Three Emperors (9780062194138) (27 page)

Chapter 36

T
rapped,” Pasques repeated.

“No,” said Catherine. “If we find the automaton, it will tell us a way out.”

The room we entered was even odder than the Star Summer Palace, outside Prague. The chamber was made of seven walls instead of the usual four. There was a round stone table on a central plinth in the middle, which could serve as an altar. It was inscribed with designs and pierced on its periphery with oblong slits, like handholds.

“Why seven walls?” I asked.

“The seven planets,” Astiza speculated. “The seven days of Creation, the seven days of the week, the seven sins, the seven virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven seals, the seven pillars, the seven sages, the seven alchemical metals, the seven hills, and the seven cycles for Egypt, representing eternal life. Can you feel the power?”

I did feel something, just as I had in the Great Pyramid, but we'd no time for metaphysical musings. Where was the android?

The room was brilliantly painted. Each wall had forty square tiles, five across and eight up, tinted every color in the rainbow and each bearing an alphabetical or numeric symbol, an animal, or an Egyptian hieroglyph. Making sense of the pattern would take a couple of centuries, I estimated. The circular altar was inscribed with four circles, a symbol within each.

“Earth, air, fire, and water,” Catherine recited.

Lines on the floor made a complex seven-pointed star. There was no golem and no Christian Rosenkreutz. The tomb, it seemed, had been robbed. We stared with disappointment.

“If the Brazen Head ever existed, it looks like it's gone,” I said.

“No,” Catherine said. “We'd have heard of its use.”

“Maybe it's a myth. Or maybe it really was destroyed by Thomas Aquinas.”

“You just said fate wouldn't have led us here unless there was something to find,” said Astiza. “Rosenkreutz carried something to Český Krumlov, and he escaped with it. He had to bring it here.”

I agreed, and yet we stood, baffled. Pasques looked uneasily out the door at the cave cavern, waiting for an appearance by Richter's men. He swung the chamber door nearly shut, peering through the crack.

“Stand guard with your gun, Pasques,” Catherine told him.

“If there's no Brazen Head, maybe Richter will simply let us be,” I said, with no conviction.

“He'll still want revenge,” Astiza countered.

And then little Harry discovered what we had not. “Drawers,” he said. He pushed on one of the tiles and it opened. We tried the same with others, and more drawers slid out. The room was a gigantic cabinet. The one I pushed revealed a rock crystal inside.

Each of the tiles was a drawer a foot wide, a foot high, and several feet deep. They held a bewildering variety of curiosities. There were crystal balls, animal horns, pelts, bolts of silk and velvet, agate bowls, a nautilus shell, silver cups, exotic feathers, crystal stones, tarnished scepters, capes, bone rings, vials of dust, vials of liquid, human skulls, a unicorn horn, splinters of old wood, mirrors, spyglasses, intricate knots, bear claws, a mummified monkey, dried roses, altar cloths, tarot cards, ancient scrolls, and old coins. “Enough rubbish to fill a king's attic,” I said.

“An emperor's,” Astiza said. “Some of this came from Rudolf, I'd surmise. And it hasn't been robbed, which means the Brazen Head should be here, too.”

There were 480 drawers, we calculated, or eighty each on the six doorless walls. But none was big enough for a man-size automaton.

“Rosenkreutz collected from all over the world,” Astiza said. “His disciples no doubt continued the tradition. Adepts paid homage to the rosy cross by pilgrimage and tribute. This is like an altar with sacrifices.”

Men had died, I thought, in pursuit of clutter in a closet.

And where was my son?

The boy had disappeared. Had he crawled into one of the drawers?

I circuited the room. “Harry?”

Astiza jerked from her trance of speculation and looked stricken. “Ethan, how do we always lose him?”

“He can't have gone far. Harry!” I shouted.

In answer I heard a dreaded call from across the cavern. “It's Gage! Come! We've got them!” The voice was Wolf Richter's.

And then my son. “There's a lever under the table, Papa.”

He was short enough to have crawled under the altar table in the center. Before I could command him to come out, he pulled. There was a clunk. And then the altar began to sink, taking my son with it.

Astiza cried out, but Harry seemed unalarmed. He rode the base of the altar down into the earth as if on a descending chariot, the sinking platform the same diameter as the table it carried. It lowered just ten feet to a floor below and stopped with a sigh. I lay down to peer through the hole it had left in our own chamber and saw a round room beneath us. My boy stoop-walked out from under the altar table and looked up.

“Papa, there's a man and a doll down here.”

Astiza, Catherine, and I slid over the edge, hung on the lip, and dropped to the altar before hopping onto this new floor. Pasques stayed above to hold off Richter.

The hidden chamber was monochrome instead of colored. Its gray stone was unpainted but engraved with a bas-relief. At first I thought it represented a chain of people, then I realized it was only one. A baby crawled out of a nautilus shell, a spiral similar to what I'd seen represented by the Great Pyramid in Egypt, a geometric representation of the Fibonacci number sequence. A toddler then walked into a forest, and fantastic beasts like griffins and unicorns shared the cyclorama as it curved around. The toddler grew to a girl, the girl to a youthful boy, the boy to a young woman, the woman to a stalwart man, and so on, aging steadily until at the end the figure was stooped, then crawling, and finally sinking into the earth, only an arm straining upward from a pile of dying leaves. The rest was sucked down into the mystery we are all headed for.

“Life's cycle,” Astiza said.

“Unless one discovers an oracle to elude the tedious tragedy,” replied Catherine. She pointed to the two figures Harry had announced.

One was a desiccated but otherwise intact corpse of an elderly man with long hair and graying beard, dressed in a simple robe and seated on a stone bench, looking across the descended altar. The arid air had mummified him, his skin sunken leather, his eyes closed, his fingers curled.

The other figure, on a bench opposite, was the most curious contraption I'd ever seen. It was a mechanical man with face and breast and backplate of tarnished brass. The android looked serenely back across the altar at what could only be the mummified remains of Christian Rosenkreutz, its guardian. The automaton had legs with a warrior's greaves and arms with a knight's gauntlets, but much of the mechanics of the Brazen Head were exposed, as if its metal skin had been torn away and we were looking at sinews and bones beneath. Here, however, the innards were rods, wires, fine chains, and gears: gears by the countless thousands, many tinier than watch workings. They were connected with springs, coils, ratchets, and levers. Some were wood and others ivory, but most were metal, remarkably preserved by this enclosure. They still glistened with oil. What extraordinary artistry had gone into this golem! It looked like the work of not just a lifetime but a thousand years.

Both husks seemed as preserved as the new wax figures in Madame Tussaud's odd new museum in London's Lyceum Theatre, which I'd seen when arranging to be an English spy.

Where had the expertise to build the Brazen Head come from? Who had taught Albertus Magnus the art of creating an artificial man?

“At last we are rewarded,” Catherine whispered.

Astiza inspected the corpse of Rosenkreutz, brushing his brown, bearded cheek with her fingertips. I went to the medieval android. It was lifeless as a puppet with no strings, yet obviously built for animation. A wire from its back disappeared into the floor, as if it were chained or tethered. It reminded me of the cable from the lightning rod.

“Does it talk, Papa?”

“I think he might when he has something to say. He needs something to eat as well. Look how skinny he is.” I poked my finger through what would have been the side of the torso, into the innards of the machine. My son laughed at my joke. But how did it work?

For many years I've generated electricity with a hand crank, giving sparks to party and a literal jolt to my former enemy Big Ned with an electrified sword. I suspect that tangible magic will be of real use someday, powering any number of devices that inventors like Robert Fulton might devise. Did this automaton draw lightning—not like Roland's broken sword at the Star Summer Palace, or the great tree I'd found in the Dakotas, but from batteries charged as Ben Franklin had taught me? I saw no crank.

Then I remembered the slits along the circumference of the altar table. They were, I realized, handles on a windlass. I gripped, tugging the table one way and then the other. It rotated clockwise.

“It's stiff with age, but I think this altar might spin in a circle around its axis,” I told the women. “Grab hold and we'll march as if raising anchor. You, too, Harry. Pretend we're at sea.”

He was delighted by this game.

The altar was stiff at first, but when we gave a heave, it started grinding around with a gasp and a wheeze. As we trudged in a circle, the mechanism below loosened and the table began to spin faster. We heard a faint hum. Finally it spun loose as a top, and all we had to do was stand in place and give it an encouraging shove. We looked at the android. The glass eyes of the Brazen Head began to glow sapphire. “We're waking it up, Harry! I think it wants to talk!”

We were interrupted by a roar from above as Pasques lit loose with his blunderbuss, followed by shouts, cries, and answering shots. Another battle had broken out. There was a pause as both sides reloaded, ramrods rasping in barrels. “Help!” the policeman called.

“Pasques, what's happening?” Catherine asked.

“They approached like wolves and scattered like puppies,” he replied. “Get the American up here.”

Then more shots, a thud, and finally a yell from the Frenchman and a clatter as his weapon fell. I heard the policeman's body slide to one side. He was groaning. We heard the others approaching.

“Wait in the cavern,” Richter shouted to his men.

There was a tread of boots and then the baron strode through a cloud of gun smoke to peer down at us, his acid-eaten countenance a vision from hell. He held two loaded pistols.

“It seems you're useful after all, Monsieur Gage,” he said, looking down at our spinning carousel of astrological images, our mummified corpse, and our glowing automaton. “You found what my Invisible College misplaced. And now I will take back what is rightfully mine.”

Chapter 37

P
asques was groaning. “Have you killed my agent?” Catherine asked. She seemed unafraid of Richter. Two thieves, consumed by themselves.

“We'll see if he bleeds out. He killed and wounded some of my men.”

A brief cloud on her pretty face, and then nothing. She tried to feel but had a heart that was numb. She pretended to passion but had no idea what passion was. She had appetites, but they were the appetites of an automaton. “So now it is just us,” she said to her opponent.

“It is just me, Comtesse, and the Brazen Head. What happens to you, I will ask the machine.” He leaped lightly down onto the altar. “Pray that its answer suits you. Throw down your pistol. The battle is over, and I have won.”

“Don't be foolish,” she tried, attempting to cast beauty like a spell. “You and I are natural partners. The witch has already led us here. Gage has animated the machine and become superfluous. Pasques is disabled. But you and I can use the android for good.” She carefully laid her gun on the altar.

“My good.” Richter glanced at Astiza. “The wife we will take as slave labor. She's strong enough to carry the android.” Despite his ruin of a face, I could still see lust and longing in his eyes. The man was noble, rich, powerful, a scholar, and here he was with us, grubbing in a hole in the ground for a forecast he didn't need and love he couldn't have. Nor did Catherine miss his glance at a rival woman.
Contentment makes poor men rich
, Franklin has counseled.
Discontent makes rich men poor.

And I needed to finish what I had started, which was to destroy Baron Richter. Except that my sword was broken, and my hands empty. I glanced at the gun Catherine had set down.

Richter pointed to me with a pistol. “Your husband, Madame Gage, is the most irritating man I've ever met. I'm sure he can be a trial to you as well. I will do you a favor by getting rid of him.” He cocked the hammer, and I stood like beef in a slaughter yard.

“Don't be stupid, Richter,” my wife snapped back with contempt as stinging as a slap. “Ethan had the key to this place, and he is the only one who knows how to animate the Brazen Head. He's our sole electrician.”

Richter hesitated. “Is this true?” he asked Catherine.

“Perhaps.” She looked sourly at me. So how could I keep her on our side? How could I use her as she tried to use me?

“Catherine has been our partner since the beginning, Baron,” I lied. “We're all necessary if you want to operate the automaton.”

He looked from us to the Brazen Head. The machine's face reminded me of the frozen, sober expression of a Greek mask. Could it really foretell the future? The idea seemed improbable, and yet isn't that what astrologers, fortune-tellers, generals, and financiers try to do every day?

Richter strode over to inspect the machine. “So complex! It reminds me of the calendar clock of Prague, but with infinitely more gearing. If Albertus Magnus truly constructed this, it would have been the work of decades. Thank God that Thomas Aquinas didn't really destroy it and that Christian Rosenkreutz spirited it to safety. The idea was that God might have designed Creation, but that once it started, we were living in a clockwork universe, predictable as Newton's laws of motion.”

“Life is a very wayward clock,” I remarked.

“Events are not the product of chance and free will, but instead are highly predictable if only enough information can be absorbed and analyzed. All the variables of the present can be simplified, codified, multiplied, divided, and ultimately analyzed today and forecasted tomorrow. For example, if we knew the position of every cloud and the direction of every wind, we could predict the weather. Albertus incorporated into gears and levers the patterns of human history, in hopes this machine could tell us great secrets.”

“Or protect us as the golem protected the Jews,” my wife said. “Perhaps the Brazen Head was built not to suggest but to warn.”

“The Jewish golem became uncontrolled. One legend is that he was put to work fetching water, couldn't be stopped, and flooded streets and cellars. A memory of an old Vltava flood, I'm guessing. But the golem was made by incantation. By building mechanical gearing instead of relying on magic, Albertus became a little god, with his own Adam.”

“Adam did not obey, either.”

Richter came to a decision. “Gage, I trade your expertise for your life. If you were the animator, how would we put this devil machine to work?”

Start with simplicity. I turned to the machine. “How do you work?” I asked.

It blinked, or rather the eyes flashed. My turning toward it, or the direction of my voice, somehow allowed it to sense me. But it was silent. I'd spoken in French, but that wouldn't be the language Albertus used. He'd been a scholar of Latin.

“Quam operor?”
I tried, turning to my meager store of the language.

Nothing.

I walked over and tapped the brass breast. Again the eyes flashed. It had some kind of sensory apparatus. I tapped knee, shoulder, forehead, mouth . . .

“The gears are turning,” Richter reported.

“Spin the altar,” I commanded. “Give it more power.” So we cranked again, there was a rattle of machinery, and finally a lid fell down from the android's chest and a board of inscribed letters appeared. We would tersely converse by writing, it seemed. The letters spun like dice and then stopped to spell out two words.

“Quinque quaestiones.”

“Five questions,” Astiza translated. “Is that all it can answer?”

“It has the machinery for an infinite number,” Richter objected.

“But perhaps not the electricity,” I said. “It's warning us to ration. Or Albertus imposed a limit—to rest the machine or avoid foolish questions.”

“What's that smell?” Catherine said.

There was a burning odor coming from the gear works under the altar. Had oil caught fire from our friction? Tendrils of smoke began drifting into the chamber.

“Is this a trap?” the baron asked. His guns came up to cover us.

“We spun too hard and overheated, which is why there is time for just five questions,” I hazarded. “Or it is designed to limit human queries. Or it will answer only so much at a time, like the oracle at the ancient Greek temple of Delphi.”

“Don't dare trick me, Gage.”

“It's the trick of dead Christian Rosenkreutz over there, or perhaps of Albertus Magnus, since this smolder could smoke poor Christian like a ham.”

The android clattered and rattled again, the letter cubes spinning. Then it stopped.
“Quinque quaestiones
,
”
it insisted.

“We must hurry,” Astiza said. She marched forward and turned letters on the automaton. “I've been pondering my first question,” she reported to us, and decided to ask an eternal one. “What is the purpose of life?” She spelled it out.
“Quid ad mores?”

“No!” protested Richter. “That's a waste of philosophic nonsense!”

But the automaton was already calculating. Gears whirred, wires hummed, levers clattered like piano keys, and finally the alphabet cubes spun to spell out a single, simple new word.

“Mortem.”
Death.

“The purpose of life is death? What does that mean?” Catherine said. “It's nonsense. Isn't it?”

I decided it was my turn. I strode to the android.
“Quid ad mortem?”
What is the purpose of death?

The machine clattered again.

“Vita.”
Life. The answers
were
nonsense.

“I didn't come all this way to play in riddles,” Richter complained.

“All right,” Catherine said. “One question each, in turn.” She moved to the keys. Hers was
“Triumphare velle Napoleon?”
Will Napoleon triumph?

This time the gears spun for far longer. How could a medieval machine know who Napoleon was? And yet it didn't hesitate, but merely “thought” longer than the first two times. And finally it shuddered, the alphabet cubes spun, and it stopped.

“Omnes triumphus ad tempus
.
”
Even though I don't read Latin, I got the gist.

“All triumph for a time,” Astiza translated.

The smoke was getting thicker, and we had no water or sand to douse a blaze. We'd have to evacuate this pit soon.

“Fools! You're wasting questions!” Richter stewed. He turned to the machine and raised his voice. “
Ubi est aurum?
Where is gold?” Catherine moved the letters for him and the machine began to clatter. The baron watched impatiently. “Finally something practical, so we have coin to hide, power, and refine this creature.”

Smoke was filling the room. “The eyes are fading,” I said. “It's running down. We should cut it free before it burns.”

“No. I want my answer.” Finally a clatter. We leaned in to look.

“In corde.”
Gold is in the heart.

“It's nothing but a medieval parlor trick,” the baron said slowly. “There's no wisdom here. Only platitudes. This monster is a fraud! It's built by Albertus to deceive the gullible.”

“That's four questions. One left,” I said.

“How to live forever,” Catherine suggested.

But Harry, whom I'd almost forgotten, shouted his own question. “Will the bad man go away?”

I held Catherine aside while Astiza hurriedly set letters.
“Erit manus abire?”

“Vile brat!”

But the machine was already grinding and calculating. This time it stopped sooner.

“Manebit.”
He will stay. And then the machine's last light faded in its eyes and it went still, five questions answered, the chamber polluted.

“Are you satisfied?” Richter sneered. “A perfect waste.”

My son was crestfallen when his mother translated. Apparently we were to drag Richter like a ball and chain, if this brass puppet was anything but a joke. Catherine looked at the baron narrowly. And what did that mean for me, the father—to have this lecher and rapist near my wife and son? I felt impotent and defeated after all our trouble. What could I kill him with?

“The fire is going to suffocate us,” Catherine coughed. “We have to retreat to the chamber above.”

“Not without the automaton,” Richter said. “Gage, get it loose.”

“It's tied to the floor.”

He slashed copper wires with his rapier, sparks flying. “Drag the machine up onto the altar so we can boost it.”

I did as ordered. Meanwhile, Astiza lifted Harry to the chamber above and then caught the lip of that floor, swung, and pulled herself up with athletic grace. She leaned down to lend a hand. Catherine uncharacteristically let them go first.

We heaved the Brazen Head up to Astiza. She grabbed to balance it so it stood in the center of the altar.

“You get the lever, Ethan,” Catherine ordered. “The baron and I will stand up here.”

I hesitated. I didn't want to be underneath with them on top.

“It elevates slowly, Ethan.”

So I dropped into the smoke, reached under where the fire had made it hot, and pulled the lever that Harry had used to lower us. There was a clunk, then an agonizing wait, and the altar began to slowly rise toward the floor above.

“Now!” Catherine cried. “Climb on!”

I scrambled aboard, and she held me to balance. As the altar's base lifted clear of the circular chamber's floor, air fed the fire, and flames burst upward. Poor dead Rosenkreutz would be cremated. We'd violated his tomb, stolen his companion, and failed at mastering the future.

An eerie red light picked out our exhausted features, the fire giving off a sulfurous stink. “It looks like hell down there, doesn't it?” the comtesse said.

“We'll put the Brazen Head in an astronomical tower under the stars of heaven,” Richter promised. “Permanently powered. With sensible questions and real answers next time.”

“You and I could still be partners,” she cooed. “What a couple you and I would make.” She reached out. “Take my hand.” She put her fingers around his, which were still holding a pistol. He looked at her with suspicion and wonder, this beautiful woman touching a hideously scarred beast, seeing in them something in common. She smiled.

And then with her other she snatched a silver brooch from her cloak and drove its needle into Richter's eye, smirking at his startled howl. The gun came loose. He toppled backward as she kicked, roaring curses, and fell into the red chamber below with a snarl of oaths, the other pistol going off as he hit the floor. Then the altar base came up to seal the hole we'd descended through with a click, returning us to the seven-walled hermetic chamber.

There was a clunk, and a snap, and the altar settled firmly into place. The smoke was snuffed away.

Muffled cries and curses. The lever was on our level, not his.

Richter was trapped.

I waited for her to turn the gun on me, but I apparently still had uses. “Ethan, destroy the mechanism,” Catherine commanded calmly.

I crawled under the table and wrenched the lever. It broke with a snap.

Richter's screams of terror were getting louder but were oddly distant, as if he were already a ghost.

The purpose of life is death. The purpose of death is life.

Was it a riddle?

Catherine smiled sweetly at Harry. “See, the prophecy came true, little lad. He
will
stay. Forever.” Then she became brisk and businesslike. “Now. Let's not let our trophy fall into the hands of those horrid ruffians waiting in ambush outside this chamber. Pasques, you've bled enough. Get up and protect us.”