In Kentucky once, near Christmas, Pierce and his family had gathered to listen to that radio priest, elsewhere he could already be seen on TV but not yet in that fastness, what was his name, so perfectly unctuous and shallow; Uncle Sam liked him for his jokes and his paradoxes and because he was the only one of ours on the airwaves amid all the Baptists. And that Christmas he asked them to imagine with him, to imagine Jesus, picture Him to ourselves, God becoming incarnate, on His way down to Earth, passing through all the starry waste cold and dark that lay between His home in Heaven and that womb He would inhabit, that stable in Palestine. Oh Beloved what a long long journey for our sakes.
Fulton Sheen: yes.
And Pierce for that one moment, the only one he remembered, had been held and shaken by the story that he had all his life assented to; grateful and appalled by God’s great painful goodness at Christmas.
The journey we all take, down through the spheres, gathering our human natures around us as we come; Pierce had told Val and Spofford and Rosie about it in the yard of the Faraway Lodge. But He the one father’s son who didn’t need to take it; and did anyway.
He wondered if Beau would say that He too got ensnared by the Archons and the princes of this world, as every messenger always does. Well sure, by the Pope and the Powerhouse, sure. So that He has to keep setting out, every year; every year arriving here small and bare and wailing in the dark of the sun.
Pierce turned over on the bed he had been given, which had been Rosie’s, and which smelled of her too; his ear pressed against it, he listened to the mattress’s ticks and tocks, another country down deep. What’ll I do, he asked. Oh what’ll I do.
After a time he got up. He pulled on his pants and sweater in the dark, and went out into the hall, the house silent and unstirring and his footsteps making no sound, solid old oak floors and long runners. He thought he had turned in the direction of the bathroom, but the door he opened was a stair, leading down, a light at the bottom, and he took it. It came out in the kitchen, where a light had been left on over the stove, and last night’s glasses and dishes squatted unwashed by the sink.
In the study at the end of the hall another light left burning, nobody paying attention, too much to think about. In there he had sat once with Boney Rasmussen and told him about finding the unfinished manuscript of Kraft’s last book. Maybe you should finish it, Boney had said.
Well how?
With Hermes Mercurius, Messenger and Trickster, Shepherd of men into the land of death. At the end of every age he comes to ingather the gods and heroes of that age, who won’t survive its dissolution, to his City, which will at that time come to be in the westernmost limit of his disappearing land. Come along now it’s time.
That’s how Pierce used to think he would end the book, if he were to end it, if it could be ended.
One of their number though left behind in the storm of the world. They seal him in a boat and set him afloat on the years, to be both the message and the messenger. Like Jor-El amid the vastation of Krypton, sealing his son within the capsule that will carry him into the far future and another world, to grow up not knowing his name or nature, the only one of his kind.
One time it was the man-king Hermes himself, the Thrice-great, self-interred or maybe helped into bed by his even greater progenitor, ibis-headed Theuth. Found centuries later, the Smaragdine Tablet gripped in his white hands. In a cave or something supposedly. And then there’s the Rosicrucians’ story of their founder, discovered in a tomb in a room in a cave.
Kraft should have put that stuff in. Maybe he meant to. If Pierce were writing it, he would. Set it in Prague maybe, where whatever it was that was supposed to happen was supposed to happen; where Dee and Bruno and the others were for a moment gathered.
Where Pierce this winter was to journey.
If he were to finish it, he would put that in: the depths of Rudolf’s castle, the Brotherhood gathered, all those magicians with their weird but real names, Drebbel and Bragadino and de Boodt. Oswald Kroll and his black box. Yes and in the box perhaps the.
Yes.
An actual box or trunk or chest which actually could play that part appeared just then to Pierce, a chest that had, yes indeed, survived and been carried from that very city, yes! To the New World for no good reason or maybe a real good one, yes, still freighted with its freight, maybe, which was in Pierce’s telling to be who or what? And opened when?
Now. If he, Pierce, were to finish it, it would end not then but now.
Pierce in the house where all but he were asleep sat down on the chaise longue of buttoned leather where Boney had spent his last days, and pulled over his lap the afghan that Boney had vainly tried to warm himself with.
Far down the snowy night then, above the town of Pikeville in eastern Kentucky, in the creepy Victorian mansion that the Infantine sisters had turned into a boarding school called Queen of the Angels, the Supervisor, Sister Mary Philomel, knelt before that very box, long black and beeswaxed, which in Pierce’s time had resided in the Bondieu hospital. Often in this autumn, not every night but many nights, Sister had come down the stairs at hours like this, unable to rest; had come here to listen, ear against the cold slick wood, to the sounds inside. Since the night of the Equinox when she discovered that she herself possessed the key to this box, and had gone and turned the key in the lock, she had been able to hear noises like clockwork or machinery, faint but distinct, altering in rhythm and tenor over time, and reminding Sister of the model machines she saw as a child in exhibits at the World’s Fair, which at the end of their whirrings and clankings and tickings turned out a pretend car, or a cigarette, or a breadloaf, or a cement block. And then another and another. She told no one what she had done and what she heard, bearing the secret within her like the worst sin she had ever committed, but she kept coming to this hall in the silence of the night and kneeling and listening to the sounds, and she could not deny (as she could in the busy bright day) that they were there, and changing too: moving—definitely, obviously—to their end.
So Pierce at Arcady dreamed it, afloat on Boney’s chaise longue, and so it was: so it will come to have been.
But then No no, Pierce thought, and sat upright. No not that box; not him, of course not. He is not the one to tell to the future, this present, what it needs to hear. It wasn’t he who walked across Europe bringing Ægypt into being around him, and the Ægyptians too who met him and helped him everywhere, his brothers all, though indistinguishable from their countrymen and neighbors.
Yes, Jordanus Brunus Nolanus. Who would somehow have to be got out of prison at the end of the story (Carcer), plucked from the burning to be reserved to a different fate, another tomb. The Jonah that the fish spat out, the brand to be plucked from the burning, said the angels to John Dee and Edward Kelley, when first they showed them Bruno in the glass; the stone rejected by the builders that has become the corner of the house. Our pretty rose. Our Bruin sleeping in a cave through the winter.
Yes.
By his bare feet was his bag, right where he had left it last evening; and in the bag the book called RECORD, and also (he rooted deeper) a pencil, no a pen.
Just then in the dark front hallway of Queen of the Angels School (smelling, at this time of the year, of pine branches and candle smoke) Sister Mary Philomel heard the sounds within the old carved chest come to a stop; and she knew that the heavy lid could be lifted now, if she chose to lift it, though in fact she seemed hardly to have a choice. She did lift it (see her long clean pale hands, Pierce and his cousins had marvelled at them, much older now though and the blue veins prominent, the gold wedding band sunk deep in the pronubis, Bride of Christ) and with all her strength heaved it back against the wall. Heart thudding from effort and expectation, she looked inside.
Pierce in Arcady thought: But who will be chosen in this passage time, our own? And into what box shall he or she or it be put? And in what future open her eyes?
A small ghost flitted across his peripheral vision, down a
t the end of the hall, a white child.
There was after all nothing in the chest down in Pikeville; nothing but—what? A few common nouns maybe: a cup, a key, a ball, a book.
Pierce waited and watched, guessing whom he had seen, and in a moment Sam reappeared, bare-armed in a white nightgown: sleepwalking maybe or confused. She stood in the high hall for a time, and lifted the pale curls of her hair with one hand, looking around herself as though she expected to see something that she did not see; but then she turned toward the light in the study, and walked right down and in.
“Hi.”
“Hi, Sam.”
“Are you up?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“The snow woke me up,” Sam said. She looked up at him frankly, smiling a little.
“Sam, you should be in bed,” Pierce said. “You need your sleep.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m strong, see?” She made a strongman’s arm, and Pierce took it delicately in his fingers; light as a bird’s wing, warm to his touch. “Wow,” he said. He felt salt fluid burn the orbits of his eyes, oh please no more. He thought again how easily harm could come to your children, you would never rest; and yet with Sam near him he did rest, as he hadn’t before.
“My ode house is gone,” she said.
“Yes?”
“This is my house now.”
“Oh. Good.”
“Where’s your house?”
“I don’t think I have one.”
She sat down on the chaise beside him and folded her hands in the lap of her thin gown; Pierce wondered if she shouldn’t be dressed more warmly, though she didn’t shiver; her bare feet hung down. “We should sing,” she said.
“We should?”
“Sing ‘Silent Night,’” Sam said.
“Oh Sam,” Pierce said. He knew he could not do this, could not even begin. “You sing it. Please.”
She composed herself in rapt solemnity and sang:
Silent night
Holy night
All is gone
All is bright
—and then collapsed in embarrassed giggles.
“Now you sing,” she said.
“What song.”
“Sing my favorite,” Sam said, and when Pierce didn’t respond, she said its name with both hands displayed, as though it was obvious: “‘Three Kings.’”
“Oh,” Pierce said. “Right. Sure. I knew that.”
They sang it together sitting on the chaise.
We three kings of ory and tar
Bearing gifts we travelled a far
Field and fountain moor and mountain
Following yonder star.
O Star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright
Ever leading still proceeding
Lead us with thy, to thy
Neither could quite remember the last words, it wasn’t “endless night” or “loving light” or “purple plight” but they hummed a sound that rhymed. As they sang, rays or waves of quicksilver pneuma, the spirit-stuff that enwrapped their souls, were carried out in the song or as the song, tentative and soiled (his) and pure and clear (hers); and journeyed outward, endlessly. When the song was over, they looked at each other, bass and treble, and smiled, pleased with their effort. It was not long till dawn, the twenty-second of December, 1979. When Sam was Pierce’s age, it would be ten years into a new century, no a new millennium, and the world would be as it was coming to be: it would not be the way it had all along been, nor yet what we then thought it would become. It is really, the old alchemists always said, so simple.
On the eighth day of the first February of a new century (1600), Giordano Bruno was taken from his small cell high up in the Castel St. Angelo and brought before a consistory of Cardinals and Inquisitors General at the Church of St. Agnes in Agony to hear sentence pronounced on him.
For eight years the Fathers had struggled with the man to convince him to recant the obvious heresies he was guilty of. For eight years he had variously denied he had said these things, or denied that they were heretical, and insisted on putting his case before the Pope. All that was now done; now he was pressed to his knees before the Fathers, and his sentence read. He was firstly to be “degraded,” stripped of all his priestly attributes and privileges; he would then be handed over to the Governor of Rome, who the Fathers of course prayed would have mercy on him and spare him the full rigor of the law. They also ordered all his writings to be burned in the Square of St. Peter and placed forever on the Index of Forbidden Books. And thus we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, degrade, command and ordain, we chase forth and we deliver and we pray, in this and in every other better method that we reasonably can and should.
A young German named Gaspar Schopp or Scioppius, a recent convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism of whom the Vatican was very proud, witnessed this final arraignment and what followed; and he wrote home how when Bruno had heard all this, and when he was allowed to stand, he said loudly and clearly to the gathered Cardinals that he was sure it frightened them more to pronounce this sentence than it did him to hear it.
Perhaps it did.
Bruno was taken, then, to an old fortress by Tiber-side belonging to the city, the Tor di Nona, crowds already gathering and the city news-sheets talking up the coming events. Yet again there was a postponement, ten days, the Governor falling into paralysis for no known reason or his servants unable to act; and the Pope in his chambers fought back an impulse to read Bruno’s petition, which he somehow kept stumbling on wherever he went, like a cat that brushed up against his legs; its ribbons had actually come undone as it lay on his table, and the leaves opened.
Then Time shook himself alert. At two in the morning on the eighteenth, brothers of the Headless John Society assembled at St. Ursula in the depths of night, as was their habit, and made procession to the Tor to awaken the prisoner, to “offer up the winter-prayers” and give comfort and correction, maybe even snatch the man back from the abyss at the last instant. But no, he stayed up through the night with them talking and disputing, “setting his brain and mind to a thousand errors and vaingloryings” (but what were these really? What did he say at the last?) until the Servants of Justice came to take him.
There was a little gray donkey tied up outside in the dawnlight, where the crowds were being held back by the Servants; Giordano Bruno clothed only in a white shroud emblazoned at the corners with Andrew crosses (and maybe little devils and hell flames too, some observers saw them) was led out. What is that on his head and breast? An iron brace that keeps his jaws tight shut, no more talking ever, and when his books are burned that will be that. He was mounted backward on his steed to cheers of loathing, and a tall white paper hat put on his head, a fool as well as a devil.
The crowds along the way were vast; it was a Jubilee Year, the first Jubilee Year in which the Papacy could feel sure, really sure, that it was not about to come to an end and be lost in the sudden ending of the world; all around, the city was being renewed, just as the Holy Catholic Church itself was. Fifty Cardinals from all over Christendom were assembled here, there were processions, high masses, new churches dedicated daily. The little ceremony at the square of the flower-sellers was not even the best attended.
He was stripped naked after being tied to the stake. At the inn La Vacca at the piazza’s end the guests looked out the upper-story windows. Gaspar Schopp says a cross was held out to Bruno at the last moment, but he turned away from it.
After many years had passed, the Vatican authorities would begin to claim that they hadn’t burned Giordano Bruno at the stake at all, that what was burned that day on the square was a simulacrum or effigy. As all the papers relating to the trial and the execution had disappeared into deep and unbreachable archives, those who wished to believe this could.
Something burned for sure, for a long time.
The little ass that had borne the man stood by the scaffold; after the man had been dragged from his back the ass had been for
gotten about, his rope not even tied. Jostled by those pushing forward to have a better look, and those pushing back who had seen enough, the beast kicked once, and pranced away. No one stopped him, no one noticed him. He left the Campo di Fiori (not pausing even at the unattended stalls where winter vegetables were sold, whose greens hung down temptingly) and entered the narrow streets beyond, Hatmakers’ Street, Locksmiths’ Street, Crossbow-makers’ Street, Trunk-makers’ Street, out beneath the high walls of palaces and churches, skirting the crowds that filled the Piazza Navona, finding another way, north, always north. Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind, none could catch him. Some noticed the sacred Cross on his shaggy back, the Cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, Whom one of their kind once carried; but this Cross was not the same, no not the same.
Next day a news-sheet, Avvisi, noted that “the wicked Dominican Brother from Nola we gave news of before has been burned alive in the Campo di Fiori; he said that he died willingly as a martyr, and that his soul would ascend in the smoke to Paradise. Today he knows if he was right or not.”
But he didn’t say that. He couldn’t speak. No one heard anything.
One certainty consoled me then in my darkest hour, says Lucius Apuleius the Golden Ass, that the new year was here at last, and the wildflowers would soon be coming out to color the meadows; and in the gardens the rosebuds long imprisoned in their thorny stocks would appear, and open, and breathe out their indescribable odor; and I would eat and eat, and become once again myself.
John Crowley’s THE ÆGYPT CYCLE
from The Overlook Press
“In its entirety, ‘Ægypt’ stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is as beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.”
—The Washington Post Book World