Love and Sleep (66 page)

Time (the Emperor had never had to conceive it in this way, he had found the conception within himself ready-made, he had always felt it so) was like ripples rising in a pond from a thrown stone, the Word of God spoken at the beginning of the world; the difference was that instead of each new rising moment being smaller and contained within all its ancestors, like the ripples in the pond, each moment was larger than all the moments that had gone before, and contained all of them. Time had no motion, only containment; there was no new thing under the sun, for all was contained within every circle.

Which is why astronomers could discern the future in the eternally arising circles that the stars and planets made.

So Regiomontanus the astronomer, a hundred and fifty years almost ago, had glimpsed this awful year (
Octavegesimus octavus mirabilis annus
, ‘88, year of wonders) and had calculated every disaster, every astral maleficence (Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars conjunct—right now, this day—in the Moon's cold house), and had written down all their consequences:
Even if all the land and the sea do not fall in ruin, still the world will heave in pain, empires will shrink, great will be the lamentations everywhere.
No astronomer or doctor the Emperor interviewed, and there were many in this city for him to question, could put much better a face on it.

And the English doctor, standing before him, summoning him to listen to angels, and to repent. He would not repent, for he could not believe he had sinned. And now the
annus mirabilis
was come. The whole world knew it. The reformers rubbed their hands with horrid glee, expecting the fall of the Beast, the Whore; the Jesuits set their shaven jaws, expecting angelic hosts in support of their Army. Meanwhile witches flourished, prodigies appeared, and wolves seized children in the streets of villages.

Did they wonder that he withdrew from his audience chamber, refused to go out among the people, kept to his apartment and his tower? Let them wonder.

The English Queen had beheaded the Scottish Queen, dreadful crime, which (he had been told) she had at once repented in tears and rending of her garments, as well she should; she had shut up in prison those who had done the deed (Rudolf saw in his mind a tall man in black). But none of that had saved her from the consequences. Down below in Rudolf's palace, the Spanish Ambassador, the Papal Nuncio, and lesser emissaries sat in anterooms or wandered bored and irritable through the map rooms and treasure rooms and libraries, kept waiting for weeks, waiting to give the Emperor the news he already knew: that the navies of his uncle Philip of Spain were on the sea, that the English were about to be overrun; that (for all he knew) the Queen of England was already dead and the gibbets and the stakes erected, the smoke of heretic flesh ascending to God's gratified nostrils. England was far away; anything could be happening.

He had seen the
autos-da-fé
in Valladolid and Seville when he was a boy, growing up in the court of Spain. He remembered the smell. In those days he had been pious, almost saintly, though amid the saints of that court not exceptional; he had attended Mass daily, had served at the altar himself in humble cassock and surplice, and taken Communion. It had struck him in those days as deeply satisfying how the liturgical year was a model or emblem of Christ's life: Winter brought in the Incarnation, Spring the Redemption; in Summer the Holy Spirit descended on the Church at Pentecost, and Midsummer and Autumn recounted the Church's growth and triumph. It was the same with the days of the week: On Monday Christ was born, Tuesday grew in wisdom, Wednesday baptized, Thursday taught and healed, Friday suffered and died, Saturday harrowed Hell, and Sunday, in the miracle of the Bread, rose again.

But every Mass was also the same miracle in even smaller compass: Christ Incarnated in the awesome theurgy of consecration, Sacrificed in the eating and swallowing, passing into the dark and smelly tomb of the intestines, only to be gloriously Resurrected in the transformed heart.

But every Mass (he came with elation to see, it was years ago now, the stern Asturian mountains) was the whole History of the World as well, not simply pictured or rehearsed but having in its center precisely the same miracle, repeated daily throughout the churches of Christendom: Creation Fall Incarnation Passion Resurrection. Acts. End of the World.

Every rising moment contains every older moment within it, contains them all even as it is itself contained in the next to arise. The Emperor Rudolf rested his big jaw in his hand, elbow on the warm stone sill of the tower's window. He had not received the Body of Christ in months.

His tower room was an eagle's AErie; he could overlook the whole broad disc of the earth and the vault of sky like a dish and its cover. Though he knew very well that earth and sky were not like a dish and its cover.

What is that?

The Emperor's eye was drawn to the sky in the East, where low on the horizon a knot of white cloud had thickened.

He gripped the stone balustrade and peered harder into the eastern suburbs. What gathered there? He turned back into the crowded tower room, and muttering began to search amid the papers, clock's bodies, alembics and retorts, fire-gloves, uncut gems, goldbeater's tools, astrolabes and staves, his assistants fluttering before him.

The perspicil. The monks uncovered it for him. Recently constructed by Cornelius Drebble the incomparable. In Flanders (part of his Empire too, though they denied it there) the skilled lens-grinders were trying to do with ordinary lenses and tubes and mirrors what Drebble had done; there were those who would pay a fortune for the secret, but the Emperor had already paid a fortune to keep it for himself.

He had it carried to the window. It was as long as a culverin, its brass barrel chased with scenes of the history of sight: Argus and his hundred eyes, Narcissus and the pool, Moses seeing from the mountaintop the Promised Land.

His assistant fixed the eyepiece, tossed the velvet drape over the Emperor's head. The Emperor bent his eye to the aperture.

There. In the direction of Trebon, where stood the country house of Petr Vok Rozmberk, mighty subject, proud too; there the Englishman Dee and the Scotsman Kelley his creature were now harbored. The Emperor fiddled with the eyepiece but could not make the house itself appear. What were they up to? It seemed that a summer dust devil had arisen near there, only far larger than the little imps of dry roadways. Not big enough to be felt here on the mountain, but growing larger even as the Emperor stared at it.

By evening the eastward sky was dark with cloud, and the Emperor felt the wind on his cheek.

On that night, in a village in the far mountains of Bohemia, a lad was called out for the first time, by a voice calling him from the village street below his window.

He left his bed, and found himself to be in his other form, the same form as the old one who looked up at him from below. He reached the street in a single bound from the window's ledge. No one had seen him leave the house, and he must take care that no one saw him return. They set off together down the village street.

He was little more than a boy in that year; he had not before made this journey, and knew of it only what the old one who ran beside him had told him, in the dark of his barn in the light of day, when he had a form different from that which he now possessed. After discovering that the boy was one like himself and was filled with dread and loathing and confusion, the old one had become his instructor. He had explained to him the strange fate they had both been born to, and the work that befell them in consequence of it, work that the old one had done in the Ember Days of each season these many years; and he promised to run beside the boy when next they went forth, to guide him. The boy looked over at him now: the long panting tongue looped from his grizzled maw, grizzled like his own daytime cheeks; his eyes yellow, but as wet and soft as they always were. All in all he looked comically like himself, himself in the day world.

The street and the shuttered houses they passed were palely bright, as though illuminated by a cold sun, and yet his vision was not as good as it was in waking life: far-off objects were shapeless and unresolved, and leaves and walls had not even the dim memory of color which they have in moonlight—they were gray as tombstones, or stars.

How fast they moved! His heart felt huge within him, pumping stolidly and without effort, like a strong man chopping wood, and the ground fled away beneath his feet. He smelled the ripening crops, mown by the night wind passing through their silver ears; he felt a great pride in the standing grain, and yet unconcerned in it, unable to remember how he himself had plowed and sown his father's strips and prayed for their good growth.

The wind was rising.

He had asked the old one: Why do we not tell the people, tell them what we have done for them, how we guard them; wouldn't they love us then, and not hate us as they do? The old one had smiled at his question, and the boy knew the answer now as he sped over the colorless country: knew it in his bloody heart, knew that he was a creature violent and ruthless, who would slay without compunction—a creature like the ferocious armed knights who protected this realm from its enemies, good men whose path the wise did not cross. He almost laughed to think it.

They skirted the cottages of the outlying folk, staying downwind of their stables and their dogs; it was not yet time to raid. Soon they had left the country that he knew, the bounds of his parish; the fields and ways were unfamiliar to him. By the moon he saw they went north and west toward the forested land. The night sped away and yet seemed also to hang changelessly in the gray air, the stars not turning, the moon not going toward its setting.

And there were others on the way now with them. He smelled them long before he saw one, a dark loping shape far off, across the fallow field, at the edge of the forest: he could taste its aliveness, its likeness to himself, with a sense he had not known he possessed. Gone then. And then again with them on the way, drawing closer.

Another caught him by surprise, appearing suddenly almost beside him, a great rufous animal from which the boy-soul just inside him shrank, starting away and toward his protector—but his protector was only another like the red, and just as hideous, as he was himself: and exaltation lifted him.

They came out, the three of them, onto the upland pastures where shepherds summered their flocks. One at least of these shepherds (he knew) was a creature of his kind, and was no doubt on the way with the rest of them this night toward the battle. That was a hard fate, he thought: to be, yourself, inside, the very creature whom you must protect your flock against, the creature they most feared.

In a soft fold of the meadows a little flock had huddled out of the wind, their shepherd with them. The three night-walkers bore down on them behind the tossing trees. The sheep sensed them, and stirred as one animal; in a moment they were running bleating together up the narrow valley, the shepherd with them hurrying the stray lambs with his crook. He could not guard them all, though, alone as he was (his fellows all in hiding, probably, ears big to hear the panicked sheep but too afraid to come out from their huts, not on this night), and it was easy for the three of them to cut out a single lamb, start it from the rest and send it hurrying toward the trees while its fellows fled the other way.

As they closed in on the lamb—he, the grizzled old one, and the red leading them—the shepherd turned to make a stand, crook grasped in his hands and his face set: they could see the teeth in his mouth, the great whites of his eyes. Brave man! They passed around him, and circled the lamb; the little thing had ceased to flee, and stood still, mild and almost patient now, its very mildness starting their bloodlust. The shepherd fled stumbling away. They blessed the lamb, they slew it and ate it.

The boy lifted his bloody head, baptized now, and replete; and the moon's white head looked down on him aghast. Then from somewhere within, from the root of his bony member or from his narrow fundament, there started a noise, a tremor as though his sinews were plucked and sounding. It issued from his throat at last, a cry that made his own rough hair stand up and his back thrill, shaking the bones of his skull and skirling forth seemingly without end. When at last he had done he saw the older ones regarding him with something like fondness; and from far off across the mountain and the valley came an answer, wolf's or man-wolf's.

Now they left the homeplaces of men behind them, the walled towns and tilled fields, the bridges, watchtowers, and turnpikes. They climbed up along the bony back of the untenanted mountain, from whose rock outcroppings they could look down on the black and endless bristle of the forest sundered by a twist of river. The giant wind, into whose embrace they seemed to rise, was taller than the mountains, rising to the torn clouds and the moon.

There were many of them now, coming from far places, joining their fellows on the broad invisible way that led toward the battle. The two elders who ran beside him exchanged a look of wonderment, or was it foreboding? This summer's battle would surely be fierce, for the witches too had been summoned in numbers, flocking thither like great nightbirds; as he climbed he heard them in the treetops, alighting to rest, taking wing again to join others passing overhead. In their bags and cloaks, in the belts they wrapped around them, they carried the yield of the year, the ripening grain and the offspring of the herds: bearing it to their lord, who would reward them for their despoiling, for the famine and despair they brought.

But how reward them? he had wondered. Don't they too have to live on the earth with us, don't they too suffer when the earth is robbed? What reward could be so great as to compensate them, what could make up for the death of the year? God forgive them, the old one said: they are that hungry, that everlastingly hungry, and nothing they can see or touch or taste can satisfy them; they must be always imagining some better food, some greater pleasure, sharper sauce, sweeter fruit than any known, and that's just what they're promised, though they never get it, never, for the Devil doesn't have it to give: he has only his promises.