DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (28 page)

Another river at last: different from the river flowing through the city; lightless, the banks featureless, the far side invisible.
This was that river: he knew.

When he came to it he found her stopped there too, loitering, bewildered; she had grown larger, her burdens around her beneath
the muffling cloaks. When she became aware of him she turned to the water, but could not cross it, it lapped at her naked
feet and darkened the hem of her skirt. She drew back and looked at him, her eye-whites big and her features mobile, afraid,
or questioning, or hurt.

Why are we here alone?

She put this question, or he read it in her or he felt it arise in himself; and a flood of pain overcame him, and he remembered
the wound to his own foot.

I’m hurt, he said. I can go no farther.

He sat or lay down on the river’s edge. Like a dog’s his long tongue lolled from his jaw as he panted; now and then he mopped
with it the slaver from his chops, and panted again.

Where is the pretty lame boy?

She came to where he lay, and bent over him, and her scarred face and its wild undone hair came close and closer until it
filled his sight.

Why are we here alone?

He didn’t know. Neither knew. They were like the last two left alive in a village through which the plague has passed, who
get up from their beds weak but not dead, and go out into the lanes and the fields, and find the ploughman dead, the priest
dead, the baker dead, the miller dead, no village to be of, only they two, whose families have perhaps quarreled for generations,
now all dead too; so they sit down side by side.

She sat down beside him where he lay. She was shaking, and drew up her knees to her chin, and put her arm around his neck.
He could feel her cheek against the rough hair of his head. He had ceased to pant.

He must have slept: for when his eyes opened he saw her far away, in the middle of the river, following the bright lame boy;
her burdens rocked side to side as she slid and slipped over the river’s billows as over ice, moving quickly, and the boy’s
head alight before her like a candle in the fog.

Bereft, bereft as though split in two by a sword, he went breastdeep into the water and stood until he could see no more.
He thought first: she has fooled me. Then he thought: I am hurt and can never go farther. And he thought: she is stronger
than I am.

When he went out and turned away from the river, the river was no more. Now before him lay the way he had come: before first
light he must go back that long way, over the roads and the highway, through the suburbs and the city gates, through the city
to the castle, to the tower and the small window of his chamber. If he could not do that he would never awaken in his bed.
The moon was down. He set out.

It was the same for all of them at that moment: through the world now they were all turning back from the land they had journeyed
to, however far toward it they had gone, chaser and chased, afraid, belated, returning each by his own way, the land to which
they had gone closing up behind them as they hurried home. In the cottages and in the narrow houses of the city some of those
asleep in their beds may have dreamed of him as he passed; some of those awake might have given thought to his kind and their
battle, for most folk knew of it, whether they believed it or not, and knew that it was on nights such as this one that it
took place. But the only ones who saw him were a priest and his
acolyte, bearing the Sacrament through the night streets to a dying man: saw the fleet dark shape of him start to cross their
path, then, eyes aglow, stop and kneel to his elbows (he could not cross himself with these arms, though desperately he wished
to) and reverently bow his long black head.

—We are alone, he would tell John Dee next day. Once we were many, and went together. And they were many, too. Now we are
few and alone. So many gone, so many. Burned and hanged and. From now on we are alone and will be, till Judgment.

Trying to rise from his bed, weak and spent, the color absent again from his cheeks and his eyes black pissholes.

—Alone, he said. Alone.

John Dee held his shoulders as though he were a sick child of his own, and thought How large the world is, how numerous its
creatures; how little of it I have known.

That day, while the boy slept, John Dee wrote in Latin to the Emperor’s chamberlain:

God, in His infinite wisdom, has provided to His children the remedies for their hurts, the first and greatest being our trust
in Him. God be praised that through the actions of my Art and our prayers accompanying them, the one who was commanded into
my care has passed again into a sort of health, and many of the
symptomata
we observed have been relieved. Still the work must be continued, and despite the care and solicitude of SS Majestas that
all things necessary be provided here, only in my own quarters can that which was here begun be completed with certainty of
success. I have begged leave of His Excellency Duke Petr of Ro
mberk that he make room in his great house
, and so on; knowing the dreadful chance he took and how short the time.

Nothing is taken away but something of equal value, or equal harm, is given: the Œconomy of hell and of heaven was disturbed,
but because of it, on earth men heard news not known before, things never imagined. Great arts now perhaps failed, but little
ones were for the moment more useful than ever. Using tricks he had neglected so long he had to knock on his brow to recall
how to do them—tricks the common people thought devilish, but which were natural, natural—John Dee passed out of the tower
room at evening, arm in arm with his wolf, and down and out: unseen by the Emperor’s guards at the doors, who thought that
they heard a mousing cat in the corner, or a jackdaw at the window, and felt perhaps a guilty wonder.

O
n an August morning of that year, Giordano Bruno left his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Turnip (everything in Prague
was golden, there were taverns and inns called Golden Angel, Golden Eyes, Golden Plough) and went down through the Old Town
on his way to the castle across the river.

The bridge that led to the castle was as broad and long as the one he remembered at Avignon, the one the children sing about.
Black-beaked gulls shrieked and battled around the cutwaters, bobbed on the foam: More spans—ten, twelve, sixteen—than the
bridge at Regensburg. The Tower Bridge in London was small compared to it, and the bridges over the Seine, and over the Main
at Frankfurt.

Giordano Bruno had crossed many bridges.

After he had slipped out of Paris, a penniless wandering scholar again, he’d come to Wittenberg, Luther’s city; for two years
he lectured there, in safety and peace, and gratitude would induce in him a rare humility.
I was a man of no name or authority among you
, he wrote, dedicating a book to the university faculty;
I had escaped from the tumults of France, sponsored by no prince, and you thought me worthy of welcome
. Then a newly ascendant Calvinist party among the theological faculty decided that, when all is said and done, Scripture
made it clear that the Sun really did go around the Earth (how otherwise could Joshua command it to stand still upon Gibeon,
and lengthen the day?) and there was to be no more disputing this, so once again Bruno had made his farewells; in tears he
parted from the young men who during his tenure there had attached themselves to him, disciples such as he would always have
wherever he went,
giordanisti
, not many in any one place but loyal and brave, all of them; almost all. And he made his way to Prague.

He carried under his arm a new little book that he had dedicated to the Emperor, an argument against the pedant-mathematicians
of the
Mordente type, who liked their systems to refer to nothing and contain nothing but the operations of the numbers they used:
striving to keep their systems closed, like a man struggling to keep his doors barred and his shutters shut in a storm. There
was another way to use numbers and figures, an open and endless way, as variable as the world is, as chaotic even; a way to
combine the heart-stirring sign (cross, star, rose) and the brain-teasing figure into one parable.
They
would never find such a thing, but he, Bruno, might.

Upward. He mounted the cobbled way up the hill to the castle-palace and its churches and cathedrals. At every gate, he opened
and showed to the guards the crackling parchment that had been issued him, hung with seals and ribbons, inviting him to wait
upon the Emperor’s pleasure this day; they looked at him not at it, and let him pass. It was harder to get by the crowds of
beggars and whores who lived in tents, hovels and caves all along the narrow way. Up ahead he saw that they importuned other
climbers, tugging at the gown of that whitebeard with the tall hat and staff who pressed strongly on past them.

That man. Somewhere in Giordano Bruno’s Memory Palace—where every person place and thing, mortal and immortal, concrete and
abstract, that Giordano Bruno had encountered in his long wanderings had its place, among all the others whose nature and
meaning it shared—in a disused wing or annex, something or someone stirred.

The man on the stair turned back to see Bruno following, and Giordano Bruno saw the face he expected to see, as though he
had himself created it.

—
Ave frater
.

The old wizard started to see him: it was the look of a man who sees a ghost, the one ghost most likely to appear before him.

—The man of Nola, he said. The Oxford scholist.

They had met at John Dee’s house on the day of Bruno’s first lecture at Oxford, where the asses brayed so loud that Bruno,
like the Titans, was silenced. (Those Oxford asses too were penned in Bruno’s Palace, not forgotten, or forgiven either.)

—
Quo vadis?
John Dee asked, beginning again to mount the cobbles. Shortlegged Bruno hurried after. What do you do in this city?

—I am summoned, he said. I have been commanded into the Emperor’s presence. Today is the day,
ante meridiem
.

—Strange. I have myself been summoned to appear this day. This morning too.

The way here was not wide enough for two to walk together, or one to pass by another. John Dee’s steps quickened; Bruno kept
pace just behind him.

—You have spoken to the Emperor before, Bruno said.

—Several times. I have been permitted to render him a service. I have had audiences. Promises were made me.

—Perhaps then, Bruno said, you will be good enough to let me pass. You have the entrée every day. I am newly arrived here
and very much in need of, of.

—You are mistaken, Dee said, not slackening his pace. The Cardinal-Nuncio is my enemy. Lies have been told. I have lately
been banished from this city and this castle. I have been issued a passport good for this one day only. I have come many leagues.
The Emperor is not quick to meet those who wait upon him. If not today never.

They crossed a vast crowded courtyard. The gate was before them; whichever of them reached it first would be first into the
Presence, for the many guards there and the clerks would be a long time examining papers and asking questions.

—Let me by, Bruno said. He was tempted to tug at the gown that filled like a sail with Dee’s progress.

—You will trip me up, Dee said. Stop.

For a moment they jostled; then without a word Dee whirled twice around widdershins, and Bruno cried out, for he faced not
an elderly Englishman but a tall pillar of adamant.

But in a moment Bruno, fired by fear and need, had changed himself to a jug of red wine, and poured himself out and around
the pillar’s base.

But the pillar became a flopping marble dolphin that drank the wine.

But Bruno became a net that entangled the fish, then a mouse that fled. But to escape the net, the fish had also become a
mouse, and the upshot was that, their stocks of
simulacra
or phantasmic projections for the moment exhausted, they both found themselves at the same time before the incurious guards
(who had of course seen nothing), both panting sharply and with disordered clothes, their papers held out.

Both were let in together. They went in an embarrassed silence across a further courtyard and in a door. Someone was coming
down toward them, hands held out in greeting.

It was Jacopo Strada who met them, welcomed them without betraying anything of the Emperor’s intentions or inclinations toward
or away from either one of them. Signor Strada was officially the Emperor’s antiquarian, a learned Italian who acquired for
the Emperor’s collections the statues and objects out of Greece and Rome and Ægypt, the books and manuscripts, the gems and
coins and medals that filled the Emperor’s cases and cabinets. He was more than that, though; he
was as close as anyone ever came to being the Emperor’s immediate family, for his daughter was the Emperor’s mistress and
had been for many years; the beautiful (so the people believed she must be) Caterina, Katerina Stradovà, mother of his children.

—You have been asked to await His Sacred Majesty’s pleasure in the
neue Saal
, Signor Strada said to them, inclining his head and with his long and beautiful hand showing them the way. The
Sala nuova
, he said to Bruno. It is a singular honor. Such men as yourselves will of course understand.

He took them through halls being rebuilt in the modern style: on high scaffoldings workmen labored, architects with rolled
drawings directed master builders with squares and plumb lines, and in spandrels and lunettes paint-spattered artists worked
quickly in wet plaster, limning gods and goddesses, virtues and vices, heroes and ancestors. Transformations. Bruno looking
upward stumbled over piled lumber, and John Dee caught his arm.

—Where do we stand now? he asked Signor Strada.

—In Hradschin’s center, said the antiquarian.

Strada pulled open the shining-new doors of a chamber and bade them enter. There are souls that can hear harmonies, and souls
that can’t; souls that in hearing a melody can also hear it inverted, reversed, transferred to another mode. So there are
souls that can perceive geometries, even when they are cast in stone and plaster. Both John Dee and Giordano Bruno knew immediately
the figure within which they had been brought.

—A Tetrad, said Dee.

Strada clasped his hands behind his back and inclined his head, smiling.

The room’s plan was indeed a philosophical Tetrad—that is, two identical squares sharing a center, one of which is rotated
forty-five degrees in respect of the other, making an eight-pointed star, within which they stood. Such a Tetrad describes
the created world, its four Elements connected by four Qualities: cold-dry Earth, cold-moist Water, hot-moist Air, hot-dry
Fire. Around them, in alcoves formed by the eight star-points, were cases cunningly made to hold just the items that they
held, labelled with signs and made of appropriate materials, so that the contents could almost be guessed.

—Perhaps we may open the
kammern
, said Strada gently. The
ratio
will become clear.

He led them within an alcove. He pulled open a slim drawer and drew out a picture, a stiff sheet made of something like a
thin slice of glowing raincloud.

—Alabaster, he said. It seemed to be the stone that his own translucent skull was cut from. It was the material of which this
division’s guardian pillar was made too.

—See, he said, how the artist has employed the natural colors and variations of the surface, and with only a little brushwork,
made them waves, or clouds.

—And the subject? asked Doctor Dee.

—Andromeda, said Bruno, flinging his arms behind himself and catching one forearm in the other hand. The rock she is bound
to. Her chains.
Vincula
. Her bonds.

—The monster, Dee said as the figure resolved itself in his gaze. There. And Perseus flying through the air. Coming to free
her.

Signor Strada turned the piece in his spectral fingers. On its underside was another picture.

—The verso, he said.

—More freeing, said Bruno.

—Yes. The Freeing of the Winds. You will remember the story, in Vergil.

Putti
with distended cheeks leapt blowing from Æolus’s Cave, and roamed the tormented air. North, South, East, West Winds; the
Little Breezes beside them. The gray and yellow swirls and flaws in the glowing stone were cast, like actors, to be stormclouds,
windblown seafoam, rockbound coast.

—Sea and wind, Bruno said. So there is a place for it here, between Air and Water.

—Yes.

Both sides, both pictures, were air and water; both were also fables of binding and unbinding. Dance of the cosmos, in one
direction running toward order and the stern elements; and along another axis toward meaning and yearning, toward a thought
about liberation. Freedom. No freedom without bonds.

Bruno turned out of the alcove of Air and Water and returned to the Tetrad’s center. He saw that at the entrance of each of
the eight alcoves a small portrait was mounted. He went to the northernmost, which should be the starting or ending point
of the series. The picture was of a gnarled, woody ancient; his mouth was collapsed where the teeth had fallen out, his skin
all warts and folds, eyes rheumy and peering. He was not, however,
like
wood or woody or rooty (Bruno came closer) but in fact
made of wood
: he was nothing but an aged chestnut stump, yellow leaves or few or none for hair, his ear a broken limb’s rotted bole, his
lips a fungus.

He was Winter. Old Age. Drought.

Bruno turned to look northeast. The portrait there was a man warmly dressed in furs. No a man made of furs, made of furbearers,
beasts of every earthly kind. The muscle of his neck was the back of a reclining bull. His eye was only a fox’s open mouth,
his brow a seated ass, his cheek an elephant’s smooth head, his ear its ear. He was not anything but beasts, every beast as
real as real, yet the face they made also real, with real wit and wisdom in it, a human face that looked out at the viewer
in recognition: you and I are alike.

—The beasts of Earth, said John Dee, coming up beside him. For Earth is the element of the North, and of Winter.

They turned east. The portrait there was a mass of early flowers, tulips, violets, dogwood,
dents-de-lion
, crocuses. It was a person too, a smiling woman. The rosy blush in her cheek
was
a rose; those two minute sprigs were the living glitter in her eyes.

—Spring, Bruno said. Jacopo Strada came closer, and looked up as into the face of someone he knew well, and he did, for it
was his own daughter Caterina as well as Spring and youth and flowers.

—Spring is to Air as Winter is to Earth, said Bruno. He pointed southeast: and the portrait there was all of birds, an impossible
wild rookery of every kind, as though frozen in just the single instant when by chance as they all took flight they made the
form of a face. Air.

In the south was Summer, King of Seasons, smiling with lips of a fat splitting peasecod, his teeth the peas, cherry lips,
come too close and he is nothing, nothing, nothing but a pile of victuals. In the coat of barleycorn he wore, as though woven
by a peasant with time to spare, were words:

GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO F.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo fecit
.

To the southwest was Summer’s element, Fire: he was a boy all made of flames, flints, guns, matches, all exploding at once,
a firework. His hair was fire, and his moist lip was a candle flame, but—oddly—his eye, a candle too, was unlit, its black
wick his pupil. The two visitors couldn’t know that it was the Emperor’s bastard son Don Julius Cæsar, furious and fiery and
soon to be mad and murderous.