The Astrologer (4 page)

IT WAS NOT YET SUNDOWN WHEN THE
ODIN
REACHED the quays north of Kronberg castle. I had spent the afternoon brooding over the insult Ulfeldt had given me. That Christian had shared my manuscript without informing me was a powerful vexation. He was crown prince of Denmark and free to do as he liked, though it seemed to me no sign of friendship. I excused myself from Christian’s company after we quit Ulfeldt’s cabin, but the prince came immediately to my door when we made landfall. He wanted me at his side when we disembarked.

“The old fortress is cold during the winter,” he said. “Be ready to sleep in your furs tonight.”

“Do we not go into Elsinore? I had thought the king would commandeer the mayor’s house for this visit.”

“Nay. I think the king intends to remain in Kronberg, and all of us with him. Put on your gloves, Soren. Let us hope there are yet books in the library, else we shall have nothing to read, either.”

“It sounds most miserable, my lord.”

“Pretend you are a soldier.”

“I know nothing of being a soldier.”

“It entails a great deal of sleeping in the cold, I am given to understand. Come, we will make an adventure of it.”

He took my arm and led me topside as the ship’s crewmen busied themselves lowering sail and dropping anchor. Hawsers
were thrown and made fast to the dock. The crew extended a gangplank and the king marched off the ship, accompanied by his private guard of Swiss mercenaries, a phalanx of killers in yellow and black. They surrounded him as he surveyed the great hulk of Kronberg rising on its hill beyond the docks. A party of men hurried from the castle, scuttling over the drawbridge and across the frozen lawns to arrive breathless at the wharf, puffing clouds of steam and bowing low. Their captain addressed the king.

“Your gracious Majesty, you come hither earlier than expected.”

“You are not prepared?”

“My lord, most of the rooms have been shut up for months. We’ve not been adequately supplied nor have we suitable household staff to make of Kronberg a royal residence.”

“Yes, yes, Quartermaster. But I care not.” The king’s voice boomed across the wharf. “We are men of arms, and it pleases us that Kronberg is a fort, not a palace. Send your men ahead to light the stoves, unroll the pallets, and unlock the wine cellar. That is all we require tonight, and we will sup on whatever you have in your stores. The lion of Denmark needs no featherbed nor sweetmeats. The lion of Denmark is a warrior. There are no weaklings nor women in our war party.”

The king looked beyond the captain, up the road to the castle.

“Where is Sir Tristram?”

“Abed, my lord, by order of the surgeon.”

The king turned and bellowed up at the ship.

“Someone unload my horse! By the rood, I shall ride into my fortress in a manner fit for the returning conqueror!”

The king’s horse was a huge black beast, clad in armor plate and silks of red and white. A groom led him down the gangplank, followed by the Swiss guards’ horses. The king mounted his stallion and cantered off to the castle, the Swiss riding in formation behind him.

Prince Christian and I walked down the gangplank with the
generals and advisors. We stood about freezing and stamping our feet as the rest of the horses were unloaded. There were more men than horses, thus some of the lesser officers and I would have to walk to Kronberg. I helped Christian onto his mount and he promised to see to it that a warm room would be ready by the time I got to the castle. I smiled and bowed, doubting him, and he rode away with his father’s men.

The remaining officers formed themselves into ranks and marched off toward the castle. I pulled my fur more tightly around my shoulders and began walking after them. Soon I lagged far behind. It was shrewishly cold and the sky burned an ugly red as the sun slipped toward the horizon. The castle was not so far from the docks, but the ground was icy and my boots were not the proper sort for tramping about out of doors. Near the guardhouse on the northern bank of the moat I thought to stop and warm myself by the brazier, where some men stood talking. When I was but a few yards from them, I recognized the voice of Knud Straslund, loud, oily, and insistent.

Straslund was a year older than Prince Christian and had been known at court since childhood. He had a habit of turning up and making mischief, and he was not well regarded. Straslund’s father had tried to have him educated at the University of Copenhagen, but Knud had recently been dismissed. His grades were so poor that even the offer of doubled tuition would not outweigh the Rector’s displeasure. Now Straslund lounged at his father’s estate northwest of Elsinore, and he spent a great deal of time gambling, drabbing, drinking, and sometimes petitioning the king for a position in the government. I had no idea what Straslund’s business was at Kronberg. He appeared to be lecturing a captain of the guard on the subject of cosmology. Even at half a dozen paces, I could smell the Rhenish on his breath.

“Listen to me, Helmuth,” Straslund said. “It is the joint consent of the Platonics, Peripatetics, and Stoics, and all the noted sects of philosophers who acknowledge the divine providence, with whom agree the greatest part of our most
learned doctors of the church, that the heavens are moved by angels.”

“Indeed, sir?” The soldier looked up at the overcast sky, squinting. Helmuth was a broad-shouldered man in a thick wool cloak thrown over armor plate, and he towered by a head over Straslund. “The heavens do not seem to move at all. The stars remain fixed, to my eye.”

“With my apologies, sir, no soldier knows his cosmology,” Straslund said. “The angels abide with the heavenly bodies, and the stars themselves sing hymns to God.”

“That seems most unlikely, sir.”

“We cannot hear them, as we live in the sublunary sphere. On the Great Chain of Being, we are a great many links below the angels. Well, if you will not believe me, here is Soren. He knows a little about astronomy.”

“A little?” I said. “You know right well I studied with the most brilliant of men. Tycho was your own cousin, Knud. Do not forget.”

“Tycho was certainly industrious when it came to stargazing, I grant you that. I will not call my departed cousin brilliant, though.”

“No?”

“A brilliant man does not turn his back upon power, property, and wealth to make a common marriage with a common woman. Tycho’s common children did not inherit his lands or title. They live in common poverty and I cannot call that brilliant. Nor call I it brilliant for a man to turn his back upon his king and find himself exiled.”

Straslund had not brains enough to judge the brilliance of a dog. Were I a different sort of man, I would have struck a hard blow against his thick head.

“Tycho was not exiled. He left Denmark at the invitation of the Emperor.”

“Had he not fled to Prague, my esteemed and brilliant cousin would have found his brainy head impaled on a spear, Soren. And he would have deserved it.”

There was no point to my argument with Straslund except that I disliked him. It was true that Tycho had been exiled, after all. We had been chased from the island, and then Tycho had been murdered by a paid assassin in Prague. But it was important that I not display too great a passion over Tycho’s fate, and so I changed the subject.

“What do you here at Kronberg, Straslund?”

We faced each other over the fire. My hands, which I had been warming near the brazier, were balled into fists. I shoved them into my cloak. Straslund laughed.

“I came to see you, as it happens.”

“Indeed.”

“Aye. Come, walk with me for a moment.” He beckoned me to follow him away from Captain Helmuth and his men at the guardhouse. A wind was picking up, bringing with it the smell of the sea and a coming storm, which promised more snowfall. I joined Straslund on the flagstone lip of the moat, above the dark lapping waters.

Zealand is the largest of Denmark’s four hundred islands, and Kronberg castle was built on the easternmost point of the island, on an angle of rocky hills known as the Spit. From this castle jutting out into the sea have Danish kings long controlled the Baltic trade. Kronberg was a solid old fort, protected behind thick battlements of brick laid over earthwork, and the Spit itself was divided from the rest of Zealand by the great moat. This deep trench cut a long arc around the castle, all the way across the Spit from the northeast to the southwest where it opened into the King’s Harbor. Behind its moat, Kronberg was an island unto itself, surrounded on all sides by water. No man could touch Kronberg’s habitants from the landward side with the deep moat laying in his way, and the cannon along the battlements would sink any enemy who came by sea. From the trumpeter’s tower, a lookout could spy far out over the Sound, to the edge of the Earth on a clear day.

“Well, Straslund? What is your business with me?”

“Will you visit your father now you’ve come back?”

“You care not about my family. Let us stipulate to all the polite forms and pretend you have something of interest to say to me.”

“I have no interest in your family, it is true.” Straslund leaned close to whisper, the smell of wine and sausages billowing out of him. “But I have, of course, a particular interest in my own family.”

“Of course.”

“When my cousin Tycho fled to Prague, he left behind a large number of valuable instruments on his island.”

“They are still there?”

“They are, Soren. The king has not moved them. I thought you knew.”

“I assumed them all gone to Prague.”

“They are worth something, do you not agree?”

“They are worth a considerable amount, to the right man.”

“So. There you are, and here you are.”

“I do not understand you, Straslund.”

It was growing colder as the sun descended. The weather had worked its way into my boots and I began to shiver. Straslund took my arm and tried to pull me closer and I shook his hand away.

“You are the only man I know who can tell me the real value of Tycho’s instruments,” he said. “I suspect that you could do with some extra coin, and I am prepared to pay for your assistance in selling off these goods. How does that plan like you?”

“It likes me not,” I said. “The armillae, sextants, and quadrants on Hven all belong to the king, do they not?”

“The king will neither look for nor miss these items, my friend.”

“We are not friends, Knud. I tell you it is unwise to steal from the king. I also tell you that I am not in want of coin, especially yours.”

“I care not what you find unwise, sir.” He turned up the collar of his cloak against the rising wind. “But you ought to
consider that the Devil fell for the sin of pride, forgetting his proper place.”

Straslund turned on his heel and took a step toward the guardhouse. The flagstones along the moat were slick and Straslund’s foot skidded out from under him and he went down, sliding half over the lip of the moat. I rushed to lean down and seize his hand, but Straslund was a large man and I could barely hold him. I strained to hoist him up and he scrabbled at the stone embankment, his eyes huge with fear.

“Pull, you stupid peasant!”

I opened my hand and Straslund fell into the freezing waters, his surprised face disappearing beneath the surface. He bobbed up, gasping like a fish, and one of the men from the guardhouse shoved the butt end of a pike at him, which he caught. Two soldiers managed to wrestle him up onto solid ground.

“You let me fall,” Straslund accused, his teeth chattering.

“Nay,” I said. “I could not hold you, that is all.”

“You let me fall,” he said. “I shall see you charged with attempted murder. You men, you saw it all!” He looked up at Captain Helmuth, who only shrugged.

“Your pardon, sir. We were not looking in this direction.”

“I shall speak to the king himself about this,” Straslund said. He hurried away, crossing the drawbridge over the moat and disappearing through the portcullis on the far end.

“He hath not the king’s ear,” Helmuth said.

“I know.”

I warmed myself at the fire a few moments and then walked over the drawbridge. Before me the castle sprawled within the battlements, the keep and towers red in the sunset like stacked wood burning on immense firedogs. Lamplight flickered in the windows and smoke from the many chimneys twined upward into the gathering night. I made my way past the pickets and the guards at the gate and finally, my fingers and feet painful with the cold, I was inside the fortress.

A great bustle of activity was underway all around me as men ran to prepare rooms for the king and his merry band of
warriors and hangers-on. Servants were sent into Elsinore to raid shops for whatever food could be found that his Majesty might feast upon. Fires were lit in the great halls and kindled in the stoves of bedchambers. The place smelled of dust, mold, and saltwater. As I made my way through the frantic servants and knots of soldiers who had already found the wine stores, in search of anyone I knew and a warm place to sit by a fire, I stumbled across Straslund. He was wrapped in a dry wool cloak and drinking from a pewter cup, in conversation with Ulfeldt. Straslund and I exchanged silent looks of malevolence and I walked on, wondering if the king knew that Tycho’s astronomical machines were still out on Hven in the abandoned observatory. I had not seen the instruments in several years, but I had the sudden idea that perhaps I might restore the observatory for my own uses once King Christian was out of the way. Certainly I was not going to aid Straslund. Tycho’s armillae and quadrants ought to be used to further advance knowledge, not be sold off to collectors of automata, mechanical clocks, and other such fantastic trinkets. I should rather the whole of Denmark sank into the Sound than Straslund profit off Tycho’s murder.

In a corridor outside the great hall, the quartermaster attended to benighted generals, officers, and advisors who were all demanding keys to their chambers. Kronberg had always been more a barracks and tax office than anything else, and the quartermaster was hard pressed to answer the needs and pride of the king’s retinue. Somewhere on his list, I hoped, the quartermaster had written my name, but I would seek him later, when the generals and other impatient lords had been satisfied. Wandering along the cold stone corridor past the bickering nobility, I came to a stairwell that led up into one of the great towers. I climbed the stairs, winding around widdershins. With each step, the air in the tower grew colder. The watch on the parapet must have left the door open, I thought, letting the frigid night pour itself down into the tower.