The Astrologer (12 page)

She was whispering; the words came in a rush and her breath fluttered against my cheek.

“He took me by the wrist and held me hard, then went to the length of his arm and fell to such perusal of my face as if he were a portrait artist. Long stayed he so. At last he raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.”

“When did this happen? Here at Kronberg?”

“Nay, sir, some seven months agone in the palace at Copenhagen.”

“And have you had much more commerce with Christian since then?”

“Oh, I have heard that sigh now many a time. He hath multiplied the tenders of his affection to me. I do not know what I should think. He hath given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of Heaven.”

“Almost all?”

Vibeke straightened, backing away from me.

“As you say, good Soren, the queen would not like it.”

“I dare say she would not, lady.”

“She will have no choice but to like it soon enough. My lord Christian trusts you, does he not?”

“He trusts me passing well, lady.” I shook my head. “What do you mean, ‘soon enough’?”

“I hope all will be well. We must be patient. I am afeared he will die on the field. You must counsel him to caution, Soren.”

“So I shall, lady.”

“I must away now. You know that I never knew my own mother?”

“Aye.”

“They say she was a madwoman.”

Vibeke put a hand to each side of her face, took a step backward, and turned a complete circle. She reminded me of those painted wooden dolls that dance pirouettes atop children’s musical boxes. I have seen them in Dresden and Berlin. When Vibeke had done her turn, she clasped her hands before her.

“I am better than my mother,” she said. “My mother kept wild birds in her closet and would never wear shoes with heels of wood. I do pity my father that he did not know of it before they married.”

“I have not heard this story, lady.”

“Oh, aye, it is most sorrowfully true. Happily I differ from my mother’s ways. I find my own path, past her past, and she have I surpassed. A daughter need be no more than passing familiar to her family.”

She closed her eyes and curtsied.

“That is very clever, lady.”

“I thank you, sir. I fear I am clever. I have knowledge my father would not dream of. Nor my mother, neither. She died birthing me. I hope that will not be my fate.”

“What do you mean?”

She curtsied again and turned suddenly to look down the corridor.

“God bye you, sir. I must to my orisons. We should all of us recall our sins.”

Vibeke drifted across the hall to her own rooms, one hand on her belly as she closed the door behind her. This was most alarming. She dare not think Kirsten would allow her to bear the prince’s bastard. She dare less think to marry Christian. I did not know if I even believed Vibeke’s inferences. She could have meant anything at all; the landscape of Vibeke’s mind was very different from my own.

I climbed out of the chair and made my way downstairs to the library. It was not locked this time and there were no secrets being whispered by unseen speakers. My head ached and I hoped to forget myself for an hour or two in one of Tristram’s books. He was fond of Ovid, I remembered.

The library was long and narrow, the longest two walls covered with shelving. It gave the impression of a hallway built from old leather spines. There was a thin slice of window at the far end and a few dusty chairs sitting beside a small square table with a lamp. The books were in no rational order and most of them were the bound journals of the fortress, records of a century of ships taxed as they made their way from the Atlantic to the Baltic through the Sound. The Sound Tax was the main source of the king’s wealth, but important as this commerce was I had no interest in going through the account books. I walked slowly along, inspecting the shelves, hoping to find something worth reading. It had long been my plan that one day I would have a library of my own, and I would fill it with the newest books, brimming with the latest ideas. There was no chance that on Tristram’s shelves I would find Francis Bacon’s
Essays,
or Abbot’s
Geography,
or even Rowland’s
The Letting of the Humour’s Blood in the Head-Vein.
A copy of Castellio’s
On the Art of Doubting and of Knowing
caught my eye and I sat down by the window to read. Outside the sky had brightened and the clouds were breaking up. The light was dazzling and I turned the chair to put my back to the window that the brightness might fall on the pages I was reading.

I was just coming to the chapter on Moses when the door opened and Tristram lumbered in, walking tenderly on his gouty leg and using a carved walnut stick to support his weight. I rose from my chair.

“Good day to you, Uncle.”

“Soren, is that you there? I have sought you the morning long, my lad. I should have known to look for you here. You were always more at home with dead books than with living men. No, no, sit down, lad.”

Tristram waved me back into my seat and he pushed along the length of the room to place himself near me. The chair he sat in creaked and he sighed to have the weight off his leg. There was a spot of egg in his beard.

“Uncle, your leg betrays you.”

“Aye. The surgeon forbids me all manner of delicious food and drink, yet my leg still purples and swells like a melon. I am bled, I am given potions of mercury and oil, I suffer through the most bland meals a man could imagine, and I drink nothing but water and milk. I am an old man, my lad.”

“You have two score more summers before you, I warrant.”

“It is the winters that worry me. Sometimes I cannot feel my fingers and toes. Day by day, a man’s health will fall to earth in bits or in bushels, just as a tree drops its leaves. I do not wax healthy.”

“You are by no means waning, Uncle.”

Tristram grunted and shifted in his chair, the wooden frame groaning as he moved.

“I am fat, you mean.”

“Healthy, like a sturdy calf.”

“Your flattery comforts me not. You have not outgrown your sharp wit, I see. When I last spoke with your father—”

“Enough on my father, Uncle. I have not come to Elsinore to pay him my respects.”

“You should.”

“I have duties here, and soon on Hven.”

“Ah, Hven. It will not be so pleasant and pretty there as you remember it. The walls have all come down. Just as your father warned they would.”

“How goes the tax collection? Do the townsfolk still call you Sir Tollbooth, Uncle?”

“You cannot turn me from my pursuit. I mean to speak of your father.”

“Then I must take your leave, Sir Tristram.”

I stood, put the Castellio on an empty shelf, and made to move past Tristram. He clutched my hand and his grip was still that of a strong young man. I twisted but could not escape.

“Stay a moment, Soren. I will leave off on your father. But stay.”

“To what purpose?”

“A favor.”

“To me or thee?”

“To me. Sit, prithee.”

He released my hand.

I sat and crossed my arms. Tristram squinted at me. The sunlight streamed into the room from behind my back and I must have been but a shadow to his eyes. Were I in a kinder mood I should have sat where he could see my face.

“You come so rarely home, Soren. I know this visitation was not of your own inclining, but here you are and here I am. We have known each other almost your entire life. I saw you baptized. I stood with you and your father when your mother was buried. Your father—”

“Enough.”

“He was a good man.”

“He was a man. Take him for all in all, Tristram.”

“We will not look upon his like again, lad.”

“God willing.”

“Now, lad—”

“Enough, Tristram. If you wish to weep at his grave I will not stop you, but neither will I join you. And that’s the end.”

Tristram heaved himself forward toward me. The chair protested beneath his weight. He reached for my hand, but I was out of reach.

“Soren, I do not mean to upset you. I was only hoping that by speaking to you kindly of your father, I might make you remember that once you were fond of me.”

“Oh, Uncle. The less you speak of that man, the more you endear yourself to me.”

Poor old Tristram. His youthful dreams of valor, fame, love, and wealth all had come to nothing and in his mature years he was a bachelor and a bureaucrat, a lonely tax collector. Tristram now belonged to that most unfortunate cohort: he was a man who does not see his own face in the mirror, but sees instead only what is left of his dreams. So many come to this pass. A man may suffer the end of his life when he is young, only to march onward through the decades toward his grave, unaware the whole time that he is already dead. I resolved to say something kind to him.

“Uncle, do you still keep that wolf as a pet? I well remember how he led your dogs during the summer hunts. He was a fearsome thing.”

“Aye, so he was.” Tristram smiled a moment at the memory and then frowned. “His name was Titus, you recall. I had to put him down two winters before last.”

Tristram had found Titus, an abandoned cub, in the forest north of Elsinore. He carried the whelp home in his doublet and gave him to his favorite bitch to raise as one of her own. Titus grew into a large black and gray beast that terrified guests to Kronberg, much to Tristram’s delight. The wolf sat at Tristram’s feet during meals and stood with raised hackles between him and any man who raised his voice in anger at the Steward of
the Sound. Titus was a dog in wolf’s clothing except when on the hunt; then he was all wolf, and Tristram’s pack of hounds followed the wolf to take up his fierce wolf ways in the forests. Tristram was said to have let Titus sleep in his closet with him, so fond was he of this frightening creature.

“Put him down, Uncle? Was he that old and infirm already?”

“Nay, lad. He was strong yet, with a fair stretch of years in him. But Titus was, alas, in the end just a wolf. His heart was ever in the wilds, no matter how long I kept him inside this castle and scratched his ears. He killed and ate two fine—and expensive, mind you—hunting dogs I had just purchased from Sweden. Then in a fit he went mad in the pantry, tearing at the laying hens. I’d forgotten his origins, but Titus remembered his wolfish blood, and that was his downfall. He could not unlearn his true self. Poor beast.”

“I am sorry, Uncle. Titus was a fair hunter. Let us speak of happier things. Tell me how you fare with the king during his present visit to your keep.”

Tristram glanced behind him, making certain the library door was shut.

“You learned at the queen’s banquet how I am allowed no spirits to drink.”

“Aye, for your health.”

“Aye, my health. At my age, lad, health is worth much less than happiness. Look you, the king is at my castle and I— Master of the Oresund, Warden of Kronberg—I am forbid to drink his Majesty’s health. My lord Christian is aware of how I sip milk whilst his generals rouse with Rhenish and aquavit. I do him no proper honor, lad. He looks at me and smiles, but I know the king weighs my use, computes my value, and figures my remaining days of service. I do not wish to retire yet. All of my friends are dead of old age and I have neither wife nor children, and though you call me ‘uncle’, we are not family. When you leave Kronberg I will not see you again.”

“What will you have me do, Tristram? I cannot make you
younger, nor can I find you a wife. My own prospects there are no better than yours, I fear.”

“Nay, it is not that.” Tristram looked again to the door. “I know that you studied alchemy with Brahe.”

“All Tycho’s apprentices spent time in the laboratories at Uraniborg.”

“Brahe was particularly interested in medicinal chemistry, was he not? When he was not fussing about with the position of the sun, that is.”

“The position of Mars, Uncle. But aye, he was a brilliant chemist.”

“And so. You see.”

“I do not see, Uncle. You have your own physician. I am an astrologer, not a surgeon. I cannot cure your gout.”

Tristram waved a hand, dismissing the idea.

“My gout will accompany me to the grave, lad. Here is the thing: I have read somewhere that certain tinctures will combat the poisonous effects of wine. Is it not so?”

“Some compounds of pepper and sulfur and saltpeter, according to Paracelsus, are said to render a man incapable of drunkenness.”

“If wine hath no power to make a man drunk, perhaps it will have no worse effect upon the same man’s gout.” Tristram looked down at his swollen hands and feet. He shook his head, the great gray mustachios wagging like a pair of hound’s tails. “My physician says that I have drunk enough wine in my lifetime already.”

“I fear I agree with him, Uncle.”

“Oh, damn you both. I have sworn before the Blessed Virgin never to lose my head to strong drink again. But I have not forsworn all habit of honor, you. I will drink a salute to my king.”

“Even if it kills thee?”

“I have not forsworn honor, I say. Besides, lad, it will not kill me.”

Although there was neither love in me for the king nor respect
for whatever honors were due that murderer, I understand what honor is. Tristram and I had many differences as men, but he had been a kindly and amusing fixture during my youth. I had no doubt that his physician refused to concoct Paracelsus’s tincture because he believed Tristram’s heart looked more to love of drink than to honor.

“My dear old Uncle,” I said. “Even with such a potion in your belly, you could not withstand a night of drinking with the king and his men. If it did not kill you, it would surely lay you very low.”

“Ah.” Tristram waggled his index finger at me. “That is not what I intend. The king rides out tomorrow, do you know? He has a hundred men digging out the highway even now. There will be no feasting nor rouse with wine this evening. Christian will want his men to be clear-headed come daybreak. No, I need only be fortified such that I might bring a bottle of Rhenish to the king’s chamber tonight and drink a single goblet with him, as a man with his lord, in honorable fashion. Can you do me this? What can be the harm?”