DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (26 page)

—How did he come by this hurt?

—The trap, said the physician. The force of its closing broke the
astragalus
. The bone coming through. So this was no spirit. No phantom or
phantasticum
.

—But, said the chaplain, have not werewolves been wounded by hunters, and the same wound later discovered on the body of the
guilty one?

—How could a wound given to a projection redound upon the living body?

—
Repercussio
, said the chaplain. We are told of the man out hunting, comes upon a clowder of cats, they mock him; he strikes at them with
his sword, and cuts off the right paw of the leader. Later returns home, finds his own wife nursing a handless right arm by
the fire. Well attested.

The Emperor, wearied with listening to their Latin—a language invented only to worry problems with—asked John Dee:

—Will he die? Can he die?

—He can and will.

—Can he be treated?

—I do not know, Your Majesty, if the wound to his ankle and foot can be treated now. Your physicians can tell better than
I.

—If the wound is God’s justice on him, said the chaplain, and shrugged.

—He must not die, said the Emperor. He is the only one ever to have come here alive.

The boy, who had evidently understood nothing either of the Latin nor of the German they spoke, only stared; John Dee wondered
what he thought he saw. And why, firstly, had the Emperor brought the boy here? Why had he called an English doctor to this
place to see to him? The wound was a dreadful one, and the boy must be in great pain; almost John Dee could see the heart
within him beating.

—Of his melancholy, John Dee said: of that too he might die. Here in this place, without sun.

—But that, said the chaplain, that that …

—That is an affection that can be treated.

—A melancholy so deep, said the Emperor. Only the Stone itself could cure such a melancholy.

John Dee arose from where he knelt on the stone floor. He understood now why he had been brought here. He had at his first
meeting with this strange king promised that he, John Dee, could make the Stone, cure for all sorrows, philosopher’s son,
living fountain, plate of divine victuals, splendor of God on earth, the only thing the Emperor wanted. That was what the
angels had told him to say. He would not unsay it; not now, not here.

—I can cure him, he said.

The others there—guards, physician, chaplain, turnkey, wolf-boy, Emperor of the Romans with his hurt eyes—all looked at him,
and went on looking; and John Dee thought that from the pressure of their eyes’ lights upon his heart he might himself momentarily
transvect, become
a dragon, a flambeau, something that would startle and chasten their foolish faces.

—Yes I, he said. Give him into my care and in twenty days I will cure him.

There is no Stone: not in this age. What the angels had told him to promise to the Emperor they could not get: John Dee knew
that now. If it had been made in the past, by men wiser than any in this our time, in Ægypt, Athens, or the Lord knows where,
then they who made it were not able to pass it down to us, or what they passed down has lost its splendor; and we can no longer
follow their instructions, or understand their fables. What the Emperor wanted from John Dee and the hundred other doctors,
smokesellers, cinder-bitten cucurbites, Paracelsian iatrochemists and gold-eating Chinamen he supported, he would not get:
the age was too cold, too old.

But there are ways to treat a melancholy: a
melancholia fumosa
, a choler adust, a dry or a moist melancholy, black as Hell though it be. Nothing that John Dee had wanted with all his heart
was to be given to him, no more than to the Emperor; perhaps he had sinned against God’s goodness in asking for it, and perhaps
he was damned now. But he could still treat a melancholy.

He chose a tower from among the many that rose above the castle, a remote high one with a broad top open to the sky. He was
given an apartment just below, a dusty chamber where armor and weapons rusted; these were cleared, and beds and tables laid,
and the tools and materials he needed brought in. Through the narrow windows the sun, moving into Libra, shone strongly in;
the nights, though, were sharp already, and there was not much time.

From T
ebo
, where his family remained in the castle of Duke Ro
mberk, he summoned his boy John Carpio. John knew the Bohemian
tongue, and was accustomed to wonders. When Dee and Kelley had sought the Stone it was John who had sat up with them and watched
with them over the athenor, wherein for the first time they had made new gold from what was not gold. John brought from T
ebo
a cart of necessary things; from the Emperor’s own workshops came other workmen skilled in several crafts.

When all was ready the wolf was brought up from his dungeon in the White Tower. The Emperor’s physicians had been tending
to his hurt foot, closely watched by armed men, and with an iron mask fitted over the werewolf’s face, in case he should transvect
and try to bite. Now he was brought out, shut up in a cage like a menagerie beast, carried upward by a gang of strong men,
and lifted the last fifty feet to the
tower’s top by block and tackle: Dee saw him squeeze shut his eyes in terror and grip his cage’s bars as he arose by jerks.
Far off (Dee was sure) the Emperor himself observed from another tower. It was near nightfall. John Dee ordered the cage (it
would not be needed long, was in all likelihood not needed now, but Dee was under strict orders not to free him uncured) to
be placed on a low wheeled table or cart he had had built there on the tower’s top. And the guards were sent below.

—Come, John, he said, summoning his boy. Come. Speak to him.

—What shall I say? asked reluctant John.

—You shall say
How do you do
, said Doctor Dee.

He could see that the boy’s left foot was mending, though it had been so badly hurt and gone so long untreated that he would
never walk without a limp or a stick now. He was thin, lean and summerbrown in the light clothes they had given him: a peasant,
a farmer’s boy. His eye liquid and large, afraid and watchful but not a melancholic’s suspicious eye with yellowish white
and dull apple: that was good. They said his urine was copious, clear and golden, pale as Bohemian ale: also good.

Dee drew up a stool to the cage and sat. He put his hand within the cage and took the boy’s thin wrist in his.

—Come, Sir Wolf, he said. We shall make a man of you again, if you be willing.

Of all the causes of melancholy the remotest are the stars: the nativity and its conjunctions, the houses where the planets
are disposed, the signs ascendant and regnant. All other causes—diet, accident, lovemadness, evil demons, brooding on wrongs,
the black humour rising to dry the tender tissues of the brain—all depend on the stars at first.

So the stars must be cure too.

There on the tower’s top the Emperor’s excellent workmen had constructed frames for three large circular mirrors, mounted
on gemel rings so that Dee could turn them by geared wheels to face any quarter of the sky. The mirrors were not flat silvered
surfaces but
catoptric
: they were like great shallow dishes, their incurving calculated according to geometries John Dee had worked out more than
thirty years before. Catoptrics, or the knowledge and use of such curved mirrors, was in his estimation the central mystery
of astrology; only by catoptrically gathering and directing the rays of the planets could a worker achieve anything beyond
mere passive description of the state and prospects (fortunate or unfortunate) of the affected party.

Alcindus of Araby knew: every object propagates itself through the universe spherically, that is by rays proceeding from every
point on it. The lodestone’s nature of attracting iron or other lodestones proceeds
spherically outward from it with diminishing force through almost any medium, water, air, anything—except, of course, garlic
juice. The planets, the sun and the moon, are the most potent propagators of rays; earth and all its beings are bathed constantly
in their angular intersections (Dee had described the mathematics of it in his
Prapædeumata aphoristica
). So, to counter the natural tendencies of a soul or a body formed by a maleficent planet’s rays, John Dee lifted the face
of his mirror to the sky, and caught within it the rays of a contrary planet in a good aspect (like Venus, just then following
the sun toward the west, effulgent, brightest object in the fading heavens). The mirror focused them not
on
but at a point somewhat
in front of
its curved surface. A man standing just there, before that focus, and looking in, would seem to see her, Venus, hovering
in the middle of the air, twice or thrice as bright as in the evening sky—or he would if he happened to be made of glass,
for Venus’s light cannot pass through his body’s solidity to reach the mirror’s surface. Instead he sees himself, inverted
as in a silver spoon. But though her light will not pass through him, the other rays of Venus will; so if he be placed there,
his brain at that focus, or his shrunken heart, Venus’s rays will still warm him, like a young girl rolled in bed with an
old cold sick man.