—They think that if a man seeks treasure he wants only coin to spend, he went on. There are other treasures. There is knowledge. There are lawful means to learn where treasure lies, true treasure.
The second offense, the justice had told him, got not the pillory but death . . . How had that evil story come out of his mouth, and not the story he had started out to tell? For a moment he could think of nothing else. He watched Doctor Dee trace down the letters of the page to which his book was opened. He picked up the cup of wine he had been given but hadn’t touched, and drank.
—A spirit led me to that book, he said. It was in old Glastonbury that I found it.
Doctor Dee’s stylus stopped on the page, and he looked up again at Talbot.
—In Glastonbury?
Mr. Talbot nodded, and drank again, and though his heart had begun to tick quick and hard he blinked slowly and calmly at Doctor Dee’s stare.
—Yes, he said. In a monk’s grave at Glastonbury. A spirit that I knew spoke to me, and told me; told me where to dig . . .
—Did you dig? At Glastonbury?
—Only a little.
Surprised by the old man’s fierce response, he began to spin out a circumstantial tale that hid more than it told. The part about Glastonbury was anyway the part he knew he would find it hardest to tell, though the spirit that had been repeating the story over and over to him was quite insistent about it. All that Mr. Talbot really wanted to tell, what was in his mouth to tell and confusing anything else that passed through it, was the end of the story: the meaning: the fact that he had been vouchsafed the book (and a stone jar too, a stone jar full of powder whose use he guessed at, that he had in his pocket) just so it could be given to this man, brought here on this night and offered to him. He knew it to be so.
But he could not say so. A kind of shyness came over him, and with the story not told at all he could suddenly say nothing more.
—No no no, said Mr. Clerkson. He means only that he brought it for you. A gift. Found in that holy place.
He dared put out his hand and push the book an inch closer to where the doctor sat.
—My thanks, then, said Doctor Dee. If it be a gift.
—What Mr. Talbot desired, Clerkson said, was to learn somewhat from your worship in spiritual practice. As he has said often to me he knows himself to be apt in it. He . . .
Without looking away from Doctor Dee, Mr. Talbot spoke to him:
—I have no need of you to interpret me.
—Mr. Clerkson, said Doctor Dee, rising. Will you go with me? There are the volumes you asked after, in the next room. I would speak to you a moment.
Clerkson, still smiling, went with the doctor, passing back to his friend only a quizzical look that might mean anything. Mr. Talbot took the curved forelimbs of the chair he sat in in his long hands, and felt their smooth solidity. He looked about him at the place he had come to: at the books rising to the ceilings on swaybacked shelves, piled in corners and on tables in unsteady columns; at the optical instruments and the globes and the great hourglass, which just now wore a velvet hat of Doctor Dee’s. He took breath hugely, and rested his head on the chair’s back. He was where he had wanted to be, and he could stay.
Doctor Dee came back alone. Mr. Talbot felt his round-eyed gaze, felt its warmth like the warmth of the sea-coal fire burning in the grate. The doctor closed the door behind him – Mr. Talbot heard it latch – then he went to a cabinet, and took from it a velvet bag, whose drawstring he loosed. He let fall from it into his hand a sphere of crystal the color of moleskin, pure as a tiny planet or a ball of gray evening, and held it up fo Mr. Talbot to see.
—Have you looked into a glass before? he asked.
Mr. Talbot shook his head.
—A boy I know, said Doctor Dee, saw somewhat in this stone. He was a player, and perhaps he lied to me, but he said that there are creatures who are answerable to this stone, only it was not he to whom they would speak; that he to whom the stone belonged was to come later.
He took a metal frame, like a claw, and set the stone within it.
—Perhaps, he said, if you look, you will see the face of that one who led you to the book.
He could not have spoken more gently, more meekly; yet Mr. Talbot heard or chose to hear a command: Come, look into this glass. And hearing a command, a command that would brook no denial, he chose to think that all which would come of his going now to look into it, to kneel before it and look, was not his fault but the fault of him who with a long white hand showed him the glass in its frame: and of those who beckoned to him already from within it.
He had not known that he was groaning aloud.
When Doctor Dee took his shoulder, everything in the glass – the ship, the child, the powers, the depths – closed up one after another as though he hurtled backward away from them through curtains rapidly drawn: backward through the window, through the showstone in the armed child’s hand, through the row of strong young men in green whose names all began with A (seeming startled and windblown just for a moment, looking on one another, before a hand – it was the skryer’s own – drew a bright curtain over them and they too were gone), and he fell backward into the upper chamber at Mortlake and the night: the real globe of smoky quartz came into view, and his own hand before it was the curtain drawn over it; he was groaning, and Doctor Dee was helping him to his feet and to a chair.
Doctor Dee looked down upon him as he might upon some rare and strange creature whom he had just captured, or just released.
—I felt faint, Mr. Talbot said. Just for that moment.
—Was there anything more spoken to you, Doctor Dee said, gently but urgently. Was there anything more said.
For a long moment Mr. Talbot said nothing, feeling his heart return into his bosom. When he had had time to think what he should say, what it would be best to say (he could not remember if anything had been spoken to him) he said:
—There will be help given here. There will not be any answer withheld from you. They promised that to me. I’m sure of it.
—Now God his grace to us be praised, said Doctor Dee almost under his breath. Given sight in chrystallo. I have written it all down.
A warming shudder covered Mr. Talbot head to toe; he turned his eyes to the stone in its frame on the table, so far from him now, so small, the stone in which there were depths like the depths inside himself. Annael Annachor Anilos Agobel. If he opened his mouth now the names of a hundred more, a hundred thousand more, would come trooping out.
He opened his mouth, a huge yawn filled him up, stretching his jaws and crossing his eyes. He laughed, and Doctor Dee laughed too, as at a child overtaken with weariness.
When he had been given some supper, and put exhausted to bed upstairs, and Clerkson had been sent home with his gift of books, Doctor Dee wiped and put on his spectacles, and trimmed his lamp, and sat again before the book that Mr. Talbot had brought.
He knew a dozen codes, some of them of as great antiquity as this book appeared to be. He read several of the old secret monkish manuscript hands; he knew the oghams of old Wales. His friend the great magician Cardanus used the trellis code: a page of writing to be read down the first line of letters and up the next and down the next, revealing the true message hidden in a false message read in the usual way, in lines left to right: it seemed to Doctor Dee a childish trick, and easily broken.
All codes, all that he had been presented with, could in the end be broken. There was only one kind that could never be: a kind of code he had conceived of while studying the great book of Abbot Trithemius, the Steganographia, which Christopher Plantin had found for him in Antwerp long ago. A code impossible to break was one which did not transpose letters into other letters or into numbers, did not transpose words or sentences into other words or sentences, but which transposed one kind of thing – the thing to be secretly spoken of – into another kind of thing entirely. Translate your intentions into a speaking bird, and let the bird speak of your intentions; encode yo
ur message in a book on automata, and the automaton when built will trace the message with a clockwork hand. Write (it was what Abbot Trithemius had done) a book on how to call down angels, and if you do so correctly, you will instruct the angels how to write the Abbot’s book themselves, in a tongue of their own, which when used will translate into works, miracles, sciences, peace on earth.
In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock phrases in various languages, which would be substituted for the key words of the secret message. The word ‘bad’ could be enciphered by ‘Pallas is blessed of charm’ or ‘You are admired of women, Astarte,’ or ‘A god of grace enthroned.’ If the same phrase were in Greek, it meant a different thing: ‘crown’ perhaps, or ‘stealthily.’ Whole fictions could be constructed out of these phrases, they were designed to fit together with standard couplings to yield long tedious and half-intelligible allegorical fantasies that actually meant something brief and fatal: The Duke dies at midnight. In fact the great trouble of the method was that the encoding was always so much longer than the message.
Late at night, unraveling such a one, Doctor Dee would sometimes think: All creation is a huge, ornate, imaginary, and unintended fiction; if it could be deciphered it would yield a single shocking word.
This night, with this book, he began with the first page, trying to find a simple anagram for these barbaric dense marks. He found none. He used the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, translated these into numbers, arranged the numbers as a horoscope of zodiacal signs and houses; the horoscope he translated into days and hours, and these numbers into letters in Greek. The wind died down; the moon set behind gathered clouds. In one of the one hundred and fifty cipher alphabets the Welsh bards knew, different trees stood for the letters; in another, different birds; in another, famous castles. A black rook calls to the nightingale in the hawthorn tree below the fortress of Seolae. It began to rain. Doctor Dee tossed into the fire each fruitless line of inquiry as it turned to nonsense. Dawn came; Doctor Dee wrote out in his scribble hand (he had four different hands he wrote in, besides a mirror hand) one meaning for the first line of Mr. Talbot’s book:
IF EVER SOM POWR WITH 3 WISHES TO GRANT
Which made little sense to him. But if he went backward – backward through the forest where the rooks called in the hawthorns along the track below the fortress, backward through the ogham and the Greek and the stars and the letters and the numbers – the same line could be read this way:
THERE WERE ANGELS IN ye GLAS
246 MANY OF THEM
and that made his heart pause for an instant, and fill again with a richer blood.
There were angels in the glass; his wish was to be granted.
He rose from his stool; gray morning almost not distinguishable from night filled the mullioned windows.
He knew, knew for certain, that he stood poised on this night at the beginning of a huge enterprise, one that he was not entirely sure he had the strength for, one that would not end with his own death, but still would require his lifelong aid for its completion; and at the same time he knew that in another sense, another deciphering, he was plumb in the middle. He blew out the lamp, and went up to bed.
FOUR
‘Egypt,’ Julie Rosengarten said dreamily.
‘Egypt,’ Pierce said. ‘The riddle of the Sphinx. Pyramid power.’
‘Tarot.’
‘The speaking statue of Memnon.’
‘Eternal life,’ said Julie.
‘Only that country isn’t Egypt,’ Pierce said. ‘Not Egypt but this country, like this.’ With a felt-tipped pen he wrote it out on the napkin brought with his whiskey:
ÆGYPT
‘I remember this,’ Julie said, looking down at this glyph. ‘I sort of remember this.’
‘It’s the story I want to tell,’ Pierce said. ‘A story I somehow stumbled into when I was a kid, when almost everyone else had forgotten it; a story that’s just coming to light again – an amazing story. And it’s got a great twist to it, too.’
‘I sort of remember,’ Julie said.
‘Anyway it’s one story,’ Pierce said. ‘If this were a novel it would be the “frame story,” isn’t that what they call it, but it would have an even bigger story inside it. About history. About truth.’
Julie bent over the typed pages of his proposal, reading it or rather scanning it symbolically. Her freckled and vacation-browned breasts went white farther within the bodice of her summer dress; her hair had gone dark-honey color. ‘“Where are the four corners of the earth?”’ she read. ‘“What is the music of the spheres, and how is it made? Why do people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes?”’ She lifted her eyes to him, they too had gone light and honeylike. ‘Weren’t you going with a Gypsy for a while? How did that work out?’
‘Part Gypsy. For a while.’ Hey, why do people say four corners of the earth, Pierce, how can a ball have corners? Why do people say they’re in seventh heaven, what’s wrong with the other six? Why are there seven days in a week, and not six or nine? Why is that, Pierce? ‘It didn’t work out.’
Julie lowered her eyes again to the papers.
They had embraced, Julie and he, tightly, at the door of the restaurant, both arriving there at the same moment, nearly colliding in fact. There was a cold stone in Pierce’s breast, there had been one all morning, for he remembered the finality, even cruelty, of his last words to her in person. They hadn’t seemed to sink in, back then; and they had not apparently persisted in her breast as they had in his. One advantage, maybe, of a real belief in Fate is that it takes the sting out of all past hurts, errors, shames; all that has been. Going through changes: that was as much as Julie would admit to having been doing, and all she would ever charge others with. A kind of new old purblind politeness that was weirdly endearing. Pierce drank of his whiskey deeply.
‘See,’ he said, ‘when I was a kid I thought or imagined that there was a country – Ægypt – which was like Egypt but different from it, underlying it or sort of superimposed on it. It was a real place to me, as real as America . . .’
‘Oh right,’ Julie said. ‘Gypsies.’
‘You remember,’ Pierce said. ‘You were there. You were my guide, some ways.’
‘God we used to talk.’
‘And the “frame story,”’ Pierce said. ‘It’s about my country; how I came to find out that it wasn’t me who made it up really at all; how that country came to be. Ægypt.’ He touched the word he had written. ‘Because I did find out. I did.’
She put down the proposal, to give all her attention to him, and rested her cheek in a dimpled hand.
It was in the spring after Julie Rosengarten left him, first for the West Side and then for the Coast and Mexico not to be seen again for years – a spring somehow flavored differently from any spring before it or since – that Pierce picked up Fellowes Kraft’s little life of Bruno, and began to read it from the first page, as he had not done in more than twenty years . . .
‘Remind me again,’ Julie asked him, ‘who Bruno was.’
‘Giordano Bruno,’ Pierce answered, crossing his hands on the placemat before him, which showed scenes of Italy, the dome of Peter’s, the tower at Pisa. ‘Giordano Bruno, 1546 to 1600. The first thinker of modern times, really, to postulate infinite space as a physical reality. He thought that not only was the sun in the center of the solar system, but that other stars were suns too, and also had planets going around them, as far and far farther than the eye could see – infinitely, in fact; infinitely.’
‘Huh.’
‘He was burned at the stake as a heretic,’ Pierce said, ‘and since he had promoted the new Copernican picture of the heavens he’s always been regarded as a martyr to science, a precursor of Galileo, a sort of speculative astronomer. But what he really was, was something much stranger. The universe he saw wasn’t the one we see. For one thing, he thought that all those infinite stars and planets were alive: animals, he calls them. And they
went around in their circles because they wanted to. Anyway . . .’
Anyway Kraft’s book had proved to be on the whole pretty ordinary, all taken from secondary sources fleshed out with a tourist’s impressions of the scenes of Bruno’s frantic life: the monastery in Naples from which he fled, the universities and courts he haunted, looking for patronage, Venice where he was arrested, Rome where he died. The couple of hundred pages had neither the exactness of fiction nor the vividness of history. But midway through it Kraft divulged, or stumbled across in passing, or handed out without quite saying so, the key not only to Bruno but to the mystery Pierce pursued.
What was it, Kraft was wondering, that compelled Bruno and Bruno alone to break out of the closed world of Aquinas and Dante, and find an infinite universe outside? It could not (Kraft thought) have been the discovery of Copernicus alone, for Copernicus posited no such frightening thing as infinite space populated infinitely; his sun-centered world was still bounded, as bounded by a sphere of fixed stars as Aristotle’s had been. Bruno always insisted that Copernicus hadn’t understood his own discoveries.
No (Kraft wrote), the impulse must have come from elsewhere. Where? Well, Bruno seems to have looked into almost every book extant in his century, though certainly he didn’t finish all the ones he opened. He was versed in the most esoteric of studies. He sought regeneration for himself and his church at the ancientest and most hidden of wells. Could he not have found a way out of the crystal spheres of Aristotle in the teachings of old Hermes the Thrice-great?
Pierce read this, and stopped. Hermes? Was this the same Thrice-great Hermes that Milton outwatch’d the Bear with? Wasn’t he a mythical sage of some kind in classical literature? Pierce had no clear memory. What teachings were these?
Hermes teaches (Kraft went on) that the seven spheres of the stars enclose the soul of man like a prison, his heimarmene, his Fate. But man is a brother to those strong dæmons who rule the spheres; he is a power like them, though he has forgotten this. There is a means, great Hermes says, to ascend up through those seven, unfooled by their angry shows of resistance, passing each one by means of a secret word which they cannot refuse; exacting, in fact, from each of them a gift, the gift of arising to the next sphere; until, at last, in the eighth sphere, the ogdoadic sphere, the released soul perceives Infinity and sings hymns of praise to God.