Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘Every history is a kind of story,’ Boney said. ‘You couldn’t really understand it if it weren’t. If it were just everything that happened.’

  ‘But do they know everything that happened?’ Of course they didn’t: not even historians: that was obvious. They just made up a story out of what they did know. Just the way Fellowes Kraft did. Only historians never said what parts they made up. ‘In this book, there’s a character who’s like a magician,’ she said.

  ‘I remember,’ said Boney. He took off his blue-tinted glasses, and wiped them with the dishtowel, and put them on again.

  ‘Not only,’ Rosie said, ‘not only does he take a photograph of Shakespeare – he never could have, right? – he also reads his horoscope. And then he has him look into like a crystal ball. To see what he can see.’

  ‘Yes,’ Boney said. He had stopped drying dishes.

  ‘A crystal ball,’ Rosie said. ‘And old Will looks in it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And doesn’t really see anything, even though he sort of pretends to. To please the old man, who he’s sort of scared of. He tells him that someone will come along who can see things in this glass. That’s the message he pretends to get.

  ‘Now first of all,’ Rosie said. ‘Nobody knows anything much about Shakespeare. As I remember. Especially his childhood.’

  ‘I think that’s right,’ said Boney.

  ‘And then a magician. With a crystal ball. I mean.’

  ‘Well,’ Boney said. ‘As a matter of fact, that person is very real. Oh yes. Very real. Doctor John Dee. He really lived, in the place where he’s described in that book as living, and he really did do the things he’s described as doing. He did. He was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, and perhaps a sort of consulting physician as well. He was a mathematician and an astrologer, when those two things weren’t very different. He had what was likely the largest library in England at the time. And he was also, really, what he is in that book: a magician.’

  ‘A photograph?’ Rosie said. ‘Of Shakespeare?’

  ‘Well,’ said Boney.

  ‘It’s as if,’ Rosie said, ‘he every once in a while, for the fun of it, pretends that the world used to be different than it is, and things could happen that can’t anymore.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘But it wasn’t. They couldn’t.’

  Carefully, Boney hung up his dishtowel, thinking; then, finger to his lips, he left the kitchen. Rosie turned off the taps and, wiping her hands on the seat of her overalls, followed him.

  ‘Sandy knew so much,’ Boney was saying, going purposefully through the long dark dining room. ‘He knew so much. It used to amuse him to put things in his books that he knew everyone would think he had made up, but which he hadn’t made up at all. And he liked to have things – real things – in his books, alongside all the imaginary things; I mean, he liked to have, in his possession, a real silver dish from the time he wrote of, and describe it in his book along with all the imaginary silver dishes: a real one hidden among the imaginary ones. Or a jewel, or a weapon. If he could have a thing that his characters really had once owned or used, it pleased him even more. He spent a lot of his time looking for such things.

  ‘And he found them, too.’

  They had gone into the sitting room, where the lights were not lit, and the dark rug and groups of thick furniture retained the long twilight. Boney went toward a commode made of varied woods, atop which were photographs in silver frames, faces Rosie didn’t know, faces long ago.

  ‘Doctor Dee was a real man,’ Boney said, trying with his shaky hand to turn a tiny key in the keyhole of the commode’s drawer. ‘As real as Shakespeare. He really did have showstones he looked into, and mirrors and jewels. And later on, a few years after your story, someone did come along who could see things for him in a crystal ball: who could see angels, and have conversations with them. Yes. A medium. It’s all true.’ He tugged at the drawer, and at last got it open.

  Rosie had begun to feel a little odd. It’s all true. As though the actors in a play were to drop their roles, and then turn out to be in fact the characters they played, and turn to face their audience for real. She watched Boney take from the drawer something in a velvet bag.

  ‘One of the glasses he used,’ Boney said, ‘a sort of polished mirror of obsidian, is in the British Museum. Sandy and I used to plot how we could steal it. There were others, now lost I guess. And there’s the one in the book you’re reading.’

  He had loosened the drawstring at the top of the bag, and let fall into his hand a sphere of smoky quartz the color of moleskin, pure as a tiny planet or a ball of gray evening. He held it up for Rosie to see.

  ‘There were angels in this glass,’ he said. ‘Dozens of them. Doctor Dee talked with them. And all their names began with A.’

  THREE

  Nine choirs of angels fill up the universe, each choir meshing with the higher and lower ones like immense gears of different ratios, their meshing making for hierarchy throughout creation, making distinction, difference, this, that, and the other. Titanic Seraphim unfold around the throne of God, unable to look away; reaching behind themselves, they take the hands of Cherubim, armed and many-winged, who stand behind the Thrones that stand upon the sphere of the fixed stars, turning it as they walk, like a treadmill. Powers are the spokes of the wheel reaching down through the Dominations who wheel the planets, the sun, and the moon, and who are (Doctor Dee thought) at the same time those planets themselves; and Virtues extend invisible from those circles downward through the earth like bones, to make it live and work. On earth, Principalities, watching over the empires and nations, and Archangels, over the Church; and Angels last, in countless milliards, one for every soul, one perhaps for every living being, down to the atomies that a lens could show wriggling in a spoonful of garden dirt.

  Angels, linked in sequence like the weave of a garment, hand to hand, mouth to ear, eye to eye to eye, ascending and descending forever on the world’s business with a sort of taffeta rustle that can be heard, if you stand silent enough, in the most silent places of the earth, or in the depths of a coiled shell.

  They are there; they are there, and if God were to withdraw them the universe would not only come to a halt and die, it would very probably disappear altogether with a single indrawn breath.

  They were there, Doctor Dee knew it, and they could be seen, those who were momentarily resting from their labors; they could be waited on, like great lords at court, in the corridors and anterooms of Being; as they passed their attention could be caught, they could be spoken to. Doctor Dee was sure that it was so; and yet not once, in any of the many glasses, mirrors, showstones, and jewels which he owned and stared into, had he ever glimpsed one of the angels he knew must be answerable to them. Sometimes, leaning close and standing stock still, he had thought he heard, far off and unintelligible to him, the chitter of their voices, as it might be mice, and laughter infinitely small. But he had never seen one.

  There was little else in spiritual practice that he had not done, or could not do if he chose.

  In the Elemental realm he knew medicine, of course, and arithmetic, not only Geometry but Perspective and Music and Megethologia and Stratarithmetria as well. He was a handler of mirrors, a worker in light, master of Catoptrics and several arts of shadow, reversal, inversion, and projection. He knew the Steganographia of Abbot Trithemius (in his youth he had copied out by hand a huge manuscript of it) and could do all that art of codes, ciphers, curtailed writing, casting messages afar at will, and so on – insofar as it operated here below; the old abbot also knew how to summon angels to a glass, and wrote their language, or so he said, but his prescriptions hadn’t aided Doctor Dee to reach them. He could astonish – he had astonished – his neighbors, and his fellow students, and his Queen, with what he could do, from making an eagle for Jove to fly in a play at Oxford to curing a wound by treating the weapon that caused it; he had astonished himself, for that matter, as once when, in stirring a jar o
f mutable airs, he had let loose a crowd of tiny elementals, which pursued him then like angry hornets, till with them shrieking at his heels and head he had leapt into the Thames to escape.

  In the Celestial world he was more learned still. He had made armillary spheres with Mercator, he had letters from Tycho Brahe praising his Propædeumata aphoristica, wherein he had calculated that twenty-five thousand possible conjunctions influenced the life of man – a daunting figure, and Doctor Dee would end by refusing to cast nativities at all. He could not, however, refuse to cast the Queen’s: it was he who had chosen by his arts the very day for Elizabeth’s coronation, which had poured down rain (he hadn’t foreseen that) but which no one could say was not a fortunate day. He had cast the nativity of the King of Spain too (Saturn lying cold and heavy on his liver and lights, he would be great but never happy), and the King of Spain had given him in return a mirror of black obsidian brought a thousand miles from Mexico, behind whose dazzling doubling surface John Dee was certain angels would be forced to pause: but he could get no spiritual creature in it, though he uncovered it and looked in it now and then for years.

  He was a tall, long-boned, long-faced man with wide, always-surprised eyes made wider by the round spectacles which he had ground himself; his pointed beard would go white as milk before he was sixty. He was passionate, forgetful, restless, and good; certain of his own pious purposes; certain that the vast knowledge – vaster than the knowledge contained in all the folios and manuscripts of his library, the largest in England – the vast knowledge contained in God’s holy angels as in vessels could be obtained by man: that it could be drunk: and that if it were, then neither the man who drank it nor the world would be the same thereafter.

  And so he practiced his arts, and he schooled a generation of Englishmen (Philip Sidney learned mathematics at Doctor Dee’s house in Mortlake, Hawkins and Frobisher came to look at his maps); he went back and forth to court, and when on the Continent he kept his eyes and ears open, and wrote to Walsingham of what he saw; he made his mirrors and his elixirs, and raised his children, and dug in his vegetable garden. And pressed, always, in his mind and in his study, against that barrier beyond which the angels conversed among themselves.

  One means by which he thought he might get through was to go by way of the doors open in the souls of others.

  He came to be able, after long study, to discern those doors, though he could not have set down in any clear way what signs he went by. A kind of cast in an inward eye. An impression Doctor Dee would receive that someone he came across – a child he was tutoring, a young curate come to borrow books – was standing slightly elsewhere from where he appeared to be standing, or in a faint breeze that no one else felt. Through no virtue or choice of his own, it seemed, only by a sort of accident of birth (though Doctor Dee doubted it was an accident at all), a man possessed a door, like a strawberry mark; or was possessed by one, as by a falling sickness. With great circumspection (for however well he himself knew the difference between his enterprise and vile conjuring, it was a distinction that not everyone could – or would – make), Doctor Dee sought out the strange ones, and sounded them, and sat them before his stones and mirrors to see what they could see.

  They knew, in London, that edgy company of nativity-casters, philtre-makers, smokesellers and University roarers, that Doctor Dee in Mortlake would repay well an introduction to such a one, if he really was such a one, which Doctor Dee would know in a moment: whoever could be cozened by that company, Doctor Dee could not be. And yet he well knew – it troubled him – that it was not only the pious, not only the honest, through whom a way could come to be pierced. Nor that, just because a man might try to cheat him with false skrying, the same man could do no true skrying as well.

  Like his Queen – who didn’t always like to be reminded of it, except by her wise wizard, who had traced her line and his own all the way back to Arthur – John Dee was a Welshman; like his Queen he knew well that burden of feeling the Welsh call hiraeth, something neither hope nor regret, neither revelation nor memory, but a compound of all of these, a yearning that could fill the heart as with warm rain. He was fifty-six years old that night in March when a certain young man from the Welsh marches was brought to his house in Mortlake. The wizard had waited by then ten years for him, though it wasn’t anyone quite like him that he had expected: nor did the doctor know that in the weeks and months, the years to come, he would be bound (bound by the blessed Archangels themselves) more intimately and singularly to his skryer than even to the wife he cherished.

  He had, in the first place, no name, this young man; or he had more than one, which seemed to him like the same thing. The name he had grown up with was a fiction, the result of his being raised the ward of a man whose bastard he may or may not have been, and having no other origins that he knew of. He had discarded that name, and the name he used now was merely that and not his own at all: Talbot, a hero’s name, though not chosen for that reason, chosen nearly at random from a church monument because he needed a new one. It was as Mr. Talbot that he was known to Clerkson and Charles Sled and those men in London whom he lived among and sat in taverns with, Edward Talbot of no particular place, living with one or another friend until a quarrel or a new friend of better hope appeared; it was as Edward Talbot that Clerkson introduced him to Doctor Dee.

  He had no ears, either: what he had were two scarred, docked humps at his ear holes, and he wore always a close-fitting black cap to cover them, which gave him a scholarly look, or anyway an antique look, like a doctor of Queen Mary’s days. The loss of his ears had happened in a town whose name he wouldn’t remember, for a crime (it was coining, or something worse, or quite different) which he had been mistakenly charged with, the result of slander and the ignorance of vulgar people, he would not rehearse the true story though – his own version of the story – not even to himself. All of that had happened after his time at Oxford, where he had earned no degree, and which he had left because of another story that he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell in a way that anyone else could understand; even years later Doctor Dee could not have told it over, though he had heard bits and fragments of it often. He was twenty-seven years old on that night in March, clouds flying fast as pinnaces over the moon’s face, when Clerkson brought him over river to Mortlake.

  He had a book, which he couldn’t read, which was the reason for his coming; and he had a friend, or an enemy, who had long accompanied him, whose breath he knew but whose name he did not know.

  —How do you come to have it? Doctor Dee asked him when the book was put before him.

  Mr. Talbot’s long white fingers plucked at the complex knots with which he had tied up his bundle.

  —Well, I will tell you, he said. I will tell you that whole tale. How I come to have it: I’ll tell you.

  Clerkson’s hands reached impatiently for the strings of the bundle, but Talbot waved them away; he said no more, though, only his hands trembled as he pulled aside the old cloths the book was wrapped in.

  Doctor Dee stood, moving aside his cup of wine so that the book could be opened.

  It was a manuscript on thick parchment, narrow and sewn up with heavy greased black thread. There was no cover or binding. The characters it was written in started immediately at the top of the first page without any heading, as though this were perhaps not the first page at all. Doctor Dee picked up the lamp and bent close over the page. Mr. Talbot turned the heavy worm-holed leaf. The second page was the same: a solid block of characters from top to bottom.

  —It is in a cipher, the doctor said. I can read a cipher, if it hides a language that I know.

  —A cipher, Mr. Talbot said. Yes.

  He looked down again at the page. So long had he stared at these pages that they were as familiar to him as any pages of any grammar he had ever memorized, and yet because he could extract no meaning from them, none, they kept all their strangeness. To look at them was to feel himself in a compact with mystery, at once excluded and privileged
; it was the same sense he had used to have as a child, looking into books before he had his letters: knowing those marks to be meaningful, charged with meaning, and not knowing what they meant.

  He moved aside so that the doctor could sit before the book.

  —How, Dee asked him again, do you come to have this?

  —I was in a manner led to it, Mr. Talbot said.

  —In what manner? the doctor asked. He had picked up a stylus and begun touching different letters of the book.

  —Led, said Mr. Talbot. And the whole story, the marvelous story, filled him suddenly brimful, and he, encompassed in it, living in it, couldn’t begin to think how to tell it.

  —Do you, he said at last (lapsing into Latin to cast what he could not relate into a sort of discourse), do you have any knowledge of the things a man of wisdom might learn through, through congress with spirits? Certain spirits, do you know of this kind . . .

  Doctor Dee raised his eyes to him slowly. He answered in Latin.

  —If you mean the working of things by what the vulgar call magic, no, I know nothing of that.

  Mr. Clerkson sat forward in his chair. A smile was on his wolfish shaven face: it was for this he had brought Mr. Talbot here.

  —I have asked, Doctor Dee said, in prayers, for knowledge of things. Through God’s angels.

  He regarded Mr. Talbot for a time; then he said, in English:

  —But tell me what you had to tell: Led.

  —There was talk, Mr. Talbot said with a glance at Clerkson, about a dead man, and a conjuration; that the dead man was made to speak, or an evil spirit to speak through him; but all that is false, and no man who wished to learn wisdom could learn it in that way.

  He had a dreadful impulse to touch his ears, tug down his cap; he resisted it.