Advent (9 page)

 
Who’d heard the voice out in the dark; surely she had. Miss Grey’s voice, telling him to go in.

 
He needed more light. His hands were shaking slightly as he took a thick log, scabbed with dry lichen, from the box beside the fireplace and dropped it onto the embers. He needed more food too, but suddenly the thought of pushing through the curtain to leave the room was more than he could face. He lowered himself back into the chair and pulled down a thick blanket that had been draped over its back. He would sit and wait for Auntie Gwen. He’d ignore the books, the papers, the treasured memories. He’d ignore his hunger. She couldn’t be much longer.

 
Exhaustion caught up with him very quickly. He was asleep before the new log began to burn. He shifted when the cat decided to occupy the space between his curled-up legs and the arm of the chair, but didn’t wake. He slept through the chiming of the clock and the rising of the wind. The rain didn’t disturb him; it began gently, and as it grew steady and persistent, its thrumming on the windows blended smoothly with the popping of the fire.

 
What woke him was the cat abruptly leaping off his lap. For a few bewildered seconds he had no idea where he was. Then the clock struck twelve, and just as it finished there was a violent hammering at the door.

Five

A December day 1537

From the highest
window of the tallest house in the Jeruzalemstraat, the greatest magus in the world surveyed the city’s steaming chimneys and stinking thoroughfares. All of it lay below the level of his eye, all but the church pinnacles and spires. They pointed up from the rabble and filth below, towards heaven.

 
The uppermost room of his house was his observatory. Ordinarily he would not have unlocked it during the day. Ordinarily he had no interest in examining the mundane panorama spread out beneath him. He came here on clear nights to watch the stars.

 
It was mid-morning, many hours before the sun would descend and unveil them, and with ominous swags of cloud piling in from the sea, it was unlikely the upper sky would be visible even then. No matter. By dark he expected to be abroad and on his way. This was not an ordinary day. He had ascended to the observatory only to take a last view of the city.

 
By dark he expected to have left other things behind him too. He gazed at the lofty white tower of the Vrouwekerk, symmetrical, harmonious, pure, a chorale in stone, and felt himself ascending with it, leaving the streets and canals and dwellings and people far beneath.

 
An uneasy thought intruded on his contemplations. Its burden was another farewell, one he very much wanted to avoid.

 
Best, then, to set to work, without delay.

 
He locked his observatory for the last time and went down through the house to the cellar. Glancing over his shoulder – since the autumn the suspicious reflex had become his unconscious habit whenever he entered his laboratory – he opened a room crowded with stoppered jars and chained volumes and caskets and boxes and dishes of magnificently bewildering variety.

 
Near the middle of the room was one large table, scratched and singed. In contrast to the racks and shelves around the walls, profuse with containers almost as rich and rare as the materials they stored, the table presented a scene of ascetic simplicity. A pentagram had been marked out on its surface in something that looked like chalk, though in no other way did it bear any resemblance to the humble substance of earth. At each of the diagram’s five points was an unlit taper in a plain pewter stick. In its enclosed centre lay a hand mirror, its palm’s width of coated glass reflecting the beams of the low ceiling. The table was otherwise bare.

 
The magus took a candle from the wall, peered once more up the stairs against imaginary intruders and then entered the laboratory, bolting the door behind him.

 
As always over these last three months his glance strayed first towards a wooden box with a silver clasp, sharing a shelf with a crowd of flasks and cases.

 
No visitor would have singled out this one box as being any more interesting than the scores of others spread around the magus’s laboratory. It was far less rich and fine than the silver bowls with their lids of ebony, or the ivory caskets whose sides had been carved so that beasts seemed to chase each other around them, or the porcelain hexagons glazed in peacock colours with orient script. In fact, should the visitor have for some idle reason considered showing an interest in this box, they would have found that without realising it their attention had slipped elsewhere, for among the many, many enchantments the magus had used in its making was one that had the virtue of evading thought, of retiring unnoticed to the back of the mind. And should the visitor not be an honest visitor at all but a thief who had somehow learned of the existence of this particular box and what lay within it, and had strength of intention enough to overcome the enchantment and keep his mind steadily bent to the task of opening it (as, after a long pause, the magus was now doing), they would lift the clasp, look inside and see . . . nothing. For the pouch inside was warded not only from earth, air, water, fire, spirits, scrying and thought, but also from sight. Only a greater magus than Master John Fiste (as from now on he had determined to call himself) would have been able to see by a light brighter and purer than the light of the eyes and so look past his wards, and Master John Fiste was the greatest magus in the world.

 
He withdrew a plain brown ring from the pouch, holding it thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. Memories overwhelmed him.

 
For an instant an unexpected expression crossed his face. A painter might have borrowed it to portray a defeated emperor, one who had seen his whole kingdom lost.

 
He laid the ring on the table and crossed the room. Extracting a key from a pouch looped to his jerkin, he unlocked a long, low chest and drew out his staff, a length of wood almost as thick as his wrist, marked with sigils.

 
Thus armed, he knelt and prayed.

 
It was his custom to spend some minutes in devotion before he set to work. Ordinarily he offered thanks for the glimpses of the living universe that had been allowed him, praising the great Author by whose generative spirit the world was inhabited, sustained and moved. What was magic after all, he would remind himself at these times, but the commerce and the interchange between mankind and the rest of the living creation? It was a simple truth, though many thought it occult: the world was alive, a body filled with spirit like Adam himself. In ancient days those who understood this were acknowledged and revered as the holiest of men, prophets and hierophants. He gave thanks that he had been permitted to achieve such a station.

 
Though it hardly seemed like a blessing, in these fallen times. Now, those who called themselves pious looked askance at him. The magus pressed his lips tight as he knelt. He lived in a degraded age, a pygmy age. The new heresy preached that God’s creation and everything in it was fallen and corrupt. Everywhere people flocked to its banner. Educated men weighed and measured the world around them like the new anatomists, who thought they could explain human life by slicing open corpses and prodding the empty flesh. The clerk of Frombork studied the gleaming volume of the heavens and determined that the Earth itself, the whole sphere of God’s substantial creation, was a vast ball of dead rock spinning madly like a child’s top, hurtling through oceans of emptiness. Amid this dark theatre where ignorance masqueraded as philosophy, the magus felt himself utterly alone, blowing on the last fading embers of knowledge in the hope that some future day the fire might blaze up again. He had students once, but they were gone. Mankind had turned its back on him.

 
Well, then. He was ready to turn his back on them.

 
His eyes opened and twitched towards the ring. The greatest gift in the history of the world had come into his possession (that was how he put it to himself, ‘had come into his possession’, while he meant to pray, though on this morning his heart and mouth were equally empty of devotion) and he would safeguard it and, through it, himself. For ever.

 
If he died, the gift and his art (which were, after all, one and the same) might be lost to the world. Mankind would forget that the universe was alive. No one would hear the echoes of the divine word that had spoken it into being. Adam’s descendants would eat dust and ashes.

 
Therefore he had decided he would not die.

 
It was indeed not an ordinary day. He was on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life, a magic that had not been done since the world’s long-departed golden age. He ought to have been exalted by wonder and reverent awe, but instead the thing he was trying not to remember, the farewell he so desired to avoid, nagged at his meditations, urging him to hurry, to seal the bargain and then be away, across the sea to England, where he could begin a new life.

 
He opened his eyes to check the ring again, as though it might have been removed while he prayed. It lay on the table still: a gift, a burden.

 
Prayer forgotten, he rose slowly to his feet.

 
He picked up his staff and, with a motion swift and imperious as a swordsman executing a salute, raised it high and traced a circle in the air. He spoke three words and then rapped the floor with its heel.

 
For a second the cellar room was flooded with a fiery light. It had no source, but seemed to stir with a restless motion of its own. Indistinct faces with lidless and pupilless eyes, smooth lips silently moving, flowed among it and then vanished, though strange reflections continued to flicker around the room: the curve of a silver bowl for a moment became a coppery cheek, the glass of a bottle caught the image of a stony gaze.

 
He gripped the staff tightly in his left hand. The feel of the familiar instrument of his authority went some way to refreshing his wavering confidence. The business was begun. Now he could show no weakness, no hesitation at all, or he might be lost for ever.

 
‘Spirit!’ he called, in a strong voice.

 
The answer was a faint, directionless whisper in the air and a red-orange gleam, as if the light of a smoky sunset had fallen into the windowless room.

 
‘I require something of you. Remember your promise of service, as I come before you!’

 
He dared say no more. Always command, never entreat: it was the first rule, learned long ago, when he had begun to conjure with the inferior spirits. He steeled himself, remembering his mastery, and reached with his right hand for the ring.

 
It would only fit on the small finger. He eased it on, felt for its power and opened the passage wide.

 
Flame surrounded him. He stood in a livid column, licking and streaming upwards, thronged with faces. The fire swam with them, mask-like faces, empty, interchangeable, implacably dire. They dissolved and reappeared among tongues of orange and crimson too fast for the eye to catch. When the fire spoke, its voice was like a consort of many voices united, but all of them dry and thin and very far away, whispers of pages turning.

 
‘Welcome, Magister. Are we paid at last?’

 
The magus reeled with surprise and sudden fear. He groped for an answer. Each instant of silence sounded like a weakness he could not admit.

 
‘Your promise was to serve, willingly.’ He held the staff tight, his hands sweating. ‘I have not released you. I do not choose to release you now.’

 
‘We serve.’ There was something in its rustling chorus that always sounded like mockery. Its unexpected question had surely been meant to unsettle him. He steadied his resolve, growing angry.

 
‘You will obey me now as you have before. You will not speak of payment. Nothing is owed.’

 
‘Nothing, Magister.’

 
‘Your bond is to serve, even until the last extremity. Is it not so?’

 
‘It is so. Has the last come?’

 
‘No.’ The magus shuddered involuntarily. The ring seemed to burn with cold fire round his finger. ‘No.’

 
‘What do you require?’