Pierce looked within, smelled sweet water. Amber reflections over the water’s black surface were cast up, marbling the walls and wooden ceiling. A fragment from the well’s lip fell with a resonant plunk into the water. It looked bottomless.
When they returned to the little house Pierce saw, through the open door, Rose standing in the dining room, his office or study as it would be, he didn’t dine much. She lifted her hand as though to touch the wall, but then didn’t touch it; she looked around the room, the house, not as though trying to remember it but as though she might at any moment be told what would happen to her here, and to him; would be told, if she paid attention, what the story was to be.
“So it suits you,” Mr. Winterhalter declared, breathing hard.
“Yes,” Pierce said. “Yes. Yes it really sort of does.”
“Could that really be true?” Rose asked as they drove away, Pierce lighter by the amount of a deposit. In his rear-view mirror Mr. Winterhalter still waved, Time’s pander, unwitting of course, though even that Pierce would come to doubt.
“Could what be true?”
“About the water. Not freezing, lying out on the ground like that.”
“It seemed convincing to me,” Pierce said. “Flowing water doesn’t freeze.” He remembered, with sudden vivid completeness, standing in the bathroom of the bungalow in Kentucky on a winter night and setting the drip of the faucets. Flowing water doesn’t freeze. In the bathroom window a ghostly feral face.
In that age the real connections between things—pattern, repetition, inversion, echo—were actually known or sensed at times, but only in odd moments; were come upon as though in the dark, and felt by wondering fingers. What is patent now was hidden then, hard to say, let slip as soon as caught.
They turned at the gate to go out.
“And how in the snow will you get all the way in?” Rose asked. Pierce didn’t answer, not having thought of that. Hire plowing. Snowshoe in. It didn’t matter. Except that Mr. Winterhalter had locked the door again behind him, no key for Pierce until a lease was signed, Pierce would have turned down that way again now, taken her into that bedroom again, and bent her at last over that sordid bed.
“I’m glad you’re by the river though,” she said. “I like the water. So much.”
“Rose,” he said. “That time last year.” But he had become just then absurdly afraid, and unwilling to trust his memory, too highly colored suddenly, unlikely. You can’t step in the same river twice. The river is not the same. You are not the same.
“Summer’s almost over,” she said.
A wind had arisen. As though borne on it they drove through the tunnel of roadside trees, whose riddled fallen leaves were swept before them across the asphalt. The road was new-laid, it seemed, for it was deeply black, edge-striped in bright white and dashed with endless yellow oblongs, and it curled through the pale restless woods smartly, purposefully. Pierce, moving his Steed along it, felt his hands turned by the wheel as though the car knew the way of itself.
SEVEN
It is a very curious thing:
After the great Armada that Philip of Spain sent against England was defeated, both winner and loser naturally attributed the victory to God. Among the English the story began then to be told which would become a staple of triumphal British History from then on, the story of the wonderful “Protestant wind” that sprang up in the nick of time to save the beleaguered island and its people from the towering galleons and orgulous grandees. Te Deum and Non nobis were ordered to be sung in churches from Penzance to Scotland. To Thee and not to us O God the victory.
Philip of Spain seems to have agreed, that the victory could not be credited to men’s arms and men’s ships, even though he had a very different idea of what God had wanted upon this occasion. “I sent them to fight against men, and not against the wind,” he is famously reported to have said on hearing of the defeat.
What is curious is that there was, apparently, no wind. A number of Spanish ships were at length blown by storms against the Irish coast, the survivors becoming incorporated into Irish legend. But that was on the long bitter journey home, after the battle, after defeat. During the days of June when the great encounter raged, the winds were mostly mild, and mostly favored the Spanish. In the dispatches from the ships at sea on both sides sent during the fighting, there is no mention of any great wind, saving or destroying.
What is to be said?
Perhaps there was a wind, and it somehow left no trace in the primary records of the time. For if there was no wind, would not the English have preferred to credit themselves with the triumph, aided (of course) by God? If there was not a wind, for what reason would Philip have invented one, and given God the blame for the defeat of what was supposed to be God’s own Navy?
Or perhaps there really was no wind—until the awesome fortunate power which commentators attributed to it belatedly conjures it up. Only when the myth of the big wind (bringer-in of the new British Empire, blower-away of Spanish hegemony over the old history of the world) settles firmly on the humps of historian’s pens does it begin to blow backward from the later time to the earlier, where kings, popes, and ambassadors can feel it, though sailors and ships do not.
There had been a great stillness in the Imperial City of Prague during the whole of the month of May, as the Spanish ships maneuvered in the Narrow Seas and the Prince of Parma prepared his landing-craft and marshaled his invasion forces. The city seemed more beautiful than ever before to the Emperor, the bright buff of its stones, the red roofs jewellike, all translucent under the dome of blue, the air so clear he could hear laughter rise from the city streets below the Hradschin where he sat, the laughter of happy citizens.
This was the year in which his Empire would fall, or be altered beyond recognition. Prophecies made a hundred years ago, but whose roots ran far deeper in time than that, said so, almost clearly, only as darkly as any prophecy perforce must that describes the unlicked bear-cubs of time, still shapeless.
The Emperor (whose horoscope had been cast by Nostradamus) regarded most prophecy as probably true but uselessly ambiguous: as ambiguous as the world whose future it claimed to describe. The only certainty lay in numbers, whose operations every man’s reason could agree on. Catholics were enjoined from the practice, but Protestants in the Emperor’s employ had combed Revelation, the Book of Daniel, the Book of Isaiah, and certain other books as sacred as these but without canonical standing, manuscripts of which were kept in the carved chests that held the Emperor’s treasures. The computations were growing ever clearer, like frost-writing etching itself on a winter glass. The numbers in Scripture hinted at a series of epochs succeeding one another from the beginning of time, each forming in its turn like a drop at the spout of a clepsydra, forming forming until pregnant with its own fullness it falls, and another begins to form. According to these accumulating and indisputable numbers, the next-to-last epoch in this series that from world-creation to world’s end had ended in 1518, when Martin Luther had defied the Pope, and all Christendom felt the vertigo of freefall. From that time to the Judgement, when the Seventh Seal was opened and the Dragon flew, was ten times seven years. The Emperor had been invited to add up the numbers himself. There was no need. It was self-evident. Fifteen hundred and eighteen plus ten times seven years reached right to this transparent afternoon, clear spherical drop too big to hang any longer.
Then there were the Capuchin friars, busy with prophecies of their own, who also made their secret reports to the Emperor, not on the same days as the Protestant scholars were smuggled in.
The Capuchins (or a certain sect within them, whose members were known only to one another) had for a hundred years and more meditated deeply on the revelation of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. Joachim had long ago determined that the Universe made by God occurred in three parts, just as the Godhead itself did: the first age was the age of the Father, and the Law was the law of the prophets, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; the second age, that of
the Son, which began when Christ died for our sins and the curtain of the Temple was rent in two, was ruled by the Church and the Law of Love. Last would come the age of the Holy Spirit, when Christ’s Church would pass away, unneeded, lovely idea Rudolf thought; then there would be no law, there would be Perpetual Peace, until the stars fell from their spheres and God shut up the world for good.
When would that age begin?
There were those among the Joachimists who already lived in the Third Age, who had withdrawn in their hearts from the superannuated Church and empty sacraments, and lived inwardly free. So the Emperor heard. Free.
His confessor taxed him with listening to heretics, but the Emperor said that heretics could compute as well as good Catholics, and the truths of Scripture are there for all to read, however wrongly they might be interpreted. He did not say, but he remembered well, how his revered father Maximilian had said, before Christendom was rent in two, that all men might be saved by their own lights, the Turks might be saved by their prophet and even the savages of the New World might be saved by their own saviors as we are saved by Christ. Even the airy spirits and other intelligences, the Emperor imagined, might be saved by the precepts of their own religion, whatever it was.
No: they would not be saved, they were of that lucky middle kind who would not be saved or damned, for they would not be judged. Tears rose to the Emperor’s eyes.
The tower room from whose windows the Emperor looked out over the city was workroom and study and retreat. Here with his assistants (the three monks and the shaven novice now patiently watching as the Emperor contemplated) the Emperor built and rebuilt clocks, ground lenses and studied catoptrics, sat up nightlong to measure the stars’ movements. The Emperor painted here; his grandfather Charles had once startled his courtiers by stooping to pick up Titian’s dropped brush, but Rudolf learned the art himself, and worked tirelessly (and fruitlessly, he knew it) on his canvases.
He loved clocks, as all the Hapsburgs did; Charles had spent his retirement in the mountains of Spain trying to get all his clocks to chime at the same time. He loved clocks, but he didn’t believe in the time they counted.
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 (Octogesimus 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 a much better 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 there.
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 through out 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 high chamber was an eagle’s ærie; 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 Drebbel 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 Drebbel 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 o
f Trěbŏn, where stood the country house of Petr Vok Rožmberk, 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 his human form and not the form that 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.