he had worked the art upon had succeeded entirely, only one had drawn the lines of time and space together so as to transmit the spirit of the owner to the eye of the possessor.
The making of it began with a paradox. If the impregnation of a mirror required that the one who first looked into it be its owner, then no other could ever have looked into it before, not he who silvered the glass, not she who polished the steel. How could the maker not be the owner? John Dee had seen the solution. There was one perfect mirror that needed no silvering, no polishing: it needed only to be discovered, detected, its smooth side inferred, then taken from the ground and secreted before even the finder’s eye fell upon its face. He knew of many such, taken from the lava fields of Greece or the Turkish lands, first found, as Pliny saith, by the traveler Obsius; his own he’d found in a lesser field in Scotland. He remembered the cold hill, the fragments sharp as knives, keeping his eyes steadily on the fast-flying clouds above while his fingers felt for the perfectest one, pocketing it unlooked-at.
He had placed it in the Queen’s hand himself. Slipping it from where it hid in a purse of kidskin, feeling for its smooth side, which he held up to her face for a long moment, as long a moment as he dared, before giving it to her to examine. She seemed dazzled by it, amazed, though she had seen similar obsidian chips before. None like this one: Doctor Dee had bestirred its latent powers by prayer—and by means he had learned from helpers he would not name, not in the hearing of this court.
And then forever there was the Queen’s face within, and more than her face, her very self: her thought, her command, her power to entrance, how well the Doctor knew of it. She had not asked to keep it—the one danger he had feared. No, she had given it back to him with a gracious nod, and turned to other matters, for it was his. And now it was not his. For having taken its owner’s face and nature it could be handled, and the Doctor had milled it and framed it in gold and given it to the Irish boy.
It may be there are ways.
Doctor Dee stood on a Welsh headland from where on a clear day the Irish coast could just be seen across St. George’s Channel. The sun was setting behind the inland hills of the other island, making them seem large and near with the golden brightness. There where the sun set Hugh O’Neill was one day to become a great chief; the Doctor’s informants had let him know of it. The little Irish kings and the old Irish lords would press him in the years to come to make a single kingdom out of the island that had never been one before, and to push out the English and the Scots for good. But Hugh O’Neill—whether he knew it or did not—was as though tethered by a long leash, the one end about his neck, the other held in the Queen’s hand, though she might never know of it; and the tug of it, of her thought and will and desire and need, would keep the man in check. She could turn to other matters, the greater world, more dangers.
And to himself as well.
He turned from the sea. A single cloud like a great beast streaked with blood went away to the north with the wind, changing as it went.
After seven years had passed, Hugh O’Neill was returned to Ulster. He was not yet the O’Neill, he was not Earl of Tyrone, but nor was he any other man. By the English designations, in which the Irish only half believed, he was mere Baron Dungannon. The quiet boy had grown into a quiet man. His father, Shane’s rebel son Matthew, had been killed by Hugh’s uncle Phelim McTurlough, for which act the English had favored him—whatever that might mean for Phelim’s benefit, to which the English would never commit: the rich earldom, an empty name, letters patent, loans of money, or nothing at all.
Hugh on Irish soil again, with English soldiers in his train and around his neck an English engine that he did not yet know the uses of, rode through Dublin and was not hailed or cheered. Who was on his side, whom could he count on? There were the O’Hagans, who were poor, and the O’Donnells, the sons of the fierce Scots pirate Ineen Duv (the “dark girl”). And Englishmen: the Queen’s men, Burghley and Walsingham, who had taken his hand and smiled. They’d known Conn O’Neill, and remarked on the white feather Hugh wore always in his cap. He’d learned more than courtly English from them. Their eyes were colder than their hands.
The castle-tower of Dungannon still stood, but the old chiefs and their adherents who had feasted and quarreled here were scattered now, fighting each other, or gone south to fight for the heirs of Desmond. But even as he came to the place with his little train they had begun returning, more every day: poor men, ill equipped, not well fed. There were women still there in the castle, and from them he learned that his mother had died in the house of the O’Hagans.
“It is ill times,” said blind O’Mahon, who had remained.
“It is.”
“Well, you have grown, cousin. And in many ways too.”
“I am the one I was,” Hugh said, and the poet did not answer him.
“Tell me,” he said. “Once in a place nearby, up that track to the crest of the hill, where a holy house once stood . . .”
“I remember,” Hugh said.
“I thing was given you.”
“Yes.”
A man may keep a thing about him, in one pocket or purse or another, and forget he has it; thinks to toss it away now and then and yet never does so—not because it’s of value but only because it’s his, a bit of himself, and has long been. So the little carven flint had lain here and there throughout his growing up, getting lost and then turning up again. It had ceased to be what for a moment here in this place and long ago it seemed to be: a thing of cold power, with a purpose of its own, too heavy for its size. It had become a small old stone, scratched with the figure of a man that a child might draw.
He felt here and there in his clothes and came upon it: felt it leap into his hand as soon as it could. He drew it out and for a foolish moment thought to display it to the blind man. “I have it still,” he said.
A commandment, O’Mahon had called the stone. But not what it commanded. He closed his hand on it. “I will soon build a house here,” he said. “A house such as the English make, of bricks and timber, with windows of glass, and chimneys, and a key to lock the door.”
“Will you go with me now, up to the place I
spoke of?”
“If you like, cousin.”
O’Mahon took O’Neill’s arm, and Hugh led him where O’Mahon guided; the poet knew very well where he went but wanted help so as not to stumble on the way. They climbed the low hill that Hugh had known in youth, when he had first come to this country with his O’Hagan fosterers, but then there had been tall trees now cut, and beyond the trees to the river fields of corn and pasture where cattle moved. Now fallow and bare.
“Day goes,” the poet said, as though he saw it. Past the riven oak, amid the low rolling of the hills there was the one hill taller and of a shape not made by wind and water, but by hands—it was easy to tell. A thousand rods or more in length, but smaller somehow now than when he had seen it as a boy. “This hour is the border of day and night, as the river is the border of here and there. What cannot be known by day or night shows itself at twilight.”
“You know these things, who can’t see them?”
“My eyes are a border too, cousin. At which I forever stand.”
They stood in silence there while the sky turned black above and to a pale, red-streaked green in the west. A mist gathered in the hollows. Hugh O’Neill would not later remember the moment, if there was a moment, when the host came forth, if it did, and stood there against the rath, hard to see but seemingly there. Growing in numbers, mounted and afoot.
“The foreign queen you love and serve,” O’Mahon said. “She cares nothing for you but this: that you keep this Isle in subjection for her sake, until and when she can fill it with her hungry subjects and poor relations, to take of it what they will.”
The ghost warriors were clearer now. Hugh could almost hear the rustle they made and the rattle of their arms. The Old Ones, the Sidhe.
“They command you to fight, Hugh O’Neill of the O’Neills. The O’Neill you are, and what you will be you do not know. But you are not unfriended.”