DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (29 page)

Autumn in the west was fruits and harvest piled into a basket, and the basket of fruits was a man: his pear nose, mushroom
ear, beard of bearded wheat and hair of green grapes and their leaves. And in the northwest, cold-moist Water, Autumn’s element,
was of course a catch of fish—a flat flounder’s eye her eye, and a string of cold pearls around her neck—just as Air opposite
was a flock of birds.

—Thus you see, Signor Strada said. You will excuse me if I leave you now. You will be made aware of His Sacred Majesty’s intentions
toward you. You may continue to study here. Go in any direction, north, south, east, west. Open the albums, inspect the gems
in their cases. Everything is in its place.

He lowered his head, and backed away, placing his long hands together as though in prayer; they seemed silvered, as though
themselves made precious by all they had handled.

John Dee and Giordano Bruno stood side by side in the midst of the universe.

—But why, John Dee asked, are they faces? Why persons?

—Because this is what we are ourselves, Bruno said, looking around him. If all these pictures could be laid over one another,
and commingled, they would form one person: one man, or woman. They would not appear strange or singular then but fully human.
For we are only composites of the elements of this world, held together while we live by our soul. This
soul
is perhaps nothing more than the form within matter, the form particular to us. It dissolves when we do, as those faces would
vanish if the animals stirred and took themselves off, or when the flowers faded and the fuses and matches burned up.

—As when we see faces in clouds, Dee said.

—The same.

—My soul is not of this earth, said John Dee. It is cut to a different pattern, and when the elements of me disperse, it will
return home. To Him Who made it. I am assured.

—Soul is soul, Bruno said curtly. Mine or yours, a god’s or a pumpkin’s or a snail’s. Vergil says:
Spiritus intus alit
, Spirit nourishes all from within.

He looked into John Dee’s long face, which looked, somewhat downward, into his. They two, surely, were made to different patterns:
a
coniunctio oppositorum
. The two of them laid one over the other would perhaps make a man of the next age; or would fly instantly into flinders,
and bring down this castle.

—Before you came to my house in Mortlake, John Dee said, I was told of you.

—That land was as full of spies as a dead dog of maggots.

—These were no human spies. Those that spoke to me were not of this earth but beyond it. They told me of your nature and your
fate, but not your thoughts.

—Well well well, Bruno said.
Benebene
. Give them my greeting when next you speak to them, and thank them for their attention to me. I am sure I have not made their
acquaintance.

—They said that you intended me no good that day. That you intended to steal from me a thing you could have had for nothing—and
which would have left me no poorer to give you.

—And what is that? Bruno asked, grinning wolfishly and knowing in fact very well what John Dee spoke of.

—They said my stone, my letter. They meant, I think, a certain sign.

Giordano Bruno could see—his inward scene changing, as in a masque—the dim and crowded library in Mortlake on the left bank
of the Thames, to which three no four years ago he had gone in the company of the Polish count Lascus or Alasco. How he found
there a book (he saw his own hand push aside another book, an almanac, to find it): the book containing the thing, the thing
that was in fact not a stone, or a letter, or a name, or a person, or a sign, but all of those things.

—I drew that sign before I understood its use or its nature, John Dee said. I drew it with a compass and a rule. I was a young
man, not yet thirty.

With his staff the Englishman began to draw upon the center of the floor of the
neue Saal
the sign he had been given or had made. For seven years, like Jacob tending Laban’s sheep, he had cared for it, taking it
out now and again and puzzling over it: a key to which the lock was lost, or not yet found.

—It contains firstly the sacred Ternary, Dee said, two lines and their crossing point. The Ternary generates the earthly Quaternary,
and here it is, four right angles and four straight lines.

Bruno watched it come to be as though scored upon the tiles of the floor with a graver’s tool. From the four corners and four
divisions of the room the elements and the seasons also took notice: their eyes (made of a fox or a fish, of asters and cornflowers,
of fire or wood-rot) looked down and turned toward it.

—The Cross of Christ is in it, Dee said; in these lines are the signs of the four elements, Earth Air Water Fire; in these
lines the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and the seven planets.

It began to burn in Giordano Bruno’s mind. At every turning of his path this sign had appeared, like a great-headed one-eyed
handless infant: cut on the seal rings of doctors and booksellers, stamped on the bindings of old books, drawn on privy walls,
gone when he looked for it again, wiped away, blurred, not what he had thought he had seen. Summoning him, or warning him;
naming him. Or not. There were months when he did not remember it; months when he could not cease thinking of it. All the
hundred signs that he had cut in wood or ruled with a pen, all the ones he had drawn in his mind or on the earth with Mordente’s
marvelous compass, had been attempts to avoid this one,
supersede it with his own. He was visited by the dreadful thought that in the end he would see nothing else.

—I have believed, John Dee said, that it is a sign of the one thing of which the world is made. Hieroglyph of the monad, the
One whose vicissitudes comprise all the multiform species we see. …

—There is no such sign, said Bruno. The One is unfigurable. If it were to have a sign … No. It has none.

—Well then, said John Dee. Since you so much desired it—if you did—perhaps you can tell me what it is.

—I cannot. Synesius says that the signs of the greatest dæmons are composed of circles and straight lines. Perhaps it is one
of those; his name, his call.

—Whose sign? Whose call?

—
Microcosmos
, said Bruno. Greatest of all the Intelligences. The Sun the head of him, the Moon his crown; the cross of the four elements,
the planets and the signs composing him. Halfway between
immensum
and
minimum
, worms and angels. No other can claim that. His other name is Man.

—The great Jew of this city, John Dee said, tells me that before the creation of the world there was made an Adam out of a
circle and a line.

—Before the creation of the world?

—He said: God withdrew himself from a space within himself; that withdrawal generated a point, which was all that the universe
was, or is; it was bounded by a circle, and crossed by a line. Adam Kadmon.

—The emptiness in God’s heart … is Man, Bruno said. He shuddered hugely, and shook his head: No, no.

—Well, John Dee said. It may be that I will never know. For she is gone.

—She?

—The one who promised to tell me of this sign; who warned me against you. She is gone and I cannot ask her more.

—Your
semhamaphores
do not speak, Bruno said. They are the Reasons of the world; they say only their own names.

—She told me: There is war among the powers. Fly from them, she said, but beware you fly not into the arms of other powers.

The sign burning in the center of the Emperor’s floor had cooled, from red to blue-black, like a cinder. Giordano Bruno erased
it.

—A question of who is to be master, he said. That’s all.

The doors at the end of the gallery opened, and a chamberlain entered. They stood and waited while the man approached gravely
down the length of polished floor. When he came close they saw that he bore two letters, one for each of them. He presented
them with a
slight bow.

—Well well, Giordano Bruno said, after opening his. I am summoned into his presence now.

He tapped the letter to his brow, and signalled with it: lead on. The chamberlain bowed again and stepped backward, turned
to lead him out.

John Dee read the brief note handed to him:
SS Majestas requires that you deliver to him immediately the thing of great value that was by you lately promised him. And
if you are not able to do this he wishes returned to his officers without fail that person who was lately given into your
care
.

He folded it, pocketed it, and thought: It is time to be gone. It is time, it is time, it may already be past time.

O
nce upon a time, somewhere other than here, there was an Age of Gold, when men were asses. (This is the story Bruno told the
Emperor of the Romans, who thought he had heard it all before.)

There isn’t anybody who doesn’t glorify that old Age. Men didn’t know how to work the land then or how to lord it over one
another; nobody knew more than anyone else; they all lived in dens and caves; the men leapt on the women as the beasts do,
there was little concealment in their lust—and little jealousy, or spice. No spice in their gluttony either; everyone got
together to eat oh apples and chestnuts and acorns, raw as Mother Nature made them.

Idleness was then the only guide, and the only god. If we call up before us the figure of Idleness to defend that age, what
shall she say? (Here Bruno projected before himself, where he alone for the moment could perceive it, exactly this personage,
and transmitted to the Emperor what she said.) Everybody exalts my Golden Age, says Idleness, and at the same time they praise
and call a “virtue” the very villain that destroyed it! Who do I mean? I mean Toil, and his friends Industry and Study. Haven’t
you heard them being praised, even as the world realizes, too late, mourning and weeping, the ills that they cause?

Who (says Idleness) introduced Injustice into the world? Toil and his brothers. Who—spurred on by Honor—made one man better
and smarter than another, left some in poverty and made others rich? It was Toil, this same meddler and stirrer-up of discontent.
Little did our first parents see that from the time they plucked the fruit of Knowledge, nothing would be the same again;
they had unleashed Change, and with it Pain, and Toil.

—It is said, the Emperor put in at that point, that the old Age of Gold is now to return. If we can bring it in.

—Nothing returns, Bruno said. Everything changes. Evolution. Transmigration.
Parturition. Metamorphosis. The coincidence of opposites. Fortuna has so many variations to produce that change will last
for eternity, and nothing will return.

The Emperor regarded him. He might have pointed out that the heavens are changeless, and do return; but his astronomers had
taught him that the heavens change too, and new stars are born. He might have named God, Who never changes, but the Emperor
didn’t think of God; he almost never did.

—In the new-found-lands, he said, there are people who live today just as we did in the Golden Age. So I am told.

—If there are, Bruno said, they had another father than Adam, and never fell. They will.

—All men are children of Adam, said the Emperor.

—Oh yes? Bruno said (not noticing how the Emperor drew back from his aggressive chin, and from his language, better suited
to the brawling of the schools than to these halls). Oh yes? And if they are, how did they get so far from home? Walked, across
the seas? Sailed, before boats were invented? Maybe they were swallowed by whales, and vomited up on those far shores? Nonono.
Nature makes men wherever men can be, and makes them suited to their land and clime.

—More than one Adam? said the Emperor.

—More than one Adam, more than one fall, more than one history of the world. More (if it please Your Majesty) than one world.

The Emperor, in his suit of black decorated richly in black, a midnight sky whereon his jewels burned, stars and planets,
put his hand upon the brow of a tall and melancholy dog that sat beside him; the beast lifted his liquid eye to his master.

—If Toil destroyed the Age of Gold and made Injustice, how can Justice be made again?

He seemed to ask this of the dog. Bruno (his ardor fading in this cold room, in this silence) knew the answer.

—More toil, he said. Action and Change made Difference. Only more can overcome it, and make all men happy. Or happier. The
wheel of Fortune rules everything, making high low, good bad, lucky unlucky, rich poor. But if we are strong patient asses
for toil we can give that wheel a shove at just the right moment, or put a nail in it to stop it where we like.

—It was Idleness that made men asses, the Emperor said. So
you
say.

—There are asses and asses, Bruno said.

—It is prophesied, the Emperor said, that a New Age is at hand. That many kingdoms will fall, crowns too fall from heads.

—Pay no attention to prophecies, Bruno said. They only tell us what we ourselves intend to do.

—This Empire too, the Emperor said. Vanished, contracted, fallen.

—This Empire cannot pass away, Bruno said. And what if it does?

The Emperor opened his eyes wide at that, and Bruno knew he should look away—one does not duel with an Emperor and subdue
his regard—but he did not. The rays of his spirit, fired from his eye by the force of his heart’s contractions, entered in
at the Emperor’s own eye and thus into his spirit. It was a shuttered mansion, colder than this room; bare as a sepulcher,
and a stone throne within it, empty. And Bruno knew what the Emperor must do, and knew he could tell him how.

—You have seen my collections, the Emperor said, as though to change the subject rather than having to respond to the Brunian
impertinence.

—I have. Your Gracious Majesty: your wonderful collection is complete and perfect. But it lacks a center. If it had a center,
then whatever you moved or changed within it would, at the same time, move or be changed outside.

—And how am I to give it a center?

—Turn it inside out, said Bruno.

—How?

—I will tell you how, Bruno said. Your Majesty has for many years enlisted the signs and symbols of things in the service
of your power. You should rather have put your power at the service of your signs.

The Emperor was still for a long moment, his eyes seeming to cross a little; and then their light went out.

—Love, said Bruno. Memory. Mathesis. These three. And the greatest of these is Love.

The big Hapsburg head began slowly to nod, but not in understanding. After a little while (how did they apprehend the Emperor’s
desire, how was it transmitted to them?) a pair of attendants opened the doors and came to stand one on either side of Giordano
Bruno like guards.

Bruno would have told him much more about how the universe is ordered and how full it is. He would have told him how every
star is a sun as bright as our own, and how suns enchant the cooler beings called planets, which travel around their suns
forever in adoration and delight, whose lands are filled with rational beings and whose seas are filled with fish, as are
ours, fish with their own natures and their own societies of which we can know nothing. Dæmons and spiritual creatures fill
the air and the spaces between the stars, fill the seas and the caves of earth, some of them gloomy and silent, some hot,
active and canny, some interested in the lives of men, some not. Humankind is everywhere, everywhere humankind can be, rushing
out to greet us when our ships come into sight, as amazed to see us as we are amazed
to find them there, black or brown or golden, foolish or wise or both.

He would have told the Emperor that all this infinite mutability was not so great that we should feel afraid of it or overwhelmed
by it, for Man is a being whose nature partakes of all and, therefore, is an equal to all, and by the arts peculiar to himself
can ascend to knowledge of all: by Mathesis, to reduce infinitude to natural categories of sense and order, and create seals
that are the secret souls of its complexities. By Memory, to contain within us those seals and open them at will, to go through
the world within in any direction, combine and recombine its stuff and make new things unheard of before. And by Love, to
bend our souls to the worlds in conquest and submission at once, to drown in infinity without drowning: Love cunning and foolish,
Love patient and stubborn, Love mild and fierce.

He would have said all that and more, but the two attendants walked him away backwards out of the Presence, cuing him to bow,
once, again, and one last time as the doors closed on the Emperor by then grown small with distance.

That evening the Emperor summoned his new Imperial Astronomer into his presence. When the man came, Rudolf gave him the little
book about mathematics that Bruno had dedicated to him. Seeing the author’s name on the title page, the Imperial Astronomer
let out a loud ghastly laugh with mouth wide open, a gesture so shockingly rude that the Emperor drew himself up scandalized.
Why was he to be affronted at every turn today? He should never have hired the man, a fine astronomer but gloomy and resentful,
a Frenchified Italian whose name was Fabricio Mordente. Go away.

The Emperor sent a new message to the man he had always wanted to come to Prague and be his astronomer, the noseless Danish
knight Tycho de Brahe. (Like a persistent though despised suitor, the Emperor wrote a similar note every so often, whenever
his heart was full and heavy.) In the note he also asked Brahe’s advice about Bruno. After a time Brahe wrote back, once again
declining, with manly courtesy, to come to Prague. He said yes, he knew Bruno’s work.
Nolanus nullanus
he called him, and said that figure and every number the man had ever written down he had got wrong, including 1 and zero.

So the Emperor put Bruno’s book away; he gave an order that Bruno should receive the sum of five hundred
thalers
from the Imperial treasury (something about him made the Emperor want to be cautious), but he never sent for him again.

That August, in another part of the vast Hradschin castle, a band of men met nightly to complete, or at least to continue,
a work they had joined together to do. The room they met in was a workshop; John Dee
would have recognized many but not all of the fine tools hung on the walls, he would have known that the boxes of small gears
and piles of brass rods, springs, concave glasses, fusée wheels and pendula were clockworks, but would not have known what
some of the other odd things were, for they had never existed before, had only recently been invented in this room. In this
room many of them would remain, too: they had been inconceivable in the past, and in the future they would no longer work.

He would have recognized one other thing in the crowded room, where now the candles were being lit against the fall of evening.
It was a small Latin book, a book dedicated to the Emperor’s father, Maximilian: Dee’s own work, the
Monas hieroglyphica
. It lay on the great central workbench, open, a weight laid upon it to keep it from closing.

Jost Bürgi was among those who had gathered there; indeed it was his workshop. Still a young man then, but already among the
greatest clockmakers of that clock-mad age, the first to divide a minute into sixty seconds and make a clock that counted
them accurately. It was said that Jost could cut the sixty teeth of a brass minute wheel freehand. He had already invented
the cross-beat escapement, which, combined with another invention of his, the remontoir, had doubled the precision of his
clocks; he was about to invent the pendulum, twenty years before Galileo. He would build clocks for Tycho to make his stellar
observations by when at last Tycho came to Prague; and he would serve Kepler too.

The Venetian gold-maker who called himself Count Bragadino was there. He was soon to be hanged (by that same Duke of Bavaria
who so feared the little homely spirits) because his alchemical processes no longer worked, not his fault of course but the
Duke couldn’t know that.

Cornelius Drebbel, was he there? Or still going from court to court? He was a masque-deviser, architect, inventor of the Perspective
Lute and of a dozen perpetual-motion machines, one of which was laboring away ceaselessly on the bench at that moment, expending
its little energies on the air, but soon to become part of the work in progress.

—Listen, Bürgi said to them all. He read from John Dee’s little book:
He who has fed the Monad will first himself go away into a metamorphosis and will afterward very rarely be beheld by mortal
eye. This is the true invisibility of the magus, which has so often (and without sin) been spoken of, and which (as all future
magi will own) has been granted to the theorems of our Monad
.

He looked around at the company, and they nodded: they understood. The time was short: they all knew that, the time short
in which to do what they had gathered here to do.

They were the Emperor’s
magi
. They were Italians, Dutchmen, Swedes, Poles; they had studied at universities in Paris and Cracow and Wittenberg, had attended
Della Porta’s
Academia curiosorum hominum
in Naples, had visited London and met Sidney and smoked pipes with the “Wizard Earl” of Northumberland, done religious magic
for the King of France or for his cousins or rivals; they had published books carefully set out with false imprimaturs and
misleading title pages and had them seized and burned anyway, better the books than their own persons, they dropped them as
caught lizards drop their tails, regrew them again in freer countries, at kindlier courts.

Doctors Kroll and Guarnieri were there, the Paracelsian and the anti-Paracelsian, unable to agree on anything, not even what
elements composed the world, Paracelsus’s three or Pythagoras’s four; they were both present here, though, side by side, for
who knew what the future would make its world out of? The Emperor’s own lapidary, Anselm Boethius de Boodt, was also there:
no one knew more about the life enclosed in mineral species than he.

—Hermes Thrice-great, said the clockmaker Jost Bürgi to them, died at a very great age in Ægypt where he had been priest,
philosopher, and king. Or he did not die but was interred alive, in a certain manner known to them but lost to us, to remain
alive thereafter though suspended in a profound sleep. Or yes he was thus interred alive, but did not thereafter survive the
whole length of his journey from that time to the time when his tomb was opened. All these tales and others are told.

—But whether the virtue of causing or sustaining that sleep resided in Hermes himself; or in the manner of his interment;
or the tomb he was laid in; or was God’s special providence: all that is not now able to be known.