AEgypt (54 page)
Authors: John Crowley
It wasn't far from the village to the top of the pass. The sky had only begun to pale, and the dimmest stars—or those farthest off—had disappeared, when the caravan began clambering up the path toward the summit. The great starless darknesses on either hand were not sky but mountains, coming suddenly clear as though they had just awakened and stood up. Between them in the azure there flamed the morning stars. Mercury. Venus. Wet to the knees with snow-melt, Giordano climbed toward them.
Earth was a star as they were; and the bright beings who inhabited them, looking this way, saw not a cold stone but another like themselves, aflame in the sun's light. He hailed them: Brother. Sister. A strange and soundless hum seemed to be filling up his ears and his being, as though the dawn itself were to make a sound in breaking, continuous and irreversible. The star he rode was turning pell-mell toward the sun with all of them aboard it, dwarfish stolid carters, chairs, animals, and men; Bruno laughed at his impulse to fall and clutch the hurtling ball with hands and knees.
Infinite.
You made yourself equal to the stars by knowing your mother Earth was a star as well; you rose up through the spheres not by leaving the earth but by sailing it: by knowing that it sailed.
Sunlight struck the lifting white heads of the peaks, though the snow of the pass was still blue. Giordano had been taught that on the highest mountains the air is eternally still, but dawn winds pierced his robes here, and from the summits glittering streams of snow were slowly blown like banners. The peaks all had names, and the huffing carter who climbed beside Giordano named them, pointing. They sailed too.
The caravan stumbled and slid through the cold roaring throat of the Col, out of sight of the dawn, passed by a multitude going the other way, all jostling as in a city alley. Then they came out onto a field of shattered flints and a steep path downward. They had crossed the ridge. The sky was huge and blue, but the far lands Bruno looked out over were still soft and asleep, mountains folded rank on rank, the rest of his life. The path that way—it brought his heart to his mouth to trace it—traversed the mountainsides switching back and forth like a whip; you could see, far far below, the turns you would have to take, and the travelers there who toiled upward. Along the fingernail of silver path that edged the precipice a shepherd walked his sheep along in a single file.
Earth turned, coming about like a trireme, beating East; and thus the sun rose, gigantic spark, God visible. Bruno, stock still, hum in his ears and heart in his throat, felt its smile on his cheek.
Hermes said: make yourself as God. And Bruno could feel his smile too, like the sun's. Make yourself as God: Infinite. And Bruno had been infinite even as he had read the words and longed to understand them.
Earth gave up its valleys to the sun. The burdened men, cheeks warmed, laughing with relief and apprehension, started downward. Day had come.
The next morning Bruno reached the Dominican monastery at Chambery, in France: he was Brother Teofilo, witch-hunter of Naples. As he stood explaining himself to the puzzled prior in the sunstruck garden, the earth took a sudden northward tilt, and the flagstones rose up to meet his darkening sight. He woke in the infirmary, where he spent Holy Week, sticking-plaster over his eye, head and heart empty, as still and weary as though he had moved the sun all by himself. He could take nothing but broth, and the Host; he slept long, and when he slept he dreamed of AEgypt.
They
were
returning, as he had seen them returning: they were returning now. The new sun of Copernicus was the sign of it; Copernicus might not know it, but Giordano Bruno knew it, and would cry it now like a bantam cock through the world. Sunrise.
Once back on the road, Bruno was rarely to cease journeying his whole life long: but even as he walked the old tracks and high roads of Europe he walked in AEgypt too, its painted temples, the glitter of its sands, its blue skies dark. Sleeping and dreaming, working and wooing, he walked toward a city built in the east or in the west of AEgypt, in the region of the rising or the setting sun, a city whose name he knew.
Those who everywhere took him in—in Paris, in Wittenberg, in Prague—those
giordanisti
who furthered his fortunes, or dressed him, or printed his books; who won him interviews with the great; who fed him; who hid him: they seemed often to recognize him too, or to remember him from some other time or place, to have once known but forgotten him or forgotten that it was he who was to come and not some other:
Oh yes I see
(holding out slowly their hands to him, eyes searching him),
yes I know you now yes yes come in
.
He left the house at Chambery as soon as he was well, bored to madness by the monks’ thick stupidity, the endlessness of their talk, like prayer, and their prayer, like talk. In 1579 he reached Geneva; he won the protection there of a Neapolitan nobleman, the Marchese de Vico, who told him for God's sake to get out of those robes of black and white, and who bought him a suit of clothes; but Bruno dismissed with a joke the Marchese's Calvinism, on account of which the Marchese had given up all he had. He registered at the University under the name Phillippus, and there began to read the Reformers, with a mixture of amusement and contempt. What poor stuff. He stood in a lecture hall full of ticking automata, planetary clocks, moon machines, and listened to a puppet-boned fellow tell how he was attempting to make a machine, an automaton, that would somehow so exactly replicate in its geometries the workings of the universe that when something happened in the universe an identical thing would be caused to happen in the model, however differently manifested: another universe, in fact, only smaller, like the image in a mirror.
But Giordano knew that such a machine, such a model, already existed. The name of the machine was Man.
The Genevans didn't like him; no more did he like them. The Marchese interceded for him when he insulted the famed theologian Antoine de la Faye and got himself arraigned before the Theological Consistory, men in deep black who had no use for notions; he wasn't tried, but he was pitched out of town and down the Rhone. Enough of Calvin's city.
Lyon, a center of the book trade, but he could gain no living there, a cold wind seemed to be blowing through the world of learning, anyway Giordano felt it. Shake the dust from his feet. He did better at Toulouse; he was elected to the University (guided by good advisers and just for the moment willing to say and do what he was advised to say and do) and for a year and a half taught philosophy and the
Sphere
.
In the quiet Languedoc months he began casting what he had learned so far into the form of gods and goddesses; not only the great planetary gods and their
horoscopi
but lesser gods too, Pan and Vertumnus and Janus and he who swaggers drunk on his ass, Silenus. On these small gods—still and pale when he set them up within as old statues along a Roman road—he would work AEgyptian magic, he would feed them from his own storehouses, and flush their cheeks, and make them speak. Had not Hermes said that a multitude of gods were distributed through all things that exist? Then they were distributed through his own shadow universe within as well, the small gods of endless becoming.
Toulouse was a Huguenot city, and in that year the armies of the Catholic League were advancing on its walls; there were riots in town and outrages at the University; Bruno moved on.
He was in Paris in 1582, the largest city in Europe but not too large to fit within the walls of Bruno's city inside. He lectured at the University, a free lance, tilting with pedants, Aristotelians, followers of Petrus Ramus; he published at last his enormous book, an Art of Memory which anyone who dared look into it could see was a work of
magia
deep-dyed and horribly potent: he even gave it a title taken from that book of Solomon's he had hidden in the privy long ago:
De umbris idearum
, About the Shadows of Ideas.
Now his universe moved as the universe outside him moved: they were the same. And so if he chose to cause a thing to happen in his world within, then ... He laughed, he laughed and could not stop: had he not moved the sun from its sphere? There was no knowing what he might not do if he chose.
The King heard of him and invited him to the Louvre, and opened Bruno's book upon his knee in wonder; he was given a glass of wine with the Queen Mother, and the Queen Mother sat him down with her astrologer and cunning-man, whose name was Notre-dame or Nostradamus. Bruno thought the man a fraud and a fool, but asked him: In what country will my bones be buried? And the answer of Nostradamus was: In no country.
In no country was a good answer. Perhaps he would just go on circling outward forever, sailing the earth like a ship, not ever to die at all.
At spring's end in 1583, in the entourage of the new French ambassador to England, he took ship from Calais with his books, and his systems, and his knowledge; with a purse fat with
louis d'or
; with a mission from the King engraved on his endless memory. The English ambassador in Paris wrote to Walsingham:
Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor of philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend.
But what religion did he carry?
The ship raised sail, Bruno stepped on its deck, the mate whistled, the lines were loosed. Bruno for the first time lost sight of land, and with the sight felt something fall away from him; something that would not ever be taken up again. Wherever he went from here he would never be going back. AEolus sang in the rigging, cold spray dashed in his face; the crew was aloft, the captain asleep below, his belly filling and luffing like his sails; the little ship clambered through the flinty seas, crowded with animals, people, and goods, a red Mexican parrot furious and swearing out the forecastle window.
—And a fire burning on its yardarms, Mr. Talbot said. St. Elmo's fire, one flame on the right side, one flame on the left. Castor and Pollux, the Twins.
—
Spes proxima
, said Doctor Dee.
The angel who showed them this ship within the showstone (she was a laughing and changeable child, and named Madimi) bent the skryer's head closer to the stone and the ship and the man in the bows holding tight.
—He, said Mr. Talbot.
—
That is he
, the angel said.
That is he of whom I told you.
—Can she speak more plainly? Doctor Dee said. Ask her.
—
The one I told you of
, said the angel Madimi.
The Jonah that the fish spat out, the brand to be plucked from the burning, the stone rejected by the builders that will be the corner of the house, the last house left standing. Our adorp, our dragon flying in the west, our philosophical Mercury. Our Grail of the quintessence, our
sal cranii humani
, for if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? Our pretty rose. Our Bruin sleeping in a cave through winter. Our Mr. Jordan Brown whose religion I cannot commend. He has stolen fire from heaven and there are spheres where he is not loved. He is coming to this house, though he knows it not; he is not going back the way he came; and nothing now will ever be the same again.
The only way to experience the semiannual festival sponsored by the Faraway Aerostatic Society and held at Skytop Farm high up on Mount Merrow is to be up before dawn, and drive to Skytop early enough to see the daybreak ascensions: for lighter-than-air flight, improbable in the best of cases, is most possible at dawn, and at evening, when the air is cool and still.
So, shivering somewhat in the chill of predawn, Pierce Moffett sat on his front steps, waiting for the lights to come on in the house opposite and Beau Brachman to come out, ready more or less for this adventure but thinking chiefly of the gray box of yellow paper on Fellowes Kraft's desk in Stonykill miles away. It seemed to glow, in his mind, like a hooded sun.
Maybe it was only because he had read so little fiction in recent years, had read nothing but what at least purported to describe what was in fact the case, that he felt in his breast this weird warmth, this satisfaction in some deep part of him that had not for a long time been satisfied; this vision of the book's contents as of morning mountains, receding row on row into pale distance, all new, all to be explored, yet somehow already known.
What a simple conceit, though, really, what a metaphor, the most revelatory of all: that once, once upon a time, the world actually was different. Was not the way it is now.
And Bruno the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring in more magic, not less: like those who cried the new age in Pierce's own time.
Bruno, cheek in hand at John Dee's table, drawing with a chip of chalk the circles of the next universe, the revolution of the orbs of heaven. Once it wasn't this way, but now it is, and from now on will be.
Dee, though. Dee knows better, forewarned by his angels, themselves due to pass away. He'll lay down his wand and (empty) globe at last, Pierce guessed, drown his books like Prospero. All over now.
A huge shudder, but why, covered Pierce and made him grin.
What if it were really true?
Time's immense body now and then waking from sleep, shifting its massy limbs, disposing them differently, groaning, sleeping again. Hm. And nothing ever the same thereafter.
He remembered how once at St. Guinefort's he had been beguiling the time in study hall with a volume of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and had come upon a condemned opinion of Origen's: that this world we know, in which Adam sinned, which Christ had come to redeem, to which He would return in the glory of the final battle—this world, after it was rolled up like a scroll, would be succeeded by another, in which none of that would happen; and that world, after its end, by another; and so on endlessly—and Pierce reading it had felt for a moment the purest sense of relief, a gust of something like freedom, to think that this might actually be so.
