DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (27 page)

There was no doubt of the efficacy of the procedure. The power of curved mirrors was known to the ancients, and even if the
story of how Julius Cæsar had used a curved mirror set up on the shores of Gaul to see the Britons preparing for war weren’t
true, it was certainly the case that a catoptric, turned to face the sun, could cause a thick stick held at its focus to take
fire. And if the sun, why not Venus and Jupiter? John Dee had first succeeded with his mirrors in curing his wife of a melancholy,
after their first son Arthur was born: a mother-sorrow
post partum
that she could not shake.

The melancholy of the man-wolf would be a deeper one; and it might be that even such sure and certain arts as catoptrics were
weakening and failing now. No way to be sure but to use them, and see.

John Dee made a slight adjustment to his mirror, turned his hourglass, and sat to wait in the deepening darkness.

He thought: We tear to pieces the melancholics who have fallen, through their disease, from man’s estate, and believe themselves
beasts. Once it was not so; once they were known to be unfortunate, and in need of our care and love. We burn deluded old
women who think to make in their iron pots the wonderful elixirs they have heard the wise can make—they take the coded and
hidden recipes of the old books and tales for plain truth, and try to do a work with cock feathers, horse piss, field grasses
and the moon’s light. Maybe, once, some deluded one—hearing
tales of the Homunculus, the Son brought to life within the athenor—put in to seethe a birth-strangled babe found in a ditch,
or a babe’s corpse dug up: wicked, surely, and deserving punishment, but inefficacious, hurting no one but the hag herself.

Old despised and outcast women. They frighten their neighbors with their curses, and when later a child falls sick or a cow
dries up the neighbor remembers. And the fear spreads, reaching at length the students of arts the vulgar cannot understand.
Arts that the priests and judges, most of them, can understand no better.

They will burn you too
, Madimi had said.

Perhaps. Let him see what good he might do, till then.

When Venus had fallen far toward the west and her beams struck this tower at too oblique an angle, John Dee smacked his knees,
arose from his stool, and consulted his ephemeris; he looked east to where Jupiter, jolly giant, had risen: as sovereign against
melancholy as his beautiful blue daughter, if she is or was his daughter, as Hesiod saith. Dee sighting with his astronomical
staff and the boy John ratcheting the dishes around at his command, they caught the star; they wheeled the caged (and weary)
wolf to the focus of the
parabola
(John Dee’s word for the mirror-shape he had devised). And feeling the ruddy star’s heat on his cheek, the boy blinked, looked
up, like a man awakened by the sun through a knothole; his mouth opened and he wet his lips and swallowed.

Dee came to the cage, opened the door of it. He said to John:

—Ask if we may safely let him come forth.

John spoke to the boy, who had begun to shiver; the boy made a short answer, and began to creep from the cage.

—He says he thirsts.

—Go, Dee said to John. Bring a clean shirt, a warm mantle. A cup of white wine, with water; apples; wheaten bread. No cheese,
no greens. They have given him black beer and pease-bread in prison, and he is the worse for it.

John went quickly, glad to go. Dee pushed away the cage from the wheeled cart, grunting with the weight of it, and the boy,
seeing him struggle, turned to help him: but when he tried to stand he fell.

—Hurt, said Dee. You are hurt—don’t rise. Be still.

He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and kept him there, waiting for John. He thought of the night six years before when
Edward Kelley came to his house in Mortlake, afraid, lost even, though not knowing it: the night this journey began.

They dressed the boy and fed him, and made a pallet for him on the cart.

John Dee altered his mirrors, for Jupiter had all this time been moving with the night and the stars. They turned the hourglass
again. The boy slept.

Half a billion miles away (John Dee thought it was some forty million) orange Jupiter shone with the Sun’s light (John Dee
thought it had its own); into its great envelopes of gas, the heavier within the lighter, the little rays of the sick boy’s
soul penetrated, going down thousands of miles, reaching to the core hot almost as a star; there they stirred the god’s generosity
to an infinitesimal degree, and redounded stronger.

By morning he was speaking, alert, cheerful even, his melancholy seemingly lifted already—if indeed it was one. John Dee,
hearing his tale, wondered if it had not been a melancholy at all that had taken him but a plain madness.

He was indeed a peasant’s son, he told them, and lived in a remote village in the Krkonóse Mountains, with his brothers and
his mother and his grandparents in a small stone house. He had slept in a loft with four others, next to a small window that
was his alone. It was only after his father was killed felling trees that his mother told him he wasn’t the man’s son at all
but the priest’s; the priest took an interest in him, and taught him some Latin. John Dee began to speak to him in that language
(to which he had not responded before, and no wonder) and the boy sometimes understood. His name was Jan, like John Dee’s
own.

Priests’ sons are known for having unlikely flaws and powers, though Jan (Jan thought) had none of them. But there was more
to his birth than that. He had been born with a caul: not merely a cap like a woman’s lace snood, as some were, but a membrane
shrouding all his face, through which (his mother said) his unopened eyes and mouth could be discerned, dimly, as though he
had not yet wholly arrived.

—Its right name
amnion
, said John Dee. Many cunning-women have their tales about it. And ancient writers too. A Frenchman I have read says: a foretelling
of the shroud we will all one day wear to cover our faces; a sign, at our coming, of our going hither.

—She dried the caul, he said. My mother. And sewed it into a little kidskin bag. She told me I must wear it always, here,
in the pit of my left arm, and tell no one.

Not until he was fourteen did he learn that the caul was a sign of what he had been born for: to be, on certain nights of
the year, along with others of his kind, a wolf.

Sweet, pliant and helpful, his voice rising hardly above a whisper as he willingly told his tale; eyes dark as a deer’s, and
his plump cheeks rosy now that he had rested and eaten.

—A wolf, said John Dee. How, born to be.

He shrugged: If I had been born female, I would have more likely been born a witch.

—Are not werewolves witches? John Dee asked. The authors say …

—A witch a werewolf? The boy glanced at his translator, puzzled: had he heard right? A witch a werewolf, he said: you might
as well say a day that is a night, a fire that’s water. They oppose each other; fight, to the death sometimes. They must.

—Why do they fight?

—For the harvest. If we did not fight them, the witches would carry off the life of the earth to their lord beneath the earth;
the harvest would fail, the young of the animals would be stillborn, or not thrive.

—Where do they fight?

—Near the gates of Hell, or within them; a meadow where no grass grows. I have never seen the place.

The night he had been captured he had been on his way with others of his kind to do battle with the witches, as at certain
times of the year, he said, they were bound to do; in the Ember Days, and at Epiphany, the feast of the Three Kings, who were
their patrons. The witches had other patrons, he didn’t know who they were; saints whose names were known only to them. That
night was the first he had ever gone out to the battle: the first night, and he had not got to the place, did not know how
far from it he was even, when he was seized in the trap meant for wolves.

At this the boy reached down to put his hand gravely and tenderly on his broken ankle.

—You were taken in your bed, Doctor Dee said. The watch believed it was you who had been caught in the trap, and got free,
but their reasons are very weak. Only that you were in your bed, with a wound to your leg.

The boy nodded, rapidly, thoughtfully, as though to say he understood that the watch had done the best they could and could
not probably be expected to understand: and then he said that indeed it had been he in the trap. He had freed himself after
a dreadful nightlong struggle, and with a crutch made from a tree limb returned just at dawn to his village, and to his home
and his brothers, and got into his bed.

—Your brothers did not awaken at that? Nor your mother?

—No.

—They made you believe this tale, John Dee said. In jail, in the cage they put you in to bring you to the city, in that dungeon
in the White Tower. On the rack or in the boot. Told the tale to you so often when you were in pain and afraid that you have
come to believe it. …

The boy shook his head, shook his head as John Carpio told him what the Doctor had just said.

—No no, he said. No, it was the night of the summer Ember Days, and the greatest battle ever to be fought; the last battle
perhaps, the last of the world; there were many many on their way, witches in the wind riding their pigs and mice and infants
and spoons, and we over the ground: more than any battle before, even the oldest among us had never seen so many on the way
to battle, and I was to be there, and help to save the crops and the coming year from them, and I failed, I erred, I allowed
myself to be caught and now I will never ever see the battle or take part in it before I die. And what will become of my soul
then?

He looked at John Carpio and then at Doctor Dee, in a plain despair that nothing could make right.

—What will become of my soul then? he asked them. How can I hold up my head now among the dead, the day when I go down to
them?

F
or fourteen nights John Dee went on bathing his wolf in starlight for his health. He would have continued the treatment in
the day as well (for the planets are of course there in the day, and just as often in good aspects), except that he would
have had to guide his mirrors not by eye but by published star tables; and as every astronomer and astrologer knew, all current
star tables and ephemerides were hopelessly incorrect, and not until the Emperor’s new Rudolphine Tables were completed and
published would such a task even be thinkable; at which time half the nativities cast in Europe would be shown to be absurdly
wrong.

He went on, but it was evident there was no trace of a melancholic affliction in the boy; he was strong, high-colored, restless,
witty.
Sir Wolf
John Dee still called him, and the boy in return called him
Pan sora
, or Sir Owl. For his beak nose and the great surprised eyes behind his round black spectacles. They slept in the tower room
below in the day, Jan in his own small chamber, the two Johns together in the one bed; they called for meals when they were
hungry, they went aloft at sundown to study the sky (strangely clear, night after night, Doctor Dee wondered at it, the great
wind had blown away the clouds for good), and as the boy sat for his time on the wheeled cart, his hurt leg favored and his
chin in his hands, they talked.

Who set the witches and the wolves in opposition? Dee did not yet know if he believed any of the boy’s tale, but he wanted
to know the whole of it. Are there such battles in other places, east, west? Do you recognize, in the day, those whom in the
night you have pursued?

Jesus set the opposition between wolves and witches when he made the heavens and the earth; just as he set the opposition
between water and fire, the living and the dead, the ass and the viper, vervain and fever. It was one of the oppositions that
make the world as it is and not
a different way instead. So all over the world the battles are fought; on the night of wind when Jan himself went out to fight
there were wolves and witches from many lands on their way to Hell-mouth, witches from Livonia, Moravia, Rus; black Bohemian
wolves, red ones from Poland, gray wolves of far northern lands. He had seen them, or known they were near.

He did not know those he pursued in the day; perhaps he would if he had gone out to fight them on many nights and not once
only. It seemed to him (he didn’t know why) that he was destined to pursue and punish one witch, one witch linked or bound
to him, his own opposition amid the larger oppositions of the battle and the world.

Doctor Dee nodded, for he thought it might well be that the two—witch and wolf—were but one person: that they were, in fact,
the melancholy and the man. The chaser and the chased sought each other because they were one, and the struggle between them
was a dream-struggle. He thought of Kelley.

—It may be, Jan said thoughtfully, that a wolf might live alongside the witch it is his destiny to pursue and never know her,
or him, except in the battle-night; or it may be they
would
know one another, and yet live peaceably.

—Why not name them, Dee said. Have them seized and burned.

The boy lifted his eyes dismayed to John Dee when he realized what the man had said.

—
Homo homini lupus
, Dee said, trying to provoke. Do not suffer a witch to live. Does not the Scripture say so?

—Wicked spellcasters who cause harm by their magic should be punished, the boy said. Who could deny that? If one turns a man’s
wife against him, or with the Devil’s help blasts a field, or makes a cow barren, or causes an illness. But not these. For
they alone can consort with the dead, and bring back news of them to the living.

—Can they do that?

—They can see them, the dead and the soon to be dead. If such a one, say an old woman, were to say to someone
You will be dead within the month
it is because she has seen that person’s spirit in thrall to the Good Woman who is their leader. Perhaps the spirit could
still be released, or brought back; perhaps not. But if the person die, then the old woman is remembered; they think that
she did not only warn or prophesy, but caused the death.

—You are not feared and hated too for that?

—No. We don’t have that knowledge. We can only go to give battle in that land, and we return forgetful of what we saw and
did. They are there somehow always. Theirs is the greater gift; they are the strong ones.

—You are the benefactors. They do harm, or intend it.

—No, said the boy, thinking hard; no. For unless this battle is fought and won the crops will fail, the animals waste away
and their young be stillborn. If the people knew how we save the good things of earth they would love and honor us. Some do.
But the witches, though they must fight just as we do in order for the earth to be fruitful, will always be hated for what
they do: steal the seedlings and the lambs and kids, and carry them to their land of death. Still, they do what they must.
I could not. I would not.

—You pity them?

—That night when I went abroad I hungered, the boy said. I with others slew a lamb and ate it. Then I was satisfied. I blessed
the lamb, and thanked God. But
their
hunger cannot be satisfied; and they cannot remember that it cannot be.

He ate now, not bloody meat but white bread and wine with water. John Dee watched him. The men and women he had come to know
in this country were largely Austrians, many of whom had learned their manners in Spain or from Spaniards; they dressed in
Spanish black and cultivated careful Spanish gestures. Or they were Jews, or Italian craftsmen or priests, or Dutch clockmakers
who had spent years in Paris or the Savoy. Watching his Bohemian wolf Dee saw there was a Bohemian way in the world too, not
quite like any other way, a Bohemian way to break bread, count on the fingers, bless oneself, a Bohemian yawn, a Bohemian
sigh.

He had one question for John Dee.

—Why have I not been hanged? he asked.

—Why, hanged?

—It was said that I would be. After the Emperor had seen me, and judged my crimes.

—I fear he wants you for his collection, said Dee. He will keep you locked up and chained, lest you escape by devilish or
magic means. Keep you weak. But not kill you. He would not kill you.

—Collection? said the boy, and looked to John Carpio for a translation, who looked to Dee.

—You are one of a kind of thing he does not have, Dee said: he has one of every other kind.

He thought: the lad is strong, and may live many years; and when he is dead they will cut him open, and see if there be a
wolf’s skin within; and whether there is or isn’t they will flay him and dry his skin and keep his flesh preserved like mummia,
and preserve his skull, more precious than any narwhal’s or two-headed babe’s: perhaps they will jewel it, or write upon it,
or make a case of ebony or red oak to keep it in, a case carved to resemble a wolf’s head.

—For now, he said, you are in my care. For now.

The moon had been waxing through those days; it blotted out the stars now, and ended the treatments, which were anyway unnecessary;
they began to sleep in the nights again, staying aloft in their tower only because John Dee did not know what else to do.
The Ember Days of autumn had come; here in the countryside the vintage would be gathered; in England they would be mourning
John Barleycorn, dead that his countless sons might live.

On Friday midnight the moon would be full. Should they put chains on their wolf?

In the end they did not. The Emperor’s guards still slept outside the door. When the white moon crossed John Dee’s window
and her light awoke him, he sat up thinking
He is gone
. And though he knew it was foolish, he must get up from his bed, pull his robe around him, and go to look into the chamber
where Jan was kept. No of course he lay asleep there, the moon on his cheek too, his mouth open, breathing steadily in and
out as though an unseen hand pressed the bellows of his lungs. A step closer: how strange: in the moon’s light Dee could see
that beneath the thin white skin of his eyelids the balls of his eyes were moving, fitfully, rapidly, side to side, just as
though they saw.

The land Death is very near, but very long to reach. Sometimes a whole night’s journey won’t bring you there, though you know
always that it lies but one step from where you are.

There is, or often is, a river to cross, and it might be this one he had come to, fast-flowing in a nightwind, dark flocks
of sleeping waterbirds, and the leap of a stone bridge to cross it by, greatest bridge he had ever seen or dreamed of, as
daunting as the wide black water down below to enter on. He was far from home.

He had come down from the tower (after pausing wondering and confused on the sill of a window, unaware of having leapt to
it, awaking there on hearing his name distinctly spoken) by turning himself around and with his claws slipping down, stone
by rough stone, like a spider. Then he had made his way out of the castle district, which was as hard to leave as to get into,
but he was not stopped, could not (it seemed) be seen, or believed in.

Now a great river.
A river to cross
, the old ones had used to say who had taught him the journey he must go.
Often a river. Sometimes a little lame child who leads you
.

No child, but a bridge. He saw walkers—belated souls, maybe, passing through the barbican to cross to the side where now they
must stay, some with lights carried before them, but who would do the dead that
service? He did not know where the bridge led; he thought that those who crossed it would flee from him if he entered onto
it, but they took no notice of him, and at length, heart hard in his throat and drumming as his four feet did on the pudding-stone
of the roadway, he went through the gate himself and crossed. The moon was high.

So many, so many more dead than living: he had known it but had not thought what a big and crowded city they would need for
themselves, all those that had gone before. The black houses were tall and with no spaces between them, the streets narrow
and twisting as though running to hide, to escape being built upon, and filled with the dead.

A drum called from on ahead, and the streets were filling with souls who followed it—stumblers, wanderers, laughing and wide-eyed
and with surely nowhere to walk to. Not all poor men either; he saw a knot of wealthy ladies masked and in furred robes, a
knight in armor, even what seemed to be a bishop by his cope and crook—except that his head was of a piece with his miter,
he was a fish or lizard staring upward with open jaws.

For here, on this side, the Good Lady’s company becomes the beasts they ride. They were all here in the thickening crowd;
Jan knew them instantly from processions and plays in his own village. There was Lucek, with his beak like a stork’s and feather
cape and mincing gait. There was Bruna the goat and Klibna the horse, and Perchta their Queen in her ragged skins. In the
buildings they passed the shutters of the windows were banged shut as the great-eyed beasts looked in, because if those inside
were among the living they should not look upon this company, Death’s company.

Yes Death’s: for he was there, in the center of the throng where the drum-thumps were loudest, Smrtka, Death himself in his
coat of moldy straw and his
Totenkopf
eyeless and white, his regal chain of broken eggshells wound around him. Those near him held him aloft, his horrid weak arms
of dead lichenous twigs and his legs of rope unable to support him.

Jan chased along with the crying singing capering crowd, swept up among them and unable not to go the way they went; but where
were his own company to take his side, and oppose Smrtka and Perchta’s legions, those who had stolen the life of things and
must be made to give it back? Why was he alone here? Why did the swaying staggerers (drunk? One spewed into the gutter) not
fall upon him, alone as he was here? No eye turned on him. No one saw.

So it must be that he was still among the living, after all. He could pass by them and among them unseen, as he had passed
by the soldiers and porters and doorkeepers of the castle, for he was not as they were; they had merely put on their skins,
and he had not. They were dressed
for the festival of the Ember Days as the beasts who die but never die, they were Death’s celebrants and attendants and carried
Death and beat drums to honor him, but they were alive; this city was after all only a dark city, not that crowded realm.

She, though. Ahead and alone, moving not with the throng but against them, as though they were not there—as though she could
not see them, just as they evidently could not see her. A tall woman with feet bare and hair free, tangled black wings of
hair, and her face dark, terribly dark, as though burned or scarred:
facies nigra
, that doctor of the Emperor’s had said, the melancholic’s black face.

She saw him. As he saw her. She seemed to awaken, or her eyes widened so that he could see the whites. She stopped, and turned
away; she stepped off with a long stride, and just then from the crowd or from elsewhere there came a boy, a young pale boy,
a naked beggar, hurt in his foot and pegging quickly on a cleft stick held under his arm. Gone from sight almost as soon as
seen, but she had seen him too, and turned the way he had turned, down an alley. Gone.

Gone.

No they were there, far ahead, where a square opened at the alley’s end, and a tower stood up, with a clock mounted in it,
which just then rang the first hour.

For a very long time he followed them. Night seemed to go on and on, or to have come to a stop and ceased to pass. Through
city gates standing wide and unguarded (or the guards asleep in heaps, mouths wide like their gates, hugging their pikes like
wives) and out onto moonstreak highways. The land smelled like his home. He saw the lame boy, far away, how could he go so
fast. He saw her too, always soon after, saw her tall and long-armed in the moonlit wheat like a scarecrow or amid the heavy
vines, gathering, gathering.