Love and Sleep (45 page)
He would not. There was a row, a row like so many others, Dee had thought they had been left behind in England but they had not been. The spirits were lying, Kelley said, they had done nothing these two years but lie, Dee was a fool to believe them, if they knew anything of worth they had not revealed it yet and would not reveal it to the mortals no though they begged them; he and Dee were objects of the spirits’ scorn and derision, he had no doubt of that, he could hear their laughter in their spheres. Look: here in Agrippa his book
De occulta philosophia
, here were all the names of the angels that govern the nations of the world, names that Kelley had spent days on his knees to be told! He would be toyed with no more. And he banged shut his door in Doctor Dee's face.
Gabriel came to him, that night, and corrected him.
Kelley would never tell his master what had been said or done that night to him, and Dee did not insist. He only knelt again with Kelley before the stone, his old kneebones crackling like broken kindling; and Gabriel, mildest and sweetest of the spirits who talked to them, joined them once again together in tears of repentance and thanksgiving: again, again, once again. On the next day Kelley received the Body of Christ in his mouth at the Church of the Bernardines.
The great plain fruited. In May, lying in bed of a morning, Kelley felt his head and breast opened as by a butcher's cleaver or an oysterer's knife, and a voice (not a voice, or a voice speaking no words) poured knowledge into the breach: why they had been chosen, what the prophecies spoke of, what the tales figured.
There was war in heaven.
Four watch-towers or castles stand in the four corners of the Earth, North South East West. Kelley started in his bedclothes as four trumpets sounded from them, and four cloths or banners rolled out vastly from the towers’ tops. One as red as new-smitten blood from the East, one lily white from the South, a green one garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin from the West, one the black of raven hair or bilberry juice from the North. Then out of the towers came the hosts, colored the same, roiling and outpouring, like banners, like words from a mouth, a seeming confusion and yet no confusion, every troop with its senior, every army with its general, great captains; they march toward the center court, ranged about their ensigns, ready for a battle.
This was happening now, he knew, but not why or to what end, except that, happy as the warriors looked, splendid as their banners, the war was a desperate one, and the issue in doubt. Was it the war of the Lamb against the Beast, against the Wind that bloweth where he listeth? What Kelley could not tell was if the angelic troops moving toward one another from all directions were about to combine into a single mighty army, or whether when they met they would fall upon one another, a war of all against all. He only knew it would not be long until they met.
Still in his shirt he roused his brother, and sent him off to Dee's house in St. Stephen Street, and John the servant-boy to the Franciscan convent where Laski lay. And stood then at the window of his room trembling and gritting his teeth with a sound that made his wife in the bed draw up the covers to her neck in fear.
Past midnight that night, John Dee rose from his place by the table of practice. A mass of scribbled papers slipped from his lap to the floor, the names of angels, the order of their march. The clear sphere was empty at last, nothing but a stone; Kelley slept in his chair, his mouth open, a whinny like a sick child's coming from his lips with each breath. All the house was asleep.
He climbed the stairs past the room where his wife Jane had left a candle burning by the curtained bed. The children and their nurse were dark humps in the next room like sleeping bears, their books and pages of childish work scattered on the floor, they had got their father's vice of disorder, a small one but hard to conquer. He went silently past to a ladder at the hall's end, up it, out through a cockloft (the pigeons murmured and fluttered as he passed) and onto the house's roof. A balustrade was built there where a man could stand.
No moon, a few clouds, their hems ermine-trimmed. Stars.
The four corners of the world. Kelley had called them by the compass points but he had meant the solstices and equinoxes, the four corners of the year, the gates of time.
If the battle was being fought among the angels that govern the heavens, and the issue was in doubt—that would explain the prophecies they were continually given, that the Turk would be overthrown, that Tartary would fall, that states would alter: prophecies which changed from week to week without ever coming about. They were reports of the battle only, how it went.
Why would God allow His angels to fight over the world?
He looked up into the confusion of the stars, so many visible, so huge a horizon that he did not always recognize the old familiar constellations. The turning heavens, bound by the colures, fixed at four corners. Changeless. They were not, though: John Dee and every astronomer in Christendom (in Araby and Cathay too doubtless) had seen a new star born in CassiopAEia's chair ten years before. A new star, come forth from nothing by God's will, the first since Bethlehem.
Unless it was not new, had merely come suddenly closer to the Earth, close enough to be seen: charging from its circular course like a racehorse faulting and rushing the crowd, just because it chose to.
Because it chose to.
With perfect clarity he saw the face of the little Italian who had stood in his study in Mortlake and challenged him. A new heaven: and if there was a new heaven, there must be a new earth too.
Was the war now taking place in heaven about the courses of the stars? Were the angels who turn the spheres (if there were spheres) engaged in their milliards in violently shifting the stars from their places? As though Earth and the Sun were not only to be newly
understood
as standing in each other's places, but
were even now on the move to their new places,
the one to the center, the other (Earth, our star, and we on it) out to the middle row of the planets.
An awful laughter arose in John Dee's breast, and he clutched the balustrade by which he stood. That would raise winds, that would throw down states. The Earth lose its balance, seas not hold up ships: yes.
If God meant now to roll up the heavens as a scroll, if He was now at work doing that, and a new heavens was to be revealed behind the old; if there was no longer to be lower and higher, up and down, no longer any measure by which a place in the universe could be found—no more four corners to the world—then men would have to be new, too.
Was God about to grant men new powers? Were all of John Dee's and poor Kelley's labors now to come to fruition, and all the tedious numeration they had been given to write down resolve itself, appear all at once to be the plain science of a new world? He was certain of it: not certain that he would ever live to understand or use it, but certain he had been chosen to give it to the men of the coming world, who would someday take it up, perhaps after it had lain long obscure and dusty, look into it and say
Yes yes of course, yes just so it must be.
He thought of—he felt in his breast like the scar of an old branding—his own
Monas hieroglyphica
, child of his heart that he had never truly understood.
How would they use it? Please God they did no harm. They could not, God would not allow it to pass into their hands if their souls were not prepared for the use of it. That was why his heart shrank in his bosom when Bruno Nolano had bragged of the new powers to be had. The child Madimi had warned Dee: He has stolen fire from heaven. Like PhAEton he could burn up the world.
That then was what John Dee was to do, that was the warning he had been given to issue, that was why he and not another had been chosen to issue it. He thought of words from Job:
I only am escaped to tell thee.
He knelt on the starlit rooftop and prayed. O God let not sharp swords be put into the hands of children; let their hearts be made wise before their hands are made strong. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And yet Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. World without end. Amen.
In May Adelbert of Lask set out for Transylvania, to his estates there. Before he departed he knelt before John Dee, profoundly embarrassing the doctor, and asked for his blessing, which Dee gave; Laski also asked, head bowed, that the angelic powers Dee and Kelley spoke for might aid him, in his journey, in his suit before King Stephen for relief of his debts.
They might not, he said, see him again. He would return through Prague, and if they had reached there, he might see them again, if God and His Angels willed. And if, if ever the angels spoke of him, or made any suggestion as to how his troubles might be resolved, please please do as they instructed.
He went out on a tall horse into the spring, knuckles on his sword-belt and his elbow turned proudly out. In that month King Stephen died, all of Laski's business unresolved; the angels expressed no surprise, though they had said they expected great things of Stephen: as though the right hand of God could not know what the left hand was doing.
By then John Dee and Edward Kelley and their wives and children, relations, servants, carts, furniture, books and papers had gone down into Bohemia to see the Emperor.
What is the one thing we inherit from the past which still retains the powers it once had?
Pierce had promised to reveal such a thing in the course of his book, and Julie said the publisher really liked the idea; a
lagniappe
, a bonus for purchasers better than a give-away record or a revealing questionnaire, oh much better. Now Pierce had actually to come up with something, pull it out of his empty fist like a string of magician's scarves.
If it were like the Stone of the alchemists, it would be lying around in plain sight, unrecognized by everyone except the fool and the wise man, the one who had never forgotten and the one who at length must learn.
It might not be a thing at all, though, Pierce thought, it might be a word, it might be a thought the mind could think by chance, sudden
conjunctio oppositorum
that starts a mental blaze.
What, what persists into this time from that near or distant past when the laws of the universe were not as they are now, but different; when such things as jewels and fire had properties they no longer have; when people witnessed, and recorded, marvels we now know to be (and believe to have always been) impossible?
Pierce thought about it. At his work at Kraft's house, at the Donut Hole, drinking alone or at Val's Faraway Lodge, he thought what in hell he could actually discover, or be seen to have discovered, that would fit the bill. On the toilet he pondered; in his bath, with the Monitor and Merrimack of the soap and sponge floating before his submerged chin; in line at the supermarket.
It could be something actual, there were a thousand possibilities for contemplation. The amulet that John Dee had supposedly cast, by means of which he raised the wind that blew away the Spanish Armada. The creepy arch-mage and blusterer Aleister Crowley (how had Pierce learned this fact or nonfact?) had actually seen this item, in the British Museum.
No no no. It would only turn out to be another of those dead things that Kraft enjoyed, Grails that were nothing but golden cups,
objets de vertu
from which the
vertu
has evaporated.
What about a journey to find such a thing? Set out to locate it, trace down the rumor, find it's worthless, but in the journey find the true magic in oh understanding, wisdom, so on.
Would he be torn apart by outraged believers if he pulled such a trick?
Something real, something simple and undeniable, not even rare; a surprise, but something you actually knew all along. Something.
As though, in the next age of the world, a cooler and a duller age than this one, somebody were to come upon a lump of radium, glowing eerily in darkness, shedding particles, decaying, showing just those properties that once upon a time in Einstein's day or Fermi's people actually believed it to have.
How could he have set himself such an insoluble problem?
He had worked on it and thought about it all through one thundery stifling day, when toward evening the problem was wholly supplanted in his thinking; for an event he had been waiting for almost all his conscious life took place as he sat on the front step of Fellowes Kraft's house waiting for Rosie Rasmussen's car to pick him up. The power that had in its keeping Pierce's three wishes showed up ready to grant them to him, and Pierce had been unable afterwards to think of anything else.
If we believe, or pretend, that the world is capable of being other than it is, alterable by our desires (as perhaps more people did believe, in that age of the world, than do now), then it is likely we will spend a certain amount of our aimless mental time in imagining just how we might alter it. Pierce Moffett had never built model railroads, hadn't spent energy imagining himself into that small world, boarding the little cars at little stations, oiling the engine and driving it through the hills and over the bridges. He had never had a teddy bear who went on imaginary travels with him, or an imaginary friend, or even a dog he pretended could talk to him, not because he was refused a dog but because he seemed so unmoved by them.
But he had always, always imagined that wishes could come true; and if wishes could come true, the wisher had better be ready to make them, the right ones, the ones he most wants, at a moment's notice, when the chance is offered him. In the days when he had sat on the steps of the dogtrot in Kentucky, looking out over the shaggy hills and twisting a lock of hair in his fingers, this was what he was often about: examining his heart, testing against its unfathomable depths of need first this wish and then that, and gauging the response.
He had never completely quelled the habit.