DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (13 page)

And John Dee, who had so often protested his innocence and the
whiteness of his enterprises, who had never knelt before a stone—not this one or any one—without invoking the sacred Name
of Christ Crucified, who had wanted knowledge of God’s creation only to increase thereby among men the glory of the Creator:
John Dee did not any longer himself know if the spirits he had spoken to, whom he had loved and served as he had no human
master, were wicked damned ones, or not.

W
ere wicked damned ones, or not
.

The words were the last ones typed on a sheet of yellow copy paper, which lay atop a pile of other, similar sheets. The pile
(a book, a novel) rose from the varnished plywood surface which the author of them had used as a desk, built in below the
casement windows that looked out on his garden. The garden, which he had labored over as much as he had over any of his books,
was neglected now and brown. Across the bottom of the yellow sheet, below the last words, were three hard-struck asterisks,
indicating a chapter’s end. The author, or rather the author’s ghost (for the author was dead) could remember nothing at all
of the book except what was on the page before him, which he could not turn, and which he stared at without satisfaction until
there came the sound of a key turned in the lock of the back door, the only sound made in the house that morning; and with
that he evanesced.

Pierce Moffett entering the cryptlike space of Fellowes Kraft’s library or sitting room was brisk and businesslike, as he
had not been when first he had been admitted here, filled with apprehensive wonder then and not knowing what he would see.
Now he knew the place, in all weathers too; the mildew he breathed in was familiar, and he sought for something to prop a
window open with—this walking stick, he guessed that’s what it was, dog-headed and worn smooth. Done. The yellowed lace curtain
lifted on a breath of October air. Piles of books rose from the dusty rug of the living room; the rifled shelves looked down
upon him and the open drawers gaped.

He felt, as he stood there, something of the grave-robber’s awe, and some regret too at the upset he had wreaked. But he should
not have; this is the best way, sometimes, to free the tenacious ghost of an old
bachelor from his earthly entanglements. When alive he will often allow stuff to pile up untouched, having no reason particularly
to disturb the accumulating papers and unheeded mail, or to change the resting places of his ancestors’ things which he’s
acquired, no reason particularly to examine them either, no one to show them to; and so parts of his own disintegrating self
remain behind after death, caught like dust or must in them.

So pull it all out, fill plastic bags with the worn shoes he had no reason to throw away, there being plenty of room in these
closets; bang the old books together like erasers after school and watch the dust fly. You do him a favor: with every scrapbook
opened, every ancient pile shifted, a little more of him is loosened, and gets away. Look, one pamphlet has lain here athwart
another on this shelf untouched for so long that it has actually left a dark shadow on the one below.

What is it? Pierce lifted it. Not a pamphlet actually but a copy of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
, one of those yellow playbooks put out by Samuel French, marked up as though in preparation for a production, in what Pierce
had come to recognize as Kraft’s own spidery hand.

Funny.

He replaced it more or less where it had lain.

Pierce had first come to this house in June, with Rosie Rasmussen. Her family foundation supported Kraft in his last years,
and he left his house and papers to it, his (worthless) copyrights too. Pierce had been hired to go through the house and
catalogue Kraft’s literary remains, and even that limited task opened up odd corners of Kraft’s life. Once opening a chance
book from the shelf (a life of Sir Thomas Gresham) he found it to be concealing about five hundred dollars in bills. Tucked
away there in some moment of paranoia maybe, a lot more money then than now. He counted it all, and informed his superior,
who was Rosie Rasmussen.

“Take it,” she said. “We’ll split it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Finders keepers.”

“No one the wiser,” Pierce said.

“Absolutely.”

It was not all that Pierce would take from the dead man.

On his very first visit to the house, in Kraft’s little office, Pierce discovered on Kraft’s desk the long yellow typescript,
corrected in dim pencil, still lying there beneath his study window. No one, until Pierce came upon it, had known that Kraft
was at work on a final novel when he died; it had been years since he’d written anything.

Once, the world was not as it has since become. It had a different
history and a different future, and even the laws that governed it were different from the ones we know
.

So the sallow pages began, without title or preface, and in Kraft’s explication of that sentence or
sententia
over the course of hundreds of succeeding pages Pierce had found his own then-unbegun book encompassed, its heart explained
to him, and himself commanded or at least permitted to begin—though whether he had seen his own thoughts reflected there,
or had stolen those thoughts from Kraft, he couldn’t truly remember. When he observed himself now they seemed always to have
been there.

Superstitious about moving it from the house, Pierce had nevertheless agreed with Rosie that the typescript ought to be taken
away, and photocopied, and then stored somewhere safe. He had already taken from the shelves and cases here and in Kraft’s
tiny office a selection of what he estimated were the most valuable of Kraft’s books, and stowed them in sturdy boxes, to
bring them to Arcady to be kept there. For Kraft’s house was to be shut up for the winter, and they should not be left here
with the mice and moths and mildew (though they had, some of them, survived centuries of such vicissitudes). And this work
or thing of Kraft’s too, a page of which Pierce now perused again before inserting it into its box.

Pierce’s idea too, discovered or inherited by him in childhood, as he’d told Boney. Hadn’t he? Something about this house,
stopped like a clock in abandonment, seemed to reverse the order of events in his thoughts, put effect before cause. Boney
had suggested that Pierce himself might finish this book of Kraft’s: add the remaining touches, bring it to an end, see it
through the press. Had even urged him, on several occasions, and named a fee, not small either. Even now, when Boney was as
dead as Kraft, his patronage continued: a Rasmussen Foundation grant awaited Pierce, if he wanted it—a research grant, supposedly,
that would set him out from here to Europe in search of.

Of what? Life everlasting; the Ægyptian medicine that the old new brotherhood passed down from age to age, the one that Rudolf
sought, that he died for lack of. A stone, a crystal ball like the one that Kraft had given to Boney, claiming it to be John
Dee’s own, tease the old man with hopeless hopes. Or something better. Something, the one and only thing maybe, that had not
lost its former efficacy, growing even more potent on its journey down through the centuries into a colder age than the one
it had been born in. Now able to be found again in the twilight, morning or evening, of the world. Believe it or not.

Pierce felt steal over him in the little room a species of dread, a feeling not wholly different from the wonder that had
filled him the first time he had come into it. This typescript, and his own book; the book’s notes he had compiled, Kraft’s
old novels he had once read, these old books that he was taking away from Kraft’s shelves, the crystal ball Rosie said was
still there in Boney’s house, the letters Kraft had written to Boney from Prague and Vienna and Rome still piled on Boney’s
desk at Arcady, the Foundation’s money awaiting him in the bank—they seemed for a moment to be items in a single list, compiled
deliberately over the years; one of those huge and lengthy black-magic spells that can only be got out of by reversing them,
step by step.

Put it all back then, cover it again, quick bind the box with a pair of red rubber bands that Kraft’s desk afforded; place
it in the liquor carton with the rest. Take it away. Out of the house and across the drifting and ungathered leaves of the
lawn.

The load of old books was damn heavy, and heaviest of all, resistant perhaps, tugging him backwards toward its resting place,
was the typescript. Scotty—Fellowes Kraft’s malamute-Lab mutt, who was buried there in the swale—relaxed at last as it passed
by him in Pierce’s arms; his great breast fell in and eased as though in a sigh, his duties to watch and ward now done at
last, all done.

A
l-Kindi—the great Arabian philosopher whose work circulated in Latin in Europe and was known to every well-read person—showed
how every entity in the universe emitted radiation, or rays:
radii
. Not only the stars and the planets and the denizens of the heavens but the four elements too, and everything made of them,
which meant everything there was. The rays proceeding from each existent thing reached to the ends of the universe, the rays
of the sun and the feeble rays of every stone and leaf and water drop, every wave forming on the sea’s incoming edge, every
fleck of spume thrown up by those waves as they curl and fall. All these rays intersected in all directions with the rays
produced by all other things in a shifting geometry of mutual influence that made everything the way it was, caused it to
continue or to change.

Everything. Pluck a dandelion and in its death you tore a small, an infinitesimal hole in the fabric of universal radiation,
a hole resolved almost as soon as it was made—but in that instant an answering hole opened in the heart of the sun; on the
Libyan desert a sleeping lion might open his eye and look up at his Father Sun, then sleep again; no harm done. But when a
butterfly alighting on a flower in the Antipodes moved its wings, the rays produced extended out from it to intersect with
the rays produced by other things, and those deflected rays with the rays of still other things, until eventually by multiplication
of effects those collisions produced a hurricane in Thule.

In that world there was no chance: if the strength and angle of every ray could have been charted, and its intersection with
every other ray predicted, the future could have been known precisely: but that was impossible, the complexity of the world
was so great that its perfectly logical and regular production of effects, though wholly determined, might just as well have
been due to chance.

Should this sound too much like the world that has (quite suddenly) come into being in our time, yours and mine, it should
be remembered that al-Kindi also knew that
feelings
produced rays—the strong feelings of gods, dæmons, and human persons, love sorrow hate rage desire: these rays too were able
to bring about effects, to reach the hearts of others and alter them. Words too, sounds, the called names of things, the
real
names: oldest magic there is almost, words called or sung aloud. The universe was a part-song for an infinite number of voices,
things forever speaking their own names and hearing their names and the names of other things called, and responding. Listen.
Vox es, præterea nihil
: you are a voice, nothing more.

Propagated spherically outward from Baghdad in the ninth century, al-Kindi’s rays reached down through time as well as out
into space, passing through collections of Arabian and Jewish magical lore, refracting and reflecting, eventually reaching
Europe, collecting in Latin magical Black Books that smelled excitingly of the infidel, attracting restless souls seeking
novelties. ‘
Tis Magic, Magic that has ravish’d mee
. By the late sixteenth century the rays had reached the cell of a young Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno, by way of a
crude manual of magic practices called
Picatrix
, written first in Arabic and translated into Latin.

Men could do wonders, said
Picatrix
, not through the power of the Devil, as the ignorant believed, but through their knowledge of the rays: the chains of being
running down from the stars to the star-formed human spirit and back again, up to the stars themselves, thence to the angels
who moved the stars, thence to God Himself. That’s what the Ægyptians had known, what they had been taught by
Mercurio Egizio sapientissimo
: but their religion was destroyed by the impious, who called them idolators. Idolators! Well if they were, Bruno was too.
And from the
Picatrix
Fra’ Giordano learned the words to say, the images to cut, that would draw the heavens’ strong rays into his own fast-growing
soul.

By the time Bruno fled his monastery and Italy (the Roman Inquisition had wanted to talk with him about his philosophical
interests), he knew
Picatrix
by heart, and knew that there was in him a nature like that of the stars, and in the stars a voice like his own, that he
might hear. He had read the works of Hermes himself; he knew how the wise man might influence and even compel the imaginations
of others—of gods and
dæmones
perhaps, but certainly of his fellow humans, causing them to see what they do not see, hear what cannot be heard.

In his student days Frater Iordanus had liked to pester his teachers with unanswerable questions. If God one day decreed that
everything in
the universe was all at once to double in size, everything, including ourselves, then would we be able to tell? And he was
given no answer, except that God’s power cannot be constrained, or that God has better things to do with His omnipotence.

But Giordano Bruno came to know that yes, you could tell.

When he looked back to see the young man who had fled Rome with a purse of coins and his Dominican habit stuffed into a bag,
he seemed to himself to be tiny—not only having shrunk with distance but a small thing, too small to contain all that he had
since come to contain. He had crossed the Alps, growing: he thought now that he could recross those Alps by stepping over
them, and brushing their snows from the hem of his gown, except for the fact that as large as Giordano Bruno had grown, the
world and the skies had kept pace; as he had grown and travelled, they had receded from him into further, into endless distance.

In England Giordano Bruno had lived in the employ of the French Ambassador to the court of Elizabeth.
Diva Elizabetta
Bruno called her, joining the crowd of her English apotheosizers but with a plan of his own, never fulfilled: for in 1586
he returned to Paris when that Ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, was recalled: he was considered too
politique
, not Catholic enough for the present moment; he was even in danger because of it. Bruno was dismissed from his service; the
things he had done for his master, the Seigneur de Mauvissière no longer needed done; he was retiring to his estates, and
wanted neither to think nor hear of the great world and the powers.

Bruno had served his master and his master’s master well: now he was turned out, an abandoned dog. Once again he would have
to make his way with only his own strengths to rely on. Today he would call on Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador
to Henri’s Court, and Henri’s master too. It was a fine French silver day, April in Paris, a beautiful city which he despised.

At Notre-Dame des Augustins he found himself stopped by a vast religious procession: musicians and choristers, crosses, wonder-working
statues, shuffling friars, the Sacrament in its pyx borne on a golden car. A dense crowd lined the route. The King, with every
noble he could persuade to join him, was making penance.

—Who is this now coming? someone in the crowd near Bruno’s ear said.

—It is the
Confrérie des Pénitents Bleus de Saint Jérôme
, said another, eating nuts from his pocket. See? All in blue, and each carrying a stone with which to beat his breast.

All of the penitent
confréries
taking part in the procession wore rough habits of homespun, heads entirely covered by hoods drooping like elephants’ trunks
before them, with only two eyeholes cut out; but each group had its special badge and color and function. Some carried whips
and were bared to the waist to flagellate themselves. The Hieronymites had these stones. Bruno felt the blow each gave. Blood
had begun to seep through the robes of some; they stumbled. But the music was sweet, yearning, in the Mixolydian mode, sorrowing
and hopeful as a lost child.
In Paradisum deducant te Angeli
.

—The Duc de Joyeuse is one among them, someone said. Who knows which.

When Bruno had first come to Paris, King Henri III and his pretty
mignons
were celebrating this Duc de Joyeuse’s wedding day; in their nightlong pageants they had dressed up as nymphs and satyrs
and done battle with Eros, bound him and tamed him, to different music than this music. They had thought, those fine, careless,
pleasure-loving boys and boy-girls, that by their rituals and songs they could bind Love, and make Love do what they liked:
or if not that they could abandon Love, and do without him. But though the King might abjure the love of women, there was
no man more entangled than Henri in the web of his own desires—which is Love—and fears—which is Love too, only his obverse
or other face.

Bruno had once told the King that. Love is magic; magic is love. The love of the lover is a
passive
love, an enchaining love: but the
active
love of the magus is a power of the imagination, a knowledge by which he binds and is not bound.

The great mage understands what others desire, and with his projections offers the image of satisfaction; by their hunger
he grows. For it is
images
that bind, whether physical signs coming in through open eyes and ears, or built in the imagination by the binder, enchainer
or enchanter. Masses of men are easier to bind than individuals, he told the King, for to the commonest bonds all men are
subject. And of all the bonds of the soul the strongest is Eros,
vinculum summum præcipuum et generalissimum
: the highest, most excellent, and most general bond.

Who can be bound? All can be: dæmons, gods and men; no one is immune from Love’s dominion. Those are easier to bind who have
less knowledge; in them the soul is open in a way that allows for the passage in of impressions created by the operator: hope,
compassion, fear; love, hate, indignation; disdain for life, for death, for risk. Wide windows which, in others, are always
closed.

The King had listened (while breaking a chicken’s wing and feeding
the meat to a tiny dog or doglet he held like a baby) and pondered, and sent Bruno to England, to do what he could.

That was then. Now the King had forsaken magic and turned, apparently, to religion alone.

—Who is this now come carrying his own head on a plate?

—St. Jean-Baptiste. Who could not see that?

—Those who follow him are his penitents?

—The
Confrérie des Pénitents Noirs de Saint-Jean Décollé
. Pray God you never need
their
services.

The penitents of the Headless John Society, all in black, dedicated to ministering to condemned prisoners, most especially
to heretics whose souls might at the last moment be saved. Their appearance at one’s cell signalled the beginning of one’s
own brief procession. Time to go.

—Here is the King’s own
Confrérie
.

Here came white-robed penitents stumbling under the weight of tall crosses, or perhaps of their shameful sins. The King’s
own, the
Confrérie des Pénitents de l’Annonciation de Notre-Dame
. It was impossible to know who was who among the shambling groaning breast-beating crowd, but those around Bruno seemed to
know that the Cardinal of Guise was one, and his brother the Duke of Mayenne another, great magnates of the Catholic League.
One of them, in no way differentiated from the others, was the King.

Now there are two things necessary for the successful accomplishment of any enterprise of magic, and religious magic is no
different. (Bruno had told the King this too, and the King had had his Secretary make a memorandum of it.) Faith is necessary,
first, and like Love it is of two kinds, active and passive: the agent must believe that his processes will work, and the
patient must believe the agent.

The other necessary thing is a complement of the first: the operator must not become entangled in his own imaginal processes,
catch himself in his own net. He must not, that is, work his magic on himself. Which is just what this King had done, it seemed.

Rex Christianissimus
. Bruno shook his head and crossed his arms, and he wasn’t the only one. The King had put aside every awe-making love-wielding
power he might project, eschewing strong images of Kingship, starry Destiny, human Prominence, divine Favor, wise Governor
ship. He was not accompanied, as he should be, by properly constructed allegories of his Genius, his Munificence, his steadfast
Immobility, by the right gods and goddesses, heroes and virtues in the right order, bearing the right symbols. He had not
elicited green Venus to calm and stupefy the red Mars whom his enemies had evoked; could not dissolve
his peoples’ sorrows in a vast Jovian smile. Instead here he was, one among many, unrecognizable in his gown of knee-stained
white wool (he had stumbled somewhere along the way under his heavy cross, just as Jesus would have, or maybe that one wasn’t
him)—well: he might sway God with his humility, but he would not sway his people. Yes that
was
him: Bruno had identified him by the anxious loose energy leaking away from him, the Universal Love, while the wolfish eyes
of the better magicians around him in their sheep’s clothing gazed sidelong at him unfooled.

—War, said Don Bernardino de Mendoza. War between the Church and her enemies. The same war, in heaven and the abyss, is even
now engaged between the good and the fallen angels. A war that may last to the ending of the world, and yet not be a long
one.

Giordano Bruno had known Don Bernardino when the Don was Spain’s ambassador to England; Don Bernardino had been expelled by
the Queen of that country for fomenting Catholic revolt. It was he who paid the Guise’s Spanish pension and financed the Catholic
League. Bruno had come to call upon him because he had decided that in order to get work in Catholic Paris he ought to be
received back into the Church, and thought the Spaniard might help; he had actually snapped his fingers and said
Sisi
! aloud when he remembered his useful if slight acquaintance with the great man. And perhaps the gods were shaking their heads
over him, as he sat there in Mendoza’s house before Mendoza: amazed (for now and then a man amazes the gods) that any man
made of their own starstuff could contain so many contradictions, such innocent cunning, such farsightful ignorance, such
unwise wisdom.