Endless Things (23 page)

In the center of the chamber, center of the floor's geometries, there was a humpbacked black ironbound trunk waiting to be opened.

Soon enough a Catholic mercenary army was on its way to Bohemia to suppress the rebellion of the Bohemian Estates and eject the so-called king they claimed to have anointed. The combined forces—Silesian, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian, Savoyard, Spanish, Flemish, French—advanced on Prague. As armies will, they left the country through which they passed a Brueghel hell: naked refugees, corpses of gutted cattle, dead children, the light of burning farmhouses. During the same weeks the Protestant forces of Europe gathered in Prague, and their generals pledged their arms to the queen.

And there were other forces on the way to battle, unseen but perhaps felt by the Catholic combatants as they went—forces shadowing them, or leading them. Cherubim, seraphim,
nerozumim
. Earthlier forces too, passing through the Böhmerwald by night, through the high forest without misstep: long low four-footed shapes, red and brown, gray and black, eyes alight and long tongues panting. They were themselves—in their waking lives—Catholic, Utraquist, Protestant, Calvinist, Orthodox, but at night they all knew whose side they were on: the side that did not hate them, and would if they helped to win the victory accept their duty, forgive their crimes, and honor them as fighters for the world to come.

On the day of the battle little redheaded Christian of Anhalt commanded the king's forces on the summit of a white hill outside the city, flying the huge royal banner of green and yellow velvet, bearing the words
Diverti nescio
, I know no different way. No one could read the words, though, for a great dead calm prevailed, as still and clear as glass, here and elsewhere; in the light of dawn the opposing army seemed suddenly shockingly close to them, as though they saw themselves in an unexpected mirror at the turning of a corridor. A terrible clarity: those in the Protestant van could actually see (they never forgot it, those who survived) the teeth and tongues of the Catholic captains as they shouted the word of command.

The battle for the end of the world was long. From the heights of the castle, the ladies and the children gathered with their queen to watch its progress: for the two armies could be seen easily from this distance, toy armies suspended upside down in the middle of the air at the
foci
of Emperor Rudolf's great parabolic mirrors. The queen and the women wept for the hurt and the slain, cried out the names of their particular champions when they could be picked out from the heaving, thrashing throng. Other combatants seemed to wrestle in the disordered sky around them. And what or who was that now shambling out from the Bohemian rearguard, hugely tall? The ladies gathered at the mirror to see. Look what damage he does! A man? A beast? Ours? Whose?

It's the man made of earth the Great Rabbi has brought to life and released. The Maharal after long thought overcame his persistent doubts, and though he was certain that he could never be forgiven and would now go down in guilt into Sheol, he has asked himself: is it good for the Jews? And it is. The city must not fall; if help is given to King Frederick, the secret promises of old Emperor Rudolf will be kept. If not, not; there will be no mercy for the Jews, no justice either.

Look, now it's lost a huge arm, struck and blown to dirt by a cannonball, but seems to be undeterred. Eyeless and noseless it sees and smells and does harm, treading heedlessly on corpses and wounded men; the Catholic forces fall back before it. Darkness comes at last, and then that other troop, those long-tailed ones that have dogged the Catholics through Bohemia, comes upon the field: and in the face of such a horror—a wolvish army—the Catholic army breaks. The battle is over. The dead lie scattered, but though night's ravens are already picking up the good scent of slaughter, these wolves will not feast: like lions, the noble bristle-backs will not touch a dead man. By dawn they are gone away, and the wagons come for the bodies, ours and theirs, dead and near-dead.

On that day, while the city rejoiced, in the Giant Mountains far from the battlefield there was carried with simple ceremony a great casket. Its attendants in black, the black wagon hung with faded roses and strewn with papery dry petals. A very large casket, because it contains a great corpse: Philip à Gabella, who despite his human form reached no farther than an ass's age, and who as death approached reverted, feature by feature, to the simple beast he had been. Speechless too finally as the brothers gathered in his byre to weep, and unable to give to them the last blessing they asked of him.

The cave is deep and cold where they inter him, in a cell no larger than the cell of his convent in Naples, his prison in Rome, but glittering with ten thousand carbuncles that have grown up in the still
matrix
of the earth and encrust the wrinkled walls: Andreas Boethius de Boodt, gem hunter to great Rudolf, discovered this place long years before, and told no one, knowing perhaps that one day a guest would arrive fit to lie in it.

No tears any longer. The brothers know that there is no death, that neither their friend Philip nor the little ass that embodied him nor great Bruno whose spirit found refuge in his body are passed away; the infinitesimals that composed them, in their transmigration across the infinite universe, will form other beings just as strange and plain and wonderful. He had only hoped—he even expected—that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and in their coming together know themselves as they had been. Somewhere, elsewhere, on this world or another, or this world when it would
be
another. Because you can't be born in the same world twice.

Te Deum
and
Non Nobis
were sung that night in the Cathedral of St. Wenceslaus, the king and queen not in red and white any longer but in gold and silver, sun and moon, Apollo and Cynthia, resetting the clocks of creation to the first hour. A flight of
putti
filled the sanctuary during the service, their voices were heard, everyone saw: it seemed clear to all that this was a sign of God's blessing and congratulation upon them. (Really, though, the angels were only younglings, careless, passing through on their way elsewhere.)

Then to the golden city was summoned the brotherhood of the Monas, those who were not already resident there: men, women, and others, Jews, Italians, Dutchmen, priests, knights, gardeners, beggars, thieves. Those who knew how to handle angels, knew their tricksome and contrary natures; who knew the
Artes magnæ lucis et umbræ
, the great arts of light and shadow, which are greater even than the goldmakers’ arts, though the goldmakers would be summoned too, and the shape-shifters and nightwalkers, and the daylight healers and the doctors of all sciences: all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rose-Cross, or pretended to be among their number, or believed themselves to be, or knew they ought to be. They were summoned by a worldwide steganography that had long lain waiting to be sent out, an invisible inaudible Messenger, who came forth at just the right astral hour, and on great peacock-eyed wings, robed in blue and stars, bearing her packet of invitations, moved over the earth and the waters even as that Hour itself moved: and he, or is it she, is trumpeter and trumpet call in one, whisper-crying into each ear just the word that causes this heart to turn in the right direction: to go and pack with needful things a ragged bag, or an ironbound trunk, or a train of pack mules, and set out.

And there, in the tetradic chamber in the center of the castle in the center of the Golden City called Adocentyn, wouldn't they at last come together at the obvious hour of the obvious day? Wouldn't they at last put off their old garments, the garments they had worn so that they might go unremarked among all peoples in all places, the furred judge's robe, the armor and gauntlets, the motley, the threadbare scholar's gown, whore's finery, Gypsy bangles, cope and miter?
Brother
, they would say to one another;
brother
, and embrace, because at last they could.
You
, they would say, and laugh, or rejoice; I never thought to see
you
here. And others too, whom they could not see but could sense and delight in, beings come gently or wildly or somberly among them, agents and representatives of other realms, deep or high or far, come with blessing, warnings, gifts, challenges.

Then at last would be the Great Instauration, not all at once or without costs or sorrows, but at last everywhere: a backward revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Age of Gold, which lies in the past, in the beginning, but which could now be sought for in the time to come, as Hermes Thrice-great in Ægypt so long ago predicted:
the restoration of all good things in the course of time by the will of God
. Or
by means of the gods
, as the Giordanisti would always say it; meaning by
gods
nothing other than the reasons of the world, the grammar of divine fecundity endless and ordered. The reasons that make all things to be as they are and yet make them always capable of transformation, the reasons that work and will go on working forever, just because they can: we call them gods because they are within us, because they made our bodies and our minds for us too, because we recognize their faces from long ago, because we love and need and fear them, every one.

And that is how the world came to be in which we would come to be. This world, our great wide wonderful beautiful world, and our benignant sun, Sol Apollo, since then grown even larger and more kind; and the great good beings who, like our Terra, circle him in love, those animals whom in time our æronauts will set out to visit, on winged ships that will be drawn up into the air and beyond the moon's sphere by Will and his cousin Eros. Our seas teeming with metamorphosis, the great gems growing in our caves, watched over by solitary dæmons; our walled and towered cities guarded too by their own
genii
, our famous colleges and abbeys where no sort of wisdom is forbidden and no error punished except by laughter. Our many well-loved monarchs, kings, and emperors holding their inoffensive dream empires together simply by sitting still at their centers like queen bees, to be fed on royal jelly by wise magi, who then can draw from those princes’ fattened hearts the alphabet of all good things, Peace, Plenty, Justice, Delight, Wisdom, and Comfort. Mere signs, yes: but signs are food and nurture for us, they are in fact all the food and nurture that we need: all of us in here.

What happened next was that, twenty years earlier, Giordano Bruno chose not to escape from the papal prison in Rome and go wandering forgetful on four legs into the world.

—No, he said to his gray visitor, who seemed to have grown older as the years of their dialogue went on, older and yet no wiser. No.

Then you must sign the papers, revocations, confessions, admissions that they wish you to sign. Or they will burn you
.

—No. I never will. Were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show they have power only over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time men will laugh at their strictures rules bulls anathemata.

It seems a slight chance, to go and be burned for.

Bruno didn't need to look upon his visitor to know that he meant this as a challenge, or a tease, or even an awed compliment. The gods are astonished by men, who can choose to do or say or seek what will bring them to destruction; and not even the gods who destroy them can always say they are mistaken to do it: though as often as not they are.

That long epic in verse that once upon a time Giordano Bruno wrote—
The Triumphant Beast Thrown Out,
the one that puzzled the inquisitors—told of a conference of all the gods in which, having themselves grown old and unlovely, they vow to reshape the heavens, and make all things new: a job they cannot, in the end, agree on how to accomplish. And—fortunately for us—they give it up.

Those men who wish to bring about the same universal reformation—the alteration of the whole wide world, with the end of making all men happy forever—should likewise give it up. It's not that it can't be done: perhaps no man, or men, or men and others, will ever be powerful enough to do it, but Bruno was sure there was no limit to the power that was available to the soul willing and able to forgo everything else to gain it—self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation. But it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can't know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll.

That's what he had learned from the thousand journeys he had made in thought, all the beings he had seen and been, in all the years he had sat in his cell on his bed of stone. Not escape or salvation: or rather, no other one but this one. The turnkey (and after he was gone his son) had looked in now and then through the small barred window to see him there, his eyes sometimes a little crossed and his mouth sometimes working as though he spoke, then listened, then spoke again; his hands moving in air, meaninglessly—the turnkey didn't perceive the pages of the books he turned—and sometimes shifting his cold hams on the stone; meanwhile Bruno had been sifting the days of his past, and walking the roads of this future and that one, to see where they would lead; in one, looking into the house of that Englishman, the empty house, and the man himself old and empty too it seemed, selling to a vile tradesman a gray glass wherein a spirit was surely contained, although he said there was none. Oh she was there, she was: she saw Bruno looking in to see her there, and he knew that she knew him, and would live forever. But the old man—a greater and better man than he had ever been, as his wisdom was greater than Bruno's knowledge—had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from the world. Because the time was past in which even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid.