Aegypt

by John Crowley

  The Genevans didn’t like him; no more did he like them. The Marchese interceded for him when he insulted the famed theologian Antoine de la Faye and got himself arraigned before the Theological Consistory, men in deep black who had no use for notions; he wasn’t tried, but he was pitched out of town and down the Rhone. Enough of Calvin’s city.

  Lyon, a center of the book trade, but he could gain no living there, a cold wind seemed to be blowing through the world of learning, anyway Giordano felt it. Shake the dust from his feet. He did better at Toulouse; he was elected to the University (guided by good advisers and just for the moment willing to say and do what he was advised to say and do) and for a year and a half taught philosophy and the Sphere.

  In the quiet Languedoc months he began casting what he had learned so far into the form of gods and goddesses; not only the great planetary gods and their horoscopi but lesser gods too, Pan and Vertumnus and Janus and he who swaggers drunk on his ass, Silenus. On these small gods – still and pale when he set them up within as old statues along a Roman road – he would work Ægyptian magic, he would feed them from his own storehouses, and flush their cheeks, and make them speak. Had not Hermes said that a multitude of gods were distributed through all things that exist? Then they were distributed through his own shadow universe within as well, the small gods of endless becoming.

  Toulouse was a Huguenot city, and in that year the armies of the Catholic League were advancing on its walls; there were riots in town and outrages at the University; Bruno moved on.

  He was in Paris in 1582, the largest city in Europe but not too large to fit within the walls of Bruno’s city inside. He lectured at the University, a free lance, tilting with pedants, Aristotelians, followers of Petrus Ramus; he published at last his enormous book, an Art of Memory which anyone who dared look into it could see was a work of magia deep-dyed and horribly potent: he even gave it a title taken from that book of Solomon’s he had hidden in the privy long ago: De umbris idearum, About the Shadows of Ideas.

  Now his universe moved as the universe outside him moved: they were the same. And so if he chose to cause a thing to happen in his world within, then . . . He laughed, he laughed and could not stop: had he not moved the sun from its sphere? There was no knowing what he might not do if he chose.

  The King heard of him and invited him to the Louvre, and opened Bruno’s book upon his knee in wonder; he was given a glass of wine with the Queen Mother, and the Queen Mother sat him down with her astrologer and cunning-man, whose name was Notre-dame or Nostradamus. Bruno thought the man a fraud and a fool, but asked him: In what country will my bones be buried? And the answer of Nostradamus was: In no country.

  In no country was a good answer. Perhaps he would just go on circling outward forever, sailing the earth like a ship, not ever to die at all.

  At spring’s end in 1583, in the entourage of the new French ambassador to England, he took ship from Calais with his books, and his systems, and his knowledge; with a purse fat with louis d’or; with a mission from the King engraved on his endless memory. The English ambassador in Paris wrote to Walsingham: Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor of philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend. But what religion did he carry?

  The ship raised sail, Bruno stepped on its deck, the mate whistled, the lines were loosed. Bruno for the first time lost sight of land, and with the sight felt something fall away from him; something that would not ever be taken up again. Wherever he went from here he would never be going back. Æolus sang in the rigging, cold spray dashed in his face; the crew was aloft, the captain asleep below, his belly filling and luffing like his sails; the little ship clambered through the flinty seas, crowded with animals, people, and goods, a red Mexican parrot furious and swearing out the forecastle window.

  —And a fire burning on its yardarms, Mr. Talbot said. St. Elmo’s fire, one flame on the right side, one flame on the left. Castor and Pollux, the Twins.

  —Spesproxima, said Doctor Dee.

  The angel who showed them this ship within the showstone (she was a laughing and changeable child, and named Madimi) bent the skryer’s head closer to the stone and the ship and the man in the bows holding tight.

  —He, said Mr. Talbot.

  —That is he, the angel said. That is he of whom I told you.

  —Can she speak more plainly? Doctor Dee said. Ask her.

  —The one I told you of, said the angel Madimi. The Jonah that the fish spat out, the brand to be plucked from the burning, the stone rejected by the builders that will be the corner of the house, the last house left standing. Our adorp, our dragon flying in the west, our philosophical Mercury. Our Grail of the quintessence, our sal cranii humani, for if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? Our pretty rose. Our Bruin sleeping in a cave through winter. Our Mr. Jordan Brown whose religion I cannot commend. He has stolen fire from heaven and there are spheres where he is not loved. He is coming to this house, though he knows it not; he is not going back the way he came; and nothing now will ever be the same again.

  TEN

  The only way to experience the semiannual festival sponsored by the Faraway Aerostatic Society and held at Skytop Farm high up on Mount Merrow is to be up before dawn, and drive to Skytop early enough to see the daybreak ascensions: for lighter-than-air flight, improbable in the best of cases, is most possible at dawn, and at evening, when the air is cool and still.

  So, shivering somewhat in the chill of predawn, Pierce Moffett sat on his front steps, waiting for the lights to come on in the house opposite and Beau Brachman to come out, ready more or less for this adventure but thinking chiefly of the gray box of yellow paper on Fellowes Kraft’s desk in Stonykill miles away. It seemed to glow, in his mind, like a hooded sun.

  Maybe it was only because he had read so little fiction in recent years, had read nothing but what at least purported to describe what was in fact the case, that he felt in his breast this weird warmth, this satisfaction in some deep part of him that had not for a long time been satisfied; this vision of the book’s contents as of morning mountains, receding row on row into pale distance, all new, all to be explored, yet somehow already known.

  What a simple conceit, though, really, what a metaphor, the most revelatory of all: that once, once upon a time, the world actually was different. Was not the way it is now.

  And Bruno the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring in more magic, not less: like those who cried the new age in Pierce’s own time.

  Bruno, cheek in hand at John Dee’s table, drawing with a chip of chalk the circles of the next universe, the revolution of the orbs of heaven. Once it wasn’t this way, but now it is, and from now on will be.

  Dee, though. Dee knows better, forewarned by his angels, themselves due to pass away. He’ll lay down his wand and (empty) globe at last, Pierce guessed, drown his books like Prospero. All over now.

  A huge shudder, but why, covered Pierce and made him grin.

  What if it were really true?

  Time’s immense body now and then waking from sleep, shifting its massy limbs, disposing them differently, groaning, sleeping again. Hm. And nothing ever the same thereafter.

  He remembered how once at St. Guinefort’s he had been beguiling the time in study hall with a volume of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and had come upon a condemned opinion of Origen’s: that this world we know, in which Adam sinned, which Christ had come to redeem, to which He would return in the glory of the final battle – this world, after it was rolled up like a scroll, would be succeeded by another, in which none of that would happen; and that world, after its end, by another; and so on endlessly – and Pierce reading it had felt for a moment the purest sense of relief, a gust of something like freedom, to think that this might actually be so.

  Might actually literally really be so.

  He laughed. The greatest secret story of all, the container and explainer of all secret stories whatever, explainer too o
f why they were secret. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, harsh in the breakfastless dawn; and he perceived a corollary.

  If then was one such time, now must be another.

  Yes. In order for him to entertain the notion, the world must just now be on the turn again: for it would only be in such moments of turning – when not only all possible futures come into view but all possible pasts as well – that the previous moments of turning become visible, Time awaking and rubbing his eyes, Oh I see, I remember. Wasn’t that really what Kraft was saying, or rather leaving to the reader to discern? Then was one time; now is another.

  Now; the white decade just past; the children in motion, the days when a closed world like Dante’s had opened, and the still earth moved, both rotating and revolving; and Pierce had found himself at a sudden crossroads, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. And this book of Kraft’s coming to be, yellow page by page, a book like no other he had ever written.

  Pierce thought of Julie, sitting on the bed in his old apartment, the hubble-bubble on the floor beside her, painting her nails in stars: It makes a lot of sense.

  The sky had lightened now, and there were oblongs of yellow lamplight in the face of Beau’s house across the street. A dog barked. Beau’s screen door banged, and Pierce rose from his chilly seat. What if it were so.

  Wouldn’t Julie be knocked out, he thought, wouldn’t she be astonished if the book he was writing for her were to make the claim that it was so. Kraft’s book was, after all, only a novel, a metaphor; but what if his own book could actually adduce evidence that it was so. God. A world more lost than Atlantis, perceived again beneath the sea, recovered, its treasures told. His own fortune made, and Julie’s too.

  He laughed again aloud. You cut it out now, he counselled himself; you be careful. He was still laughing softly when he entered Beau’s yard, and his puzzled neighbors smiled at him.

  ‘Hi, hi,’ he said, and set to helping them fit picnic baskets and children into Beau’s car, a large dented Python that did not always function.

  ‘Ready? Ready?’ said one of the kids to him, horribly excited.

  ‘Ready,’ said Pierce, climbing in. He found it funny that while he had been out of the world of auto travel, the nature of jalopies had changed. This was not a humpbacked Nash like Sam had owned, or an old winged DeSoto; this Python was one of the sleek predator-like cars of, well, of the recent past; a new-car type of car, and yet no, it was already old, a junker, it had that smell of burnt oil and damp upholstery and it had the plaid rug thrown over the back seat. Funny.

  At the Donut Hole there were two or three pickups parked in the yellow lamplight, but otherwise town was still and seemed strangely nonexistent, the morning and the river so large around it and so real and odorous. They cruised out the Shadow River road and upward: and even the excited child in Pierce’s lap was hushed by the white river’s breath and the ghostly pines and the wet wind pouring through the car.

  But what if it were so, Pierce went on thinking, or perhaps only saying in his heart, what if it were so: that the world could be, and had once been, different than it is. And the more he thought or felt it, the more he understood – without any real surprise – that in fact he had long supposed it to be so. Had always supposed it to be so: yes: had never truly believed that History lay behind him in the same stream of time he floated in, that all those people places and things colored like the ten digits had ever actually occurred in the world in which he had his own being, where water flowed and apples ripened. Never. Whatever he had told himself, or his students or his teachers, what he had really sought for in those pieces of past time which he had picked over and examined with such diligence and attention was confirmation of what he longed to know for sure: that things do not have to be the way they are.

  The last wish: the only wish, in fact. That things could be, not as they are, but some different way instead. Not better, really, or not better in all ways; a little larger maybe, more full of this and that, but mostly just different. New. That I, Pierce Moffett, could know that it had once been as it was and is that way no longer, that I could know it to have once been remade and so able to be remade again, all new, all other. Then perhaps this grief would at last be lifted from my heart.

  ‘Oh look,’ said the woman in the front seat. ‘Oh look there’s one.’

  The mist had risen, and the sky was clear behind it; the balloon was hanging in the air, not far away, where it had not been before, insolent in its improbability – an unreal blue globe with an orange stripe, a white star, and a wicker basket full of folks. The Python took a sweeping turn, and every head within it but the driver’s turned to look back at the balloon, which seemed to look godlike down on them. Deus ex machina. A jet of flame arose within it, making a noise like a dragon’s long exhalation, and it mounted smoothly up the clearing sky. Day had come.

  Skytop Farm really was once a farm; then it was a summer camp for years, and is now a closed camp. Its central lodge is opened only occasionally now, for a game supper, a balloon festival. The lodge is at the top of a long varicolored blanket of meadows spread over the knees of Mount Merrow, and sees a wide circle of the Faraways.

  The parking lot was already filling when the troop from the Jambs arrived; Beau had to leave the Python far from the flying field. Passing through the lot Pierce noticed Spofford’s truck, and a little red Asp that looked a lot like the car he had seen Mike Mucho and his ex-wife struggle with.

  ‘Some folks we know here,’ he said to Beau.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Beau said. ‘Oh you bet.’

  A hot day was succeeding the cold dawn. The aeronauts – who had slept here all night in tents and campers or tucked within their special ballooner’s trucks – were up and about, sipping coffee at refreshment wagons, zipping up their coveralls, checking their gear. Some had already got aloft; others’ balloons were beginning to sprout from the grass, tumescent and slowly erecting. A whole field of balloons was comically heart-lifting, lighter than air, and made the child who tugged at Pierce’s hand leap up in imitation, and laugh exultantly. Pierce laughed too, unable not to, when just then another one of them left the earth, not suddenly but calmly, and ambled outward in the air over the meadow.

  ‘Thought I’d see you here,’ said someone at his elbow as he gaped.

  ‘Spofford,’ Pierce said. ‘I saw your truck. Hey where have you been?’

  ‘Around,’ Spofford said mildly.

  ‘Well hell,’ Pierce said. ‘Hell. You might visit.’

  ‘Hey, likewise,’ Spofford said. ‘I’m usually up at the place.’

  ‘You forget I don’t drive,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Spofford said, grinning even more broadly at Pierce, as though still relishing a trick he had played on Pierce some time ago. He held out to Pierce a book he had had behind his back. ‘I brought this along,’ he said, ‘on the chance you’d be here. You left it last year.’

  It was the Soledades of de Góngora, the twisted pastorals Pierce had never retrieved from Spofford’s cabin. He took the book from Spofford. A rich chain of past moments was forged within him, link by link, and he remembered how he came to be here now. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I looked into it,’ Spofford said. ‘Interesting, but tough.’

  ‘Well,’ Pierce said. ‘They’re not really meant to be read, I mean I mean . . .’

  ‘One of those shepherds,’ Spofford said, ‘used to be a soldier.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Spofford took the book back from Pierce and opened it. ‘“When I, who now wear homespun, went in steel.” Do I guess right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘He fought once in a battle, on this same mountain he guides the shipwrecked guy over. Right? Once a long time before. See:

  Round the bare stones of these dejected heaps

  Now pitying ivy creeps:

  Time, which heals every woe,

  On ruins green endearments can bestow.’

  He gave the book back. ‘Interesting,’
he said. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, looking out over the Faraways. ‘I remember how quick the jungle came back.’

  ‘Hm.’ Pierce tucked the book under his arm, shamed somewhat, shamed that his old pupil could find true matter in the written word, however much the writer might have preferred it not to be sought there.

  They walked together through the crowds at the perimeter of the field, upon which now most of the balloons had been at least unfurled and laid out, a heraldry of checks, bars, chevrons, and targets in savagely gaudy colors, like knights’ tents pitched on a jousting field – enormous, though, tent flag and charger all in one.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Pierce said. He waved to a dark-haired man in tailored shorts who had waved to him, a lawyer he thought, whom he had met playing croquet. ‘When I first moved up here, I was afraid there wouldn’t be many people to know. I thought I’d be making regular trips back to the city, for, for . . .’

  ‘Sparkin’.’

  ‘Entertainment. I haven’t though. And now I’m getting introduced around, and really there are lots of people. Good people too. Interesting. I’ve met more and more. I was surprised.’

  ‘Yep.’ Spofford raised a brown hand himself, and nodded a greeting to someone.

  ‘But,’ Pierce said. ‘Look now. This field is filling up with people I’ve already met, or seen at least. The same ones. I must have been introduced to oh a fifth of these people. A lot of the others I know by sight.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’ll run out soon. They aren’t endless like the city. I’ll come to the end of them.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Spofford. ‘Wait’ll you’ve been married to one or two, and had kids by another; and your kids’ mother is the lover of your ex-wife’s old husband, et cetera. Then you’ve come to the end of them. And it’s time to move on.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well they just don’t leave you a lot of room to maneuver,’ Spofford said. ‘They think they know all about you, and what they’ve decided you are, that’s what you gotta be. Small town, y’know?’