DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (24 page)

The round glass of clear crystal still stood in its frame in the tower room, but cold, vacant: gone out, like a lamp.

Never once, in all the years he had faithfully attended on them, from the time when he had first acquired a bright black obsidian
mirror (cut and polished on the other side of the world for a Mexican lady’s toilet) down to this day—never once had John
Dee himself been given sight
in chrystallo
. Long ago he might sometimes have believed for a day or a week that he had seen, but nothing came of what he saw (a tower,
a room, a rose) so it had surely been his own desire only that he had seen, as we see faces in trees and clouds.

Never once.

He stood in his nightgown at the door of the tower room, a candle in his hand. He could see the candle flame, like the living
spark in an eye, glitter on the cold ball’s surface.

Why have you refused me that, kept that gift from me? The only one, of all those proffered, that I desired.

He went into the little room. The table of practice he and Kelley with their own hands had built with such care exactly to
the angels’
specifications stood in the middle of the room, each of its four feet resting on a seal of pure wax made in a certain pattern,
a
sigillum Æmæth
, a multiple cross with Hebrew letters on it standing for the words
Thou art great forever O Lord
. On a larger seal of the same kind (
twenty-seven inches in diameter
, they had said,
an inch and a half thick
, how sweetly childish they could seem in their punctiliousness) stood the frame of sweet wood that held the glass.

And what if it had been for Edward as for himself: that there was nothing at first to see in stones like this, until he taught
himself to see them there? What if Edward had not received those spirits out of the glass into his mouth and heart at all,
what if they had really proceeded from his heart into the glass, there to reside thereafter, and speak to him his own thoughts?

Perhaps it was only thus that angels speak to men; perhaps the angels that we hear are ours alone, hidden inside.

And he said aloud:

—Then I will do it myself.

As though a seedpod burst just then within him he felt a hot certainty—no, not certainty, possibility—fly through him to his
fingertips and his hair roots, and pass, and leave him calm.

Myself. Like the red hen in the tale:
I will do it myself, said the red hen: and she did
.

He set down his candle and came closer to the ball. Did it shrink away from him, shy or afraid, no it could not. As he came
closer he could see that on its silvery surface the whole room was reflected, walls and windows curving to touch one another
and the floor and the ceiling. Closer and he could see his own face in the middle, swollen like a puncheon, his vast hand
that reached out toward it.

How beautiful you are, he thought, beautiful. Bending to it open-eyed and gentle, as though he approached a tetchy pony or
a newborn child of his own or an elemental spirit, one of those bumblebee-sized ones he used to catch in a jar among his roses:
come I will have you.

He had not got very close, not even as close as Kelley had used to, when he felt taken: felt the cords of his throat tickled,
his heart tugged. He knelt. Still he saw nothing but the stone, but now its deeps; his view opened and he looked not at but
into. And he heard, faint but clear in his inward ear, a voice, not his own though it seemed to spring at once from the glass
and from his throat.

—
I am glad to see thee. Why hast thou forsaken me?

It was her voice, he knew it, he had never heard it before but it could be no other’s. Christ Jesus Lord God thanks be unto
Thee for Thy great mercy unto Thy servant.

—I have not forsaken thee, he said.

The sound of his own speaking was loud and coarse, though he barely whispered. He heard no more. He supposed his speaking
had frightened her away, and his heart went cold. Then she spoke again:

—
You have not called me. Not these many months
.

—Madam I could not. And he would not.

—
Well let him go. He is a foul traitor, and treason will have his reward
.

She said it teasingly, and yet it chilled him; Lord how she cursed, she always had, like a wicked child, and who was able
to reprove her.

—
Has my mother brought thee comfort?
she asked.
Hast had thy way with her? How many times?

—Thy mother, child? Who is thy mother?

—
Who else but the great lady I brought thee unto?

—She.

—
She is my mother; her other name Amphitrite
. Her
mother’s name is Night
.

For a moment it was as though he could remember what he had not himself seen: that green mead, the woman coming to them, telling
them she was Understanding; opening her garments. He shuddered hugely.

—
She has given him what he asked
, Madimi said.
Know you that? He has gold now in overplus. He may eat and drink it if he likes
.

—He is grown great, John Dee said. He is called Doctor,
dominie
; loved of all.

—
He has not praised me. No matter. Let him enjoy it as he may
.

—We were obedient unto thee, Madam, John Dee whispered. And now we are parted, and the rift cannot be made up; his wife is
gone; my wife is given a hurt will be a long time mending.

—
I know it. I know it and I am sorry for it. I am, in part
.

—I would have done that and more for the great gift promised me, he said. Of knowledge of God, His purpose in this enterprise;
true knowledge. I would have done all that was asked. I did do. And I, I have not been answered.

—
For that
, she said, in a small voice.
I had not in my gift what thou asked of me
.

—Hadst thou not?

—
Not though I promised it. I gave what I had: Power. I had not Under standing to give
.

A huge and indissoluble stone had arisen in his breast, like a cold precipitate in an alembic, it would never pass. He knew
he should bear it and not ask why; but he could not bear it, he must ask.

—Then why did you set that duty upon us? he whispered. Tell me. Why did you ask that great sin of us, of having our wives
in common?
Which then we did, thinking it commanded by you for holy purposes. Why?

—
For my delight only
, she said.
That I might witness it. I and my kin gathered here
.

He felt himself falling as he knelt, the room tipped up like a dish from which he was to be spilled out, down, forever.

—Then you are fallen angels, he said. You are fallen, and I am damned.

—
Old man
, she said, almost gently, almost tenderly.
Foolish old man. Hast not known? Hast not seen? All the angels are fallen angels
.

—All? How, all?

—
All the angels are fallen. It is in this that they are angels. Have no pity for us; it is so, and has ever been so
.

—How is it then that you can praise God, and say prayers; bless; be wise?

—
How? Cannot fallen man do these things? Enough. Listen now to me and I will prophesy: There is war in heaven, a war of all
against all. That war will have its mirror on earth in a like war. It must have
.

—A new war of religion, he guessed. Christ’s church divided. More blood spilled between the sects.

—
Ha
, she said.
That is the less war. The great war is the war of all Christ’s churches against their enemies: those who invoke the gods dæmons
and angels of heaven and earth from the places where they reside. They will burn all who do so. They will have them into the
fire as paper
.

—I invoked no wicked spirits, I.

—
They will burn you too. Listen to me and write it in your heart: Fly, but do not fly from the powers into the arms of other
powers. And beware: for the powers reside each inside all the others
.

He was weeping now, hearing her voice through the tears that gathered in his throat.

—I know not what you mean, he said. I will do as you say if I can.

—
Come, old man
, she said.
Come. I am off to the wars. You shall not see me more. How like you that?

—I do not like it. I would see you often, Madam.

—
Do you weep? Do not weep. Come closer. Kiss my brow, tell me you love me. Do you not love me?

—I do. I do love thee, child.

—
I will give thee a gift. Come closer
.

—Madam, I fear your gifts.

—
Sir, you are right to fear them. I have a kickshaws here in my pocket will bring down nations
.

—I do not want it.

—
Come close. Closer. My gift is for you alone
.

He had drawn so close to the glass, and to the child somewhere inside, that he could have kissed her brow if he could have
seen her; so close his breath clouded on the surface.

—
Here it is
, she said.
May’st thou have joy in it
.

He thought of his own children, how they came to him with treasures in their empty hands, that he must ask the name of before
he could thank them (what is it, child? A gold ring? Why thankee then for this gold ring).

—What is it? he asked her.

—
It is a wind I have in my power
.

—Doth not the wind blow where it listeth? John Dee said. I know not how to command it.

—
Speak sharply to it, that it obey thee. The gold I have given him is not good. But the wind is a good wind. There. Now it
is thine. Farewell
.

He felt, with a steely thrill of fear along his spine and scalp, a small cold hand take his. Then it was gone. As though a
sinew or nerve were drawn out of his heart’s heart he felt her depart; and through the breach a cold wind blow in.

A house burns down, with all the movables, and reveals to the stricken family the place where the miser uncle long ago hid
his money. An army tramples a poor farmer’s field, and takes his eldest son for a soldier; the boy rises to become a general,
buys his father new fields as far as eye can see. Job had his flocks returned to him, new children given to him, and a new
wisdom too: and did he never go to sit by his first children’s graves, and weep?

She had said to them long ago that a new age was to come, that many now alive would see it before their eyes were closed forever;
it would steal upon many, and bewilder them. Much would be taken then, and much of value would be thrown away as trash; but
nothing would be lost that would not be replaced with something of equal worth, somewhere, in some sphere, though far from
here.

Not ten days after that midnight when she spoke to him from the glass for the first time—only to say
Farewell
—John Dee wrote in his diary:
EK did open the great secret to me, God be thanked!

And it was a simple thing, as of course it should be; he had known it should be, all the books said it was. Kelley nearly
laughed to speak it; it took but a moment to say. He gave them a powder to use, in a plain twist of paper as though it were
an ounce of pepper or mustard. He lost nothing by parting with it, he said; nothing. Like a child’s riddle:
What is it I give, and others take, yet I never part with it? Answer, my hand
.

Once, he and Kelley had watched and prayed through a whole zodiacal year (two days and two nights, as it happened) to make
a single convolute nugget of new gold; now, with what Kelley gave them and the secret he told them, it could be made in a
few hours, and the process begun soon again, and more made the second time than the first, the projective powders growing
not weaker but stronger through use, multiplying even as they generated: breeding, said John Dee, increasing like a lucky
housewife’s hens from their own eggs. It was child’s play, and indeed Doctor Dee’s sons Arthur and Rowland soon learned to
assist at the furnace and the alembic; nor did they pray and cleanse their hearts through fasting and reception of the Sacrament
as Dee had always done in the (fruitless) former times, it was unnecessary, for clean or soiled their hands did as well. They
rolled up their sleeves and like bakers or smiths they went to work, and at evening they were richer than they had been at
morning. They cast the gold into half- and quarter-ingots, or made medallions or coins of their own devising, currency of
their new republic, any goldsmith would after a quick test change them for coin of this realm. John Dee opened a bag of them
and spilled them on the table before his wife, what he had promised, what the angels had promised them, they peeped up proud
from where they lay as though saying
Mistress, we told you so
: and she smiled down on them, and laughed, and slipped her hands beneath her apron and would not touch them.

Gold: like the fairground magician who could seem to fill a basin with clinking coins, more and more snatched out of the air
and ringing in the basin, the Miser’s Dream, Kelley and Dee in Prague that year produced more and then more. Many years later
Arthur Dee would often tell his friend the physician Sir Thomas Browne how his father had made gold in Rudolf’s time; how
the younger children had played with disks of it, how it lay about everywhere. Had they done so truly? asked Dr. Browne. Oh
yes; heaps. Real gold? Oh yes, Arthur would say, with a sad smile; oh yes, real enough.

John Dee did not tell Jane of the other gift, the one he had himself been given by the angels, his own recompense, his tip.

Alone with it he learned its name, or the name of its name; he sat up with it all through one night, as a falconer must with
a newly captured goshawk, to befriend it, and teach it to mind: to come to his hand, and go where he sent it.

In the day, like a shy ghost, it stayed shut up within him, but in the solitudes of the night he would feel it stir, touch
his hair and beard, wind around him like a juggler’s tame serpent; it put out his candle sometimes, made his wife look up
and seek for the crack where the draft
she felt came in, and pull her (new, fur-trimmed) mantle closer.