The Astrologer (15 page)

“I do the king’s bidding,” I said, shaking my arm loose from the priest’s grip. “The king’s bidding, do you hear?”

“We do the Lord’s bidding.” The priest smiled. “You may share our noon meal if you like, in an hour or so. And you are welcome to worship here. But more than that we will not do.”

I looked from the young priest to Maltar, from Maltar to the boy who sat attentive to the conversation, and then I looked up at Cornelius and Voltemont, who were lounging on a pew, their hats over their faces. I am not one who has often commanded men. I never gained the manner of ordering others about and had hoped that invoking the king’s imprimatur on our task would suffice to make Hven’s peasants do my bidding. But Father Maltar was implacable and I saw that no help would come from him or his church.

The wind had picked up and I heard it whistling outside,
buffeting against the doors and shuttered windows of St. Ibb’s. If the road from Tuna was clear, we might manage the walk, but it would be very cold and I doubted that my assistants could drag our trunks a mile over hills and snow banks.

“I have money,” I said to the young priest. “I will hire a villager to cart us.”

“None will take your money. Everything that emerges from the shadow of Brahe is tainted.”

“This island has emerged from the shadow of Brahe,” I said. “He did truly eclipse all other men.” My voice rose in pitch and volume. When I am vexed I sound much like an old woman. I cried out to Cornelius and Voltemont, took my trunks up, and stormed out of the church. The wind blew waves of ice crystals over the island, which stung the skin of my face. In vexation I stamped a foot and turned about twice, hoping to think up a solution. My assistants dragged the large trunks out into the snow and sat on them. They pulled their cloaks tight and favored me with a pair of scowls.

“We will walk to Uraniborg,” I said. “There will be a cart for us and we will push it back here and retrieve our supplies. To your feet, both of you.”

Neither man moved.

“Why will there be a cart?” Voltemont asked.

“Come,” I said. “It is not far. A little over a mile. Two thousand paces. It is nothing.”

Cornelius stood, shook his head, and walked back into the church. Voltemont followed a moment later. I stood shivering there in the path between the church and the village, my bags in my hands, waiting for my assistants to come out of St. Ibb’s and join me. The wind slackened, dropping to a whisper, and then it began to snow.

The devil take them, then. I turned and walked south, past Tuna’s huts and down a slight hill. The road had not been recently cleared and soon I was kicking my way through snow a foot deep. The devil take Cornelius and Voltemont. I would send them back to Marcellus for a whipping. I would move
the supply trunks on my own somehow. I cared nothing for the king’s project in any case. My intention was to see what of Tycho’s work I could salvage and use for myself when Christian son of Rorik was dead. Cornelius and Voltemont would be of no use in that wise. The devil take them.

I had gone only half a mile or so when they overtook me. I heard my name called and I looked up to see a pair of ugly gray oxen tramping through the snow at my left. The oxen were yoked to a small two-wheeled cart. The sudden appearance of the animals, their immense black eyes looking accusingly at me, was so startling that I dropped my bags and stumbled backward, falling into a snow bank.

“Master Soren,” Cornelius called. “This is no time for making snow angels.” He and Voltemont jumped from the cart, retrieved my bags from the road, and pulled me out of the snow.

“What is this?”

“The church ox cart,” Voltemont said. “You did not expect us to walk all the way? The weather turns bad and the trunks and packs are heavy. But we must not tarry, sir. The boy must needs return the oxen to their stable before the priests see they are missing.”

The boy who had been in the chapel with Father Maltar sat at the front of the cart, the reins in one hand and a long whip in the other. He was bundled in old woolens much too large for him.

“You must hurry,” the boy said. His voice was high and pure.

We climbed into the carriage, wedging our bodies into what little space there was between the trunks. Cornelius handed me a small jar of wine and I took a drink, grateful to him. The boy cracked his whip over the oxen’s backs and the cart lurched forward. The snow fell heavier now and I could not see far in any direction. The world had disappeared behind a shifting, sparkling veil.

“Can you find the observatory?” I said.

“Do not worry. I can find Brahe’s house in any weather. But pray do not distract me.”

I fell silent, hunched under my cloak, and I looked past the oxen at the snow falling onto the barely visible road. Somewhere within the worsening weather sat Uraniborg, or what was left of it. Tycho had designed the observatory himself and it had been built to last a dozen lifetimes, yet after only four years of disuse people called it a ruin. It was inconceivable that the palace no longer stood. The walls of the keep were four feet thick, the towers rose fifty feet, and the roof was of heavy copper tiles. The huge timbers beneath the floorboards had been sawn from great fir trees felled in Sweden and ferried over the Sound at some expense. Uraniborg was no barn, no shepherd’s hut to collapse upon itself after a few neglected years. Uraniborg was a noble house of many floors, with seven towers and terraces to hold the great brass instruments. Uraniborg was a glittering villa on the highest point of the island. Every angle and measurement that had gone into the construction, from the subcellar laboratories to the Pegasus weathervane on the tall center tower, had been painstakingly computed to produce a structure perfect to eye and soul, a place where all was in harmony within and without, a microcosm of the macrocosm. Uraniborg was beautiful and solid, a shining fortress on the frontier of the future.

“Here is Brahe’s ruin,” the boy said.

IT WAS SNOWING HEAVILY, AS IF THE SKY ITSELF crumbled and fell down to Earth. I could not see beyond a few yards. Tycho’s castle was a dark shadow standing over us, a vague impression of high walls of brick and marble. The extent of the damage to the villa was hidden by the storm. The ramparts about the gardens had been pulled down and the bricks carted away by farmers, the boy said. I asked about the main building.

“You shall discover that yourself,” he said. As soon as our trunks and bags were out of his cart he drove off into the gloom of snow. He was gone from sight almost instantly. We had not even learned his name.

The doors into the main hall were blocked from within. I circled around to a side door and, after some labor, opened it and stepped into a dark store room, once full of dried meat, sacks of grain, and kegs of ale but now empty. A stair spiraled from floor to ceiling through the center of the room, leading up to an exposed landing outside the offices and bedrooms, and down to the kitchens and laboratories. I called Cornelius and Voltemont in and we cleared the stairs of rubbish and snow to make our way down. A bit of light filtered into the kitchen through windows set high in the walls. Snow billowed over the floor when Cornelius discovered that the glass was missing from all these windows and he packed them full with snow again to keep out the wind. There were no coals in the bin nor
split wood in the rack, but Voltemont broke apart an oak table and built a fire in the central oven.

One of Tycho’s Italian architects had designed a clever system of pipes to bring water from a nearby spring to the castle and he had installed in almost every room a tap for fresh water, the copper spigots cast in marvelous shapes of Neptune and Venus, of dolphins and carp. This copper piping and all of the taps had been ripped out of the kitchen walls and taken away. I would find out later that islanders had stolen Tycho’s amazing aqueduct works from every room in his house. Voltemont boiled snow down into water and we dined on a hasty pottage with dried fruits and dark bread and then drank from Cornelius’s jar of wine. The kitchen was large and drafty but eventually warmed up, and we hung our cloaks on pegs and even pulled our boots off and sat them on the brick lip of the oven to dry.

“Why cannot these labors be delayed until springtime?” Cornelius asked. “This weather is a misery, and this house is ready to collapse upon us.”

“The king commands it,” I said. This was not true, for he had not told me to begin the task immediately. It was Captain Marcellus’s idea that I should be kept away from Ulfeldt until the war party returned from Copenhagen. Marcellus thought me such an idiot that I would reveal my intentions to any who observed me. That Marcellus had declared himself my ally did not go far in making me fond of him.

“The worst of winter is not even upon us,” Voltemont said. “January can freeze the very blood in a man’s heart.”

“We will not be here in January,” I said. “But I have endured many winters in this latitude.”

“Ah, yes. You are a son of Elsinore.”

“I am.”

“So are we,” Cornelius said, punching Voltemont’s shoulder. “And as the three of us are so neighbored in age and origin, you ought to treat us more kindly, Soren.”

“On Hven, I am your master.”

“I see. My mother is a baker, and you will have eaten her
bread your entire youth. The very bread I also ate. But as a man, you are my better, are you? Soldiers such as I did guard Elsinore’s walls while you played in your father’s garden.”

Voltemont waved Cornelius to silence.

“My father owns the hostel in the center of Elsinore, by the market square. Do you know it? When my father is dead I shall inherit the inn and retire into that noble profession. Cornelius here will be a soldier until he dies or is cashiered. These are the honorable employments of Elsinore’s sons.”

“And fathers,” Cornelius said. “You are the mason’s son. Master Willem. Was that not your father’s name?”

“Aye.”

“Will you visit his grave? Is it not at the church here?”

“He was buried in Elsinore.” I stood and walked around the oven, to the shadows behind it.

“But he was killed on Hven, was he not?”

“Let us speak of other things.”

“It was that Brahe’s fault, was it not?”

“Nay, it was not.”

“Indeed, sir. It was. We have all heard how he—”

“Enough on this.” I would not discuss Tycho with these buffoons. “I am no son of Elsinore,” I said.

Cornelius nodded.

“You are an educated man.”

“University of Wittendon,” Voltemont said.

“Wittenberg,” I corrected him.

“A son of Germany,” Cornelius said. “No longer a son of Elsinore. Well. Do you think, son of Wittendon, that you can encamp yourself in this frozen and snow-filled monument, clear the wreckage, build your own fires, and cook your meals? With neither Voltemont’s assistance nor my own? I dare say you’d not last the night, sir.”

“Do you threaten me?”

“Nay, sir. I but point you to the obvious. Your trunks are much smaller than ours, and I wonder if you have food in them, or only parchment, ink, and books.”

“Yes,” I said, and sat with them before the open oven. “I cannot survive without you fellows. Therefore let we three sons of Elsinore all be friends, not master and servants. Your hands, good sirs. And more of that wine, good Cornelius.”

This speech pleased them, and I was relieved. I am a small man, and I cannot wield an axe to break up wood for a fire, nor can I dig my way through drifting snow should a blizzard lay itself against the observatory doors. I smiled at the men and we drank, and I wondered that I did not feel as if I had come home again. Perhaps when I saw the great instruments or the laboratories, my heart would be content.

After we had declared ourselves friends and drank half a jug of wine, we began to explore the cellars. The kitchens led to the alchemical laboratories through a heavy oaken door against which Cornelius and Voltemont struggled for nearly an hour without success.

“Shall I take the axe to it?” Voltemont asked.

“Nay,” I said. “On the morrow we will find the stairs down from the main hall.”

“If that part of the building is passable.”

“Aye.”

The daylight was fading, the kitchen windows shifting from gray to blue. Darkness filled the corners of the room. Cornelius peered into the gathering blackness beyond the oven’s glow.

“Where are the bed chambers?”

“Upstairs, above the main hall.”

“Shall we see if the staircase will hold a man’s weight?”

“As you like,” I said.

The stair led up into a large, round terrace surrounded by a brick parapet. I was surprised to find the space filled with waist-deep snow. Tycho had designed the terrace roof with care, having it fashioned from triangular wooden panels that could each be opened or closed as desired to allow observation of any portion of the night sky. Most of those panels were gone and the terrace had lain open to the elements for I knew not how long. It was half an hour’s work clearing away enough
snow that the three of us could climb up the stairs and onto the landing. The door from the terrace into the second floor of the main building was behind a tall drift. We had not put on our cloaks for this work and I could not labor much longer. The air was very cold.

“Shall we leave off this heavy task and go make up our pallets by the oven downstairs?” I asked. Cornelius and Voltemont thought this a better plan than digging through more snow and ice. I let them descend the stairs first, as they had done most of the work to clear the snow. The blizzard had stopped while we had been eating and patches of starry black showed though gaps in the clouds. I had stood on that very spot under that very roof with Tycho, measuring the ascension and declination of Mars. Now Tycho’s clever roof was broken. The great brass sextant that Tycho had placed in the terrace to stand proudly above us was no longer there. Likely it had been beaten into plows or melted down into spoons.

I followed Cornelius and Voltemont down the spiral stair into the kitchen. Voltemont had some cured mutton and potatoes, out of which he cooked a sort of stew.