Advent (27 page)

 
‘I would spare you that grief if I could,’ he murmured, holding her close.

 
‘Would you truly, Johannes?’

 
The question surprised him. He met her look deep and unreadable as the sea. ‘Yes,’ he answered, full of reckless love. ‘I would. I would do anything for your sake.’

 
She leaned her head on his arm. ‘You will regret what you do.’

 
‘Never,’ he assured her.

 
‘Never is a long time.’

 
‘I know my heart.’

 
She smiled sadly, or came as close as a face not made for smiling could. ‘No one knows that.’

 
‘Do you doubt me?’ He was a little hurt, but it was no use expecting her to mollify him. He might as well look for sympathy from the sea along whose edge they walked.

 
‘You have said yourself that the world is changing,’ was all she answered, as she returned her gaze to the sea.

 
‘Not my heart. Not I. I still know what I have always known. But for other men, yes. Inconstancy grips the world. Even the wise no longer pay heed to my knowledge. And where the learned lead the unlearned will follow. I fear there will be no one to come after me.’

 
He would have said more, but she pressed weathered fingers against his lips. ‘That is twice you have spoken of your death,’ she said.

 
‘Kiss me, then.’

 
The stars became pinpricks of hard light, and the hiss and thump of the sea was muffled. They still stood on the dune, but now wrapped in a space that was not there or then, or anywhere or anywhen. As their lips parted, he saw her as he had first seen her, the gaunt solemnity of her face now rich with beauty. There was not a king between the utter west and the farthest east who would not have risked his throne for the chance to hear this woman call him ‘my lord’,
domine
. Giddy with bliss, he forgot his worries and drew her down to the cool sand.

 
But though her warning went out of his head, the change he felt and saw in the world was not so easily ignored.

 
Its first manifestation had been the indifference he began to meet with out of doors, an indifference sometimes bordering on disdain. When he had been an honoured doctor under the protection of the counts Palatine, petitioners had doffed their caps at his door throughout the year, and riders had brought letters from the greatest princes of Europe. Now no one came. If letters arrived, they were answers to his own prior supplications, and he dreaded reading them, because the refusals they contained were offered with something akin to contempt. Even his own patrons were unwilling to meet him publicly. His art had always been feared by the ignorant, and often treated with suspicion even by the educated and the noble, but never in the annals of magic had he read of it being ignored, let alone mocked. There were those now who openly compared it with the tricks of strollers and mountebanks, as if the living spirits of the universe, in all their myriad gradations, were no more than puppets or painted cards.

 
He did not expect the common herd to distinguish his art from the puerile dabbling of the malicious or ignorant nobodies who called themselves magicians. But when he saw that even studious men no longer had any use for the wisdom he had spent his life pursuing, it was a different matter. It was not because they thought his art unholy, or even dangerous. It was – he only grasped this slowly – because they thought it irrelevant.

 
Antique. Dead.

 
That mankind was the pinnacle of earthly creation the magus did not of course dispute, but these new philosophers made man the measure of all things. It was as if nothing existed at all except as it appeared to his eye and was subject to his hand. All the subtler presences of the world, invisible and intangible, had no meaning for them at all. To their way of thinking, magic was not a sin, not a thing to be feared, or even doubted. It was merely unnecessary.

 
Insidious as these opinions were, he might have dismissed them as simply another case of the usual folly of the world, were it not for the details that were circulating about Copernik’s work.

 
The deranged theories of this one obscure canon in his faraway town at the mouth of the Vistula possessed the magus with a diseased fascination. He could not ignore them. The more he acquainted himself with them, the more he saw in Copernik’s single annihilating idea an epitome of the whole cancerous philosophy of the age.

 
He knew, needless to say, that Copernik was wrong. He knew it the same way he knew that spring followed winter, that water flowed downwards. For decades he had been perfectly familiar with the several virtues of the fixed and the wandering stars. Seated in his observatory on a clear night, he could read their motions as easily as others might read a handbill, and while he worked in his laboratory, he mapped the auspicious or baleful influences they shed as they circled the mortal sphere. And yet! And yet he could not deny that Copernik’s dreadful system corresponded in every particular to every motion that the mere eye observed. It dogged him like a recurring nightmare, that vision of the universe reduced to timbers and nails in a shipwright’s barn, a thousand disassembled dead fragments of the beautiful vessel whose parts they were. Everywhere around him honest men, men whose diligence and intelligence he acknowledged, shared the same vision. Their universe was a place not of creation but of manufacture, as if God were only a cunning architect, and wisdom consisted in deciphering the ingenious procedures by which His world had been mortared together. In the long light evenings, when noise from the streets carried inside the house, a reminder of how the indifferent city pursued its business outside his doors, he sometimes found himself looking at the codex open on his table and seeing only an inert heap of brittle vellum that would fray into dust after he was gone, the wisdom of ages decayed to inky rubbish.

 
As midsummer passed, he tried to tell her more explicitly of his doubts and fears. The more he spoke of it, the more an unfamiliar melancholy began to take hold in his thoughts, as if he was no longer sure of what he knew to be true. She listened patiently, as always, but he began to feel he was throwing his words away.

 
One day he asked her to be silent and listen until he had finished speaking, and then he told her all he knew of Copernik’s hypothesis. She listened as she always did, solemnly and without looking away; he sometimes felt that she never blinked.

 
When he had finished, a sick dizziness came over him, as if he were trying to balance on Copernik’s spinning top. He knew the order of creation, sphere within sphere, the Earth at its still centre, and yet in his thoughts he could see the system of Copernik laid out like the mechanism of a giant clock, each part perfectly fitted, flawless. His understanding had split in two. He had no hold on himself: each half stared across an abyss at the other.

 
‘But which is true?’ he cried out, welling up with childish tears. ‘Which is true? Why will you not tell me the truth?’

 
She held his head between her hands. Her expression was mute grief, as if there was something she wanted to say but could not: a pitying look. It was the first time he had seen weakness in her face.

 
‘Is that what you want?’ she asked, when he was quieter. ‘To know the truth?’

 
When he thought back on that question the next day he was ashamed. It pained him to remember begging her, who called him
domine
, to settle the disputes of the clerks as if she were Holy Paul in Rome. There was a lingering humiliation in having been comforted by those knuckly hands.

 
For the first time in a number of months he turned to work as a distraction and a relief. It occurred to him how far he had neglected his studies since the spring, and he found a guilty pleasure in returning his attention indoors, where she did not come. When they did meet again, he was careful not to refer to the subject that had troubled him.

 
It was some weeks later, and he had assumed his aberration was forgotten, when – most uncharacteristically, and out of nowhere – she put the same question to him again: ‘Johannes, can you bear to know the truth?’

 
It was a startlingly unpleasant surprise. They were walking, peacefully until that moment, by a musty riverbank on a warm afternoon. The magus’s mood soured at once.

 
‘I am
magister
,’ he answered loftily, after a pause. ‘A teacher. It is not for my own sake that I dedicated my life to knowledge. If I do not seek truth, who will? I cannot let the whole world suffocate in ignorance.’

 
‘The end you fear,’ she said, ‘is coming.’ She was quivering slightly despite the summer heat.

 
He looked at her in astonishment. Who was she to speak to him of fear? Unwanted, accompanied by a prickle of shame, the memory of having cried in her arms like a boy with night-terror came to him again.

 
‘I am not afraid,’ he said.

 
‘My gift is going from me.’ She seemed not to have heard him. Her voice sounded strained, as if she were ill, or unbearably tired. She stumbled in the lank grass and would have fallen if the magus had not caught her shoulders. ‘Johannes.’

 
‘
Carissima
.’ He was amazed by how frail she felt. Her head bowed against his chest and a deep shudder ran through her, so violent that the magus instinctively looked up to see whether a sea wind was stirring the tops of the alders, or a cloud had blown across the sun.

 
‘I have carried this burden so long. For so long. I am tired.’

 
Puzzled, he smiled an uncertain smile. ‘Then let me give you ease.’

 
‘You alone did not turn away from me,’ she whispered. ‘You stayed to hear.’

 
He had never known her in this mood before. Usually so self-possessed, she seemed – he scarcely believed it – afraid. It softened him. His pride could not support the idea of receiving comfort from her, but now it was his turn to give it instead his truculence melted away.

 
‘I love you,’ he told her, for (though he did not know it) the last time.

 
‘You are still free to choose.’ Her eyes seemed to search inside his, pursuing some certainty that slipped away like an otter in the riverbank. ‘Men and women are always free. Will you take my burden from me, Johannes? Can you bear the truth?’

 
He looked down at her, speechless.

 
‘It is a terrible thing to give,’ she went on. The afternoon glowed around them and the sluggish water passed by, thick with drowned pollen, insects crowding above it like flakes of dust in low sunlight. The day seemed altogether ordinary and yet the magus was beginning to suspect that something extraordinary was about to happen, that he was about to find out why she had come to him, across the ages, a living miracle. ‘I have tried not to speak of it. I have tried, Johannes. Words sting me and I stop my mouth. But I knew as soon as you came to me. I knew, though I fear for you.’

 
He held her shoulders gently, coaxing. He was sure the answer to all the questions she had shied away from was near the surface now, coming up into the light. ‘What is it that you knew?’

 
She hooked her hands over his arms. ‘All that time I have known. All that time I have waited for you. Waited, waited. A long road, Johannes.’ She was unburdening herself of words as if they were stones round her neck. His heart beat hard as he stood ready to catch her.

 
‘I am here now. Let me comfort you.’

 
‘Is this what you truly wish? To bear the burden? To know truth?’

 
He could hardly believe what he was hearing and yet the meaning of it rushed up towards him, into the clear open air. Her burden. The truth. It was the very meaning of her ill-fated name: it was proverbial.

 
Prophecy.

 
He watched in mounting wonder as she unfolded her hands from his arms and clasped them together.

 
There was a ring she always wore. He had barely noticed it before, even when their fingers were knotted together in passion. It was merely a pauper’s ring. Plain, oak-brown, unadorned. A beggar’s ornament. Now she was slipping it from the index finger of her left hand.