DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (45 page)

Jan lifted his face to the old man’s as though to read in it a gloss on the words he had said.

—I cannot cease to be what I am, he said then.

—No more can the Emperor, said John Dee. I am leaving this country, and can no longer keep you.

—Then, the boy said, tomorrow when you come for me I will not be here.

John Dee answered nothing, nor did he make any sign of assent.

—You would not lock me in, the boy said.

—No. But think. There is nowhere you can go. Nowhere in Christendom you will not be hunted. A stranger too; everywhere you
would be the first to be noticed, and pointed at. You must go far, if you go.

—Nowhere far enough.

Dee pondered. He held his long staff behind his back in both his hands.

—Atlantis, he said. On the other side of the sea.

The boy tried to see in Dee’s face if he were being mocked.

—A wolf might do well there, Dee said. Never be caught, never be seen. They say the forests are infinite, and as full of game
as a menagerie. They say there are few men there, and those men savages, who speak not nor think nor pray, and harm no one.

Jan had been listening intently; now he laughed aloud, as though waking from a spell.

—And how would I get my living there? he said. I am most often only this fellow you see. Lame now too. I don’t know how to
be a savage. Or how to get over the sea.

He struggled to his feet.

—I will not go back, he said. Better to die quickly. I will not go back.

—What am I to do with you then? Dee asked. Cut your throat? Poison you? No no.

—Listen, the boy said, and stood to whisper urgently into the old man’s ear. Do this for me. Keep watch, and when next I am
abroad and yet seem to be still in my bed asleep, here is what you must do: turn the body lying there over onto his face.
That’s all.

—And if I do?

—If you do that, the boy said, then when the night is done and I come home again, I will not be able to return into that body
on the bed.

—The spirit’s way out is by the mouth, said John Dee. I have heard the tales.

—And the way in again. And if day comes and I have not returned, I never can. I will remain where I have gone, to wander there
till my appointed death-day comes.

—Why then do you ask me to do this?

—Better my spirit never return than that I be shut up in that Tower. Let the Emperor have my body. I will not be there.

He had begun to tremble, and gripped the collar of John Dee’s robe in his hands.

—Do this for me, he said, and wherever I am and wherever I go I will bless you for it. If I can bless.

John Dee took the boy’s hands from his robe and helped him sit again. He wondered if what the boy had said could be true,
if such fates really existed for souls, and could be chosen; he hoped not. He said in English:

—Somewhat we will do.

Not till Christmas did an ambiguous but perhaps not useless answer come to John Dee from his Queen. Enough to keep him from
the Emperor’s prisons at any rate if he left quickly enough—and if he left behind the things the Emperor desired. One of them
was the wolf-boy; the other was Edward Kelley, whom he had led, or had followed, to this shape-shifter’s city.

Kelley was in the Imperial service now. The Emperor had required of Duke Ro
mberk that Kelley be released to him; he had promised
not to keep him, but did not intend to part with him. And was it Kelley who suggested to the Emperor that, though born in
England, he was of a
noble Irish family and of the gentry of that unhappy kingdom; or did he simply not object to someone else’s suggestion to
this effect? Anyway from then on it was true: the Emperor granted him a patent of nobility. He was thenceforth
eques auratus
.

—Gilded knight? John Dee asked him.

—An ancient term of honor, Sir Edward said. Of old in this land a knight’s armor was gilded.

He took wine the Doctor poured for him. On the long table in Dee’s T
ebo
apartments were all the treasures that John Dee
had brought out to give him, to keep and use for as long as he needed: his convex glass, the small original of those great
ones with which he had tried to cure the wolf; the vessels and other necessaries with which Kelley and he had first made gold
in Dr. Hagecius’s house; all the powders remaining from Dee’s own recent work, all the glassware and waxes and resins and
spirits.

—All as stated, John Dee said. He held out a catalogue to Kelley, and handed him the pen. Subscribe it with your name, we
will seal it, it is yours.

Kelley stood and clasped his hands behind his back. He seemed not to have heard; he looked weighted down by the brocade gown
he wore, the gold chain.

—I too will return to England, he said. Soon. Tell Burleigh, and the Queen. I have had letters imploring me.

He had recently sent to the Queen in London a warming pan, an ordinary copper warming pan, from which a piece had been broken,
and by action of his powder turned to gold. (This pan and its golden shard would go into the royal collections and persist
there for a long time; Elias Ashmole actually saw it, or knew someone who had seen it, and drew a picture of it to put in
his book
Theatrum chemicum Britannicum
, where it still is: on page four hundred and eighty-one. The pan is lost.)

—The Italian didapper has come here, Kelley said. The one we were shown in the glass. Who came to Mortlake house.

—Yes. I have seen him.

—Why have the spirits summoned him here?

—Have they summoned him?

Kelley stopped his pacing.

—Ask them, he said. The know-alls from heaven, or t’other place. You may, and see if they will answer you.

He said it tauntingly. John Dee pushed away his cup.

—I have heard her voice, he said. Edward, she has spoken to me.

He had not intended to reveal this; like any poor child with one thing he is forbidden to say, who is told that it must never
be said, who then blurts it first thing.

—Who has? Kelley asked.

—Madimi, said Dee. She spoke to me, and told me of many matters.

He could not tell if Kelley heard. There had been times before, in Poland, in England, when Kelley could not hear the plain
things spoken to him by his fellow-men, as though the crowd of other beings were too thick about him for the words to reach
him.

—She said, John Dee went on, that you have gold in overplus; that you may eat it and drink it if you like; that you have not
praised her for it.

Kelley laughed, so hugely that Dee could observe a missing tooth or two. No longer a youth, and no elixir for that.

—Old friend, Kelley said. Think you that it was they or anything they said that opened those secrets to me? Do you think so?

John Dee laced his fingers together. He asked: If not they, who?

—Who. Who. I told myself. Where did I learn? From myself. Who did I teach? Myself. I fetched out the secret, I took myself
by the sleeve and whispered it in my own ear.

—Jest not with me.

—Thou’rt a wise old fool, Kelley said. And I love thee. Therefore for my love I will tell thee. I make gold from nothing,
not because I have learned how, no not from the angels nor from the devils of Hell nor from old books of shitty rhyme. I followed
no
recipe
. I do not know how the world works. I make gold because I am I. Because of the power that I am. It matters not how I do it;
I make gold because I know I can.

He had leaned his hand upon the table and bent into his old friends face; he pounded his breast as though in confession.

—I can, I can, I can. And because they cannot keep me from it I can give the same to you if I choose. To the Emperor too when
it suits me. Gold was never made before, but now ever after it can be, from this time to the ending of the world.

—And when is that? said John Dee. If you know, say.

Kelley remained still leaning forward on the table, mouth ajar and eyes wide, mouth stopped.

—I do not know myself, John Dee said to him. But I think this. I think the ending of the world comes to every man alone, soul
by soul; when it is ended for you and for me it will not be ended for all; it will not be done till the last soul says Amen.

Kelley, burdened with his things, left the T
ebo
house, and John Dee rode with him as far as the high road to Prague. The
wind was cold and sharp, making their horses dance and toss their heads, wanting to
be home. The two men took hands, and John Dee saw that a tear coursed across Kelley’s face. From the wind, he thought.

—I’ll await you in Bremen, Dee called over the wind’s blowing.

—I will be there, Kelley said.

—Then England.

—England, Kelley said. He turned, and raised a knight’s gauntlet; set out without looking back. John Dee never saw him again.

It is some twenty leagues from T
eboa
to Prague. At his new house in the castle precincts, Kelley found a man awaiting him:
a man he knew slightly, a physician of the Emperor’s named Croll, or was it Kroll. All in black like a monk or. Kelley said
he hoped he had not been waiting long.