The Astrologer (27 page)

“I? Christian killed you. It was not me.” I whispered, not knowing if the ghost could hear me. He did hear, and he nodded.

“You are no soldier, I know. But you live unfairly on while I—after a mere three score and nine years—am but a poor ghost, dead. I know not even where I am. Do you know that at my age, my vision was still as sharp as a hawk’s until the prince stabbed me to death? Now all fades, becomes shadow. I see this room, but the things it contains—the very walls—are as shapes made of fog. Behind the fog there is something else, something you will not see until your own doomsday. I am frightened, young man, with such fear as I never had in life. Have you read Epicurus?
Mors nobis timenda non est, quia, donec simus, mors non est, et cum mors sit, nos non sumus.
Epicurus was a fool, a gullion, for in death we do exist, and I do fear it.”

“Do you come from Purgatory, to ask for my prayers?”

Ulfeldt laughed.

“You do not believe your own prayers,” he said. “Your faith is weak. God respects you no more than you respect Him, you know. I do not want your prayers.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, I know who and what you are, Soren Andersmann. Once I was a young man on the rise, though from a better family than yours, I dare say. I had ambition and craft, but I wasted no time with philosophy. At your age I was already managing the business of Denmark from behind the throne. My hand was on the tiller while some idiot in a bejeweled tiara barked orders
at kneeling idiots who kissed his ring and called him Majesty. Before that I took my doctorate at Wittenberg, just as you did. I can remember walking Collegienstrasse down to the market square to charm the young girls, or walking up Mittelstrasse with those sweet beauties on my arm, climbing the stairs to my room at the top of the Franciscan house. Oh, such love, such distress, such confusion as I had never known! All gone from me now, gone for decades, gone forever, for I am but a corpse lying alone and ignored in the chapel at Kronberg. The priest burns incense all day but he cannot mask the smell of gunpowder, for the cannoneers’ stores are in the cellar beneath the chapel. The king loves the smell when he prays, I have no doubt. I can see my body even now, and I do not look comfortable. My chain of office is missing, my right slipper remains in the graveyard where the prince murdered me, and none has thought to dress me in dry robes. Nor even has any man yet told my daughter that I am dead. Vibeke sleeps, dreaming of a day thirteen years ago when her brother and I took her out into the pastures north of Copenhagen, there to pick wildflowers and eat bread with honey in the shade of a young oak tree that no longer stands—it was cut down for firewood by one of that rabble of Swiss the king maintains. In old Rorik’s day, no foreign soldier would dare to cut down a living tree. And so—by my faith, I have lost my thread. What was I about to say?”

“Vibeke.”

“Aye, Vibeke. She is not like her brother. Jens is a priest, you know, but his friends are violent men and will attempt great havoc if sufficiently angered. Have care and place yourself not between my son and the prince should Jens act on a desire for revenge. He is a dull and often pious lad, my Jens, earnest and without cheer, but dogged in persecuting an idea. You have some experience of how even a man unschooled in the arts of war can embroil himself in vengeance.”

“I know not what you mean.”

“Oh, pooh. I am dead, not an imbecile. You will attempt to use that Swiss dagger you hide in your doublet. You suppose
some other king will buy your foolish telescope for you and allow your treason into print. Deny it not.”

Ulfeldt paced the kitchen as he spoke. His legs and feet passed through the benches and boxes that stood in his way, and he seemed to be fading into the air. His voice grew hollow and the fire in the oven dimmed.

“It grows late,” he said. I strained to hear him. “Dawn approaches and I am dead, slain by Christian. You might have put a word in his ear that his father is an adulterer and I acted merely as a concerned father. Ah, well. It grows late, late. I ask only that you see my Vibeke is taken to Paris and safely bestowed. You did promise you would do this. Vibeke is a fragile creature. It is most dark where she is. I bid you farewell. Be thou wary: revenge is a great fire burning all who touch it. Farewell.”

My eyes opened and I was within the trunk, under the closed lid. I pushed up and opened it an inch, listening hard for any noise. There was no sound. The room was gray with the weak light of dawn, and very cold. I did not know if I had dreamed Ulfeldt or if I had truly been visited by a spirit. I crossed myself and swore to light a candle for the old man.

As I climbed out of the trunk, every sound I made seemed loud as cannon shots echoing through the kitchen. My heart pounded with fear that Christian would come flying down the stairs and murder me with Voltemont’s sword. He did not appear, even after my hand slipped and the lid of the trunk fell closed with a terrible crash. The noise so startled me that I jumped backward, tripping over some rubbish and landing hard on the stone floor. I listened as the echo died away, straining against the silence, but there was nothing, no one else in the castle. The floor was like ice and my breath clouded the air.

I wondered how much snow had fallen in the night. If the road to the village was passable, I intended to leave Uraniborg, to get off the island. Spending another night in that dead castle was unthinkable. There were too many ghosts of too many sorts roaming the crumbling halls, and I wanted to be far from
them. My visit had only been for a few days, but living inside Brahe’s head—as Christian had put it—clouded my judgment. My intentions had been clear when I arrived on Hven, but now I no longer knew what I would do, or why. All I did know was that I had been too long in that dreadful place.

“I will walk to the church in Tuna for Christmas Mass,” I said, as if speaking the words would give me strength for the march over snowy fields. “I will hear the language of God and I will have the Host on my tongue. I will consider Heaven beyond the stars. I shall contemplate Christ born into this imperfect world. I shall light a candle for the old man. I shall say a decade of rosaries. I will find someone in the village to sail me off this miserable island.”

The trunks and other supplies I had brought from Kronberg could be left behind and fetched whenever I returned to rescue Brahe’s abandoned instruments. There was nothing for me to take but my small traveling case, and so I stood and brushed the dust from my cloak, preparing to brave the road to St. Ibb’s. The sun had risen enough to shine down through the high windows and I saw a message written in charcoal on the lid of the trunk in which I had spent the night. It was from the prince.

My excellent friend,

Your will is mine to command, but I must beg: forgive me. It is difficult to live as a prince, and you are a lucky man to escape that fate. Come to Kronberg for the royal name day, I beseech you. Your passage is arranged.

Christian

My passage is arranged? What did this mean? Christian had written his message in the belly of the night. He could not have hired a ship by then. I was vexed by Christian’s behavior and I hoped when he returned to Kronberg a surgeon would at last examine his princely head. The shifts of his mood could not all be put down to a boy become a man.

I pulled my cloak tight about me and pushed my hat low on my head. Up the spiral stairs I went and out into the courtyard, where I was glad to find it had not kept snowing all the night through. The tracks Christian had made as he earlier walked out of the ruin were clearly visible and I followed his footsteps all the way to the village. The three score or so residents of Tuna were leaving their huts for the church and I joined them for Mass. The singing was ragged and the Latin of the responses was mumbled and poorly pronounced, but Father Maltar in his white vestments and gold-trimmed stole seemed a holy man for the moment. He did not refuse me the Host, nor did Father Stepan withhold the wine, and I sat among the congregants of St. Ibb’s as if I were one of them. It was warm in the chapel and I nearly slept during the homily, which Father Maltar delivered in the strangely accented Danish of the island. The entire service was charming and quaint and I could happily pretend I was a tourist, a visitor from the Continent perhaps, with nothing more troubling on my mind than where to dine after the service.

Maltar blessed and dismissed us. I watched the villagers leave the church, hoping to recognize one of the fishermen to whom I had spoken the day before. All of the men looked the same to me and I steeled myself to speak with the priests, readying my pride for a few minutes of begging. Happily I was spared that humiliation.

“Happy Christmas, friend of Brahe.”

It was the boy, Justus Axlrod. I had not noticed him during the service. He was bundled up in his oversized clothes, but he held out one gloved hand to me, like a man, like an equal. I looked down at him for a moment and then took his hand.

“Happy Christmas, friend of Father Maltar. Are you wishing me farewell?”

“Aye, for you are leaving Hven today.”

“I am. You already know this?”

“It was my unhappy duty to open the doors to that prince very early this morning. He knocked for I know not how long before Father Stepan bade me see who broke our sleep. Your
prince was white with frost and demanded I build up the fire. Is he mad?”

“He is a prince, and does as he pleases. Such men walk with a greater tether than we.”

“Aye. He had me rouse Father Maltar, who confessed him before dawn. I think he is mad, though he gave me a few coins. He bade me hire a boat to carry him to Kronberg, and I awakened Ole Faaborg, who is a fisherman.”

The villagers had by now all left the church, but for the boy and an old woman praying alone. The priests were not in the chapel. No doubt they were in the kitchen, eating bread and roe.

“Where is Prince Christian?”

“On Zealand, I imagine.” Justus tilted his head and looked at me, perhaps wondering if I was as mad as Christian. “Ole Faaborg sailed north with your prince before Matins. I am to tell you that when he returns he will load you into his boat and take you back to Kronberg in your turn. If Ole is not attending Mass in Elsinore, he ought to be at our wharf by noon. And you will leave Hven, and so farewell, friend of Brahe. I advise you to be at the wharf and not make Ole Faaborg wait.”

“I thank you, Justus Axlrod.” I put a few coins into the boy’s hand. “My advice to you is that if you are true to yourself, you can be false to no man.”

“Do you mean that I should then not be true to myself, that I may be false to others?”

“That is one way to interpret it. You are a clever lad. I wish you well. I will pray for your sister.”

“You should go down to the wharf and await Ole Faaborg. Fare you well.”

Ole Faaborg did not go to Mass in Elsinore and returned well before noon. His boat was small and stank of fish, as did he. He refused my offer of further payment, saying that he did the crown’s bidding. He also refused to speak of the prince except to allow as how Christian had disembarked at the King’s Harbor in Elsinore.

I sat before the mast in Ole Faaborg’s stinking boat and we set out for Kronberg. The dirty canvas sail flapped and rustled in the wind. Behind me the island of Hven, the church of St. Ibb’s, the fallen paper mill, and the ruins of Tycho Brahe’s great house all receded into the distance. I did not look back.

PERHAPS THE ASSASSINATION OF KING CHRISTIAN WAS an empty gesture, and perhaps I had no reason to hold my course toward the treasonous act. But when I stepped off the boat at Elsinore, it was as if the act had already been committed, my future as unchangeable as my past and my steps—inexorably carrying me with Bernardo’s dagger closer to the king’s heart full of royal blood—were steps I had already taken. I could no more walk a different path than could the moon change her orbit around the Earth. The king’s death was indelibly written into my book of days and all I need do was endure, keep walking toward and through that moment until I emerged somewhere in the future with blood on my hands and the deed complete. I was not resolved, nor was I brave. I was no more than awake. And thus awake did I enter the fortress of Kronberg on the 28
^th
day of December in the year of our Lord 1601, to join those loyal Danes in celebration of King Christian’s name day, a murder weapon hidden within my doublet.

Under my left arm I carried a star chart for the coming year, the most beautiful horoscope I had ever drawn, in four colors on heavy parchment. The chart showed indications of victory and increased wealth for the king, urged caution in dealings with Denmark’s enemies, and remained vague but positive about the weather and the prosperity of fishers and farmers. These were the same sorts of lies the king had expected from his astrologer
on every previous name day. Drawing this horoscope and illustrating the four corners of the parchment with portraits of the four elements blessing Denmark had taken up almost all of my time since leaving Hven. Had the hostler in Elsinore not reminded me to eat, I would have fasted for three days, so bent was I on my craft.

Before I left the hotel and made my way to Kronberg, I hastily drew up my own horoscope. The portents were unclear, the Parts of Fortune cryptic, but Mercury was in the ascendant with Saturn opposed. The day held great promise but also great risk for me. Unfortunately I had spent so much of my time creating the king’s false horoscope that I had no chance to cast a true chart for him. I reminded myself to be careful.

The road into Kronberg was thick with guests, provisioners, and many Swiss soldiers, who were conspicuous in their plumed helmets and yellow-on-black trappings. Even on this day of celebration, the king made a show of strength. If any of his guests’ sympathies bent toward rebellion, the presence of these infamous lancers should remind them that Christian had beaten down a dozen insurrections in as many years. At the great iron gate into the keep, one of the Switzers greeted me by name. I did not recognize him.