The Astrologer (6 page)

“Peace, Soren. Do you want to wear my gloves as well as your own?”

“Nay”

“Then accept that it is cold. Look you, here is Elsinore.”

We had got to the top of the rampart on the western side of the castle. Below us, beyond the moat and past a field that had been cleared of trees during my childhood, was the town where I had been born. Raised in the shadow of Kronberg, I had seen the fort thousands of times in all seasons, lights, and weather, but I had never stood on the castle walls and looked down upon Elsinore. Despite myself I thought it a fine view: the houses, mercantiles and offices gathered behind the walls in neat rows along the harbor, the spire of the basilica rising at the northeast corner of the town, Lake Elsinore and the wilderness
beyond, where thick stands of trees encircled the city walls and protected the inhabitants against intellectual and philosophical advances. A few lights shone in windows, and in the harbor the furled sails of ships glowed ghostly white. It was quite a lovely scene, as Torstensson had promised. Though I could well enough see the neighborhood, I could not make out my father’s house from so far in the night.

“Fritz,” I said. “Do you know what a telescope is?”

“Some Greek potion?”

“Nay, it is an optical device that allows a man to see far into the distance. They are a Dutch invention, though doubtless a Dane could build a better one.”

“You would look at your stars with one?”

“Nay, the stars are finite in number and seen well enough on a clear night. I should look at the planets instead. They are closer than the stars, larger, and certainly they would prove of more interest to the investigating eye. Ah, to gaze clearly upon the features of the moon!”

“I should rather see the faces on coins, Soren. Whose face will be on our money when there is a new king, do you think? Young Christian?”

“Faith, I know not.”

“I should not wish the throne upon him,” Torstensson said. “He believes that to rule is to sit handsomely on a horse and wear fine armor. Being king is not always valor and glory, Soren. Being king is trade and treaties, fishing disputes with England, taxes on ships and sheep and wool and wheat, or petty arguments between owners of orchards and owners of granaries. Or perhaps I should say that being king is to concern oneself with displaying the right breed of courtesy to the right breed of courtier.”

“I do not think my friend Christian would enjoy this. He could well refuse the crown.”

“Nonsense. Every man wishes to be king.”

“I do not.”

“A philosopher king is what you’d be, but surely you would rule if you could.”

“Only were it thrust upon me by necessity.”

“Aye, and every man keeps a wary eye for the call of necessity, that he may finally act according to his deepest desire.”

“I do not share your cynicism, Fritz.”

“In any case, young Christian is now being groomed to take a high place in Denmark’s affairs.”

The moon was bright behind a thin curtain of cloud hung along the eastern sky. I estimated the aspect between the moon and where I supposed my father’s house lay, with me at the crux of the angle. Sesqisquare, I thought, or within an orb of ten degrees or so.

“I am fond of the prince,” I said. “Though he and I are becoming strangers.”

“You move in different orbits.” Torstensson smiled at his cleverness. I also smiled.

“Aye.”

“Well, we shall see. But it is painfully cold and you cannot keep me freezing out here all night, Soren. Tell me: will you accomplish you task here, or will you wait until the court is returned to Copenhagen?”

“It is nearly three months since Tycho was murdered,” I whispered, my face close to Torstensson’s ear. “That is already too long for his murderers to remain alive. What is being done about Erik?”

“He dies by Christmas.”

“Then so doth the king. When he murdered Tycho he sinned against Denmark’s very future, and he will do penance in Hell for it.”

“I confess I do not share your absolute devotion to my cousin,” Torstensson said. “I never understood a word of his and he quarreled even against his own kin. My mother had Tycho escorted from her estate once, for his rudeness. But your
heart is your own to follow, and my family welcomes your eager hands.”

Torstensson’s words should have given me pause, but I was deaf to any criticism of my old master and I barely listened. My mind busied itself far away in the past, recalling the spring afternoon that had brought a short reply from Tycho to the long and flattering letter I had sent him from Copenhagen. I still keep his note in my Bible, at the first page of the Revelation of Saint John.

“Have you any more need of me?” Torstensson tugged on my sleeve, shaking me out of my memory.

I listed the things I required from Copenhagen to do the deed, and Torstensson swore to bring them to me within three days.

“It is very late now,” he said. “I must return to town, where I have taken a room at the hotel. In the morning I will away to Copenhagen. Mind my cousin. Straslund is an idiot, but he is meddlesome, curious, and talkative.”

Fritz took my arm and pulled me closer.

“Be wary, Soren. You dance in the jaws of death. If you fail it will be not just your life, but also mine, and the lives of my family and those of the families of many other good men. We depend upon you. Remember this always.”

“I do. I will. Now be gone, and return with haste and the tools of my new trade.”

We went back into the castle and made our farewells. At length I discovered my chamber, which was cramped and plain but warm, and my trunk had found me. As I lay down and pulled a blanket over me I resolved to adopt Tycho’s old motto,
non viduri sed esse.
I would not be seen, but I would be. What I would eventually be, I could not say. To be a knife in the king’s back was good enough for now.

IN THE MORNING I CAST THE KING’S HOROSCOPE, and then my own. The
Pars Fortunae
looked ill for both of us and the planets were uncertain, but in any case I would not act before Torstensson’s return. There was little for me to do until then, as I had no intention of going into Elsinore, and so I left my room to seek the kitchens. My chamber was near the armory, and as I passed by it I heard the unmistakable steel-on-steel ring of swordplay. I paused at the open door and saw within Prince Christian, practicing at the rapier against the king’s master-at-arms.

Some men are said to be born with a sword in hand. Christian was one of those men, as was his father. The prince was intelligent and had been mostly mindful of his studies under my care, but he always showed the greatest diligence for his fencing lessons.

“Fencing is a dance, a felicitous glory,” he would say to me, excusing his tardiness to a lesson in Greek or mathematics. The prince’s face shone with sweat, his eyes burned bright, and he would mime a series of feints and thrusts before me as I waited with some impatience for him to sit down and pick up a book. More often than I can remember did young Christian offer to teach me fencing.

“Every nobleman wears a sword and knows at least how to heft it,” he said.

“I am no nobleman.”

“You are noble in your heart, and it is such a wondrous pastime, Soren! Come, there are blunt wooden swords and helms and gloves and I promise not to harm you ever.”

“My lord, it is presently the hour to study Heraclitus.”

And so it went during Christian’s adolescence. I had not seen him fence in a long time and it gave me some pleasure to watch him that morning against the master-at-arms. Christian’s every movement was a grace no matter if he was fencing or walking or swatting at a fly. He had never drawn blood nor been injured in a real duel, for what man would dare challenge the king’s son in earnest?

Christian cut a wide arc with his sword to knock aside the master’s high thrust.

“Do not parry so wildly,” the master-at-arms barked. “Use your dagger, boy; that’s why you’re holding it. You’ll exhaust yourself and allow your enemy to cut you into a feast for his hounds.”

Christian growled at the master and circled, moving counterclockwise. The master growled back and Christian threw aside his dagger, leaping forward to seize the hilt of the master’s rapier and fighting to prise it from his grasp. The master let his own dagger fall and mirrored Christian’s attack, the men now chest-to-chest, both struggling to wrest his opponent’s sword away. With a cry the combatants wrenched and separated, each holding the other’s rapier.

“You are better at left-hand seizure than many,” the master said. “Most Danes are familiar with di Grassi, but few have read Didier’s manual.”

“Has my father read Didier, do you think?”

“Very like, my lord. Do you wish to play with more French tactics, then?”

“We have played enough this morning.” Christian wiped his brow on his sleeve. “I thank you, good master. We can discuss my footwork tomorrow.”

“Nay, my lord, by your leave. The king commands me that I shall work you tomorrow with broadsword from horseback, as you are to ride into battle with him soon.”

“Ah. Yes. Well, then I shall see you tomorrow.” Christian gave his rapier and gloves to the master and turned to leave, seeing me then standing in the doorway.

“Soren! Well met. How do you this morning?” He ran, nearly, to take my arm and propel me down the hall away from the armory.

“My lord, are you going off to war?”

“Tush, Soren. It is nothing.”

“My lord—”

“Enough, I say. Have you eaten?”

“I was even now headed to the cooks.”

“I am famished. We have battled since dawn, the master-at-arms and I. Come, I recall the pantry lies this way.”

We walked down the long hallway. Rays of pure white from the windows along the eastern wall streamed across our path and the polished marble floor reflected hard, blinding light in rectangular patches every eight paces. The air in the hallway was alternately warm and cold as we hurried along from sunglow to shadow, my face and hands heated and cooled and then heated again in a pleasant sort of way.

Christian was but half dressed in breeches, stockings, slippers, and an untucked blouse like a page roused from sleep, but everyone knew his face and all bowed low, generals and gentlemen and chambermaids, as we passed along. It was much as it had been in Copenhagen when I had tutored Christian, before we took our separate paths. During the walk the prince told a long and involved comic story with a baldly obscene climax that set us both laughing.

“That is one of Sir Tristram’s old stories,” I said.

“Oh. You have heard it.”

“My lord, you tell it excellently well and I’ve not heard that one in a decade.”

“You are too generous in your praise. Well, if I cannot feed
your organ of amusement, I can at least feed your belly. Here is the kitchen.”

“At last!”

Like schoolboys, we fought to get through the door first. When the cooks saw who had come to their kitchen, they made a great fuss over Christian, preparing a massive tray of cold meat, bread, butter, and pottage with honey and almonds. I took the tray and followed Christian into the depths of the kitchen. We wove our way around large steaming vats of broth, ovens hot and primed for rising loaves of bread that I could smell but not see, a boy plucking countless chickens at a low bench, and servants chopping vegetables and roots and I know not what else. We exited the kitchens into the south corridor and followed a stair up two flights and walked down another hallway until at last we were in the castle’s map room, a square hall containing three tables as large as beds. The walls were covered with wooden cabinets in which rolled maps of all lands and seas were stored. A great mural depicting Denmark, northern Europe, the Baltic Sea, and Scandinavia was painted on one wall, between a pair of narrow windows.

Christian and I were alone there. We dragged one of the massive tables over to a window where the sun could shine down upon us as we sat on the tabletop and ate our breakfast. I shaded my eyes with a hand and looked out the window, down into the courtyard at the center of the castle. At one end of the yard was the great iron gate that led out of the keep. At the other end was a circular marble planter two yards across, in which a maple stood thirty or so feet tall, branches naked to the winter. A single leaf still clung to the tree up near the crown, a crimson and gold leaf of some beauty, startling and vivid in that season of frost, snow, and ice. Soon the king’s army would sally forth into the snow and ice, carrying Prince Christian into battle.

“Is it true, my lord, what the master-at-arms said? You will go to war soon?”

“Aye, Soren. Do you not think it would be fine to ride out alongside my father?”

“I am a philosopher, not a knight.”

“I am crown prince of Denmark.”

“Aye.”

We were silent some minutes, eating our bread and meat. A wind came up roughly and rattled the windows. I watched the maple in the courtyard pull against the wind, and then the solitary crimson leaf shook free from its branch and the wind carried it up, over the castle roofs and out of sight.

“I am not afraid, you know.”

“My lord?”

“I am not afraid to go to war. I can handle sword and horse. My father and his Swiss are terrifying on the field, and if there is an enemy, they will be mostly peasant farmers armed with hoes and kitchen knives. You need not worry over my safety.”

I thought the prince protested too much, but I only nodded. The king would certainly surround his only son with his best warriors. Still, I was fond of Christian, no matter my feelings against the king. It would grieve me were the prince to fall so young.

“If you do go out, you go with my prayers, my lord.”

“I thank you. You have ever been a good friend, Soren.”

His hands were shaking, a slight tremor I do not think he noticed.

“You will of course be victorious at your father’s side.”

“Yes. I doubt it nothing. My pity goes to the footmen, for they shall be very cold in this weather.” He laughed and looked away, at the mural of Denmark beside us. “I should not like to be cold.”