DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (44 page)

What had that Italian said, that uncowled monk. Toil destroyed the
Age of Gold, and created injustice, and want, and inequity. And only more toil could correct this.

He must not be still, any more than the productive seasons could stand still. Not even Winter stands still, but nourishes
Spring in his old cold heart. He must work, and not for himself; roll up his sleeves and humbly toil. God had not taken from
him the strength of his hands by anointing his head.

What was it he must do? The old fear threatened his heart. He could
do
nothing. Nothing he had ever tried to accomplish had been completed; it was a curse or a sin in him, a lack like a cast in
his eye or a short leg: he said to this one Come, and he goes, and to this one Go, and he comes.

The Italian had said he knew what must be done, and how to do it. Believing he had himself known better, the Emperor had not
bothered to listen.

Love, Memory, Mathesis. What he had said. And the greatest of these is Love.

—Call him again, the Emperor said. Everyone started at his sudden command.

—Call … said Strada hurrying to his side.

—The Italian monk. You know the one, Braun or Bruin, a little bear-like fellow, oh you remember!

—Bruno.

—Call him again.

Strada bowed, backing away as fast as he dared, turning at the door and calling for servants even as he left the chamber.

—Call him again, he cried. The Italian, the little man, Brunus Nolanus Italus.

His servants called their own servants, and sent them into the city, to Bruno’s lodgings at the Golden Turnip, to the libraries
and the schools and the taverns; they sent a message to T
ebo
to ask John Dee what had become of the man. But no one knew.

John Dee knew one thing for sure: if the Emperor was still demanding the Stone of him (
the thing of value
he had written in his note to Dee, as though shy to speak its name) it meant that the gold Kelley had learned to make—and
taught his old friend to make—was barren. Dee had already guessed that it was. It would not generate a son,
filius Philosophorum
, the reason or Logos of matter whose juice or blood was the Elixir the Emperor sought. And everyone knew that the greater
the hopes a practitioner raised in His Sacred Majesty the harder it would go with him when those hopes were dashed.

So it was time to be gone. Yes there was a new world to cry; no he would not cry it. Let him once reach his home again and
they would not see him more.

Around Ro
mberk’s house in T
eboa
the spies had increased in numbers, not only the Emperor’s but the Papal Nuncio’s as well;
they could be seen from the windows of Dee’s apartments, genial loiterers with hands clasped behind them, approaching the
carters and purveyors coming out of the gates to ask a friendly question. What new people are in the house? When does the
Duke return? What is that smoke? One thing those spies learned was that a young countryman had lately been taken into the
house, a dark strong lad with a limp. He was noted in the reports; the Nuncio’s reports went to Rome, and would still be able
to be found there four hundred years later; maybe the cryptic references in them to
Giovanni Dii e il su compagno, il zoppo
, “the cripple,” refer to this young man, glimpsed taking the air with the old one, or pulling a cartful of children.

By now the news had reached Prague that King Philip of Spain had failed in his attempt to conquer England. His Armada, greatest
Catholic fleet to put to sea since the Battle of Lepanto, had been turned aside: by the Queen’s steadfastness (
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman
, she told her army at Tilbury, words generations of Englishmen would commit to memory,
but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince
of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm
) and also by English seamanship (Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, they had all been there, Dee’s old fellows, he had made maps
for them in years past and had long pleaded with the Queen to buy them ships, see now), and—at the last moment—by a wind,
a marvelous wind, a wind out of nowhere, blowing from the wrong quarter, blowing nightlong: a wind that, by dawn next day,
had changed everything. John Dee, hearing the news weeks later, thought of the tower room, that summer night, and of his imp;
he computed the time, and laughed: laughed aloud as he had not laughed in many months.

Then he sat down, and cleared a table in his busy study, and with good parchment and new pens wrote in his best hand a letter
to his Queen.

His wife Jane put her hand on his shoulder.

—Husband, the carriage maker sent for is here below to see thee. And a harness maker is come too.

—Yes. Soon, soon.

He paused and dusted his nose with the plume of his pen; the letter that Sir Edward Dyer had brought him from England, hinting
that the Queen might receive him kindly, was a year old at least. He spoke for Kelley here, as well as for himself: but he
no longer knew Kelley.

He completed it with compliments, signed it, sanded it.

The answer would be long in coming, if answer there was. A safe-conduct out of this land, Dee hoped, and a welcome into his
own. At least that much.

To Edward Dyer, who was to carry the letter, he told more, for the Queen’s and Burleigh’s ears only: a tale about gold, and
that wind that had blown away the Queen’s enemies. Of this last, he said to Dyer, speak very delicately. For everyone knew
who it was that could raise destructive winds, and by whose agency they did it.

Meanwhile there was much to pack and ready; many farewells to make, not all openly

—I am summoned, he told Duke Ro
mberk. I have been long abroad, and my Queen, to whom my services are owed, has called me
home.

He said it gravely, with regret, and the Duke bowed, and assured the old man of his eternal admiration; offered him every
help he could give in preparing the journey. Dee asked but one thing: that it be kept, for the moment, secret. Another bow.
And then the Duke, as quickly as was consistent with a solemn and regrettable parting, left for Prague and Kelley: Dee from
the room over the gate (furnace gone out) watched
his coach tear away, the driver wielding his whip, the postilions galloping, footmen clinging.

Home, home, sang Jane Dee, as she gathered and put into trunks her fine new and plain old clothes, her cuttings taken from
the Duke’s kitchen-gardens; home again home again jiggety jig. She packed the clothes her children could still wear—her children,
the two youngest of them born here and speaking
prager Deutsch
more readily than English, poor younglings: she sat down in the midst of her packing, pressed her apron to her face and wept
for the years.

—The Emperor in Prague, the Doctor said, desires that you be returned to him.

He had found Jan the wolf-boy in the kitchen, in his chimney corner, with his stick by him. He liked to stay here, in the
warmth and the odors, with folk who spoke the tongue he had grown up speaking.

—When the Emperor gave you into my care, Dee said to him, it was because I told him that I could cure you of your affections
of mind. Your melancholia, your delusions of being a wolf. I failed. He wants you returned.