DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (25 page)

Then toward dawn on the ides of June he slipped its jesses, and cast it.

Or did it simply escape from him?

Was it ever his to command?

It scattered the papers and dust in the tower room (having rushed at his summons, he felt it, from his gown’s pockets or from
his bag or his fingertips); he heard laughter, a child’s, hers; it grew stronger in a moment, it blew the feather-pens about
and made the hangings lift and quiver as though a spy were behind them. Then, before John Dee could shutter and bar the window,
it was gone, out and away, little runagate, a lost hawk that might return and might not: and a stillness filled up the disordered
chamber. The day was the last of the Ember Days following Whitsun, 1588. John Dee sat and waited, thinking that today or tomorrow
or in a week’s time he might see the world grow suddenly worse, or better.

By evening a windstorm had already arisen in those parts, blowing the wrong way, from east to west around the world. Exhilarating
at first, like a fast ride downhill, it grew alarming as the bloody sun went down amid flying clouds and night gathered too
quickly. Through that day and night and the next day it went on. Horses would not brave it, oxen would not pull, only the
patient asses were unafraid, braying back at the wind’s shrieking and closing their lashy eyes against the dust. Travellers
hoping to take advantage of the long summer day and the night’s full moon to hurry their journeys shut themselves up instead
in inns and monasteries, and even knocked on the barred doors of poor folks’ cottages when the storm grew huge and living.
Once upon a time, on such groaning moaning sleep-banishing nights, innkeepers might have entertained travellers with local
stories of the
wilde Jagd
, the Wild Hunt; might have told how the wind they heard crying was actually the clatter of the lady Diana or Perchta or Abundia
and her followers beating their steeds through the air, on their way to the land of the dead. On certain days of the year,
particularly the days between Christmas and Epiphany, certain of their neighbors went abroad under the moon: not, or not necessarily,
in their own persons, which might remain fast asleep in their beds, but in some other form, the form of mice or horses or.
And the wind that bore them up and away was also the wind of their own passage overhead, as they travelled to a place known
only to themselves, where they did battle on behalf of the rest of us, who kept within doors: we whose duty was only to tell
their tale, and bless them.

But those tales had become dangerous ones to tell.

For the protection of the souls of his people the Duke of Bavaria (and he not the only one) had lately instituted laws. No
longer were these beliefs and practices of country people to be allowed, for it had been determined that they had all along
been worshipping the Devil—perhaps without knowing it—by their superstitions. Ghosts, manikins, ogres, mountain giants, will-o’-the-wisps,
the imps that combed sparks into cats’ fur and soured milk, all the small creatures of everyday and every-night life: either
they had been suborned by the Enemy, or they had always been devils in disguise, working for men’s harm, but what was certain
was that it was a sin, and worse than that it was now a crime, to leave a dish of milk for them, or laugh at tales of them,
or invoke their help to find a lost calf, or to induce one of them to reverse the harm another had done. To do so would be
prima facie
evidence of witchcraft.

Best to make sure, then, that our neighbors and our guests saw us bless ourselves when we sneezed, or when nightwalking animals
crossed our paths, or when we passed the churchyard. And when the wild wind blew from the wrong quarter, best to bolt our
doors and shutters, and in silence (or better yet in prayer, for our husbands and our children are listening) to roll ourselves
into our beds and pull up the blankets over our heads.

S
omething had happened in Hell.

A hundred years before, Alfonso de Spina had calculated the number of devils in Hell at 133,306,668. Most were confined forever
there below, Padre Alfonso thought; only a few—those once worshipped as gods by the pagans—or perhaps only one, Satan, as
we are told in Job, ever roamed our upper air, with perhaps a few attendants to run his errands.

No more, though. Since that time either Hell-mouth had opened wider, or more doors had been made, or the princes below had
acquired new powers; or men’s (and women’s, particularly women’s) wickedness, pride, lust, and luxury had at last given those
devils egress from their land (God shaking His head sadly in Heaven, Who had seen it coming) and access to our world and our
days. Now it seemed they walked or flew over the earth in legions, herding the wicked like cattle toward their pens, contracting
with the desperate and the proud for their immortal souls, their signatures in blood smoking on the parchment; or in female
form hovering over men in the night to steal their seed as the men tossed and groaned in guilty dreams.

Once witches were few and isolated, and cases of
maleficium
—harm done by witchcraft or sorcery—rare; now witches gathered in Sabbaths, flying or somehow travelling great distances
to worship the Devil, who was allowed to appear among them either in his own dreadful person or in some animal form, actual
or illusory. There they performed obscene rituals unheard of in former times. Jean Bodin in his tract
Dæmonomania
asserted that “witches by the thousands are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as the worms in a garden.” In fact
the witches had apparently formed a sect or heretical religion of their own, a rival or infernal Church subsisting and growing
within the very body
of Christendom itself, not as worms grow in a garden but as they grow in the body of a wasting child.

How long had this been going on? No one could say; little of it had been suspected until two Dominicans, Fathers Sprænger
and Institoris, compiled a manual in the 1480s for investigators to use, the
Malleus maleficarum
or Hammer Against Witches, listing all the secret crimes the fathers had heard or read about or deemed to be possible, and
all the methods that ought to be used to search them out. The suspects began to come before judges who had the
Malleus
open on the bench before them. And the confessions began to accumulate, and dovetail.

Did you go abroad at night and consort with others at a Sabbath?

I do go out at certain times, in certain seasons of the year, to fight the others. I have gone since childhood.

What others? Other witches?

They
are witches. We go in the service of Christ to fight them.

Blaspheme not. Why do you go out? What reason?

Because I am summoned. I am one of those who is summoned.

Who summons you? God, or an angel, or the Devil?

A man. Just a man. He is from Cologne, a big, bearded man; he leaves his body in his bed, and comes to summon me. I leave
my bed and follow.

A big dark man comes at night and summons you to join the witches. What are the names of the other witches that you see?

I cannot say. I would be beaten. We have all agreed not to tell the names of those who go to fight, not our names or the names
of the witches.

You will say. You will say or you will be made to say …

An invisible army, its captains and soldiers known only to one another; a sect, meeting not openly in the daylight as Christians
do but secretly at night. A foreign nation to which the witch and the sorcerer gave their whole allegiance, where every common
human act and feeling was reversed and made into its opposite: where the Savior of mankind was despised and His Cross trampled
and shat upon, and the Devil’s fundament worshipped; where persons surrendered their natural dominion over the animals and
instead took on animal form themselves; where coupling was done openly in groups and not in the dark alone; where children
were not nurtured but aborted and slain, not fed but eaten.

Children killed and eaten: not in fable, not released unharmed from the wolf’s belly or resurrected from their own boiled
bones, but truly killed and eaten like fowl by our neighbors in secret. The ultimate crime, the crime the Roman magistrates
once charged the first Christians with, and the Christians their Gnostic rivals and later the Jews who lived among them. When
we hear of children killed and eaten we have entered
the counterworld, Hell on earth, and it is usual for some, or many, to be hunted down and slain before it is closed and forgotten
again.

Madimi had said it: all Christ’s churches joined in warring against them. Doctrinaire Dominicans demanded they be burned,
but so did Genevan Calvinists and French Huguenots and sensible Dutch Reformers. In 1588 in the lands of the Elector-Archbishop
of Trier, more than a hundred witches were burned, including an eighty-year-old blind woman and an eight-year-old boy. The
judge of the secular court, deputy governor of the city of Trier, tried to stop the burnings, but after a number of convicted
witches revealed that they had seen him himself among the worshippers of Satan at the Devil’s ball, he was arrested. Under
torture he remembered, or confessed to, appalling obscenities, and went to the stake forgiven.

Burning to death is an awful spectacle, but not as painful as it seems it must be: not the ultimate earthly pain its employers
hope and suppose it to be. Many who have been severely burned say that the pain comes largely afterward; while the fire is
at work there is horror, or dread, or an unearthly peace worse than either, but not pain. This was not apparent to the shrieking
laughing crowds watching the skin blister away, beards and hair catch fire like straw, eyeballs coagulate; but the angels
who met those souls on the other, cooler shore and asked in pity
Are you all right
,
are you all right
? were often answered
Yes, yes I think
: for they had escaped while the body was still overwhelmed and unable to tell of its anguish. And all all right now.
In Paradisum deducant te Angeli
.

Practiced executioners who suspected that their subjects were escaping the full measure of punishment liked to damp down the
fires when half the work was done, when legs and bound hands were so burned as to be unrecognizable but eyes could still see
and throat still scream (could, unless the tongue was tied or cut or a metal brace was strapped to the face to keep the jaw
jammed shut, so that the witch could not shriek out the name of her demon protector, or the heretic blaspheme).
Knowledge
is the goal of the torturer, as of the moral instructor: unconsciousness is failure. So let the crowds come right up to the
barriers, where they can see and hear, let them hold their children up, let the burghers and the civil authorities have high
seats, and let them lean forward, the better to see, to hear, to know: they are here to be made intimate with the sinner,
to be made momentarily one with her, they must learn all they can. The eye is the mouth of the heart.

In that year 1588, a certain Peter Stumpf of Bedburg, near Cologne, was met in the woods by hunters who had just seen a wolf
and given
chase; he was out for a stroll, he said; the hunters found this suspicious, and Stumpf was arrested and imprisoned. Subjected
only to the
territio realis
—the showing of the tools of torture—he immediately confessed that he was a werewolf, had killed and eaten sixteen people,
yes, that his wife yes and his daughters yes and his mistress were all witches. So he was condemned; bound to a cartwheel,
his legs and arms broken, his flesh pulled off with white-hot pincers, and his head “strooke from his body and stuck upon
a hye pole,” said the vividly illustrated English broadside account published soon after, and was then burned with his women:
“Thus he lived and dyed in the likeness of a woolf, and shape of a man.”

—And may God have mercy on them that did it, said John Dee. For it was a great wrong and wickedness.

—He had murdered sixteen, said the Emperor of the Romans. Why should he not die the death?

—If they were murdered, John Dee said, bowing low to soften his disagreement with the Emperor, they were murdered by a wolf,
or wolves.

—He was the wolf!

—So it is said. Your Majesty will I hope pardon me if I do not believe it.

—He confessed. He confessed all. He confessed murders that had not before been known of.

—Under the threat of torture. Your Majesty, if all your subjects have not confessed such things it is only because we have
not all been tortured.

They went spiralling steadily downward, the Emperor, Doctor Dee, the Emperor’s physician and his chaplain, a secretary, four
clanking guards, all following the servingmen and their wavering torches. The stone steps of the tower were slick with damp;
the Emperor leaned upon his chaplain.

—You do not, the Emperor’s physician asked Doctor Dee, believe in the transvection of witches.

—I do not, said John Dee. I do not believe that God would grant to the Devil such powers, which then the Devil could grant
to his worshippers. God’s care for us does not admit of it. Whatever the poor deluded women believe. Or are led to believe.
Read Wierus,
de prestigiis dæmonum
, of devilish tricks.

—Jean Bodin says otherwise, said the chaplain testily, and with as good citations.

—The man, or woman, who believes himself to be a wolf, said Doctor Dee, suffers from a species of melancholy. A very deep
dreadful
melancholy. The wolf he believes himself to be is only the inward form or picture of that melancholy. Hear how often they
say: my wolf’s skin is on the inside.

At that the Emperor, beside him on the narrow stair, made a small sound, a whimper like a puppy’s or a child’s: one only,
and his face did not change. Only John Dee heard. The Emperor had suffered lifelong from melancholy.

—All the ancient writers agree, said Dee. The physical signs are well known: the dry mouth and eye, the unslakable thirst,
the insomnia by night. Thoughts fixed on cemeteries, and corpses.

—Witches cannot weep, said the Emperor’s physician. That too is well known.

—
Morbus lupinus
, said Dee. The stars being conjoined, and the spirit properly formed. Or better say improperly formed. They will believe
themselves turned into beasts, and behave accordingly.

—How is it then, the chaplain asked, that those who see a werewolf see, not a man who believes himself a wolf, but a wolf
indeed?

—The question is, the physician said, whether the witches can transform themselves into the forms of animals—wolves, mice,
flies, all are attested—and go about doing harm; or whether what is seen is only a
phantasticum
or projection of the spirit, sent out as the witch lies asleep.

—How could the witch be guilty of the wolf’s crimes if the witch lies asleep and only dreams them? asked the chaplain in a
rising voice. Shall we pardon them all then and give them their freedom?

The Emperor stilled them with a lift of one hand. They continued downward. From within the dungeons there came as they passed
the rattle of manacles, and sounds that might have been a man’s breathing, or a dying man’s entreating. John Dee had heard,
without believing, that it was here in the tiny chambers of the White Tower that fraudulent or careless alchemists were imprisoned
who failed to produce what they promised to the Emperor. The way had grown damper, for now they had gone down beneath the
surface of the earth, and the only light that reached them fell from above through tall chimneys. The guards stopped before
a door, the sweating black nailheads on it showing how thick it was; an opening in it was too small to admit anything but
a man’s hand, yet was barred anyway.

—Look in, said the Emperor.

John Dee came close to the little window. He had, the day before, received a special summons from the Emperor, passed to him
by Sir Edward (that was Kelley) to appear quickly at the castle, to advise the Emperor on a matter beyond the skills of his
physicians. Edward Kelley
had told the Bohemians that nothing was beyond the skills of Jan Devus,
doctor sapientissimus
, and when Kelley spoke now everyone listened, and so John Dee had been brought down into this place of terror: and if he
could do nothing in the case, here he might well remain.

In the little stone space on a stone bed a young man sat in the near darkness. He was drawn into a shivering bundle, as tight
as he could draw himself given the black shackles on his wrists and neck. By a trick of the small light in the cell, his eyes
shone visibly, white and wide and afraid, though his face was dark.

—Taken in his bed in a village of the Giant Mountains twenty nights ago, said the physician. Imperial huntsmen followed a
spatter of blood from a wolf trap, not long after a wolf attacked sheep nearby and killed a lamb. The blood led toward his
village. He was found in bed amid bloody sheets.

—Naked, said the chaplain. The blood still on his mouth.

—May we open the door?

—Open the door, said the Emperor.

For only the briefest moment—it was over before the Emperor noticed it—no one did anything; then the guards took up positions
at the door’s side, and the turnkey was put forward, and a torch held up.

The door opened.

No ravening wolf. He drew back, and his chains dragged against the stones: the dreariest of all sounds. Dark hair matted,
with blood maybe; a rug or mantle thrown around his nakedness. John Dee thought not of wolves but of a lamed fox kit he once
found the boys of Mortlake tormenting: of its big eyes and panting mouth. So still and weak. Reynard. They let the dogs have
it.

—Does he speak?

—He has not.

—Is he hurt? He is.

Dee came to the lad (perhaps he was fifteen years old, perhaps not so old) and drawing up the skirts of his robe knelt on
the stone floor beside him. The werewolf’s left ankle and foot were bound in cloths, a great clout that the blood had nevertheless
seeped through. The naked foot extending from the bandage was blue. The wound stank.