The Astrologer (25 page)

I remember Tycho’s astonishment when he heard from the king’s envoy that he was to leave Uraniborg. It was a hard truth that none of us there wished to believe, but it was true. One must accept the truth. When news came to me that Tycho had been murdered in Prague, I could not at first believe it. It was horrible, vile news. Yet it was true.

I have gone with anatomists to witness dissections of corpses. Some men gaze upon the inner organs and hidden places beneath our skin and see a beautiful puzzle, but the dead meat and jellied guts I saw on the dissection table were obscene and horrible in my eyes. Had I some magic, I might be tempted to erase those bloody images from my memory and unlearn whatever lessons I had from them, but that would be the act of a primitive, of a cave dweller. If a man seeks the truth, he must be prepared to discover that the cosmos is both beauty and ugliness, both birth and corruption.

It took me nearly an hour to light a fire in the room upstairs at Uraniborg. I used a few blank sheets of paper I had with me for tinder and carefully stewarded the flames, feeding the stove with sticks of kindling Voltemont and Cornelius had made until the fire lived on its own and took the chair legs and other wood piled by the stove. I had time to think, time to consider what was true.

No great man is infallible. Ptolemy the Greek imagined a
cosmos centered around the Earth, with heavenly wanderers swimming about us, all rotating beneath the glorious roof of Heaven. The entire universe traced a majestic course that encircled us with the glory of God. Ptolemy believed in a universe of great beauty and complexity, and what he believed was not true.

Copernicus the Pole saw that the Earth doth move, orbiting the sun with the five planets. This was heretical speech, and indeed remains a heresy. It is the truth no priest will hear, but it is true: the sun is the center of the universe.

Our Danish hero Tycho Brahe imagined a cosmos of spectacular intricacy, with sun, moon, and planets wheeling about the Earth in eccentric spiral orbits, an inelegant and drunken dance over the face of the sky. When I first encountered Tycho’s cosmology I grew dizzy trying to picture it. There was so much motion, so many worlds spinning through Tycho’s vision, and all of it was so much fantasy.

I am not a gifted mathematician. I did not reason this out on my own. The Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic cosmologies have been explained to me by patient men with gifts far greater than any I possess. The proofs make momentary sense when they are laid out before me, and I believe them. Tycho’s cosmos was a clever and desperate argument against Copernicus, but there Tycho was a man making excuses, not a man inquiring into the truth of things. Brahe cast his gaze backward into the past, into the ages of barbarism. The greatest man I have known is also the greatest failure I have known. That is a truth.

It is also true that no great man is universally loved. Even Christ was reviled to His face by educated Jews and Romans. Is a great man still great when he is alone or hid away, or is it the worship of others which makes a man great? Is Christ our Lord if no man knows Him? Is a king without a kingdom in any meaningful sense noble? Was Tycho Brahe a great man because we worshipped him, or was he merely an egoist with deep but narrow talents and an audience? Surely his genius for observation and instrument design is undeniable. But as I
warmed my hands at the stove, I looked around and saw how his castle, intended to last centuries, crumbled into rubble after a handful of years. Brahe’s other ruin, the paper mill on the western slope of the island, had collapsed and killed my father. Tycho had been no master builder. If I believed all I heard of Tycho in my visit to the island, he was no great man at all, but an indifferent knave like so many others. If this was true, it was not a truth I desired to know. To believe this, to deny Tycho, was to deny myself.

I had loved Tycho as a second—better—father. Imperious and preoccupied as Tycho often was, I felt valuable in his house. It seemed impossible that he had not wanted me until ordered by the king to take me in. Ought I love him less for this? Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Love looks on tempests and is not shaken. Or is love truly so blind? And what of love when the beloved is unworthy of our worship?

If Tycho was not worthy of my respect and my love, if he had no loyalty to any but himself, then what did my loyalty to him mean? That great men serve unto themselves, and we lesser men serve the great only for our own reward? Is that all there is to it? Is that the sum of a man’s life? Servitude and gain without love or meaning? Is life so empty as that? Is such a life any better than death?

Night had fallen and I heard the wind blow through the ruin around me. Huddling near the stove I realized how hungry I was, not having eaten all day. The front of my skull buzzed and I could feel every tooth throb in my jaw, the way my head always ached when I had gone too long without food. I put more wood into the stove and tried to recall if there were any bread crusts or cuts of dried meat in the trunks Voltemont and Cornelius had left in the kitchen. Perhaps there was a last jar of wine.

The wind rose higher, shrieking through the cracked walls and broken ceilings. I heard and felt a tremendous crash in the rooms beneath me. I held my breath and waited for the wind to bring the building down. My father and I would both
die within Brahe’s flawed temples to his own glory, I thought, suddenly angry. Glory, worship, and death: there was no point to it. In the cold and dark of Uraniborg’s ruin, the walls and floors creaking like a ship on rough seas, I could not imagine the pattern connecting my father with my master with the king and to myself. Who is a worthy man? What man is worthy to follow and what man to be followed, who to lead and who to be led, and for whom is mere death sufficient and for whom is vengeance not enough? I did not know. Who did I serve? Who was my enemy? Who did I advantage? My friends in Copenhagen? Myself?

All was still again as the wind dropped. I rushed out of the chamber and down the spiral stairs to the kitchens, in hopes of laying my hands on whatever food and drink remained. If the castle was to collapse on me, I would at least be drunk.

My mind wheeled on as I descended the stairs. What mattered it in the least if the king died by my hand? I was no great part of the machine of history. I was a flagstone over which history rolled, ignorant almost of my own existence. I was a little man, having done nothing of import my entire life. Was killing the king important? Did he signify to me at all, or to the ghost of Tycho? Once it had seemed an imperative, the only conclusion. The syllogisms had written themselves upon my brain in letters of fire:

According to Danish law, a legal order of execution is to be made publically. Brahe’s order of execution was not so made. Ergo, the order of execution was illegal.

Further, an illegal execution is a murder, and murder is punishable by death. The king hath committed a murder. Ergo, the king’s life was forfeit.

This had been my litany since I learned of how King Christian had hired Erik Brahe, an impoverished and debt-ridden cousin of my master, to ride out to Prague and poison Tycho with a tincture of mercury. This had been my religion, my prayer, my only law. But if Tycho Brahe was no better than the king and both men were no better than I, there was nothing
to gain from revenge. Perhaps. I could not sum the figures. Christian or not Christian? Was that the question? I had thought this battle with myself won, but now I was unsure. We are all little men. The Earth doth move. None of us is center of the universe.

I came down into the kitchen and heard something moving in the dark. My hand went to my doublet, seeking Bernardo’s dagger.

“Who’s there?” I said.

“Soren?”

“Who’s there?”

A man came rushing through the black to take hold of me. For a moment I struggled, and then I realized that I was being embraced and not attacked. His arms were around me and he shook with sobs.

“My lord Christian?”

“Aye, Soren! Oh, ’tis good to know you are here.”

“My lord, you are thought lost, and presumed drowned. Where have you been?”

“I am not drowned.”

“I see that, my lord.”

Christian relaxed his embrace but kept hold of my cape. He was barely visible even when my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness.

“I rowed to the beach where the actors’ wreckage had washed ashore and then I pushed the boat out into the current. My father’s guards are not the most brilliant of men. I knew they would discover the empty boat and think me dead.”

“Why do this, my lord? It seems mad.”

“Ah. I do not trust the Swiss.”

“Nor do I, my lord.”

“Excellent. You are a man of some perception. Tomorrow you and I shall hire a boat to return us to Elsinore. We shall arrive like the Wise Men, on Christmas Day. Or, since you frown at that, we shall come like the two angels who visited Lot in Sodom.”

“I do not like that either, my lord. Let us come merely as ourselves.”

Christian released me.

“Very well. You are most difficult to please, Soren. But I have a present for you. I have forced open the door to Brahe’s library.”

So that was the noise I had heard earlier: Christian breaking into Tycho’s inner sanctum.

“It took me some time,” Christian said. He pulled something from beneath his cloak and pushed it into my hands. “Here is a memento for you that Brahe left behind. It lay beneath one of the desks.”

Even in the dark I knew the object for one of Tycho’s astrolabes, handmade by Roman craftsmen from brass and steel and beautiful in the light of day. Tycho had kept it on a shelf in the library, alongside a framed etching of Ptolemy and a small globe of the Earth. It must have been misplaced during Tycho’s hurried exodus.

The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before, but I had seen it every day during my service on Hven, displayed over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after nights spent observing the slow shifting of a planet through the heavens.

“Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this.”

“You should sell it,” he said. “There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets.”

“I shall keep it, for it has been hiding here awaiting my return,” I said. “And how long, my lord, have you been hiding here?”

“I do not hide, Soren. As I say, I am outwitting certain foreigners and opening library doors. Tell me, is there aught here to eat or drink?”

“That is the very reason I am here in the kitchen,” I said. Christian and I dug through the two large trunks. We found a stale loaf of bread, a wedge of hard cheese and half a jar of Rhenish.

“A feast,” Christian said. We carried our tiny bounty to the chamber upstairs and sat before the stove to eat and drink, mostly in silence. Christian started at every sound and twice jumped up, checking the door and window for intruders. When the bread and wine were gone the prince declared himself exhausted and lay down on the pallet against the wall. He whispered a prayer, rolled himself up in his furs, and was soon sleeping.

I no longer knew him. Perhaps I had never known him at all, seeing only a boy to be taught or a prince who was my patron, wrongly imagining him to be of some common mind with me. Perhaps every man imagines his friends and allies in much the same manner as Ptolemy or Brahe had imagined the cosmos: as systems that buttress our personal faiths. Perhaps our friends are in truth nothing like the constellations we see in our mind’s eye. The prince was a strange young man, and a stranger. Perhaps his vision of himself was no more accurate than was my vision of him. The idea brought my headache back and I tried to think on other subjects. I took the astrolabe from my cloak and held it up to my face. The intricate engraving over the climate, rete, and rule was just visible.

This astrolabe had once belonged to Tycho Brahe. The astrolabe is an ancient tool, an instrument inferior to Tycho’s great charts of the sky, to his cosmic globe, to the immense armillaries buried under the snow in Stjerneborg. Perhaps Tycho was not a great man in some respects, but he had been an unquestionable genius in the art of empirical astronomy. No other man could have imagined Tycho’s great machines. No other man could have pushed astronomy from a theoretical science to a science built upon the foundation of countless measurements of the night sky. Tycho was the sort of genius I had aspired to be. Tycho was the mark at which I aimed and failed to hit, forever.

Even while I labored and studied in Tycho’s library, even while I sat in the great man’s shadow and listened with rapt attention to his lectures on the heavens, I knew that no matter
how much I put my mind to learning the things he knew, I would ever fall far short of Tycho’s brilliance. I am intelligent enough that I recognize a gifted, exceptional man when I meet him, but I do not myself have that exceptional spark. I lack whatever capacity for genius is given to men like Copernicus and Tycho and even to that little weasel Kepler. No, it is not for me to ride in the vanguard of the intellectual elite. It is for me to scrabble beneath the tables of the elect and feed upon scraps of their philosophy that I can only half digest. This is who I am.
Ecce Soren.

I looked over at Christian, asleep on his pallet under his fine fur cape. Maybe he was dreaming of his future coronation. Christian was also a man of lacking, a man ill-suited for the path he desired above all others, yet by an accident of birth he would be the next king of Denmark. It mattered not at all how unworthy he was for that lofty estate. It occurred to me that I could bash his brains out with the astrolabe I held.

Christian, sleeping in the corner of a ruined house, was no leader of men. It was God’s will that he be born crown prince, and even if Christian had humiliated himself before all Denmark, it would make no difference, for his destiny was already written. Christian would be king after his father. What was the worth of my own paltry mind? I was no genius. Desire to be a greater man is not enough. Perhaps I could influence Christian’s rule if he would listen to me, and we two, inadequate as we were, might push the kingdom toward an enlightened age.