Doctor Copernicus

I. Orbitas Lumenque

At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of evening drowsed and dreamed, swaying in the blue, the goldeny air. Even at night it did not go away. Wrapped in his truckle bed, he could hear it stirring darkly outside in the dark, all the long night long. There were others, nearer to him, more vivid still than this, they came and went, talking, but they were wholly familiar, almost a part of himself, while it, steadfast and aloof, belonged to the mysterious outside, to the wind and the weather and the goldeny blue air. It was a part of the world, and yet it was his friend.

Look, Nicolas, look! See the big tree!

Tree. That was its name. And also: the linden. They were nice words. He had known them a long time before he knew what they meant. They did not mean themselves, they were nothing in themselves, they meant the dancing singing thing outside. In wind, in silence, at night, in the changing air, it changed and yet was changelessly the tree, the linden tree. That was strange.

Everything had a name, but although every name was nothing without the thing named, the thing cared nothing for its name, had no need of a name, and was itself only. And then there were the names that signified no substantial thing, as linden and tree signified that dark dancer. His mother asked him who did he love the best. Love did not dance, nor tap the window with frantic fingers, love had no leafy arms to shake, yet when she spoke that name that named nothing, some impalpable but real thing within him responded as if to a summons, as if it had heard its name spoken. That was very strange.

He soon forgot about these enigmatic matters, and learned to talk as others talked, full of conviction, unquestioningly.

The sky is blue, the sun is gold, the linden tree is green. Day is light, it ends, night falls, and then it is dark. You sleep, and in the morning wake again. But a day will come when you will not wake. That is death. Death is sad. Sadness is what happiness is not. And so on. How simple it all was, after all! There was no need even to think about it. He had only to be, and life would do the rest, would send day to follow day until there were no days left, for him, and then he would go to Heaven and be an angel. Hell was under the ground.

Matthew Mark Luke and John

Bless the bed that I lie on

If I die before I wake

Ask holy God my soul to take

He peered from behind clasped hands at his mother kneeling beside him in the candlelight. Under a burnished coif of coiled hair her face was pale and still, like the face of the Madonna in the picture. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moved, mouthing mutely the pious lines as he recited them aloud. When he stumbled on the hard words she bore him up gently, in a wonderfully gentle voice. He loved her the best, he said. She rocked him in her arms and sang a song.

See saw Margery Daw

This little chicken

Got lost in the straw

*

He liked to lie in bed awake, listening to the furtive noises of the night all around him, the creaks and groans and abrupt muffled cracks which he imagined were the voice of the house complaining as, braced under the weight of the enormous darkness outside, it stealthily stretched and shifted the aching bones of its back. The wind sang in the chimney, the rain drummed on the roof, the linden tree tapped and tapped, tap tap tap. He was warm. In the room below his room his mother and father were talking, telling each other of their doings that day abroad in the world. How could they be so calm, and speak so softly, when surely they had such fabulous tales to recount? Their voices were like the voice of sleep itself, calling him away. There were other voices, of churchbells gravely tolling the hours, of dogs that barked afar, and of the river too, though that was not so much a voice as a huge dark liquidy, faintly frightening rushing in the darkness that was felt not heard. All called, called him to sleep. He slept.

But sometimes Andreas in the bed in the corner made strange noises and woke him up again. Andreas was his older brother: he had bad dreams.

The children played games together. There was hide and seek, and hide the linger, jack stones and giant steps, and others that had no names. Katharina, who was older than Andreas, soon came to despise such childish frivolity. Andreas too grew tired of play. He lived in his own silent troubled world from whence he rarely emerged, and when he did it was only to pounce on them, pummelling and pinching, or twisting an arm, smiling, with eyes glittering, before withdrawing again as swiftly as he had come. Barbara alone, although she was the eldest of the four, was always glad of the excuse to abandon her gawky height and chase her little brother on all fours about the floor and under the tables, grinning and growling like a happy hound all jaws and paws and raggedy fur. It was Barbara that he loved the best, really, although he did not tell anyone, even her. She was going to be a nun. She told him about God, who resembled her strangely, an amiable, loving and sad person given to losing things, and dropping things. He it was, struggling to hold aloft so much, that fumbled and let fall their mother from out his tender embrace.

That was an awful day. The house seemed full of old women and the dreary sound of weeping. His father’s face, usually so stern and set, was shockingly naked, all pink and grey and shiny. Even Katharina and Andreas were polite to each other. They paced about the rooms with measured tread, emulating their elders, bowing their heads and clasping their hands and speaking in soft stiff formal voices. It was all very alarming. His mother was laid out upon her bed, her jaw bound fast with a white rag. She was utterly, uniquely still, and seemed in this unique utter stillness to have arrived at last at a true and total definition of what she was, herself, her vivid self itself. Everything around her, even the living creatures coming and going, appeared vague and unfinished compared with her stark thereness. And yet she was dead, she was no longer his mother, who was in Heaven, so they told him. But if that was so, then what was this thing that remained?

They took it away and buried it, and in time he forgot what it was that had puzzled him.

*

Now his father loomed large in his life. With his wife’s death he had changed, or rather the change that her departure had wrought in the life of the household left him stranded in an old, discarded world, so that he trod with clumsy feet among the family’s new preoccupations like a faintly comical, faintly sinister and exasperating ghost. The other children avoided him. Only Nicolas continued willingly to seek his company, tracking to its source the dark thread of silence that his father spun out behind him in his fitful wanderings about the house. They spent long hours together, saying nothing, each hardly acknowledging the other’s presence, bathing in the balm of a shared solitude. But it was only in these pools of quiet that they were at ease together, and thrust into unavoidable contact elsewhere they were as strangers.

Despite the helplessness and pain of their public encounters, the father clung obstinately to his dream of a hearty man-to-man communion with his son, one that the town of Torun would recognise and approve. He explained the meaning of money. It was more than coins, O much more. Coins, you see, are only for poor people, simple people, and for little boys. They are only a kind of picture of the real thing, but the real thing itself you cannot see, nor put in your pocket, and it does not jingle. When I do business with other merchants I have no need of these silly bits of metal, and my purse may be full or empty, it makes no difference. I give my word, and that is sufficient, because my word is money. Do you see? He did not see, and they looked at each other in silence helplessly, baffled, and inexplicably embarrassed.

Nevertheless once a week they sallied forth from the big house in St Anne’s Lane to display to the town the impregnable eternal edifice that is the merchant and his heir. The boy performed his part as best he could, and gravely paced the narrow streets with his hands clasped behind his back, while his insides writhed in an agony of shame and self-consciousness. His father, sabled, black-hatted, wagging an ornate cane, was a grotesque caricature of the vigorous bluff businessman he imagined himself to be. The garrulous greetings—Grüss Gott, meinherr! fine day! how’s trade? — that he bestowed on friend and stranger alike in a booming public voice, fell clumsily about the streets, a horrible hollow crashing. When he paused to speak to an acquaintance, his sententiousness and grating joviality made the boy suck his teeth and grind one heel slowly, slowly, into the ground.

“And this is Nicolas, he is my youngest, but he has a nose already for the business, have you not, hey, what do you say, young scamp?”

He said nothing, only smiled weakly and turned away, seeking the consolation of poplars, and the great bundles of steely light above the river, and brass clouds in a high blue sky.

They made their way along the wharf, where Nicolas’s fearful soul ventured out of hiding, enticed by the uproar of men and ships, so different from the inane babbling back there in the streets. Here was not a world of mere words but of glorious clamour and chaos, the big black barrels rumbling and thudding, winch ropes humming, the barefoot loaders singing and swearing as they trotted back and forth under their burdens across the thrumming gangplanks. The boy was entranced, prey to terror and an awful glee, discerning in all this haste and hugeness the prospect of some dazzling, irresistible annihilation.

His father too was nervous of the river and the teeming wharves, and hurried along in silence now, with his head bent and shoulders hunched, seeking shelter. The house of Koppernigk & Sons stood back from the quayside and contemplated with obvious satisfaction the frantic hither and thithering of trade below its windows; under that stony gaze even the unruly Vistula lay down meekly and flowed away. In the dusty offices, the cool dim caverns of the warehouses, the boy watched, fascinated and appalled, his father put on once more the grimacing mask of the man of consequence, and a familiar mingling of contempt and pity began to ache again within him.

Yet secretly he delighted in these visits. An obscure hunger fed its fill here in this tight assured little world. He wandered dreamily through the warren of pokey offices, breathing the crumbly odours of dust and ink, spying on inky dusty grey old men crouched with their quills over enormous ledgers. Great quivering blades of sunlight smote the air, the clamour of the quayside stormed the windows, but nothing could shake the stout twin pillars of debit and credit on which the house was balanced. Here was harmony. In the furry honeybrown gloom of the warehouses his senses reeled, assailed by smells and colours and textures, of brandy and vodka snoozing in casks, of wax and pitch, and tight-packed tuns of herring, of timber and corn and an orient of spices. Burnished sheets of copper glowed with a soft dark flame in their tattered wraps of sacking and old ropes, and happiness seemed a copper-coloured word.

It was from this metal that the family had its name, his father said, and not from the Polish coper, meaning horseradish, as some were spiteful enough to suggest. Horseradish indeed! Never forget, ours is a distinguished line, merchants and magistrates and ministers of Holy Church — patricians all! Yes, Papa.

*

The Koppernigks had originated in Upper Silesia, from whence in 1396 one Niklas Koppernigk, a stonemason by trade, had moved to Cracow and taken Polish citizenship. His son, Johannes, was the founder of the merchant house that in the late 1450s young Nicolas’s father was to transfer to Torun in Royal Prussia. There, among the old German settler families, the Koppernigks laboured long and diligently to rid themselves of Poland and all things Polish. They were not entirely successful; the children’s German was still tainted with a southern something, a faint afterglow of boiled cabbage as it were, that had troubled their mother greatly during her brief unhappy life. She was a Waczelrodt. The Waczelrodts it is true were Silesians just like the Koppernigks, having their name from the village of Weizenrodau near Schweidnitz, but apart from that they were something quite different from the Koppernigks: no stonemasons there, indeed no. There had been Waczelrodts among the aldermen and councillors of Münsterburg in the thirteenth century, and, a little later, of Breslau. Towards the end of the last century they had arrived in Torun, where they had soon become influential, and were among the governors of the Old City. Nicolas’s maternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, with property in the town and also a number of large estates at Kulm. The Waczelrodts were connected by marriage with the Peckaus of Magdeburg and the von Allens of Torun. They had also, of course, married into the Koppernigks, late of Cracow, but that was hardly a connection that one would wish to boast of, as Nicolas’s Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, a very grand and formidable lady, had often pointed out.

“Remember,” his mother told him, “you are as much a Waczelrodt as a Koppernigk. Your uncle will be Bishop one day. Remember!”

*

Father and son returned weary and disgruntled from their outings, and parted quickly, with faces averted, the father to nurse in solitude his disappointment and unaccountable sense of shame, the son to endure the torment of Andreas’s baiting.

“And how was business today, brother, eh?”

Andreas was the rightful heir, being the elder son. The notion elicited from his father one of his rare brief barks of laughter. “That wastrel? Ho no. Let him go for the Church, where his Uncle Lucas can find a fat prebend for him.” And Andreas gnawed his knuckles, and slunk away.

Andreas hated his brother. His hatred was like a kind of anguish, and Nicolas sometimes fancied he could hear it, a high-pitched excruciating whine.

“The Turk is coming, little brother, he has invaded the south.” Nicolas turned pale. Andreas smirked. “O yes, it is true, you know, believe me. Are you afraid? Nothing will stop the Turk. He impales his prisoners, they say. A big sharp stake right up your bum — like that! Ha!”

They walked to school and home again together. Andreas chose to be elaborately indifferent to Nicolas’s meek presence beside him, and whistled through his teeth, and considered the sky, slowed up his pace abruptly to scrutinise some fascinating thing floating in a sewer or quickened it to lurch in mockery behind an unsuspecting cripple, so that, try as he might to anticipate these sudden checks and advances, Nicolas was forced to dance, smiling a puppet’s foolish fixed smile, on the end of his capricious master’s invisible leash. And the harder he tried to efface himself the fiercer became Andreas’s scorn.

“You, creepy — do not creep behind me always!”

Andreas was handsomely made, very tall and slender, dark, fastidious, cold. Running or walking he moved with languorous negligent grace, but it was in repose that he appeared most lovely, standing by a window lost in a blue dream, with his pale thin face lifted up to the light like a perfect vase, or a shell out of the sea, some exquisite fragile thing. He had a way when addressed directly of frowning quickly and turning his head away; then, poised thus, he seemed shaped in his beauty by the action of an ineradicable distress within him. In the smelly classrooms and the corridors of St John’s School he floundered, a vulnerable aetherial creature brought low in an alien element, and the masters roared in his face and beat him, their stolid souls enraged by this enigma, who learned nothing, and trailed home to endure in silence, with his face turned away, the abuse of a disappointed father.

Gaiety took him like a falling sickness, and sent him whinnying mad through the house with his long limbs wildly spinning. These frantic fits of glee were rare and brief, and ended abruptly with the sound of something shattering, a toy, a tile, a windowpane. The other children cowered then, as the silence fluttered down.

He chose for friends the roughest brutes of boys St John’s could offer. They gathered outside the school gates each afternoon for fights and farting contests and other fun. Nicolas dreaded that bored malicious crowd. Nepomuk Müller snatched his cap and pranced away, brandishing the prize aloft.

“Here, Nepomuk, chuck it here!”

“Me,Müller,me!”

The dark disc sailed here and there in the bitter sunlight, sustained in flight it seemed by the wild cries rising around it. A familiar gloom invaded Nicolas’s soul. If only he could be angry! Red rage would have flung him into the game, where even the part of victim would have been preferable to this contemptuous detachment. He waited morose and silent outside the ring of howling boys, drawing patterns on the ground with the toe of his shoe.

The cap came by Andreas and he reached up and plucked it out of the air, but instead of sending it on its way again instanter he paused, seeking as always some means of investing the game with a touch of grace. The others groaned.

“O come on, Andy, throw it!”

He turned to Nicolas and smiled his smile, and began to measure up the distance separating them, making feints like a rings player, taking careful aim.

“Watch me land it on his noggin.”

But catching Nicolas’s eye he hesitated again, and frowned, and then with a surly defiant glance over his shoulder at the others he stepped forward and offered the cap to his brother. “Here,” he murmured, “take it.” But Nicolas looked away. He could cope with cruelty, which was predictable. Andreas’s face darkened. “Take your damned cap, you little snot!”

They straggled homeward, wrapped in a throbbing silence. Nicolas, sighing and sweating, raged inwardly in fierce impotence against Andreas, who was so impressively grown-up in so many ways, and yet could be so childish sometimes. That with the cap had been silly. You must not expect me to understand you, even though I do! He did not quite know what that meant, but he thought it might mean that the business of the cap had not really been silly at all. O, it was hopeless! There were times such as this when the muddle of his feelings for Andreas took on the alarming aspect of hatred.

They were no longer heading homeward. Nicolas halted.

“Where are we going?”

“Never mind.”

But he knew well where they were going. Their father had forbidden them to venture by themselves beyond the walls. Out there was the New Town, a maze of hovels and steaming alleys rife with the thick green stench of humankind. That was the world of the poor, the lepers and the Jews, the renegades. Nicolas feared that world. His flesh crawled at the thought of it. When he was dragged there by Andreas, who revelled in the low life, the hideousness rolled over him in choking slimy waves, and he seemed to drown. “Where are we going? We are not to go down there! You know we are not supposed to go down there. Andreas.”

But Andreas did not answer, and went on alone down the hill, whistling, toward the gate and the drawbridge, and gradually the distance made of him a crawling crablike thing. Nicolas, abandoned, began discreetly to cry.

*

The room was poised, weirdly still. A fly buzzed and boomed tinily against the diamond panes of the window. On the floor a dropped book was surreptitiously shutting itself page by page, slowly. The beady eager eye of a mirror set in a gilt sunburst on the far wall contained another room in miniature, and another doorway in which there floated a small pale frightened face gaping aghast at the image of that stricken creature swimming like an eyelash come detached on the rim of the glass. Look! On tiptoe teetering by the window he hung, suspended from invisible struts, an impossibly huge stark black puppet, clawing at his breast, his swollen face clenched in terrible hurt.

And here comes a chopper

To chop off his

head

He dropped, slack bag-of-bones, and with him the whole room seemed to collapse.

“Children, your father is dead, of his heart.”

*

The reverberations of that collapse persisted, muted but palpable, and the house, bruised and raw from the shedding of tears, seemed to throb hugely in pain. Grief was the shape of a squat grey rodent lodged in the heart.

The more fiercely this grief-rat struggled the clearer became Nicolas’s thinking, as if his mind, horrified by that squirming thing down there, were scrambling higher and higher away from it into rarer and rarer heights of chill bright air. His mother’s death had puzzled him, yet he had looked upon it as an accident, in dimensions out of all proportion to the small flaw in the machine that had caused it. This death was different. The machine seemed damaged now beyond repair. Life, he saw, had gone horribly awry, and nothing they had told him could explain it, none of the names they had taught him could name the cause. Even Barbara’s God withdrew, in a shocked silence.

*

Uncle Lucas, Canon Waczelrodt, travelled post-haste from Frauenburg in Ermland when the news reached him of his brother-in-law’s death. The affairs of the Chapter of Canons at Frauenburg Cathedral were as usual in disarray, and it was not a good time to be absent for a man with his eye on the bishopric. Canon Lucas was extremely annoyed — but then, his life was a constant state of vast profound annoyance. The ravages wrought by the unending war between his wilfulness and a recalcitrant world were written in nerveknots on the grey map of his face, and his little eyes, cold and still above the nose thick as a hammerhead, were those of the lean sentinel that crouched within the fleshy carapace of his bulk. He did not like things as they were, but luckily for things he had not yet decided finally how they should be. It was said that he had never in his life been known to laugh.

His coming was the boom of a bronze gong marking the entry of a new order into the children’s lives.

He strode about the house sniffing after discrepancies, with the four of them trotting in his wake like a flock of frightened mice, twittering. Nicolas was mesmerised by this hard, fascinatingly ugly, overbearing manager of men. His cloak, flying out behind him, sliced the air ruthlessly, as once Nicolas had seen him on the magistrate’s bench in the Town Hall slicing to shreds the arguments of whining plaintiffs. In the strange, incomprehensible and sometimes cruel world of adults, Uncle Lucas was the most adult of all.

“Your father in his will has delivered you his children into my care. It is not a responsibility that I welcome, yet it is my duty to fulfil his wishes. I shall speak to each of you in turn. You will wait here.”

He swept into the study and shut the door behind him. The children sat on a bench in the sanded hall outside, picking at their fingernails and sighing. Barbara began quietly to weep. Andreas tapped his feet on the floor in time to the rhythm of his worried thoughts. Sweat sprang out on Nicolas’s skin, as always when he was upset. Katharina nudged him.

“You will be sent away, do you know that?” she whispered. “O yes, far far away, to a place where you will not have Barbara to protect you. Far, far away.”

She smiled. He pressed his lips tightly together. He would not cry for her.

The time went slowly. They listened intently to the tiny sounds within, the rustle of papers, squeak of a pen, and once a loud grunt, of astonishment, so it sounded. Andreas announced that he was not going to sit here any longer doing nothing, and stood up, but then sat down again immediately when the door flew open and Uncle Lucas came out. He looked at them with a frown, as if wondering where it was that he had seen them before, then shook his head and withdrew again. The flurry of air he had left behind him in the hall subsided.

At last the summons came. Andreas went in first, pausing at the doorway to wipe his damp hands on his tunic and fix on his face an ingratiating leer. In a little while he came out again, scowling, and jerked his thumb at Nicolas.

“You next.”

“But what did he say to you?”

“Nothing. We are to be sent away.”

O!

Nicolas went in. The door snapped shut behind him like a mouth. Uncle Lucas was sitting at the big desk by the window with the family papers spread before him. He reminded Nicolas of a huge implacable frog. A panel of the high window stood open on a summer evening full of white clouds and dusty golden light.

“Sit, child.”

The desk was raised upon a dais, and when he sat on the low stool before it he could see only his uncle’s head and shoulders looming above him like a bust of hard grey grainy stone. He was frightened, and his knees would not stay still. The voice addressing him was a hollow booming noise directed less at him than at an idea in Uncle Lucas’s mind called vaguely Child, or Nephew, or Responsibility, and Nicolas could distinguish only the meaning of the words and not the sense of what was being said. His life was being calmly wrenched apart at the joints and reassembled unrecognisably in his uncle’s hands. He gazed intently upward through the window, and a part of him detached itself and floated free, out into the blue and golden air. Włocławek. It was the sound of some living thing being torn asunder. .

The interview was at an end, yet Nicolas still sat with his hands gripping his knees, quaking but determined. Uncle Lucas looked up darkly from the desk. “Well?”

“Please sir, I am to be a merchant, like my father.”

“What do you say, boy? Speak up.”

“Papa said that one day I should own the offices and the warehouses and all the ships and Andreas would go for the Church because you would find a place for him but I would stay here in Torun to tend the business, Papa said. You see,” faintly, “I do not think I really want to go away.”

Uncle Lucas blinked. “What age are you, child?”

“Ten years, sir.”

“You must finish your schooling.”

“But I am at St John’s.”

“Yes yes, but you will leave St John’s! Have you not listened? You will go to the Cathedral School at Włocławek, you and your brother both, and after that to the University of Cracow, where you will study canon law. Then you will enter the Church. I do not ask you to understand, only to obey.”

“But I want to stay here, please sir, with respect.”

There was a silence. Uncle Lucas gazed at the boy without expression, and then the great head turned, like part of an immense engine turning, to the window. He sighed.

“Your father’s business has failed. Torun has failed. The trade has gone to Danzig. He timed his death well. These papers, these so-called accounts: I am appalled. It is a disgrace, such incompetence. The Waczelrodts made him, and this is how he repays us. The house will be retained, and there will be some small annuities, but the rest must be sold off. I have said, child, that I do not expect you to understand, only to obey. Now you may go.”

Katharina was waiting for him in the hall. “I told you: far far away.”

*

The evening waned. He would not, could not weep, and his face, aching for tears, pained him. Anna the cook fed him sugar cakes and hot milk in the kitchen. He sat under the table. That was his favourite place. The last of the day’s sunlight shone through the window on copper pots and polished tiles. Outside, the spires of Torun dreamed in summer and silence. Everywhere he looked was inexpressible melancholy. Anna leaned down and peered at him in his lair.

“Aye, master, you’ll be a good boy now, eh?”

She grinned, baring yellowed stumps of teeth, and nodded and nodded. The sun withdrew stealthily, and a cloud the colour of a bruise loomed in the window.

“What is canon law, Anna, do you know?”

Barbara was to be sent to the Cistercian Convent at Kulm. He thought of his mother. The future was a foreign country; he did not want to go there.

“Ach ja, you be a good boy, du, Knabe.”

*

The wind blew on the day that he left, and everything waved and waved. The linden tree waved. Goodbye!

* * *

Dearest Sister:

I am sorry that I did not write to you before. Are you happy at the Convent? I am not happy here. I am not very unhappy. I miss you & Katharina & our house. The Masters here are very Cross. I have learned Latin very well & can speak it very well. We learn Geometry also which I like very much. There is one who is named Wodka but he calls himself Abstemius. We think that is very funny. There is another by name Caspar Sturm. He teaches Latin & other things. Does Andreas write to you? I do not see him very often: he goes with older fellows. I am very Lonely. It is snowing here now & very Cold. Uncle Lucas came to visit us. He did not remember my name. He tested me in Latin & gave me a Florin. He did not give Andreas a Florin. The Masters were afraid of him. They say he is to be the Bishop soon in Ermland. He did not say anything to me of that matter. I must go to Vespers now. I like Music: do you? I say Prayers for you & for everyone. We are going home for Christmas-tide: I mean to Torun. I hope that you are well. I hope that you will write to me soon & then I will write to you again.

Your Loving Brother:

Nic: Koppernigk

*

He was not very unhappy. He was waiting. Everything familiar had been taken away from him, and all here was strange. The school was a whirling wheel of noise and violence at the still centre of which he cowered, dizzy and frightened, wondering at the poise of those swaggering fellows with their rocky knuckles and terrible teeth, who knew all the rules, and never stumbled, and ignored him so completely. And even when the wheel slowed down, and he ventured out to the very rim, still he felt that he was living only half his life here at Włocławek, and that the other, better half was elsewhere, mysteriously. How otherwise to explain the small dull ache within him always, the ache that a severed limb leaves throbbing like an imprint of itself upon the emptiness dangling from the stump? In the cold and the dark at five in the mornings he rose in the mewling dormitory, aware that somewhere a part of him was turning languidly into a deeper lovelier sleep than his hard pallet would ever allow. Throughout his days that other self crossed his path again and again, always in sunlight, always smiling, taunting him with the beauty and grace of a phantom existence. So he waited, and endured as patiently as he could the mean years, believing that someday his sundered selves must meet in some far finer place, of which at moments he was afforded intimations, in green April weather, in the enormous wreckage of clouds, or in the aetherial splendours of High Mass.

He found curiously consoling the rigours of discipline and study. They sustained him in those times when the mind went dead, after he had been trounced by the band of bullies that were Andreas’s friends, or flogged for a minor misdemeanor, or when memories of home made him weep inside.

Lessons commenced at seven in the Great Hall after matins. At that grey hour nothing was real except discomfort, and there was neither sleep nor waking but a state very like hallucination between the two. The clatter and crack of boots on floorboards were the precise sounds that in the imagination chilled bones were making in their stiff sockets. Slowly the hours passed, sleep withdrew, and the morning settled down to endure itself until noon, when there was dinner in the refectory and then what they called play for an hour. The afternoons were awful. Time slackened to a standstill as the orbit of the day yawned out into emptiness in a long, slow, eccentric arc. The raucous babble of a dozen classes ranged about the room clashed in the stale thickening air, and the masters bellowed through the din in mounting desperation, and by evening the school, creeping befuddled toward sleep, knew that another such day was not to be borne. But day followed day with deathly inevitability, into weeks distinguished one from the next only by the dead caesura of the sabbath.

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily. The masters resented him, who swallowed down their hard-won knowledge in swift effortless draughts. It was as if they were not really teaching him, but were merely confirming what he knew already. Dimly he saw how deeply he thus insulted them, and so he feigned dull-wittedness. He watched certain of his classmates, and learned from them, to whom it came quite naturally, the knack of letting his lower lip hang and his eyes glaze over when some complexity held up the progress of a lesson; and sure enough the masters softened toward him, and at length to his relief began to ignore him.

But there were some not so easily fooled.

*

Caspar Sturm was a Canon of the Chapter of Włocławek Cathedral, to which the school was attached. He taught the trivium of logic and grammar and Latin rhetoric. Tall and lean, hard, dark, death-laden, he stalked through the school like a wolf, always alone, always seemingly searching. He was famous in the town for his women and his solitary drinking bouts. He feared neither God nor the Bishop, and hated many things. Some said he had killed a man once long ago, and had entered the Church to atone for his sin: that was why he had not taken Holy Orders. There were other stories too, that he was the King of Poland’s bastard, that he had gambled away an immense fortune, that he slept in sheets of scarlet silk. Nicolas believed it all.

The school feared Canon Sturm and his moods. Some days his classes were the quietest in the hall, when the boys sat mute and meek, transfixed by his icy stare and the hypnotic rhythm of his voice; at other times he held riotous assembly, stamping about and waving his arms, roaring, laughing, leaping among the benches to slash with the whip he always carried at the fleeing shoulders of a miscreant. His fellow teachers eyed him with distaste as he pranced and yelled, but they said nothing, even when his antics threatened to turn their classes too into bedlam. Their forbearance was an acknowledgment of his wayward brilliance — or it might have been only that they too, like the boys, were afraid of him.

He chose his favourites from among the dullards of the school, hulking fellows bulging with brawn and boils who sprawled at their desks and grinned and guffawed, basking in the assurance of his patronage. He looked on them with a kind of warm contempt. They amused him. He cuffed and pummelled them merrily, and with cruel shafts of wit exposed their irredeemable ignorance, making them squirm before the class in stuttering sullen shame; yet still they loved him, and were fiercely loyal.

On Nicolas he turned a keen and quizzical eye. The boy blushed and bowed his head, embarrassed. There was something indecent in the way Caspar Sturm looked at him, gently but firmly lifting aside the mask and delving into the soft palpitating core of his soul. Nicolas clenched his fists, and a drop of sweat trickled down his breastbone. You must not understand me! The master rarely addressed him directly, and when he did there settled around them a private silence fraught with cloying unspeakable intimacies that neither would think of attempting to speak, and Canon Sturm stepped back and nodded curtly, as if he had satisfied himself once again of the validity of a conclusion previously reached.

“And here is Andreas, elder scion of the house of Koppernigk! Come, dolt, what can you tell us now of Tullius’s rules for the art of memory, eh?”

*

He learned with ease, perhaps too easily: his studies bored him. Only now and then, in the grave cold music of mathematics, in the stately march of a Latin line, in logic’s hard bright lucid, faintly frightening certainties, did he dimly perceive the contours of some glistening ravishing thing assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air in a clear blue unearthly sky, and then there thrummed within him a coppery chord of perfect bliss.

“Herr Sturm Herr Sturm!” the class cried, “a conundrum, Herr Sturm!”

“What! Are we here to learn or to play games?”

“Ach, Herr Sturm!”

“Very well, very well. Regard:”

In a room there are 3 men, A & B who are blindfold, & C who is blind. On a table in this room there are 3 black hats & 2 white hats, 5 hats in all. A 4th man enters: call him D. He, D, places a hat on each of the heads of A & B & C, and the 2 remaining hats he hides. Now D removes the blindfold from A, who thus can see the hats that B & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the 2 hats that are hidden. D asks A if he can say what colour is the hat that he, A, is wearing? A ponders, and answers:

“No.”

Now D removes the blindfold from B, who thus can see the hats that A & C are wearing, but not the hat that he himself wears, nor the two hats that are hidden. D asks B if he can say what colour is the hat that he, B, is wearing? B ponders, hesitates, and answers:

“No.”

Now: D cannot remove the blindfold from C, who does not wear a blindfold, and can see no hats at all, not white nor black, not worn nor hidden, for C, as said, is blind. D asks C if he can say what colour is the hat that he, C, is wearing? C ponders, smiles, and answers:

“Yes!”

“—Well, gentlemen,” said Canon Sturm, “what is the colour of the blind man’s hat, and how does he know it?”

The glass blocks sailed in silence through the bright air, and locked.

Done!

Harmonia.

“Well, young Koppernigk? You have solved it?”

Startled, Nicolas ducked his head and began scribbling feverishly on his slate. He was hot all over, and sweating, aghast to think that his face might have betrayed him, but despite all that he was ridiculously pleased with himself, and had to concentrate very hard on the thought of death in order to keep from grinning.

“Come, man,” the Canon muttered. “Have you got it?”

“Not yet, sir, I am working on it sir.”

“Ah. You are working on it.”

And Caspar Sturm stepped back, and nodded curtly.

*

And then there was Canon Wodka. Nicolas walked with him by the river. It was the Vistula, the same that washed in vain the ineradicable mire of Torun — that is, the name was the same, but the name meant nothing. Here the river was young, as it were, a bright swift stream, while there it was old and weary. Yet it was at once here and there, young and old at once, and its youth and age were separated not by years but leagues. He murmured aloud the river’s name and heard in that word suddenly the concepts of space and time fractured.

Canon Wodka laughed. “You have a clerkly conscience, Nicolas.” It was true: what the world took for granted he found a source of doubt and fear. He would not have had it otherwise. The Canon’s smile faltered, and he glanced at the boy timidly, tenderly, out of troubled eyes. “Beware these enigmas, my young friend. They exercise the mind, but they cannot teach us how to live.”

Canon Wodka was an old man of thirty. He was startlingly ugly, a squat fat waddling creature with a globular head and pockmarked face and tiny wet red mouth. His hands were extraordinary things, brown and withered like the claws of a bat. Only his eyes, disconsolate and bright, revealed the sad maimed soul within. To the school he was a figure of rare fun, and Canon Sturm’s boys loved to follow him at a lurch down the corridors, mocking his preposterous gait. Even his name, so perfectly inapt, conspired to make a clown of him, a role to which he seemed to have resigned himself, for it was in irony that he had taken the name Abstemius, and when thus addressed would sometimes cross his eyes and let his great head loll about in a travesty of drunkenness. Nicolas suspected that the Canon, despite his admonition, derived from the intricacies of pure playful thought the only consolation afforded by a life that he had never quite learned how to live.

He taught the quadrivium of arithmetic and geometry, astronomy and music theory. He was a very bad teacher. His was not the disciplined mind that his subjects required. It was too excitable. In the midst of a trigonometrical exposition he would go scampering off after Zeno’s arrow, which will never traverse the 100 ells that separate the target from the bow because first it must fly 50 ells, and before that 25, and before that 12½, and so on to infinity, where it comes to a disgruntled kind of halt. But the farther that the arrow did not go the nearer Nicolas drew to this poor fat laughable master. They became friends, cautiously, timidly, with many checks and starts, unwilling to believe in their good fortune, but friends they did become, and even when one day in the airy silence of the organ loft in the cathedral Canon Wodka put one of his little withered claws on Nicolas’s leg, the boy stared steadily off into the gloom under the vaulted ceiling and began to talk very rapidly about nothing, as if nothing at all were happening.

In their walks by the river the Canon sketched the long confused history of cosmology. At first he was reluctant to implant new ideas in a young mind that he considered too much concerned already with abstractions, but then the wonder of the subject possessed him and he was whirled away into stammering starry heights. He spoke of the oyster universe of the Egyptians in which the Earth floated on a bowl of bitter waters beneath a shell of glair, of the singing spheres of the Greeks, Pythagoras and Herakleides, of the Church Fathers whose Earth was a temple walled with air, and then of the Gnostic heresiarchs and their contention that the world was the work of fallen angels. Last of all he explained Claudius Ptolemy’s theory of the heavens, formulated in Alexandria thirteen centuries before and still held by all men to be valid, by which the Earth stands immobile at the centre of all, encircled eternally in grave majestic dance by the Sun and the lesser planets. There were so many names, so many notions, and Nicolas’s head began to whirl. Canon Wodka glanced at him nervously and put his finger to his own lips to silence himself, and presently began to speak earnestly, like one doing penance, of the glory of God and the unchallengeable dogma of Mother Church, and of the joys of orthodoxy.

But Nicolas hardly listened to all that. He knew nothing yet of scruples such as those besetting his friend. The firmament sang to him like a siren. Out there was unlike here, utterly. Nothing that he knew on earth could match the pristine purity he imagined in the heavens, and when he looked up into the limitless blue he saw beyond the uncertainty and the terror an intoxicating, marvellous grave gaiety.

Together they made a sundial on the south wall of the cathedral. When they had finished they stood and admired in silence this beautiful simple thing. The shadow crept imperceptibly across the dial as the day waned, and Nicolas shivered to think that they had bent the enormous workings of the universe to the performance of this minute and insignificant task.

“The world,” he said, “is all an engine, then, after all, no more than that?”

Canon Wodka smiled. “Plato in the Timaeus says that the universe is a kind of animal, eternal and perfect, whose life is lived entirely within itself, created by God in the form of a globe, which is the most pleasing in its perfection and most like itself of all figures. Aristotle postulated as an explanation of planetary motion a mechanism of fifty-five crystalline spheres, each one touching and driving another and all driven by the primary motion of the sphere of the fixed stars. Pythagoras likened the world to a vast lyre whose strings as it were are the orbits of the planets, which in their intervals sing beyond human hearing a perfect harmonic scale. And all this, this crystalline eternal singing being, this you call an engine?”

“I meant no disrespect. Only I am seeking a means of understanding, and belief.” He hesitated, smiling a little sheepishly at the lofty sound of that. “Herr Wodka — Herr Wodka, what do you believe?”

The Canon opened wide his empty arms.

“I believe that the world is here,” he said, “that it exists, and that it is inexplicable. All these great men that we have spoken of, did they believe that what they proposed exists in reality? Did Ptolemy believe in the strange image of wheels within wheels that he postulated as a true picture of planetary motion? Do we believe in it, even though we say that it is true? For you see, when we are dealing with these matters, truth becomes an ambiguous concept. In our own day Nicolas Cusanus has said that the universe is an infinite sphere whose centre is nowhere. Now this is a contradictio in adjecto, since the notions of sphere and infinity cannot sensibly be put together; yet how much more strange is the Cusan’s universe than those of Ptolemy or Aristotle? Well, I leave the question to you.” He smiled again, ruefully. “I think it will give you much heartache.” And later, as they walked across the cathedral close at dusk, the Canon halted, suddenly struck, and touched the boy lightly in excitement with a trembling hand. “Consider this, child, listen: all theories are but names, but the world itself is a thing.”

In the light of evening, the gathering gloom, it was as if a sibyl had spoken.

*

On Saturdays in the fields outside the walls of the town Caspar Sturm instructed the school in the princely art of falconry. The hawks, terrible and lovely, filled the sunny air with the clamour of tiny deaths. Nicolas looked on in a mixture of horror and elation. Such icy rage, such intentness frightened him, yet thrilled him too. The birds shot into the kill like bolts from a bow, driven it seemed by a seeled steely anguish that nothing would assuage. Compared with their vivid presence all else was vague and insubstantial. They were absolutes. Only Canon Sturm could match their bleak ferocity. At rest they stood as still as stone and watched him with a fixed tormented gaze; even in flight their haste and brutal economy seemed bent to one end only, to return with all possible speed to that wrist, those silken jesses, those eyes. And their master, object of such terror and love, grew leaner, harder, darker, became something other than he was. Nicolas watched him watching his creatures and was stirred, obscurely, shamefully.

“Up sir! Up!” A heron shrieked and fell out of the air. “Up!” Monstrous hawklike creatures were flying on invisible struts and wires across a livid sky, and there was a great tumult far off, screams and roars, and howls of agony or of laughter, that came to him from that immense distance as a faint terrible twittering. Even when he woke and lay terror-stricken in a stew of sweat the dream would not end. It was as if he had tumbled headlong into some beastly black region of the firmament. He pulled at that blindly rearing lever between his legs, pulled at it and pulled, pulling himself back into the world. Dimly he sensed someone near him, a dark figure in the darkness, but he could not care, it was too late to stop, and he shut his eyes tight. The hawks bore down upon him, he could see their great black gleaming wings, their withered claws and metallic talons, their cruel beaks agape and shrieking without sound, and under that awful onslaught his self shrank together into a tiny throbbing point. For an instant everything stopped, and all was poised on the edge of darkness and a kind of exquisite dying, and then he arched his back like a bow and spattered the sheets with his seed.

He sank down and down, far, far down, and sighed. The beasts were all banished, and his inner sky was empty now and of a clear immaculate blue, and despite the guilt and the grime and the smell like the smell of blood and milk and decayed flowers, he felt afar a faint mysterious chiming that was at once everywhere and nowhere, that was a kind of infinite music.

He opened his eyes. In moonlight Andreas’s pale thin unforgiving face floated above him, darkly grinning.

*

Now he became an insubstantial thing, a web of air rippling in red winds. He felt that he had been flayed of a vital protective skin. His surfaces ached, flesh, nails, hair, the very filaments of his eyes, yearning for what he could not name nor even properly imagine. At Mass he spied down from the choir loft on the women of the town kneeling in the congregation below him. They were hopelessly corporeal creatures. Even the youngest and daintiest of them in no way matched the shimmering singing spirits that flew at him out of the darkness of his frantic nights. Nor was there any comfort to be had from the snivelling smelly little boys that came trailing their blankets through the dormitory, offering themselves in return for the consolation of a shared bed. What he sought was something other than ordinary flesh, was something made of light and air and marvellous grave gaiety.

Snow fell, and soothed the raw wound he has opened with his own hands. For three days it stormed in eerie silence, and then, on the fourth, dawn found the world transformed. It was in the absence of things that the change lay; the snow itself was hardly a presence, was rather a nothing where before there had been something, a pavement, a headstone, a green field, and the eye, lost in that white emptiness, was led irresistibly to the horizon that seemed immeasurably farther off now than it had ever been before.

Nicolas carried his numbed and lightened spirit up the winding stairs of the tower where Canon Wodka had his observatory, a little circular cell with a single window that opened out like a trapdoor on the sky. All tended upward here, so that the tower itself seemed on the point of flight. He climbed the seven wooden steps to the viewing platform, and as his head emerged into the stinging air he felt for a moment that he might indeed continue upward effortlessly, up and up, and he grew dizzy. The sky was a dome of palest glass, and the sun sparkled on the snow, and everywhere was a purity and brilliance almost beyond bearing. Through the far clear silence above the snowy fields and the roofs of the town he heard the bark of a fox, a somehow perfect sound that pierced the stillness like a gleaming needle. A flood of foolish happiness filled his heart. All would be well, O, all would be well! The infinite possibilities of the future awaited him. That was what the snow meant, what the fox said. His young soul swooned, and slowly, O, slowly, he seemed to fall upward, into the blue.

* * *

In his fourth year at the University of Cracow he was ordered by Uncle Lucas to return at once to Torun: the Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter was dying, and Uncle Lucas, now Bishop of the diocese, was bent on securing the post for his youngest nephew. Nicolas made the long journey northwards alone through a tawny sad September. He was twenty-two. He carried little away with him from the Polish capital. Memories still haunted him of certain spring days in the city when the wind sang in the spires and washes of sunlight swept through the streets, and the heart, strangely troubled by clouds and birds and the voices of children, became lost and confused in surroundings that yesterday had seemed irreproachably familiar.

Andreas and he had lodged with Katharina and her husband, Gertner the merchant. Nicolas disliked that smug stolid household. Womanhood and early marriage had not changed his sister much. She was still, behind the mask of the young matron, a feline calculating child, cruel and greedy, tormented by an implacable discontent. Nicolas suspected her of adultery. She and Andreas fought as fiercely as ever they had done as children, but there was palpable between them now a new accord, forged by the sharing of secrets concealed from husband and brother alike. They united too in baiting Nicolas. His anxieties amused them, his shabbiness, his studiousness, his risible sobriety — amused them, yes, but disturbed them too, obscurely. He suffered their jibes in silence, smiling meekly, and saw, not without a certain satisfaction of which he tried but failed to feel ashamed, that indifference was the weapon that wounded them most sorely.

*

True, he had learned a great deal in Poland. After four years his head was packed with great granite blocks of knowledge; but knowledge was not perception. His mind, already venturing apprehensively along certain perilous and hitherto untrodden paths, required a lightness and delicacy of atmosphere, a sense of air and space, that was not to be had at Cracow. It was significant, he realised later, that the college on first sight had reminded him of nothing so much as a fortress, for it was, despite its pretensions, the main link in the defences thrown up by scholasticism against the tide of new ideas sweeping in from Italy, from England, and from Rotterdam. In his first year there he witnessed pitched bloody battles in the streets between Hungarian scholastics and German humanists. Although these student brawls seemed to him senseless and even comical, he could not help but see, in the meeting under the lowering mass of Wawel Rock of flaxen-haired northerners and the Magyars with their sullen brows and muddy complexions, something made tangible of that war of minds being waged across the continent.

The physical world was expanding. In their quest for a sea route to the Indies the Portuguese had revealed the frightening immensity of Africa. Rumours from Spain spoke of a vast new world beyond the ocean to the west. Men were voyaging out to all points of the compass, thrusting back the frontiers everywhere. All Europe was in the grip of an inspired sickness whose symptoms were avarice and monumental curiosity, the thirst for conquest and religious conversion, and something more, less easily denned, a kind of irresistible gaiety. Nicolas too was marked with the rosy tumours of that plague. His ocean was within him. When he ventured out in the frail bark of his thoughts he was at one with those crazed mariners on their green sea of darkness, and the visions that haunted him on his return from terra incognita were no less luminous and fantastic than theirs.

Yet the world was more, and less, than the fires and ice of lofty speculation. It was also his life and the lives of others, brief, pain-laden, irredeemably shabby. Between the two spheres of thought and action he could discern no workable connection. In this he was out of step with the age, which told him heaven and earth in his own self were conjoined. The notion was not seriously to be entertained, however stoutly he might defend it out of loyalty to the humanist cause. There were for him two selves, separate and irreconcilable, the one a mind among the stars, the other a worthless fork of flesh planted firmly in earthy excrement. In the writings of antiquity he glimpsed the blue and gold of Greece, the blood-boltered majesty of Rome, and was allowed briefly to believe that there had been times when the world had known an almost divine unity of spirit and matter, of purpose and consequence: was it this that men were searching after now, across strange seas, in the infinite silent spaces of pure thought?

Well, if such harmony had ever indeed existed, he feared deep down, deep beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained.

*

He took humanities, and also theology, as Uncle Lucas had directed. His studies absorbed him wholly. His ways became the set ways of the scholar. Old before his time, detached, desiccated and fussy, he retreated from the world. He spoke Latin now more readily than German.

And yet it was all a deeply earnest play-acting, a form of ritual by which the world and his self and the relation between the two were simplified and made manageable. Scholarship transformed into docile order the hideous clamour and chaos of the world outside himself, endistanced it and at the same time brought it palpably near, so that, as he grappled with the terrors of the world, he was terrified and yet also miraculously tranquil. Sometimes, though, that tranquil terror was not enough; sometimes the hideousness demanded more, howled for more, for risk, for blood, for sacrifice. Then, like an actor who has forgotten his lines, he stood paralysed, staring aghast into a black hole in the air.

He believed in action, in the absolute necessity for action. Yet action horrified him, tending as it did inevitably to become violence. Nothing was stable: politics became war, law became slavery, life itself became death, sooner or later. Always the ritual collapsed in the face of the hideousness. The real world would not be gainsaid, being the true realm of action, but he must gainsay it, or despair. That was his problem.

*

Amongst the things he wished to forget from Cracow was his encounter with Professor Adalbert Brudzewski, the mathematician and astronomer. The memory of that mad mangled afternoon, however, was the ghost of a persistent giant with huge hairy paws that for years came at him again and again, laughing and bellowing, out of a crimson miasma of embarrassment and shame. It would not have been so bad if only Andreas had not been there to witness his humiliation. By rights he should not have been there: he had shown no interest whatever in Brudzewski or his classes until, after weeks of wheedling and grovelling, Nicolas had at last won a grudging invitation to the Professor’s house — to his house! — and then he had announced in that languid way of his that he would go along too, since he had nothing better to do that day. Yet Nicolas made no protest, only shrugged, and frowned distractedly to show how little he cared in the matter, while in his imagination a marvellously haughty version of himself turned and told his brother briefly but with excoriating accuracy what a despicable hound he was.

*

Professor Brudzewski’s classes were rigorous and very exclusive, and were, as the Professor himself was fond of pointing out, one of the main bases on which the university’s impeccable reputation rested. Although he was of course a Ptolemeian, his recent cautious but by no means hostile commentary on Peurbach’s planetary theory had raised some eyebrows among his fellow academics — brows which, however, he immediately caused to knit again into their wonted, lamentably low state by means of a few good thumps in defence of Ptolemaic dogma, delivered with malicious relish to the more prominent temples of suspect scholarship. The Peurbachs of the present day might come and go, but Ptolemy was unassailable on his peak, and Professor Brudzewski was there to say so, as often and as strenuously as he deemed it necessary so to do.

Nicolas had read everything the Professor had ever written on the Ptolemaic theory. Out of all those weary hours of wading through the dry sands of a sealed mind there had been distilled one tiny precious drop of pearly doubt. He could no longer remember where or when he had found the flaw, along what starry trajectory, on which rung of those steadily ascending ladders of tabular calculation, but once detected it had brought the entire edifice of a life’s work crashing down with slow dreamlike inevitability. Professor Brudzewski knew that Ptolemy was gravely wrong. He could not of course admit it, even to himself; his investment was too great for that. This failure of nerve explained to Nicolas how it was that a mathematician of the first rank could stoop into deceit in order, in Aristotle’s words, to save the phenomena, that is, to devise a theory grounded firmly in the old reactionary dogmas that yet would account for the observed motions of the planets. There were cases, such as the wildly eccentric orbit of Mars, that the general Ptolemaic theory could not account for, but faced with these problems the Professor, like his Alexandrian magister before him, leant all the weight of his prodigious skill upon the formulae until they buckled into conformity.

At first Nicolas was ashamed on the Professor’s behalf. Then the shame gave way to compassion, and he began to regard the misfortunate old fellow with a rueful, almost paternal tenderness. He would help him! Yes, he would become a pupil, and in the classroom take him gently in hand and show him how he might admit his folly and thereby make amends for the years of stubborness and wilful blindness. And there would be another but very different book, perhaps the old man’s last, the crowning glory of his life, Tractatus contra Ptolemaeus, with a brief acknowledgment to the student — so young! so brilliant! — whose devastating arguments had been the thunderbolt that had struck down the author on his blithe blind way to Damascus. O yes. And though the text itself be forgotten, as surely it would be, generations of cosmologists as yet unborn would speak of the book with reverence as marking the first public appearance — so characteristically modest! — of one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Nicolas trembled, drunk on these mad visions of glory. Andreas glanced at him and smirked.

“You are sweating, brother, I can smell you from here.”

“I do not have your calm, Andreas. I worry. I very much want to hear him lecture.”

“Why? This stargazing and so forth, what good is it?”

Nicolas was shocked. What good? — the only certain good! But he could not say that, and contented himself with a smile of secret knowing. They passed under the spires of St Mary’s Church. Spring had come to Cracow, and the city today seemed somehow airborne, an intricate aetherial thing of rods and glass flying in sunlight through pale blue space. Andreas began to whistle. How handsome he was, after all, how dashing, in his velvet tunic and plumed cap, with his sword in its ornate scabbard swinging at his side. He had carried intact into manhood the frail heart-breaking beauty of his youth. Nicolas touched him tenderly on the arm.

“I am interested in these things, you see,” he said, “that is all.”

He had done his brother no wrong that he could think of, yet he seemed to be apologising; it was a familiar phenomenon.

“You are interested — of course you are,” Andreas answered. “But I imagine you are not entirely unmindful either that our dear uncle is watching our progress closely, eh?”

Nicolas nodded gloomily. “So: you think I am trying by being zealous to outflank you in his favour.”

“What else should I think? You did not want me to come with you today.”

“You were not invited!”

“Pah. You must understand, brother, that I know you, I know how you plot and scheme behind my back. I do not hate you for it, no — I only despise you.”

“Andreas.”

But Andreas had begun to whistle again, merrily.

*

Professor Brudzewski lived in a big old house in the shadow of St Mary’s. The brothers were shown into the hall and left to wait, ringed round by oppressive pillars of silence stretching up past the gallery to the high ceiling with its faded frescos. They looked about them blandly, as if to impress on someone watching them the innocence of their intentions, only to discover with a start that they were indeed being watched by a dim figure behind the screens to the left. They turned away hurriedly, and heard at their backs a soft mad laugh and footsteps retreating.

They waited for a long time, apparently forgotten, while the hall came gradually to weird life around them. At first it was a matter of doors flying open to admit disembodied voices that shredded the silence, before closing again slowly with a distinct but inexplicable air of menace. Then, when they had wearied of assuming an expectant smile at each unfinished entrance, the voices began to be followed through the doorways by their owners, an oddly distracted, anonymous assortment of persons who did not stay, however, but merely passed through in small tight groups of two or three, murmuring, on their absorbed way elsewhere. These enigmatic pilgrims were to cross Nicolas’s path throughout that day without ever giving up the secret of their mysterious doings.

The steward returned at last, a soft fat pale pear-shaped creature with a tiny voice and paddle feet and an immaculately bald white skull. He crooked a dainty finger at the brothers and led them into an adjoining room full of sudden sunlight from a high window. Briefly they glimpsed, as they entered by one door, a smiling girl in a green gown going out by another, leaving behind her trembling on the bright air an image of blurred beauty. Professor Brudzewski peered at them dubiously and said:

“Ah!”

He had a long yellowish face with a little pointed grey beard clenched under the lower lip like a fang. His back was so grievously bent that his loose black robe, fastened tight at the throat, hung down to the floor curtainwise. Through a vent at the side was thrust a gnarled claw in which there was fixed, as a peg into a socket, the stout black stick that alone it seemed prevented him from collapsing in a little heap of dust and drapery and dry bones. This seeming frailty was deceptive: he was a quick-tempered cold old body who disliked the world, and tolerated it at best, or, when it made so bold as to accost him face to face, lashed out at it with high-pitched furious loathing.

There was a silence; it was plainly apparent that he had no idea who his guests were, and hardly cared. Nicolas felt his smile curdle into a sickly smirk. He could think of nothing to say. Andreas, clutching the hilt of his sword — which both brothers at once, wincing, suddenly remembered he was forbidden by college rules to wear in public — stepped forward with a clank.

“Magister! this is my brother, Nicolas Koppernigk, whom you know, of course; I am Andreas of that name. We come in humility to this veritable Olympus. Ha ha. Our uncle, Doctor Lucas Waczelrodt, Bishop of Ermland, sends greetings.”

“Yes yes, quite so,” the Professor muttered. “Quite so.” He had not been listening. He looked past them with a frown to the doorway where three gentlemen had entered quietly, and stood now in a huddle, whispering. One was tall and thin, another short and fat, and the third, whose back was turned, was a middling sort with warts. They had a look about them of conspirators. Professor Brudzewski began to make a whirring noise under his breath. Abruptly he excused himself, set off rapidly crabwise for the door through which the green girl had gone, mumbled something that the brothers did not catch, and vanished. The conspirators hesitated, exchanging looks and hopping agitatedly from foot to foot, and then all together in a rush plunged after him, almost knocking over in their haste the steward returning with two incongruously jolly foaming mugs of beer, which he tenderly bestowed upon the guests in silence, with a mournful smile. Cloudshadow swooped into the room like a great dark bird.

After that for a long time the brothers drifted slowly about the house, somewhat dazed, jostled by flotsam. A strange distraught little man in cloak and hose with an absurd feather in his hat waylaid them in a corridor and launched without preamble into a bitter invective against the incompetence of the Chaldean cosmographers, who he seemed to feel had injured him personally in some mysterious way. Andreas slipped off, leaving Nicolas to stand alone, smiling and nodding helplessly, under a fine spray of spittle. At last the little man wound down, and, panting, departed, nodding furious approval of his own arguments. Nicolas turned, and turning caught at the edge of a canted mirror blazing with reflected sunlight a glimpse of green, that smile again, that girl! and all at once he knew her to be an emblem of light and elusive loveliness, a talisman whose image he might hold up against the malignant chaos of this ramshackle afternoon.

He hurried down the corridor, following the mirror’s burning gaze, and turned a corner to find no girl, only the black stooped figure of the Professor tapping his way toward him.

“Ah, you!” the old man said peevishly. “Where have you been?” He frowned. “Were there not two of you? Well, no matter.”

Nicolas launched forth at once upon the speech that for days he had been preparing. He stammered and sweated, beside himself in his eagerness to impress. Pythagoras! Plato! Nicolas Cusanus! The names of the glorious dead rolled out of his mouth and crashed together in the narrow corridor like great solid stone spheres. He hardly knew what he was saying. He felt that he had become entangled in the works of some dreadful yet farcical, inexorable engine. Herakleides! Aristotle! Regiomontanus! Bang! Crash! Clank! The Professor watched him carefully, as if studying a novel and possibly snappish species of rodent.

“Ptolemy, young man — you make no mention of Ptolemy, who has after all, as is well known, resolved for us the mysteries of the universe.”

“Yes but but but magister, if I may say, is it not true, has it not been suggested, that there are certain, how shall I say, certain dispositions of the phenomena that nothing in Ptolemy will explain?”

The Professor smiled a wan and wintry smile, and tapped on the oaken tiles with his stick as if searching for a flaw in the floor.

“And what,” he murmured, “might these inexplicable phenomena be?”

“O but I do not say that there are such mysteries, no no,” Nicolas answered hastily. “I am asking rather.”

This would not do, this faint-heartedness, it would not do at all. What was required now was a clear and fearless exposition of his views. But what were his views? And could they be spoken? It was one thing to know that Ptolemy had erred, and that planetary science since his time had been a vast conspiracy aimed at saving the phenomena, but it was quite another to put that knowledge into words, especially in the presence of a prime conspirator.

The orbit of the afternoon had brought him back to his starting point in the hall. He was confused, and growing desperate. Things were not at all as he had imagined they would be. The little man with the feather in his cap, scourge of the Chaldeans, passed them by with a fierce look.

He could only say what was not, and not what was; he could only say: this is false, and that is false, ergo that other must be true of which as yet I can discern only the blurred outline.

“It seems to me, magister, that we must revise our notions of the nature of things. For thirteen hundred years astronomers have been content to follow Ptolemy without question, like credulous women, as Regiomontanus says, but in all that time they have not been able to discern or deduce the principal thing, namely the shape of the universe and the unchanging symmetry of its parts.”

The Professor said: “Hum!” and flung open the door on the sunlit room and the high window. This time there was alas no green girl, only the ubiquitous trio of conspirators, each with a hand on another’s shoulder—Soft! See who comes! — watching. The Professor advanced, shaking his head.

“I fail to understand you,” he growled. “The principal thing, you claim, is to, what was it? to discern the shape of the universe and its parts. I do not understand that. How is it to be done? We are here and the universe, so to speak, is there, and between the two there is no sensible connection, surely?”

The room was high and wide, with rough white walls above half panelling, a ceiling with arched black beams and a checkered stone floor. There was a table and four severe chairs, and on the table a burnished copper bowl brimming with rose petals. A plaster relief on one wall depicted three naked women joined hand to shoulder in a sinuous circular dance of giving, receiving and returning. Below them on the floor a pearwood chest stood smugly shut, opposite an antique hourglass-shaped iron stove with a brass canopy. The conspirators began imperceptibly to advance. The window’s stippled diamond panes gave on to a little courtyard and a stunted cherry tree in bloom. Suddenly Nicolas was appalled by the blank anonymity of surfaces, the sullen, somehow resentful secretiveness of unfamiliar things whose contours have been rubbed and shaped by the action of unknown lives. Doubtless for others this room was strung with a shimmering web of exquisitely exact significances, perhaps it was so even for these three peculiar persons edging stealthily forward; but not for Nicolas. He thought: what can we know that is not of ourselves?

“Paracelsus says,” he said, “that in the scale of things man occupies the centre, that he is the measure of all things, being the point of equilibrium between that which is great and that which is small.”

Professor Brudzewski was staring at him.

“Paracelsus? Who is this? He is mad, surely. God is the measure of all things, and only God can comprehend the world. What you seem to suggest, young man, with your principal thing, smacks of blasphemy therefore.”

“Blablablasphemy?” Nicolas bleated. “Surely not. Did you yourself not say that in Ptolemy we find the solution to the mysteries of the universe?”

“That was a manner of speaking, no more.”

The door behind them opened and Andreas entered softly. Nicolas squirmed, drenched with sweat. The conspirators, without seeming to move, were yet bearing down upon him inexorably. He felt a dismayed sense of doom, like one who hears the ice shattering behind him as he careers with slow, mad inevitability out into the frozen lake.

“But magister, you said—!”

“Yes yes yes yes, quite — I know what I said.” The old man glared at the floor, and gave it a whack with his stick — take that, you! “Listen to me: you are confusing astronomy with philosophy, or rather that which is called philosophy today, by that Dutchman, and the Italians and their like. You are asking our science to perform tasks which it is incapable of performing. Astronomy does not describe the universe as it is, but only as we observe it. That theory is correct, therefore, which accounts for our observations. Ptolemy’s theory is perfectly, almost perfectly valid insofar as pure astronomy is concerned, because it saves the phenomena. This is all that is asked of it, and all that can be asked, in reason. It does not discern your principal thing, for that is not to be discerned, and the astronomer who claims otherwise will be hissed off the stage!”

“Are we to be content then,” Nicolas cried, “are we to be content with mere abstractions? Columbus has proved that Ptolemy was mistaken as to the dimensions of the Earth; shall we ignore Columbus?”

“An ignorant sailor, and a Spaniard. Pah!”

“He has proved it, sir—!” He lifted a hand to his burning brow; calm, he must keep calm. The room seemed full of turbulence and uproar, but it was only the tumult within him dinning in his ears. Those three were still advancing steadily, and Andreas was at his back doing he did not wish to imagine what. The Professor swung himself on his stick in a furious circle around the table, so stooped now that it appeared he might soon, like some fabulous serpent, clamp his teeth upon his own nether regions and begin to devour himself in his rage. Nicolas, gobbling and clucking excitedly, pursued him at a hesitant hop.

“Proof?” the old man snapped. “Proof? A ship sails a certain distance and returns, and the captain comes ashore and agitates the air briefly with words; you call this proof? By what immutable standards is this a refutation of Ptolemy? You are a nominalist, young man, and you do not even know it.”

“I a nominalist—I? Do you not merely say the name of Ptolemy and imagine that all contrary arguments are thus refuted? No no, magister; I believe not in names, but in things. I believe that the physical world is amenable to physical investigation, and if astronomers will do no more than sit in their cells counting upon their fingers then they are shirking their responsibility!”

The Professor halted. He was pale, and his head trembled alarmingly on its frail stalk of neck, yet he sounded more puzzled than enraged when he said:

“Ptolemy’s theory saves the phenomena, I have said so already; what other responsibility should it have?”

Tell him. Tell him.

“Knowledge, magister, must become perception. The only acceptable theory is that one which explains the phenomena, which explains. . which. .” He stared at the Professor, who had begun to shake all over, while out of his pinched nostrils there came little puffs of an extraordinary harsh dry noise: he was laughing! Suddenly he turned, and pointed with his stick and asked:

“What do you say, young fellow? Let us hear your views.”

Andreas leaned at ease by the window with his arms folded and his face lifted up to the light. A handful of rain glistened on the glass, and a breeze in silence shook the blossoms of the cherry tree. The unutterable beauty of the world pierced Nicolas’s sinking heart. His brother pondered a moment, and then with the faintest of smiles said lightly:

“I say, magister, that we must hold fast to sanity and Aristotle.”

It meant nothing, of course, but it sounded well; O yes, it sounded well. Professor Brudzewski nodded his approval.

“Ah yes,” he murmured. “Just so.” He turned again to Nicolas. “I think you have been too much influenced by our latterday upstarts, who imagine that they can unravel the intricacies of God’s all-good creation. You spoke of Regiomontanus: I studied under that great man, and I can assure you that he would have scorned these wild notions you have put forth today. You question Ptolemy? Mark this: to him who thinks that the ancients are not to be entirely trusted, the gates of our science are certainly closed. He will lie before those gates and spin the dreams of the deranged about the motion of the eighth sphere, and he will get what he deserves for believing that he can lend support to his own hallucinations by slandering the ancients. Therefore take this young man’s sound advice, and hold fast to sanity.”

Nicolas in his dismay felt that he must be emitting a noise, a thin piercing shriek like that of chalk on slate. There was a distinct sensation of shock at the base of his spine, as if he had sat down suddenly without looking on the spot from whence a chair had been briskly removed. The three conspirators, crowding at his shoulder, regarded him with deep sadness. They were at once solicitous and sinister. The one with the warts kept his face turned away, unable to look full upon such folly. Andreas, laughing silently, said softly in his brother’s ear:

“Bruder, du hast in der Scheisse getreppen.”

And the fat conspirator giggled. Behind the screens in the hall the secret watcher waited. It was of course — of course! — the green girl. The Professor peered at her balefully, and turning to the brothers he sighed and said:

“Gentlemen, you must forgive me my daughter. The wench is mad.”

He shook his stick at her and she retreated, harlequinned by crisscross shadows, pursued by the conspirators scurrying on tiptoe, twittering, to the stairs, where the little man in the plumed hat waited among other, vaguer enigmas. All bowed and turned, ascended slowly into the gloom, and vanished.

Professor Brudzewski impatiently bade the brothers good day — but not before he had invited Andreas to attend his lectures. Grey rain was falling on Cracow.

“What? — spend my mornings listening to that old cockerel droning on about the planets and all that? Not likely, brother; I have better things to do.”

*

Nicolas arrived in Torun at September’s end. The house in St Anne’s Lane received him silently, solicitously, like a fellow mourner. Old Anna and the other servants were gone now, and there was a new steward in charge, a surly fellow, one of the Bishop’s men. He followed Nicolas about the house with a watchful suspicious eye. The sunny autumn day outside was all light and distance, and above the roofs and spires a cloud, a ship in air, sailed gravely at the wind’s pace across a sky immensely high and blue. The leaves of the linden were turning.

“Build a fire, will you. I am cold.”

“Yes, master. His Grace your uncle gave me to understand that you would not be staying?”

“No, I shall not be staying.”

Uncle Lucas came that evening, in a black rage. He greeted Nicolas with a glare. The Frauenburg Precentor had been crass enough to die in an uneven-numbered month, when the privilege of filling Church appointments in the See of Ermland passed by Church law from the Bishop to the Pope.

“So we may forget it, nephew: I am not loved at Rome. Ach!” He beat the air vainly with his fists. “Another week, that was all! However, we must be charitable. God rest his soul.” He fastened his little black eyes on Nicolas. “Well, have you lost your tongue?”

“My Lord—”

“Pray, do not grovel! You took no degree at Cracow. Four years.”

“It was you that summoned me away, my Lord. I had not completed my studies.”

“Ah.” The Bishop paced about a moment, nodding rapidly, with his hands clasped behind his back. “Hmm. Yes.” He halted. “Let me give you some advice, nephew. Rid yourself of this rebellious streak, if you wish to remain in my favour. I will not have it! Do you understand?” Nicolas bowed his head meekly, and the Bishop grunted and turned away, disappointed it seemed with so easy a victory. He hoisted up his robe and thrust his backside to the fire. “Steward! Where is the whoreson? Which reminds me: I suppose your wastrel brother is also kicking his heels in Poland waiting for me to find him a soft post? What a family, dear God! It is from the father, of course. Bad blood there. And you, wretch, look at you, cowering like a kicked dog. You hate me, but you have not the courage to say it — O yes, it’s true, I know. Well, you will be rid of me soon enough. There will be other posts at Frauenburg. Once I have secured you a prebend you will be off my hands, and my accounts, and after that I care not a whit what you do, I shall have fulfilled my responsibility. Take my advice and go to Italy.”

“It—?”

“—Or wherever, it’s no matter, so long as it is somewhere far off. And take your brother with you: I do not want him within an ass’s roar of my affairs. Well, man, what are you grinning at?”

Italy!

* * *

On Easter Day in 1496 Canon Nicolas and his brother marched forth from Cracow’s Florian Gate in the company of a band of pilgrims. There were holy men and sinners, monks, rogues, mountebanks and murderers, poor peasants and rich merchants, widows and virgins, mendicant knights, scholars, pardoners and preachers, the hale and the halt, the blind, the deaf, the quick and the dying. Royal banners fluttered in the sunlight against an imperial blue sky, and the royal trumpeters blew a brassy blast, and from high upon the fortress walls the citizens with cheers and a wild waving of caps and kerchiefs bade the wayfarers farewell, as down the dusty road into the plain they trudged. Southwards they were bound, over the Alps to Rome, the Holy City.

“He could have got us a couple of nags,” Andreas grumbled, “damned skinflint, instead of leaving us to walk like common peasants.”

Nicolas would not have cared had Bishop Lucas forced them to crawl to Italy. He was, for the first time in his life, so it seemed to him, free. A post had been found for him at last at Frauenburg; the Chapter at the Bishop’s direction had granted him immediate leave of absence, and he had departed without delay for Cracow. He found that city strangely altered, no longer the forlorn gloomy terminus he had known during his university years, but a bustling waystation cheerful with travellers and loud with the uproar of foreign tongues. To be sure, the change was not in the city but in him, the traveller, who noticed now what the student had ignored, yet he chose to see his new regard for this proud cold capital as a sign that he had at last grown up into himself and his world, that he was at last renouncing the past and turning his face toward an intrepid manhood; it was all nonsense, of course, he knew it; but still, he was allowed for a few days at least to feel mature, and worldly-wise, and significant.

His newfound self-esteem, however tentative it was and prone to collapse into self-mockery, infuriated Andreas. No undemanding canonry had been secured for him. Wherever he turned Bishop Lucas’s black shadow fell upon him like a blight. He was not going to Italy — he was being sent. And he had not even been provided with a horse to lift him above the common throng.

“I am almost thirty, and still he treats me like a child. What have I ever done to deserve his contempt? What have I done?”

He glared at Nicolas, daring him to answer, and then turned his face away, grinding his teeth in rage and anguish. Nicolas was embarrassed, as always in the presence of another’s public pain. He wanted to walk away very quickly, he even imagined himself fleeing with head down, muttering, waving his arms like one pursued by a plague of flies, but there was nowhere to go that would be free of his brother’s anger and pain.

Andreas laughed.

“And you, brother,” he said softly, “feeding off me, eating me alive.”

Nicolas stared at him. “I do not understand you.”

“O get away, get away! You sicken me.”

And so, lashed together by thongs of hatred and frightful love, they set out for Italy.

*

They equipped themselves with two stout staffs, good heavy jackets lined with sheepskin against the Alpine cold, a tinderbox, a compass, four pounds of sailor’s biscuit and a keg of salt pork. The gathering of these provisions afforded them a deep childish satisfaction. Andreas found in the Italian swordsmith’s near the cathedral an exquisitely tooled dagger with a retracting blade that at the touch of a concealed lever sprang forward with an evil click. This ingenious weapon he kept in a sheath sewn for the purpose inside his bootleg. It made him feel wonderfully dangerous. Bartholemew Gertner, Katharina’s husband, sold them a mule, and cheated them only a little on the deal, since they were family, after all. A taciturn and elderly beast, this mule carried their baggage readily enough, but would not bear the indignity of a rider, as they quickly discovered.

Nicolas could have bought them a pair of horses. Before leaving Frauenburg he had drawn lavishly on his prebend. But he kept his riches secret, and sewed the gold into the lining of his cloak, because he did not wish to embarrass his penniless brother, so he told himself.

Andreas gazed gloomily southwards. “Like common pig peasants!”

Forth from St Florian’s Gate they marched into the great plain, behind them the cheering and the brassy blare of trumpets, before them the long road.

*

The weather turned against them. Near Braclav a windstorm rose without warning out of the plain and came at them like a great dark animal, howling. The inns were terrible, crawling with lice and rogues and poxed whores. At Graz they were fed a broth of tainted meat and suffered appalling fluxions; at Villach the bread was weevilled. A child died, fell down on the road screaming, clenched in agony, while its mother stood by and bawled.

Their number shrank steadily day by day, for many who had left with them from Cracow had been, like the brothers, merely travellers seeking protection and companionship on their way to Silesia or Hungary or South Germany, and by the time they reached the Carnic Alps they were no more than a dozen adults and some children, and even of that small band less than half were pilgrims. Old Felix, the holy man, smote the ground with his staff and inveighed against those worldly ones in their midst who were exploiting God’s protection on this holy journey; it was their impiety that had led them all to misfortune. He was a stooped emaciated ancient with a long white beard. On the women especially he fixed his burning eyes.

“It is sin that has brought us to this pass!”

Krack the murderer grinned.

“Ah give it a rest, grandpa.”

He was a jolly fellow, Krack, and useful too, for he knew well the ways of the road, and could truss and roast a pilfered chicken very prettily. He was convinced that they were all fugitives like him, using the pilgrimage as a handy camouflage for flight. Their dogged protests of innocence hurt his feelings: had he not regaled them readily enough with the details of his own moment of glory? “Bled like a pig he did, howling murder and God-a-mercy. He was tough, I tell you, the old bugger — slit from ear to ear and still clutching his few florins as if they was his ballocks I was tearing off. Jesus!”

The men squabbled among themselves, and once there broke out a desperate fight with fists and cudgels in which a knife with a spring blade played no small part. There was trouble too with the womenfolk. A young girl, a crazed creature mortally diseased who lay at night with whatever man would have her, was set upon by the other women and beaten so severely that she died soon after. They left her for the wolves. Her ghost followed them, filling their nights with visions of blood and ruin.

And then one rainy evening as they were crossing a high plateau under a sulphurous lowering sky a band of horsemen wheeled down on them, yelling. They were unlovely ruffians, tattered and lean, deserters from some distant war. “Good holy Jesus poxed fucking Christ!” Krack muttered, gaping at them, and slapped his leg and laughed. They were old comrades of his, apparently. Their leader was a redheaded Saxon giant with an iron hook where his right hand had once been.

“We are crusaders, see,” this Rufus roared, his carroty hair whipping in the yellow wind, “off to fight the infidel Turk. We need food and cash for the long journey before us. When you reach Rome you may tell the Pope you met with us: we’re his men, fighting his cause, and he’ll return with interest the donations you’re going to make to us. Right, lads?” His fellows laughed heartily. “Now then, let’s have you. Food I say, and whatever gold you’ve got, and anyone who tries to cheat us will have his tripes cut out.”

Old Felix stepped forward.

“We are but poor pilgrims, friend. If you take what little we have you must answer to God for our deaths, for certes we shall not leave these mountains alive.”

Rufus grinned. “Offer up a prayer, dad, and Jesus might send manna from heaven.”

The old man shakily lifted his staff to strike, but Rufus with a great laugh drew his sword and ran him through the guts, and he sank to his knees in a torrent of blood, bellowing most terribly. Rufus wiped his sword on his sleeve and looked about. “Any other arguments? No?”

His men went among the travellers then like locusts, leaving them only their boots and a few rags to cover their backs. The brothers watched in silence their mule being driven off. Nicolas’s suspiciously weighty cloak was ripped asunder, and the hoard of coins spilled out. Andreas looked at him.

“Friends,” cried Rufus, “many thanks, and God go with you.”

They mounted up, but paused and muttered among themselves, grinning, and then dismounted again and raped the woman and two young boys. It took a long time for all those heaps of wriggling white flesh to be skewered, screaming, in the mud. Old Felix died as night fell, lying supine on the ground in the rain with his horny bare feet splayed, like a large wooden effigy, crying: Ah! Ah! Krack, waving a cheery farewell, had gone off with his friends. Andreas said:

“All that money, and not a word; you cunt.”

*

They would have perished surely, every one, had they not next day at dawn chanced upon a monastery perched on a rock high above a verdant valley. An old monk tending a vegetable garden outside the walls dropped his hoe and fled in terror at the sight of these walking dead who lifted up their frozen arms and mewled eerily. They could themselves hardly believe that they had survived. The night had been a kind of silvery icy death. They had spent it climbing blindly and in frantic haste, like possessed things, up the rocky slopes, watched by a huge impassive moon. Dawn had come in a flash of cold fire.

The monks of St Bernard received them kindly. One of the young boys died. Andreas, still brooding on that hidden trove of gold, would not speak to his brother. Nicolas passed his days out of doors, tramping the mountain paths in a monk’s cloak and cowl, telling himself stories, muttering Latin verse, imagining Italy, trying to purge himself of the memory of rain and screaming, of rags stiff with brown blood, of Krack’s smile. This country was unreal, this fiery icy Ultima Thule. He could not get his bearings here, everything was too big or too small, those impossible glittering mountains, the tiny blue flowers in the valley. Even the weather was strange, vast bluish brittle days of Alpine spring, fierce sun all light and little heat, transparent skies pierced by snowy peaks. The mountain goats clattered off with bells jangling at his approach, frightened by this staring alpenstocked dark parcel of pain and loathing. There was no forgetting. At night he was plagued by dreams whose sombre afterglow contaminated his waking hours, hung about him like a darkening of the air. He began to detect in everything signs of secret life, in flowers, mountain grasses, the very stones underfoot, all living, all somehow in agony. Thunderclouds flew low across the sky like roars of anguish on their way to being uttered elsewhere.

It was not the sufferings of the maimed and dead that pained him, but the very absence of that pain; he could not forget those terrible scenes, the blood and mud, the bundles of squirming flesh, but, remembering, he felt nothing, nothing, and this emptiness horrified him.

*

At Bologna, where they were to enrol at the university, the brothers parted company with the remnants of the pilgrimage. The representative at Rome of the Frauenburg Chapter, Canon Bernhard Schiller, had travelled north to meet them. He was a small grey cautious man.

“Well, gentlemen,” he snapped, “welcome to Italy. You are late arriving. I hope you had a pleasant journey, for certainly it was a leisurely one.”

They gazed at him. Andreas laughed. He said:

“We have no money.”

“What!” The Canon’s grey face turned greyer. In the end, however, he agreed to advance them a hundred ducats. “Understand, this is not my money, nor the Church’s either; it is your uncle’s. I have written to him today informing him of this transaction, and demanding an immediate refund.” He permitted himself a bleak smile. “I trust you have ready for him a satisfactory explanation of your poverty? And why, may I ask, are you got up in this monkish garb? Have you been gambling with clerics? A perilous pastime. Well, it is no business of mine. Good day.”

Andreas watched with bitter amusement as Nicolas carefully counted his share of the ducats.

“Better get it sewed up quick, brother.”

* * *

At twilight through hot crowded noxious streets he strode, speculating furiously on the true dimensions of the universe. Dark glossy heads and almond eyes turned to follow him with curiosity and amusement as he flew past. Bologna was a city of grotesques and madmen, yet he did not go unnoticed, with his long cloak and stark fanatic face. What did he care for their opinion, this noisy, stupid people! Italy had been a great disappointment; he hated it, the heat, the stale inescapable smell, the infantile uproar, the indolence, the corruption, the disorder. He had imagined a proud blue sunlit, serene land. Hawkers shrieked in his face, wheedling and bullying, thrusting at him their wine, their sweetmeats, their blinded singing birds. A fat buffoon with a head like a gobbet of raw meat, jiggling a string of stinking sausages, opened the wet red hole of his mouth and crowed: Bello, professore, bello, bello! A leprous beggar extended a fingerless hand and whined. He fled around a corner and was struck full tilt by a blinding blast of light. The setting sun sat on the city wall, flanked by a pair of robbers freshly hung that morning, black blots against the gold. Suddenly he yearned for those still pale pearly, limpid northern evenings full of silence and clouds. Vile vapours rose up from below. He had stepped in dogmerd.

With a sinking heart he heard his name called from the courtyard of a tavern close by, but when he made to hurry on he was prevented by a grinning drab, black as pitch, who planted herself in his path, smacking her blubber lips. A roar of tipsy laughter gushed out of the tavern.

“Come join us, brother, in a cup of wine,” Andreas called. He sat with a band of blades, good Germans all, his friends. “See, fellows, how pale and gaunt he looks. You are too much at the books.”

They regarded him merrily, delighted with him, provider of fine sport. One said:

“Too much at the rod, more like.”

“Aye, been galloping the maggot, have you, Canon?”

“Bashing the venerable bishop, eh?”

“Haw haw.”

“O sit down!” Andreas snapped, flushed and petulant; drink did not agree with him very well. Nicolas had often wondered at his brother’s uncanny knack of gathering about him the same friends wherever he went. The names varied, and the faces a little, but otherwise they were the same at Torun or Cracow or here in Bologna, idlers and whoremasters, pretender poets, rich men’s sons with too much money, bullyboys all. There was of course this difference, that they got progressively older. Among this present lot there was not a one under thirty. Perennial students! Nicolas smiled wryly to himself: he was not so young that he could afford to scoff at others. Yet he was different, he knew it, a different species; why else did he fit so ill among them, perched here on the edge of this bench, hugging himself in a transport of embarrassment and repugnance, grinning like an idiot?

“Tell us, brother, who was that fair wench we spied you with just now? Likely you were discussing the motions of the spheres? Venus rising and suchlike?” Nicolas shrugged and squirmed, simpering foolishly; he was no match for his brother at this kind of cutting banter. Andreas turned to the others with his languorous smile. “He is very hot on stargazing, you know, the pearly orbs, the globes of night, and so forth.”

A pimply fellow with straw-coloured locks and a wispy beard, the son of a Swabian count, took his sharp little nose out of his pintpot and leaned across the table seriously, and seriously said:

“Canon, have you heard tell of the unfortunate astronomer who got his sums mixed, and ended up with two planets where there should have been only one? Why, he made a ballocks of the orbit of Mars!”

There was more hawing and hohoing then, and more wine, and landlord! landlord! come fellow, a bowl of your best stewed tripe, for blind me but I have a longing for innards tonight. They left off baiting Nicolas. He was a poor foil for their wit, a poor punchbag. The last light of evening faded and the night came on apace, and stars, hesitant and dainty, glimmered in the trellis of vineleaves above their heads. A boy with a bunch of smoking tapers went among the tables. Here comes our young Prometheus, bringer of fire. What a sweet arse he has, look where he bends; here, boy, a ducat for your favours. The child backed off, smiling in fright. Music swelled in the street, wild caterwauling of fifes and the rattle of kettledrums, and a band of minstrels entered the courtyard in search of free wine. Nicolas grew dizzy in the noise and the smoke of the shaking rushlight. He drank. The Tuscan red was dark and tawny as old blood. Andreas mounted the table, wild-eyed and unsteady, roaring of freedom and rebirth, the new age, l’uomo nuovo. He staggered, clutching the air, and fell with a scream and a clatter into his brother’s lap. Nicolas, suddenly stricken by sad helpless love, rocked in his arms this slack damp drunken lump, this grotesque babe, who leaned out over the table and gawked—Ork! — upon the straw-strewn floor a dollop of tripe and wine.

Later they were in a narrow ill-lit stinking street, and someone was lying in an open drain being strenuously kicked. The count’s son stood by sniggering, until he was punched smartly out of the darkness by a disembodied fist and went down with a cry, gushing blood from a smashed nose. Nicolas found himself unaccountably on his knees in a low room or kind of little hut. The place was loud with grunting and moaning, and tangles of humped pale phosphorescent flesh writhed on the earthen floor. In the ghastly candlelight a woman lay on a pallet before him spreadeagled like an anatomical specimen, grinning and whimpering. She smelled of garlic and fish. He fell upon her with a moan and sank his teeth into her shoulder. It was a messy business, quickly done. Only afterwards did it strike him, when he put it to himself formally as it were, that he had at last relinquished his virginity. It had been just as he had imagined it would be.

*

Next morning he crept into the Aula Maxima bleared and crapulous, and late; his fellow students, elderly earnest young men, glared at him in disapproval and reproach. The Professor ignored him — what was a student’s tardiness to Domenico Maria da Novara, astronomer, scholar of Greek, devotee of Plato and Pythagoras? Perched in his high pulpit he was as ever supremely, magisterially bored. The dry sombre voice strolled weary and indifferent through the lecture, pacing out the sentences as if they were so many ells of fallow land; only later would the significance and peculiar brilliance of his thought be made manifest, when their notes exploded slowly, like an unfolding myriad-petalled flower, in the mean rooms and minds of his students. He was a cold queer fastidious man, tall and swart, in his middle years, with a cruel face like a sharp dark blade. At Bologna, where it was not uncommon for an arrogant lecturer to be humbled by a hail of brickbats, or even run through by a playful rapier, Novara commanded universal fear and respect.

“Koppernigk — a word, if I might.” Nicolas halted in alarm. The class had ended, and the last of his fellows were shuffling out of the hall. He tried to smile, and leering waited, sick-shotten, quaking. The Professor descended thoughtfully from the pulpit, and on the last step stopped and looked at him. “I am told that you have been putting about some, how shall I say, some curious ideas. Is it so, hmm?”

“Forgive me, maestro, I do not understand.”

“No?” Novara smiled thinly. They walked together down a sunlit corridor. Narrow stone arches to their right gave on to a paved courtyard and a marble statue with one arm raised in mysterious hieratic greeting; jagged shadows bristled under their feet. The Professor went on: “I mean of course astronomical ideas, speculations on the shape and size of the universe, that kind of thing. I am interested, you understand. They tell me that you have expressed doubts on certain parts of the Ptolemaic doctrine of planetary motion?”

“I have taken part, it is true, in some discussions, in the taverns, but I have done no more than echo what has been said already, many times, by you yourself among others.” Novara pursed his lips and nodded. Something seemed to amuse him. Nicolas said: “I do not believe that I have anything original to say. I am a dabbler. And I am not well this morning,” he finished wanly.

They strolled in silence for a time. The corridor was loud with the tramp of students, who eyed with furtive speculation this ill-assorted pair. Novara brooded. Presently he said:

“But your ideas on the dimensions of the universe, the intervals between planets, these seem to me original, or at least to promise great originality.” Nicolas wondered uneasily how the man could have come to hear of these things. His encounter with Brudzewski in Cracow had taught him discretion. He had admitted taking part in tavern talk, but surely he had never been more than a silent sharer? Who then knew enough of his thinking to betray him? The Professor watched him sidelong with a calculating look. “What interests me,” he said, “is whether or not you have the mathematics to support your theories?” There was of course one only who could have betrayed him; well, no matter. He was both pained and pleased, as if he had been caught in the commission of a clever crime. The few notions he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly travesties of the inexpressibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain, were suddenly made to seem far finer things than he had imagined by the attentions of the authoritative Novara.

“Maestro, I am no astronomer, nor a mathematician either.”

“Yes.” The Professor smiled again. “You are a dabbler, as you say.” He seemed to think that he had made a joke. Nicolas grinned greyly. They came out on the steps above the sunny piazza. The bells of San Pietro began to ring, a great bronze booming high in the air, and flocks of pigeons blossomed into the blue above the golden domes. Novara mused dreamily on the crowds below in the square, and then abruptly turned and with what passed in him for animation said:

“Come to my house, will you? Come today. There are some people I think you might be interested to meet. Shall we say at noon? Until noon, then. Vale.” And he went off quickly down the steps.

Well what—?

*

“Well, what happened?” Andreas asked.

“Where?”

“At Novara’s!”

“O, that.” They sat in the dining-hall of the German natio, where they lodged; it was evening, and beyond the grimy windows the Palazzo Communale brooded in late sunlight. The hall was crowded with crop-headed Germans at feed. Nicolas’s head pained him. “I do not know what Novara wants with me, I am not his kind at all. There were some others there, Luca Guarico, Jacob Ziegler, Calcagnini the poet—”

Andreas whistled softly. “Well well, I am impressed. The cream of Italy’s intellectuals, eh?” He smirked. “—And you, brother.”

“And I, as you say. Andreas, have you been putting about those few things I told you of my ideas on astronomy?”

“Tell me what happened at Novara’s.”

“—Because I wish you would not; I would rather you would not do that.”

“Tell me.”

*

He was shown into a courtyard with orange bushes in earthenware pots; a fountain plashed, playing a faint cool music. The guests were gathered on the terrace, lolling elegantly on couches and dainty cane chairs, sipping white wine from long-stemmed goblets of Murano crystal and lazily conversing. Nicolas was reminded of those cages of pampered quail that were to be seen hanging from the porticoes of the better houses of the city. Diffident, ill at ease, acutely aware of his raw-boned Prussian gracelessness, he stood mute and nervously smiling as the Professor introduced him. Novara was very much the patrician here, with his fine town house behind him. He affected a scissors-shaped lorgnon with which he made much play. This article, together with the brilliant light, the pools of violet shadow on the terrace, the sparkling glass, the watermusic and the perfume of the orange bushes, contrived to create an air of theatre. Elbing. Elbing? Nicolas wondered vaguely why he should suddenly have thought of that far northern town.

How did he like Italy? The climate, ah yes. And what subjects was he studying here? Indeed? There was a silence, and someone coughed behind gloved fingers. Their duty done, they turned back to the conversation that evidently his arrival had interrupted. Celio Calcagnini, a willowy person no longer in the first flower of youth, said languidly:

“The question, then, is what can be achieved? Bologna is not Firenze, and I think we all agree that our Don John Bentivoglio is not, and never could be, a Magnifico.” All softly laughed and shook their heads; the jibe against the Duke of Bologna seemed to be a familiar one. “And yet, my friends,” the poet continued, “we must work with the material to hand, however poor it is. The wise man knows that compromise is sometimes the only course — this is an excellent vintage, Domenico, by the way. I envy your cellar.”

Novara, leaning at ease against a white pillar, lifted his glass and bowed sardonically. A sleek black hound, which Nicolas with a start noticed now for the first time, lay at the Professor’s feet, sphinxlike, panting, with a fanged ferocious grin. Jacob Ziegler, astronomer of some repute and author of a recent much-admired work on Pliny, was a dark and brooding lean young blade with a pale long face and flashing eyes and a pencil-line moustache. He was exquisitely if a trifle foppishly attired in rubious silk and calfskin; a wide-brimmed velvet hat lay beside him like a great soft black exotic bird. The cane chair on which he sat crackled angrily as he leaned forward and cried:

“Compromise! Caution! I tell you we must act! Times do not change of themselves, but are changed by the actions of men. Bologna is not Firenze, just so; but what is Firenze? A town of fat shopkeepers besotted by soft living.” He glanced darkly at Calcagnini, who raised his eyebrows mildly and toyed with the stem of his wineglass. “They gobble up art and science as they would sugared marchpane, and congratulate themselves on their culture and liberality. Culture? Pah! And their artists and their scientists are no better. A gang of panders, theirs is the task of supplying the pretty baubles to mask the running sores of the poxed courtesan that is their city. Why, I should a thousand times rather we were the outcasts that we are than be as they, pampered adorners of decadence!”

“Decadence,” Novara softly echoed, gingerly tasting the word. Calcagnini looked up.

“A pretty speech, Jacob,” he said, smiling, “but I think I resent your imputations. Compromise likes me no better than it does you, yet I know that there is a time for everything, for caution and for action. If we move now we can only make our state worse than it already is. And come to that, what, pray, would you have us do? The Bentivoglio rule in this city is unshakeable. There is peace here, while all Italy is in turmoil — O I know, I know you would not call it peace, but besottedness. Yet call it what you will, our citizens, like their fellows in Firenze, are well fed and therefore well content to leave things just as they are. That is the equation; it is as simple as that. You may harangue them all you wish, berate them for their decadence, but they will only laugh at you — that is, so long as you are no more than a crazy astronomer with your head in the clouds. Come down to earth and meddle in their affairs, then it will be another matter. Fra Girolamo, the formidable Savonarola, was cherished for a time by Firenze. The city writhed in holy ecstasy under his lash, until he began to frighten them, and then — why, then they burnt him. You see? No no, Jacob, there will be no autos da fe in Bologna.”

Ziegler pouted, and a pretty flush spread upward from his cheeks to his pale forehead. “Are you comparing us to that mad monk, that creature, who castigated Plato as a source of immorality? He deserved burning, I say!”

Calcagnini smiled again tolerantly.

“No, my dear Jacob,” he murmured, “of course I make no such comparison. I am merely trying to demonstrate to you that precipitate and rash action on our part can lead us straight to ruin.”

“—And further,” Ziegler continued hotly, “why do you assume that the power of the Bentivoglios can be challenged only from within Bologna’s walls?”

The hound shut its jaws with a wet snap and rose and loped leanly away. There was an awkward silence. Ziegler glared about him haughtily, flushed and defiant. “Well?” he asked, of no one in particular. Novara frowned at him with pursed lips, and very slightly shook his head in wordless mild reproof. A scrawny individual, rejoicing in the name of Nono, laughed squeakily.

“L-let us hear the results of L–Luca’s 1-1-labours!” he ventured brightly. The others paid no heed to him, being engrossed in disapproving silently of whatever indiscretion it was that the unrepentant Ziegler had committed, and Nono turned unhappily to Nicolas and said, very loudly and deliberately, as if addressing a stone-deaf idiot: “H-he has made a horosc-sc-scope of Cesare, you see. Il Valentino, as he is called, ha ha.” Nicolas nodded, smiling hugely, miming extravagant gratitude and encouragement. “Bo-Bo-Borgia, that is,” Nono finished lamely, and frowned, searching it seemed for that last elusive word, the stammerer’s obsession, that surely would make all come marvellously clear.

Novara stirred. “Yes, Luca, tell us, what do the stars say of our young prince?”

Luca Guarico, he of the large head and hooked nose of a decayed Caesar, sighed fatly, and fatly shrugged. He was fat; he was that kind of fat that conjures up, in the goggling imaginations of thin fastidious men such as Nicolas, hideous and irresistible visions of quaking copulations, and monstrous labours in water closets, and helpless tears at the coming undone of a shoe buckle. He thrashed about briefly on the couch where he sat, and panting brought out from beneath his robes a wrinkled scrap of parchment.

“There is little to tell,” he wheezed. “Had I the facts it would be easy, but I have not. A long life, certainly; good fortune at first, as befits—” he smiled gloomily “—the Pope’s bastard. After his thirtieth year there will come a falling off, but that is not clear. He will conduct a victorious campaign in Lombardy and the Romagna, as that Sforza bitch will learn to her cost. He should beware the French, if Mars is to be trusted.” He shrugged again apologetically and put away the parchment. “So.”

“O brilliant, brilliant,” Ziegler muttered, plucking fiercely at his moustache. Guarico looked at him. Calcagnini hastened to say:

“Jacob, you are so fiery today! As Luca has told us, he has not the necessary facts — and indeed we may ask, who can know the facts concerning that strange and secretive dynasty?”

Bland smiles were exchanged. Novara said:

“But Luca, do you have nothing that touches on our concerns?”

“I can tell you this,” the fat man answered, and looked about him dourly, “this I can tell you: he will never sit on the throne of Peter.”

There was the sense of a slow soft crash, and Ziegler sniggered bitterly.

“Well then,” Novara murmured, “there is nothing for us there.”

Suddenly they all relaxed, and looked at Nicolas, a little bashfully it seemed, like players awaiting his applause. He stared back blankly, baffled. He felt he must have missed something of deep significance. The servants carried on to the terrace small silver trays of choice comestibles, flaked game in aspic, chunks of melon, translucent cuts of the spiced ham of the region. He picked, not without a faint concealed amusement, at a portion of cold quail. The sun had shifted out of the square of sky above the courtyard, and the light there no longer crackled harshly, but was a solid cube of hot bluish brilliance. He was acutely aware of his foreignness, and longed for the cold north. This was not his world, this heat, these strident passions, this stale flat air that sat so heavily in his lungs, like someone else’s breath; nothing touched him here, and he touched nothing. He was a little Prussia in the midst of Italy. An olive-skinned young dandy sitting opposite was eyeing him peculiarly, with a kind of knowing insolence.

Having eaten, the company retired from the terrace to a cool blue high-ceilinged lavish room, with an open archway at one end, and at the other wide windows giving on to a hazy sunlit distance of shimmering cypresses and olive-green hills. An air of expectancy was palpable, and presently the desultory talk stopped abruptly on the entrance of a strange distraught emaciated person with a lyre. He seemed the luckless bearer of a burden of intolerable knowledge, a seer cursed with unspeakable secrets. He stood by patiently, his blurred gaze fixed on some inner vision, while the servants reverently arranged a bank of cushions for him in the centre of the floor, then he settled himself with great care, crossing his pathetically skinny ankles, and began to sing in a weird piping voice. A breeze stirred the silken drapes at the windows, and billows of pale pearly light swayed across the shining floor. The black dog returned and lay down throbbing at Novara’s feet with wet jaws agape. Nicolas felt vaguely alarmed, for what reason he did not know. The song was a sustained sinuous incomprehensible cry that the anguished singer seemed to spin out of his very substance, slowly, painfully, a thin silver thread of sound rippling and weaving hypnotically above the soft dark plashing of the lyre. The company sat rapt, listening with such intensity that it appeared they were in some way assisting in the making of this unearthly music.

At length the song ended, and the singer gazed about him with a lost forsaken look, fretfully fingering the lank yellow strands of his hair. The others rose and went to him quickly, cooing and whispering, solicitous as women. He was given a beaker of wine to drink but took only a sip, and then was helped away, mumbling and sighing. The room was left limp and somehow satiated, as after a debauch. Novara rose, and with a glance invited Nicolas to follow him. Together they went out under the archway with the black dog padding softly behind them. The singer sat alone in an antechamber, ravaged and desolate in the midst of a great light. He looked at them blankly out of his strange pale yellowish eyes, and could not answer when Novara spoke to him, and only shook his head a little and turned away. But he smiled at the dog knowingly, as one conspirator to another. They passed on, and Nicolas asked:

“What is he? Is he ill?”

Novara lifted the lorgnon and looked at him searchingly.

“You do not know? Did you not recognise that music? It was an Orphic hymn to the Sun. He knew Ficino, you see, at the Academy in Firenze. He is not ill, not with what you or I understand as illness. The ancient knowledge to which he is heir consumes him fiercely. Great passion, great wisdom, these cannot be lightly borne by mortal men.”

Nicolas nodded, and said no more. All this was fraught with deep meaning, it seemed; it meant little to him.

They entered the library and walked among the cases of precious manuscripts and incunabula and priceless first editions from Germany and Venice. Novara caressed with his fingertips tenderly the polished spines. He was abstracted, and said little. A bent blade of sunlight from a narrow window clove the gloom. The silence throbbed. Novara produced a tiny gold key with which he unlocked a pearwood chest that Nicolas vaguely felt he had seen somewhere before. Here was the heart of the library, its true treasure, rare and exquisite copies of the Corpus Hermeticum along with Marsilio Ficino’s translations and a host of commentaries and glosses. The Professor began gravely to expatiate on the celestial mysteries. He spoke of decans and angels, of talismans and sympathetic magic, of the spiritus mundi that rules the world in secret. A change came over him and he spoke as one possessed. He was, it seemed, something of a magus.

“Do you believe, Herr Koppernigk?” he asked suddenly.

“I do not know what I believe, maestro.”

“Ah.”

Nicolas had already heard of the strange aetherial philosophy of this Thrice-Great Hermes, Trismegistus the Egyptian, wherein the universe is conceived as a vast grid of dependencies and sympathetic action controlled by the seven planets, or Seven Governors as Trismegistus called them. It was all altogether too raddled with cabalistic obscurities for Nicolas’s sceptical northern soul, yet he found deeply and mysteriously moving the gnostic’s dreadful need to discern in the chaos of the world a redemptive universal unity.

“The link that bound all things was broken by the will of God,” Novara cried. “That is what is meant by the fall from grace. Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and eternal!” He fixed on Nicolas his burning gaze. “Is this not what you yourself have been saying, however differently you say it, however different your terms? Ah yes, my friend, yes, I think you do believe!”

Nicolas smiled nervously and turned away, alarmed by this man’s sudden tentacled intensity. It was mad, all mad! yet when he imagined that fiery soul flying upward, aching upward into light, a nameless elation filled him, and that word glowed in his head like a talisman, that greatest of all words: redemption.

“I believe in mathematics,” he muttered, “nothing more.”

At that suddenly the Professor checked himself, his fire abated, and he was once again his former urbane studied self. “Exactly, my dear fellow,” he said, smiling, “just my point!” And he touched his guest lightly on the shoulder and led him back to join the waiting company.

Luca Guarico, squatting on a delicate ebony and velvet couch, shifted his vast bulk to make a little space beside him which he patted with a pudgy hand in roguish invitation, and Nicolas had no choice but to lower himself with a shiver into the faintly perfumed puddle of warmth that the fat man had left behind him. Novara paced the floor deep in thought, tapping the folded lorgnon against a thumbnail. No one spoke. Nicolas suspected that Guarico was watching him, and he would not turn for fear of what frightful intimacies he might be forced to share by meeting those pinkish porcine eyes. The insolent dandy who had stared at him before was now deep in whispered dark confabulation with two others of his kind. Celio Calcagnini sighed a brief bored melody and considered the ceiling, peeling off his immaculate white linen gloves finger by finger. The fiery Ziegler gnawed his nails in a furious abstraction. Nicolas was suddenly beset out of the blue by a sense of general absurdity. He rose hastily, propelled to his feet by the force of a soft fart inadvertently let slip by Guarico, and at that moment Novara turned to him and said: “Herr Koppernigk. .” He stopped, perplexed, finding his guest apparently on the point of fleeing. Nicolas leered apologetically and slowly subsided, while just above his head he fancied he could hear rumblings of muffled celestial merriment. “Herr Koppernigk,” Novara continued, “I feel I am not wrong in thinking that you are one of us at heart. You have realised by now, of course, that this is no mere aimless gathering of friends; we are, you may say, men with a purpose. We marked how closely you attended to that brief exchange between Celio here and our dear impetuous Jacob, and so we suspect that you have some little notion of the nature of our purpose?”

“O yes,” Nicolas said brightly, quite at a loss; finding himself stared at he beat an immediate retreat. “That is to say I feel I understand—”

“Yes yes, I see.” Novara waved a languid hand and resumed his pacing. “Let me explain. I say we have a purpose, but from this you must not imagine that you have stumbled upon a nest of conspirators. No doubt in the north they tell terrible tales of us here in Italy, but I assure you, we have no stilettos under our cloaks, no poisons secreted in our signet rings. We are, simply, a group of men dissatisfied with the state of things, frightened by the state of things. The world, my dear friend, is flying headlong to disaster, driven thither by the corruption that is all too evident in Church and State. There is the decay of the aristocracy, and along with it the collapse of the manorial system. There is the diminution of the standards of education, so that mere tradesmen’s sons are now allowed into our greatest univ. .” He caught Nicolas’s eye, and winced. “Ahem. In short, Herr von Koppernigk, there is the decadence of the age. Decadence. Ah. Is it not greatly to be feared? Is it not a plague, is it not worse than war? For decadence is the attendant midwife at a brute birth, and the beast that is being born, here, now, in this very city, is — I shudder to say it—”

“He m-means,” piped Nono, eager as the clever boy in the classroom, “the c-concept of lullul lullul lu-liberty!”

Novara looked at him coldly. “Just so,” he said, and turned away.

Calcagnini was still dreamily considering the ceiling, where pink plaster cherubs rioted in buttocky abandon.

“Ah, liberty,” he murmured, smacking his lips delicately, “that fearful word.” For the first time that day he turned his cool sardonic gaze directly on Nicolas, and smiled. “You see, my dear sir, we believe that when the people are allowed to entertain notions of individual freedom — nay when they are encouraged to it! — then begins the swift decline of civilised values.”

At that for some reason Guarico chortled. Nicolas’s heart sank into a quag of gloom. He was tired, he wanted to be elsewhere. His glass was full again, and already he had drunk too much. He shook his head and mumbled dully:

“I do not understand.”

“The point is—” Novara began, but once again he was interrupted, this time by Ziegler who lunged forward and jabbed a trembling finger at Nicolas’s breastbone, crying:

“The point is that the rot can be stopped! Yes yes, it can be stopped by a few determined men, a few good minds—we, sir, we can stop it!”

“How, pray?” Nicolas snapped. He disliked intensely this rabid young man, whose face under the force of his passion had turned a kind of furious purple.

“Jacob,” Novara said softly. “Calm now, calm.” He turned to Nicolas. “You see how strongly our feelings run? How should it be otherwise? We are, as Jacob has already remarked, outcasts in this city. O there is no conspiracy against us, no pressures are brought to bear on us, we are free to come and go, to congregate, to hatch plots even, if we wish; we are—” he shrugged “—free. But what does it signify, this objectless freedom? Only that we are not feared, because the times themselves ensure that men such as we shall not be heeded. In a bad age the wise man is scorned.” He paused in his pacing and looked about him at the company with a fond melancholy smile. “Regard us, sir: we are scholars, we are philosophers and scientists and poets, but we are not activists. Yet now, here in Bologna and throughout Italy and all Europe, action is necessary. Who will act if we do not? As Platonists we know that justice and good government are possible only when power rests in the hands of the philosophers. Therefore we must have power. How are we to achieve it? Herr Koppernigk, let me be specific: we seek—” Calcagnini stirred nervously, but Novara disregarded him “—we seek, sir, firstly union between our city state and Rome, and beyond that, O far beyond that, a Europe united under papal rule. A new, strong and united Holy Roman Empire — that is our aim, no less than that.”

Nicolas blinked. Calcagnini coughed drily.

“I think, Domenico,” he murmured, “I think you have forgotten a most important thing.” He looked at Nicolas. “We seek, yes, a Europe united, but only under a Pope of our making. His Holiness Alexander will not do, he will not do at all.” A ripple of bitter amusement passed through the room. Novara nodded.

“Of course,” he said, not without a trace of irritation, and bowed to the poet, “a most important point assuredly. A Pope, yes, of our making. We have even considered candidates; does that surprise you, Herr Koppernigk? We are in earnest, you see. We have for instance considered Alexander’s bastard Cesare. Luca’s horoscope, however, is not encouraging, and tends to confirm the grave doubts we have for some time been entertaining in that quarter. I think we must look elsewhere.” And he looked with a smile upon Nicolas, who after a moment’s reflection sat upright suddenly and said:

“O but you cannot imagine that I–I mean, surely not!”

They stared at him, and then Novara laughed somewhat uneasily.

“Ah,” he said, “a joke; I see. I did not at first — very droll, yes.”

Calcagnini joined his fingers at the tips and tapped that spire thoughtfully against his pursed lips, saying:

“We thought: What if we should discover that there is in Bologna a young churchman from the north, a scientist, whose uncle is Bishop of a Prussian princedom and a voice of no little significance in the affairs of Europe? And what if we should discover further that this young scientist is a thinker of potential greatness? Would he not be, to use a cold word, useful? These are strange times. The world is yielding up its secrets to those who know how to look for them. What if it should come to our ears that this young man has been cautiously expounding the outlines of a planetary theory which, if proved, should compel us to reconsider our conception of the nature of the physical world? We said: What if we were to provide for this astronomer certain facilities — a villa in the quiet of the provinces, say, and ample funds to enable him to spend two or three years in study and research — if, in short, we were to provide him with the means of perfecting this new theory of his? Now the Church, as we all know, is free apparently to indulge in all manner of fleshly vices, but it is not free to indulge in speculations that run contrary to dogma: for dogma is unassailable. And whose is the task of ensuring the inviolability of dogma? Why, it is the Pope’s! Now, what if our young astronomer, at the end of this two or three years of seclusion, should travel to Prussia and present to his uncle the proofs of his new theory? It is well known that the Bishop of Ermland is no friend of Rome’s, and especially not of Alexander, this bloated Borgia despot. Does it not seem likely that within a short time all Europe would be rife with reports of this new and apparently blasphemous theory? And Alexander would be forced to act. But the Bishop of Ermland is not the only enemy that the Pope has; his enemies are legion. In that battle, then, between a theory mathematically verified and vouched for beyond all doubt, and a bad Pope, who, we wondered, would be likely to win? It seemed to us that the only possible outcome would be a new conclave of the College of Cardinals; and thus the cause of the Church would be served, and our cause, and also of course, Herr Koppernigk, yours. These are questions, you understand, that we have been putting to ourselves for some time past. We hoped that you might be able to help us to find the answers. Hmm?”

But Nicolas was engrossed in the wonderfully ridiculous image of himself and Bishop Lucas deep in dark discussion of a plot to bring down the Pope, and he said only:

“Sir, you do not know my uncle.”

It was a poor reply to such a speech, but it hardly mattered, for the company, strangely, had lost all interest in him. The dandy and his friends, amid shrieks of laughter, were trying to force the hound to drink a goblet of wine. Novara stood by the window gazing vacantly at the far hills. Nicolas was reminded of an audience grown bored with a play. The singer had crept back into their midst with a tentative uncertain grin, no longer the mysterious priestly figure that their attentions had made him seem before, but a soulful, sad, unloved and unlovely weird madman. Guarico had fallen asleep. Calcagnini smiled blearily, nodding. He was drunk. They were all drunk. Nicolas rose to go. The scrawny Nono, giggling and stammering and trembling all over, crept after him and made an inept and farcical attempt at seduction.

*

Andreas pushed his platter away and belched sourly. A scullion passed by their table, lugging a steaming urn, and he turned to watch her joggling haunches. Dreamily he said:

“They are all Italians, of course,” and he smiled at his brother suddenly, icily. “Yes, bumboys all.”

Nicolas went no more to Novara’s house, and stayed away from his lectures. By Christmastide he had left Bologna forever.

* * *

The city crouched, sweating in fright, under the sign of the brooding bull. Talk of portents was rife. Blood rained from the sky at noon, at night the deserted streets shook with the thunder of unearthly hoofbeats and weird cries filled the air. A woman at Ostia come to her time brought forth an issue of rats. Some said it was the reign of Antichrist, and that the end was nigh. In February the Pope’s son Cesare returned victorious from the Romagna and rode in triumph with his army through the cheering streets. He was clad for the occasion all in black, with a collar of gold blazing at his throat. The entire army likewise was draped in black. It seemed, in the brumous yellowy light of that winter day, that the Lord of Darkness himself had come forth to be acclaimed by the delirious mob.

This was Rome, in the jubilee year of 1500.

*

The brothers had moved south to the capital on the instructions of Uncle Lucas: they were to act as unofficial ambassadors of the Frauenburg Chapter at the jubilee celebrations. It was a nebulous posting. They performed during that year only one duty that could have been considered in any way connected with diplomacy, when they dined at the Vatican as guests of a minor papal official, a smooth foxy cleric with a disconcerting wall-eyed stare, who desired, as far as the brothers could ascertain from his elaborately veiled insinuations, to be reassured that Bishop Lucas’s loyalty to Rome was in no danger of being transferred to the King of Poland; and they might have made a serious blunder, inexperienced as they were in matters of such delicacy, had not the grey and cautious Canon Schiller, the representative of the Frauenburg Chapter, been there to guide them with astutely timed and enthusiastically administered kicks under the table.

It was with Schiller that they lodged, in a gloomy villa on the damp side of a hill near the Circo Massimo, where the food was stolidly Prussian and the air heavy with the odour of sanctity. Nicolas glumly accepted the discipline and arid rituals of the house; from his schooldays on he had been accustomed to that kind of thing, and expected nothing better. Andreas, however, chafed under Canon Schiller’s watchful eye, in which there was reflected, all the way from Prussia, the light of a far fiercer, icier gaze. Lately he had become more morose than ever, his rages were redder, his fits of melancholia less and less amenable to the curative pleasures of student life. What had once in him been fecklessness was now a thirst for small destructions; his gay cynicism had turned into something very like despair. He complained vaguely of being ill. His face was drawn and pallid, eyes shot with blood, his breathing oddly thin and papery. He began to frequent the booths of astrologers and fortune tellers of the worst kind. Once even he asked Nicolas to cast his horoscope, which Nicolas, appalled at the idea, refused to do, pleading not very convincingly a lack of skill. Uncle Lucas had secured a canonry at Frauenburg for Andreas, and for a time his finances flourished, but he was soon penniless again, and, worse, in the hands of the Jews. Nicolas watched helplessly his brother’s life disintegrate; it was like witnessing the terrible slow fall into the depths of a once glorious marvellously shining angel.

Yet Andreas loved Rome. In that wicked wolf-suckled city his peculiar talents came briefly to full flower, nourished by the pervading air of menace and intrigue. He spoke the language of these scheming worldly churchmen, and it was not long before he had found his way into the cliques and cabals that abounded at the papal court. In the eyes of the world he was a firebrand, brilliant, careless, and hedonistic, destined for great things. Schiller cautioned him on the manner of his life. He paid no heed. He was by then treading waters deeper than that Canon could conceive of. But he was out over jagged reefs, and his light was being extinguished; he was drowning.

Nicolas detested the capital. It reminded him of an old tawny lion dying in the sun, on whose scarred and smelly pelt the lice bred and feverishly fed in final frantic carnival. He was shocked by what he saw of the workings of the Church. God had been deposed here, and Rodrigo Borgia ruled in his place. On Easter Sunday two hundred thousand pilgrims knelt in St Peter’s Square to receive the blessing of the Pope; Nicolas was there, pressed about by the poor foolish faithful who sighed and swayed like a vast lung, lifting their faces trustingly toward the hot sun of spring. He wondered if perhaps the tavern prophets were right, if this was the end, if here today a last terrible blessing was being administered to the city and the world.

In July Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Alfonso Duke of Bisceglie, was savagely attacked on the steps of St Peter’s; Cesare was behind the outrage, so it was whispered. The rumours seemed confirmed some weeks later when Il Valentino’s man, Don Michelotto, broke into Alfonso’s sickroom in the Vatican and throttled the Duke in his bed. Nicolas recalled a certain strange day in Bologna, and wondered. But of course it was altogether mad to think that Novara and his friends could be in any way involved in these bloody doings, or so at least the Professor himself insisted when one day, by chance, Nicolas met him on the street near the amphitheatre of Vespasian.

“No no!” Novara whispered hoarsely, glancing nervously about. “How can you imagine such a thing? In fact the Duke knew something of our views, and was not unsympathetic. Certainly we wished him no harm. It is too terrible, truly. And to think that we once considered this Cesare as. . O, terrible!”

He was paying a brief visit to Rome on university business. Nicolas was shocked by his appearance. He was stooped and sallow, with dead eyes and trembling hands, hardly recognisable as the magisterial, cold and confident patrician he had lately been. He frowned distractedly and mopped his brow, tormented by the heat and the dust and the uproar of the traffic. He was dying. A slender bored young man got up in scarlet accompanied him, and stood by in insolent silence with one hand resting on his hip; his name was Girolamo. He smiled at Nicolas, who suddenly remembered where he had seen him before, and blushed and turned away only to find to his horror Novara watching him with tears in his eyes.

“You think me a fool, Koppernigk,” he said. “You came to my house only to laugh at me — O yes, do not deny it, your brother told me how you laughed after running away from us that day. My scheming and my magic, I suppose they must have seemed foolish to you, whose concern is facts, computation, the laws of the visible world.”

Nicolas groaned inwardly. Why were people, Andreas always, now Novara, so eager that he should think well of them? What did his opinion matter? He said:

“My brother lied; he is prone to it. Why should I laugh at you? You are a greater astronomer than I.” This was horrible, horrible. “I left your house because I knew I could be of no use to you. What part could I play in your schemes—” he could not resist it “—I, a mere tradesman’s son?”

Novara nodded, grimacing. The sun rained hammerblows on him. He had the look of a wounded animal.

“You lack charity, my friend,” he said. “You must try to understand that men have need of answers, articles of faith, myths — lies, if you will. The world is terrible and yet we are terrified to leave it: that is the paradox that hurts us so. Does anything hurt you, Koppernigk? Yours is an enviable immunity, but I wonder if it will endure.”

“I cannot help it if I am cold!” Nicolas cried, beside himself with rage and embarrassment. “And I have done nothing to deserve your bitterness.” But Novara had lost interest, and was shuffling away. The youth Girolamo hesitated between them, glancing with a faint sardonic smile from one of them to the other. Nicolas trembled violently. It was not fair! — even if he was dying, Novara had no right to cringe like this; his task was to be proud and cold, to intimidate, not to mewl and whimper, not to be weak. It was a scandal! “I never asked anything of you!” Nicolas howled at the other’s back, ignoring the looks of the passers-by. “It was you that approached me. Are you listening?”

“Yes yes,” Novara muttered, without turning. “Just so, indeed. And now farewell. Come, Girolamo, come.”

The young man smiled languorously a last time, and with a small regretful gesture went to the Professor and took his arm. Nicolas turned and fled, with his fury clutched to him like a struggling captive wild beast. He was frightened, as if he had looked into a mirror and seen reflected there not his own face but an unspeakable horror.

He did not see Novara again. Once or twice their paths might have crossed, but time and circumstance happily intervened to keep them apart; happily, not only because Nicolas feared another painful scene, but also because he dreaded the possibility of being confronted again by the frightening image of himself he had glimpsed in the looking glass of that incomprehensible fit of naked fury. When he heard of the Professor’s death he could not even remember clearly what the man had looked like; but by then he was in Padua, and everything had changed.

*

That city at first made little impression on him, he was so busy searching for habitable lodgings, performing the complicated and exasperating rituals of enrolment at the university, choosing his subjects, his professors. He had also to cope with Andreas, who by now was badly, though still mysteriously, ill, and full of spleen. Early in the summer the brothers travelled to Frauenburg, their leave of absence having expired. They had asked by letter for an extension, but Bishop Lucas had insisted that they should make the request in person. The extra leave was granted, of course, and after less than a month in Prussia they set out once more for Italy.

Nicolas paused at Kulm to visit Barbara at the convent. She had not changed much in the years since he had seen her last; in middle age she was still, for him, the ungainly girl who had played hide and seek with him long ago in the old house in Torun. Perhaps it was these childhood echoes that made their talk so stilted and unreal. There was between them still that familiar melancholy, that tender hesitant regard, but now there was something more, a faint sense of the ridiculous, of the ponderous, as if they were despite their pretensions really children playing at being grown-ups. She was, she told him, Abbess of the convent now, in succession to their late Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, but he could not grasp it. How could Barbara, his Barbara, have become a person of such consequence? She also was puzzled by the elaborate dressing-up that he was trying to pass off as his life. She said:

“You are becoming a famous man. We even hear talk of you here in the provinces.”

He shook his head and smiled. “It is all Andreas’s doing. He thinks it a joke to put it about that I am formulating in secret a revolutionary theory of the planets.”

“And are you not?”

Summer rain was falling outside, and a pallid, faintly flickering light entered half-heartedly by the streaming windows of the high hall where they sat. Even in her loose-fitting habit Barbara was all knees and knuckles and raw scrubbed skin. She looked away from him shyly. He said:

“I shall come again to see you soon.”

“Yes.”

*

When he returned to Padua he found Andreas, though sick and debilitated already from the Prussian journey, preparing to depart for Rome. “I can abide neither your sanctimonious stink, brother, nor this cursed Paduan smugness. You will breathe easier without me to disgrace you before your pious friends.”

“I have no friends, Andreas. And I wish you would not go.”

“You are a hypocrite. Do not make me spew, please.”

However much he tried not to be, Nicolas was glad of his brother’s going; now perhaps at last, relieved of the burden of Andreas’s intolerable presence, he would be permitted to become the real self he had all his life wished to be.

But what was that mysterious self that had eluded him always? He could not say. Yet he was convinced that he had reached a turning point. Those first months alone in Padua were strange. He was neither happy nor sad, nor much of anything: he was neutral. Life flowed over him, and under the wave he waited, for what he did not know, unless it was rescue. He applied himself with energy to his studies. He took philosophy and law, mathematics, Greek and astronomy. It was in the faculty of medicine, however, that he surfaced at last, like a spent swimmer flying upward into light, in whose aching lungs the saving air blossoms like a great dazzling yellow flower.

*

“Signor Fracastoro?”

The young man turned, frowning. “Si, I am Fracastoro.”

How handsome he was, how haughty, with those black eyes, that dark narrow arrogant face; how languidly he sprawled on the bench among the twittering band of dandies, with his long legs negligently crossed. The lecture hall was putrid with the stink of a dissected corpse, the gross gouts and ganglia of which two bloodstained attendants were carting away, but he was aristocratically indifferent to that carnage, and only now and then bothered to lift to his face the perfume-soaked handkerchief whose pervasive musky scent was the unmistakable trademark of the medical student. He was dressed with casual elegance in silk and soft leather, booted and spurred, with a white linen shirt open on the frail cage of his chest; he had come late to the lecture that morning, flushed and smiling, bringing with him into the fetid hall a crisp clean whiff of horses and sweet turf and misty dawn meadows. He was all that Nicolas was not, and Nicolas, sensing imminent humiliation, cursed himself for having spoken.

“We met last year in Rome, I think,” he said. “You were with Professor Novara.”

“O?”

Fracastoro’s friends nudged each other happily, and gazed at Nicolas with bland sardonic seriousness, trying not to laugh; they too could see humiliation coming.

“Yes yes, in Rome, and before that in Bologna, at the Professor’s house.” He was beginning to babble. Someone sniggered. “I remember it well. You tried to make a drunkard of Novara’s dog, ha ha. Ha.”

The young man raised an eyebrow. “Yes? A dog, you say? Extraordinary. Certainly I do not remember that.”

Nicolas sighed. Blast you, you young prig. Life is dreadful, really. He stepped back, trying not to bow.

“A mistake,” he muttered. “Forgive me.”

“But wait, wait,” Fracastoro said, “this Novara, it seems to me I do know the man, vaguely.” He lifted a slender hand to his brow. “Ah yes, a mathematician, is he not? — much given to mysticism? Yes, I know him. Well?”

“You do not remember our meeting.”

“No; but I may do so, if I concentrate. Do you have news of the Professor?”

“No, no, I merely — it is no matter.”

“But—?”

“No matter, no matter.” And he fled, pursued by laughter.

*

They met again some days later, in the vegetable market, of all places, at dawn. Lately Nicolas had begun to suffer from sleeplessness, and went out often at night to walk about the city and bathe his feverishly spinning brain in the chill dark air. He developed a fondness for the market especially; the colours, the clamour, the heavy honeyed smell of ripeness, all conspired to cheat of its bleakness that inhuman hour before first light. He was leaning on the damp parapet of the Ponte San Giorgio, idly watching the upriver barges like great ungainly whales unloading their produce in the bluish gloom of the wharf below, when a voice said at his shoulder:

“Koppernigk, is it not?”

He was wrapped in a dun cloak, and his long fair swathe of hair was hidden under a battered old black slouch hat; even in such dull apparel he could not be less than elegant. He was smiling a little, not looking at Nicolas, but musing on the still-dark distance beyond the city walls, saying silently, as it were: come, cut me now if you wish, and so have some small revenge. But Nicolas just as silently declined the offer, and suddenly the Italian laughed softly and said:

“Nicolas Koppernigk — you see? I have been concentrating.”

Nicolas with a faint smile inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Signor Fracastoro.”

The other looked at him directly then, and laughed again.

“O please,” he said, “my friends call me that; you may call me Girolamo. Shall we walk this way a little?” They left the bridge and crossed the open piazza, where the fishwives were hurling amiable abuse from stall to stall. “But tell me, what brings you here at this strange hour?”

Nicolas shrugged. “I do not sleep well. And you?”

“Wine and women, I fear, keep me from my bed. I am for home now after a misspent night.” It was meant as a boast. He was at that age, not quite twenty yet, when the youth he had been and the man he was becoming both held sway at once, so that in the same breath he could slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness. Now he said: “You disappointed Novara greatly, you know, by not taking seriously his grand schemes to save the world. Ah, poor Domenico!”

They both laughed, a little spitefully, and Nicolas, suddenly stared at out of the sky by the Professor’s pained reproachful eyes, said hastily:

“But they are not without significance, his preoccupations.”

“No, of course; but it is all mere talking. He is too much in love with magic, and despises action. I mean that natural magic for him is all centaurs and chimaeras. Now I, however, understand it in general as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations.” He glanced out quickly from under the downturned brim of his black hat with a candid questioning look, but it was impossible to know if he was being sincere or otherwise. “What do you say, friend?”

But Nicolas only shrugged and murmured warily:

“Perhaps, perhaps. .”

He did not know what to make of this young man; he did not trust him, and did not trust himself, and so determined to go cautiously, even though he could not see where trust came into it, except that he knew he did not care to be made a fool of again. It was all odd, this meeting, this dreamlike morning, these dim figures hurrying here and there and crying out in the gloom. They entered a narrow alleyway given over entirely to the trade in cagebirds. Cascades of bright mad music drenched the dark air. Coming out at the other end they found themselves abruptly in a deserted square. The sky was of a deep illyrian blue, lightening rapidly now to the east, and the towers of the city were tipped with gold.

“May I offer you breakfast?” said Fracastoro. “My rooms are close by.”

He lived in a tumbledown palazzo near the Basilica of St Anthony, the family home of an elderly count who had long ago fled to a villa in the Dolomites for the sake of his ailing lungs. “My uncle, you know,” he said, and winked. They ascended through the shabby splendours of gilt and tempera and stained marble statuary to the fourth floor, where a kind of rambling lair, stretching through five or six large rooms, had been scooped out of the dust and genteel wreckage deposited by years of neglect. Here, under the sagging canopy of a vast four-poster, they came upon a young man asleep in a tangle of soiled sheets. He was naked, his limbs sprawled in touchingly childish abandon, tacked down firmly, as it were, like some exotic specimen, by the enormous erection that reared grotesquely out of his jet-black bush. Fracastoro barely glanced at him, but in passing picked up a tortured shirt from the floor and flung it at his head, crying:

“Up up up! Come!”

The main room was a general disorder of books and clothes and empty wine bottles. Most of the furniture was draped in dustsheets. Here and there amidst the clutter the skeleton of a former glory was visible in richly patterned panelling and polished marble pillars, gold-embroidered drapes, an inlaid rosewood spinet delicate and tentative as a deer. Magnificent arched windows framed a triptych of the airy architecture of St Anthony’s soaring motionless against an immaculate blue sky. Fracastoro looked about him, and with a shrug waved his hand in a vague helpless gesture of apology. How many generations of aristocratic breeding had been necessary, Nicolas wondered, to produce that patrician indifference and ease? He shrank back into his black cloak, a lean grey troubled soul suddenly aching with envy of this young man’s confidence and carelessness, his disdain for the trivial trappings of the world. They stood a while in silence by the window, gazing out at the sunlit city and listening to the morning noises that rose to them from the street below, the rattle of cane shutters, rumbling of the watercart, the breadman’s harsh cry. Nothing happened, they said nothing, but forever afterwards, even when much else had faded, Nicolas was to remember that moment with extraordinary vividness as marking the true beginning of their friendship.

There was a sound behind them, and Girolamo turned and said:

“Ah, here you are, you dreadful dog.”

It was the handsome young man from the bedroom. He stood in the doorway clad only in his shirt, scratching his head and gazing at them blearily. His name was Tadziu or Tadzio, Nicolas did not catch it clearly; it hardly mattered, since he was never to see him again. After that first morning he disappeared mysteriously, and Girolamo did not mention him save once, a long time afterwards. They spoke together rapidly now in a dialect that Nicolas did not understand, and the boy shrugged and went away. Girolamo turned to his guest with a smile. “I must apologise: apparently there is no food. But we shall have something presently.” He began to glance idly through a disorderly mass of papers overflowing a small ornate table, looking up at Nicolas now and then with a quizzical, faintly amused expression, seeming each time about to speak but yet remaining silent. At last he laughed, and throwing up his hands said helplessly:

“I do not know what to say!”

Nicolas would not look at him; he knew what he meant.

“Nor I,” he murmured, confused and suddenly happy. “Nor I!”

Tadziu or Tadzio returned then, with a steaming loaf of bread under his arm, and in one hand a magnum of champagne, in the other a platter covered with a napkin which Girolamo lifted gingerly to reveal a greasy mess of griddle cakes. “O disgusting, disgusting!” he cried, laughing, and they sat down and began to eat. Girolamo’s handsome young friend bent on Nicolas bitterly a dark unwavering glare. But Nicolas refused to be intimidated; he had been light-headed already from lack of sleep, but now the champagne and the warm brown stink of the bread and the griddle cakes befuddled him entirely. He was happy.

“Come,” said Girolamo, “tell us your famous theory of the planets.”

Yes, yes, he was happy!

*

But happiness was an inadequate word for the transformation that he underwent that summer — for it was no less than a transformation. His heart thawed. A great soft inexpressible something swelled within him, and there were moments when he felt that this rapture must burst forth, that his cloak would fly open to reveal a huge grotesque foolish gaudy flower sprouting comically from his breast. It was ridiculous, but that was all right; he dared to be ridiculous. He fell in love with the city, its limpid mornings, burning noons, evenings in the piazzas loud with birds, that city fraught now with secret significances. Never again without a unique pang of anguished tenderness would he walk through the market, or stand upon the Ponte San Giorgio at dawn, or smell at the streetcorner stalls the rank humble pungency of frying griddle cakes.

Yet behind all this fine frenzy there was the fear that it could destroy him, for surely it was a kind of sickness. In his studies he thought he might find an antidote. He read Plato in the Greek, and reread Nicolas Cusanus and Ptolemy’s Almagest, which last by now he almost knew by heart. He took up again those texts to which Novara had introduced him, and plunged once more into the thickets of the translation of Trismegistus that Ficino had made for Lorenzo de’ Medici. But it was useless, he could not concentrate, and rushed out and strode through the deserted noonday streets under the throbbing plane trees, distraught and alarmed, until his legs of their own volition brought him to the Palazzo Antonini and that disordered room overlooking the basilica, where Girolamo smiled at him sleepily and said:

“Why, my friend, what is it? You look quite crazed.”

“I am too old for this, too old!”

“For what?”

“All this: you, Italy, everything. Too old!”

“An old greybeard you are, yes, of twice ten years and eight! Come, uncle, sit here. You should not go out in the sun, you know.”

“It is not the sun!”

“No; you are altogether too much a Prussian, too sceptical and cold. You must learn to treasure yourself more dearly.”

“Nonsense.”

“But—”

“Nonsense!”

Girolamo stretched himself and yawned.

“Very well, uncle,” he mumbled, “but it is siesta time now,” and he laid his head down on the couch beside his friend and smiling fell asleep at once. Nicolas gazed at him, and wrung his hands. I am besotted with him, besotted!

*

He was captive to a willing foolishness. Those concerns that up to now he had held to be serious, and worthy of serious considerations, he had with lunatic lightheartedness abandoned; but they had not abandoned him, no, they waited in the outer darkness, gnashing their teeth, ready to come back at him and have a fourfold revenge, he knew it. He knew, but could not care. Had he not liberated himself at last from the pinched mean hegemony of the intellect? Had he not at last set free the physical man that all his life had waited within him for release? The senses now would have their day; they deserved it. Yet strangely, the body whose bonds he had cast off seemed not to know what to do with its newfound liberty. Like a starved stark loony released after years in the dungeons, it reeled about drunkenly in the unaccustomed light, sweating and dribbling, tripping over itself, a gangling spidery pale fork of flesh and fur, faintly repellent, faintly comical, wholly absurd.

Absurd, absurd: he remembered Ferrara particularly, and the day of his conferring.

*

It was for reasons of economy — or stinginess, according to Girolamo — that Nicolas chose to take his doctorate in canon law other than at Padua, for even the most solitary of graduates would find himself surrounded by hitherto unknown friends when the conferring ceremony, and more especially the lavish banquet he would be expected to provide afterwards, were at hand. Nicolas had no intention of allowing a gang of sots to stupefy themselves with drink at his expense, and therefore, although it was a far less prestigious institution than Padua, and he had never studied there, he applied for graduation to the University of Ferrara, and was accepted, and in the autumn of the year travelled south accompanied by Girolamo.

The ritual of conferring took a full week to complete. It was a horrible business. The promoter assigned to him by the college was one Alberti, a harassed apologetic canon lawyer with a limp and a wild fuzz of prematurely grey hair that stood out from his narrow skull like an exclamation of alarm. During a class of his once a student had been stabbed to death while he lectured on oblivious. Nicolas liked him; he was of the same sad endearing tribe as Abstemius of Włocławek.

“Well now, Herr Kupperdik, here is the drill. Firstly I take you before an assembly of doctors to whom you will swear that you have been through the proper course et cetera, which ha ha you have, I take it? The reverend gentlemen will set you two passages of law, and we retire together to study them. It is all a sham, of course, since I know already what the passages will be — I should be a poor promoter if I didn’t, eh, Herr Kopperdyke? Anyway, after a decent absence we return, the doctors question you, they ballot, and you are made a licentiate. All that remains then is for you to take the public examination for your full doctorate, but that is merely a formality after the oral test, which as I said is really a formality also. And there you are: Doctor Popperdink! Nothing to it!”

But of course it was not so simple. Alberti got the set passages mixed, and coached Nicolas, with admirable diligence, in those intended for another graduate, and on the day of the inquisition Nicolas spent a frantic hour in a hot antechamber, while the doctors fretted next door, trying to memorise the new answers and at the same time block out the distracting apologies of his mortified promoter. The examiners, however, seemed to have had some experience already of Alberti’s organisational powers. It was apparent that they cared less about the indifferent quality of Nicolas’s performance than they did about the fact that the ritual had not been strictly adhered to. They voted, mumbling among themselves, fixed Alberti with a crushing glare, and having announced the result of the examination rose and swept away amid an outraged rustling of gowns. Nicolas, drenched with sweat, closed his eyes and lowered his burning face gently into his hands. His promoter leapt at him and began to thump him on the back in a transport of relief, almost knocking him off his chair. “Congratulations, my dear fellow, congratulations!” Throughout, Nicolas had been able to think of one thing only: the reception he would get from Uncle Lucas if he returned to Ermland without his doctorate. “Herr Poppernik? Are you unwell?”

Girolamo laughed, of course, when he heard of the affair, and then sat in silence, pale and distant, while Nicolas poured over him the scalding bitter brew of the day’s pent-up frustration and rage. And that night along with Alberti they went down to the stews and got vilely drunk in the company of a band of shrieking whores.

The week rolled on inexorably, like a giant engine gone out of control and disintegrating, flinging bits of itself in all directions, bombarding Nicolas, the innocent bystander, with spokes and broken ratchets and gouts of thick black oil. On Sunday the contraption exploded finally, with a deafening report. Arriving at the cathedral for the conferring, he halted in the porch, horror-stricken. “Jesus, what’s this?” The place was full of students, hundreds of them, they were even squatting on the steps of the high altar. Alberti turned to him with a bland enquiring smile. “Yes, Doctor?” He had taken to using that title at every opportunity, with a proprietary rib-nudging roguishness that made Nicolas want to strike him very hard with his fist.

“This crowd!” he cried. “What does it mean? I came to Ferrara to avoid just this kind of thing!”

Alberti was puzzled; a true Italian, he thrived on crowds and clamour.

“But the students always come to hear the orations,” he said mildly. “It is the custom.”

“God!”

Girolamo was studiously inspecting the architecture, with the solemn look of one shaking inwardly with laughter. He was got up for the occasion in a quilted scarlet doublet and tight black hose, with a long white plume to his cap; like a damned peacock, Nicolas thought bitterly. Now without turning Girolamo murmured:

“It is for the comic possibilities that they come, I imagine?”

Alberti nodded enthusiastically. “Si, si, the comedy, just so.”

“God,” Nicolas groaned again, and, wrapping his gown about him tightly, plunged up the aisle to the pulpit. On the narrow steps he trod upon the liripipe dangling from his neck and almost throttled himself. A sea of rapturous expectant faces greeted him as he peered apprehensively over the brim of the pulpit. Someone at the back of the nave whistled a piercing heraldic flourish, provoking an uproar of catcalls and applause. Nicolas fished about under his gown for the text of his oration. For one appalling moment he thought. . but no, he had not left it behind, it was there, though in a dreadful jumble that his shaking hands at once made worse.

“Reverendissimi. .”

The rest of his opening address was drowned by shouts and a stamping of feet, and he stopped, quite lost. Alberti and Girolamo, sitting below him, leaned forward with their hands cupped around their mouths and together cried: “They cannot hear your!”After a time some semblance of order returned, and he stuck out his neck like an enraged tortoise and hurled his text at them as if it were an execration. His argument was a defence of the canonical interdict on marriage between a widow and her brother-in-law; it was a purely formal declaration of an accepted doctrine, upon which his audience in like formality was meant to challenge him, but he suspected, rightly as it happened, that these turbulent students had no intention of playing by the rules. Even before he had finished, a dozen of them or more were on their feet, howling abuse at him and at each other amid a general hilarity. He tried to discern even some halfway sensible objection to the contents of his text, but in vain, for his tormentors were mouthing merely nonsense, or obscenities, or both at once, and like a large rag doll being fought over by children he bounced about in the pulpit, throwing up his arms, grinning, opening and closing his mouth in mute helplessness and pain. Never in his life had he known such an exquisite agony of embarrassment.

At length they lost interest in him, and as the uproar subsided and they began to look about for the entrance of a fresh victim, he scrambled shakily down from the pulpit. He was grabbed at once by a pair of burly vestrymen with cruelly barbered skulls, who marched him off smartly to a side altar and thrust him into the master’s chair. There he was presented with the cap, the book and the gold ring and the graduate’s diploma, and Alberti, with the lunatic intensity of a father crazed with pride, his wild hair bristling, advanced limping and planted on his cheek a tacky garlic-scented kiss of peace.

“Ave magister!” he cried; and then, unable to restrain himself, he added rapturously: “Doctor Peppernik!”

As if from a distance Nicolas looked in anguished amusement at himself, a dazed grotesque figure with cap askew, full of irredeemable foolishness, a lord of misrule propped upon a pretender’s throne. Italy had done this to him, Italy and all that Italy signified. Girolamo came forward to kiss him, but he turned his cheek away.

* * *

The weather was bad that spring, rain and gales for weeks and the muttering of thunder in the mountains. Great fortresses of black cloud rumbled westward ceaselessly, and Lake Garda boiled in leaden rage. This tumult in the air seemed to Nicolas an omen, though what it might signify he could not say. He arrived with Girolamo at the villa at dusk, wet and weary and dispirited. The big old timber and stone house was set among tall cypresses on a steep hill overlooking Incaffi and the lake. It had the look of money about it. There was a spacious courtyard paved with rough-cut marble, and busts of the Caesars set on marble plinths; wide stone steps swept up to a pillared entrance. He had expected something far more modest than this.

“Will your family be here?” he asked, unable to conceal his apprehension.

“Why no,” said Girolamo, “they are in Verona. They live there. We do not agree, and so I seldom see them. This is my house.”

“O.”

The Italian laughed. “Come now, my friend, do not look so alarmed. There will be no one here but you and I.”

“I did not think you were so—”

“—Rich? Does it trouble you?”

“No; why should it?”

“Then for God’s sake stop cringing!” he snapped, and slapping his riding gloves against his thigh he turned and strode up the steps to the vestibule, where the servants were gathered to welcome their master. There was a dozen of them or more, from young girls to grey old men. They looked at Nicolas in silence stonily, and all at once he was acutely aware of his shabbiness, his cracked boots and few poor bits of baggage, the decrepit mare trying not to fall over out in the courtyard behind him. We know your kind, those eyes told him, we have seen you come and go many times before, in different versions but all essentially the same. And he wondered how many others there had been. .

Girolamo impatiently performed his signorial duty, pacing up and down the line of attentive servants with a fixed false smile, questioning each one in turn in a detached formal voice on their health and that of their parents or children. And what news of the estate? Everything was in order? Splendid, splendid. Nicolas looked on with envy. At twenty, Girolamo had the ageless self-assurance of the aristocrat. He dropped his wet cloak and gloves on the floor, from whence they were immediately and reverently snatched up by one of the maids, and throwing himself down into a chair he motioned the steward, a bent old gouty brute, to help him off with his boots. He looked up at Nicolas and smiled faintly.

“Well, my friend?” he said.

“What?”

“Caro Nicolo.”

They sat down in a richly appointed dining-room to an elaborate veal and champagne supper. A candelabrum of Venetian glass glistened above their heads, its gaudy splendours reflected deep in the dark pool of the polished table on which there sailed a fleet of handcrafted gold and silver serving dishes. The room was hushed, suspended in stillness, except where their bone knives and delicate forks stabbed and sliced the silence above their plates with tiny deft ferocity. Everywhere that Nicolas looked he encountered the Fracastoro monogram, intricately graven in goldleaf on the dishes and the cruets, woven into the napkins, even carved on the facings and reredos of the vast black marble fireplace.

“Tell me,” he said, “how many such establishments as this do you keep up?”

“O, not many; the apartments in Verona, where my books are, and a house in Rome. And of course there is a hunting lodge in the mountains, which we must visit, if the weather clears. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity.”

“Are you still brooding on my unsuspected wealth? It is not so great as you seem to imagine. You are too easily impressed.”

“Yes.”

“Are you glad you came here?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“What would you have me say? Indeed, my liege, my humble thanks, sweet lord, I am overwhelmed.” He ground his teeth. “Forgive me, I am tired from the journey, and out of sorts. Forgive me.”

Girolamo gazed at him mildly, more in curiosity it seemed than anger or hurt.

“No, it is my fault,” he said. “I should not have brought you here. We were happier on neutral ground — or should I say, we were happy?” He smiled. “For we are not happy now, are we?”

“Does happiness seem to you the greatest good?”

At that the Italian laughed. “Come, Nicolas, none of your sham philosophising, not with me. Do you hate me for my wealth and privilege?”

“Hate?” He was genuinely shocked, and a little frightened. “I do not hate you. I. . do not hate you. I am happy to be here, in your—”

“Then do you love me?”

He was sweating. Girolamo continued to gaze at him, with fondness, and amusement, and regret.

“I am happy to be here, in your house; I am grateful, I am glad we came.” He realised suddenly that even yet they did not call each other thou. “Perhaps,” he stammered, “perhaps the weather will clear tomorrow. .”

*

But the weather did not clear, in the world nor in the villa. Nicolas stormed, wrapped in a black silence. His rage had no one cause, not that he could discover, but bubbled up, a poisonous vapour, out of a mess of boiling emotions. He felt constantly slighted, by Girolamo, by the smirking servants, even by the villa itself, whose sumptuous sybaritic splendours reminded him that it was accustomed to entertaining aristocrats, while he was what Novara had said, a mere tradesman’s son. Yet was he in reality being thus sorely scorned? Was he not, in discerning, indeed in cultivating this contempt all round him, merely satisfying some strange hunger within him? It was as if he were being driven to add more and more knots to a lash wielded by his own hand. It was as if he were beating himself into submission, cleansing himself, preparing himself: but for what? He hungered, obscenely, obscurely, as under the lash his flesh flinched, went cold and dead, and at last out of a wracked humiliated body his mind soared slowly upward, into the blue.

Now he saw at last how the plot had been hatching in secret for years, the plot that had brought him without his willing it to this moment of recognition and acceptance; or rather, he had not been brought, had not been made to move at all, but had simply stood and waited while the trivia and the foolishness were shorn away. The Church had offered him a quiet living, the universities had offered academic success, Italy had even offered love. Any or all of these gifts might have seduced him, had not the hideousness intervened to demonstrate the poverty of what they had to offer. At Frauenburg among the doddering canons he had been appalled by the stink of celibacy and clerkly caution. Ferrara had been a farce. Now Italy was making of him an anguished grimacing clown. The Church, academe, love: nothing. Seared and purified, shorn of the encumbering lumber of life, he stood at last like a solitary pine that stands in a wilderness of snow, aching upward fiercely into the sky of fire and ice that was the true concern of the essential selfhood that had eluded him always until now. Beware of these enigmas, Canon Wodka had warned him, for they cannot teach us how to live. But he did not wish to live, not by lessons that the world would teach him.

He had often before retreated into science as a refuge from the ghastliness of life; thus, he saw now, he had made a plaything of science, by demanding from it comfort and consolation. There would be no more of that, no more play. Here was no retreat, but the conscious accepting, on its own terms, of a cold harrowing discipline. Yet even astronomy was not the real issue. He had not spent his life pursuing a vision down the corridors of pain and loneliness in order merely to become a stargazer. No: astronomy was but the knife. What he was after was the deeper, the deepest thing: the kernel, the essence, the true.

*

Rain fell without cease. The world streamed. Lamps were lit at noon, and a great fire of pine logs burned day and night in the main hall. Outside, black phantom cypresses shuddered in the wind.

“The villagers have gone back to the old ways,” Girolamo said. “Christ-come-lately is abandoned, and the ancient cults are revived. Now they are praying to Mercury to carry their appeals to the gods of fair weather.”

They were at table. They dined now four or five times a day. Eating had become a sullen joyless obsession: they fed their guts incessantly in a vain effort to dull the pangs of a hunger that no food would assuage. The tender flesh of fish was as ash in Nicolas’s mouth. He was pained by Girolamo’s gentle puzzled attempts to reach out to him across the chasm that had opened between them, but it was a vague pain, hardly much more than an irritant, and becoming vaguer every day. He nodded absently. “Curious.”

“What? What is curious? Tell me.”

“O, nothing. They are praying to Mercury, you say; but I am thinking that Mercury is the Hermes of the Greeks, who in turn is the Egyptian Thoth, whose wisdom was handed down to us, through the priests of the Nile, by Hermes Trismegistus. Therefore by a roundabout way your villagers are praying to that magus.” He looked up mildly. “Is that not curious?”

“The fisherfolk cannot work in this weather,” Girolamo said. “Three of their men have been lost on the lake.”

“Yes? But then fishermen are always being drowned. It is, so to speak, what they are for. All things, and all men, however humble, have their part to play in the great scheme.”

“That is somewhat heartless, surely?”

“Would you not say honest, rather? This sudden concern of yours comes strangely from one who lives by the labour of the common people. Look at this fish here, so impeccably prepared, so tastefully arranged: has it not occurred to you that those fishermen may have perished so that you might sit down to this splendid dinner?”

Guido, the stooped steward, paused in his quaking progress around the table and peered at him intently. Girolamo had turned pale about the lips, but he smiled and said only:

“Do I deserve this, Nicolas, really? — Guido, you may go now, thank you.” The old man departed with a dazed look, shocked and amazed it seemed at the suggestion that his master should concern himself with housekeeping. Girolamo’s hand trembled as he poured the wine. “Must you make a fool of me before the servants?”

Nicolas put down his knife and laughed. “You see? You are less anxious for the fate of fishermen than for the good opinion of your servants!”

“You twist everything I say, everything!” Suddenly the Italian’s poise had collapsed entirely, and for a moment he was a spoilt petulant boy. Nicolas, intensely gratified, smiled with his teeth. He watched the other closely, with a kind of detached curiosity, wondering if he might be about to break down and weep in fury and frustration. But Girolamo did not weep, and sighed instead and murmured: “What do you want from me, Nicolas, more than I have already given?”

“Why nothing, my dear friend, nothing at all.” But that was not true: he wanted something, he did not know precisely what, but something large, vivid, outrageous — violence perhaps, terrible insult, a hideous blood-boltered wounding that would leave them both whimpering in final irremediable humiliation. Both, yes. There must be no victor. They must destroy each other, that is, that part of each that was in the other, for only by mutual destruction would he be freed. He understood none of this, he was too crazed with rage and impatience to try to understand, nevertheless he knew it to be valid. Frantically he cast about for a further weapon to thrust into the shuddering flesh. “My theory is almost complete, you know,” he said, shouted almost, with a kind of ghastly constricted cheerfulness.

Girolamo glanced up uneasily. “Your theory?”

“Yes yes, my theory of planetary motion, my refutation of Ptolemy. Ptolemy. .” He seemed to gag on the name. “Have I not told you about it? Let me tell you about it. Ptolemy, you see—”

“Nicolas.”

“—Ptolemy, you see, misled us, or we misled ourselves, it hardly matters which, into believing that the Almagest is an explanation, a representation—vorstellung, you know the German term? — for what is real, but the truth is, the truth is that Ptolemaic astronomy is nothing so far as existence is concerned; it is only convenient for computing the nonexistent.” He paused, panting. “What?”

Girolamo shook his head. “Nothing. Tell me about your theory.”

“You do not believe it, do you? I mean you do not think that I am capable of formulating a theory which shall reveal the eternal truths of the universe; you do not believe that I am capable of greatness. Do you?”

“Perhaps, Nicolas, it is better to be good than great?”

“You do not believe! — ”

“—I believe that if there are eternal truths, and I am not convinced of it, then they can only be known, but not expressed.” He smiled. “And I believe that you and I should not fight.”

“You! You you you— I amuse you, do I not? I am kept for the fine sport I provide: what matter if it rain, Koppernigk will cut a merry caper and keep us in good spirits.” He had leapt up from the table, and was prancing furiously about the room in what indeed looked like a grotesque comic dervish dance of pain and loathing. “O, he’s a jolly fellow, old Koppernigk, old Nuncle Nick!” Girolamo would not look at him, and at last, trembling, he sat down again and held his face in his hands.

They were silent. Greenish rainlight draped them about. The trees beyond the window throbbed and thrashed. Presently Girolamo said:

“You wrong me, Nicolas; I have never laughed at you. We are made differently. I cannot take the world so seriously as you do. It is a lack in me, perhaps. But I am not the dunderhead you like to think me. Have you ever, once, shown even the mildest interest in my concerns? I am a physician, that I take seriously. My work on contagion, the spread of diseases, this is not without value. Medicine is a science of the tangible, you see. I deal with what is here, with what ails men; if I were to discover thereby one of your eternal truths, why, I think I should not notice having done it. Are you listening? I express it badly, I know, but I am trying to teach you something. But then, I suppose you cannot believe that I am capable of teaching you anything. It is no matter. Do you want to know what I am currently embarked upon? I am writing a poem — yes, a poem — dealing with the pox! But you do not want to know, do you? Remember, Nicolas, the morning we met in the market place in Padua? I told you I was returning from a debauch; not so. I had gone there to study the methods of sanitation, or I should say the lack of such, in the meat market. Yes, laugh—” It had been hardly a laugh, rather a hollow retching noise. “—How prosaic, you will say, how comic even. That is why I lied to you that morning. You wanted me to be a rake, a rich wastrel, something utterly different from yourself: a happy fool. And I obliged you. I have been lying ever since. So you see, Nicolas, you are not the only one who fears to be thought dull, who is afraid to be ridiculous.” He paused. “Love. .” It was as if he were turning up the word gingerly with the toe of his shoe to see what outlandish things might be squirming underneath. “You drove Tadzio away.” There was no trace of accusation in his tone, only sadness, and a faint wonderment. Nicolas, still cowering behind his hands, ground his teeth until they ached. He was in pain, he thought it was pain, until late that night when the word was redefined for him, and pain took on a wholly new meaning. Girolamo’s door was ajar, and there were sounds, awful, vaguely familiar. The scene was illuminated by the faint flickering light of an untrimmed lamp, and in a mirror on the far wall all was eerily repeated in miniature. Girolamo with his long legs splayed was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head thrown back and his lips open in an O of ecstasy, a grotesque and yet mysteriously lovely stranger, his blurred gaze fixed sightlessly on the shadowy ceiling. Ah! he cried softly, Ah! and suddenly his body seemed to buckle, and reaching out with frenzied fingers he grasped by the hair the serving girl kneeling before him and plunged his shuddering cock into her mouth. Look! The girl squirmed, moaning and gagging. Girolamo twined his legs about her thighs. Thus, locked together in that monstrous embrace like some hideous exhibit in a bestiary, they began to rock slowly back and forth, and with them the whole room seemed to writhe and sway crazily in the shaking lamplight. Nicolas shut his eyes. When he opened them again it was finished. Girolamo gazed at him with a look of mingled desolation and defiance, and of utter finality. The slattern turned away and spat into the darkness. Nicolas retreated, and closed the door softly.

*

Nothing less than a new and radical instauration would do, if astronomy was to mean more than itself. It was this latter necessity that had obsessed him always, and now more than ever. Astronomy was entirely sufficient unto itself: it saved the phenomena, it explained the inexistent. That was no longer enough, not for Nicolas at least. The closed system of the science must be broken, in order that it might transcend itself and its own sterile concerns, and thus become an instrument for verifying the real rather than merely postulating the possible. He considered this recognition, of the need to restate the basic function of cosmography, to be his first contribution of value to science; it was his manifesto, as it were, and also a vindication of his right to speak and be heard.

A new beginning, then, a new science, one that would be objective, open-minded, above all honest, a beam of stark cold light trained unflinchingly upon the world as it is and not as men, out of a desire for reassurance or mathematical elegance or whatever, wished it to be: that was his aim. It was to be achieved only through the formulation of a sound theory of planetary motion, he saw that clearly now. Before, he had naturally assumed that the new methods and procedures must be devised first, that they would be the tools with which to build the theory; that, of course, was to miss the essential point, namely, that the birth of the new science must be preceded by a radical act of creation. Out of nothing, next to nothing, disjointed bits and scraps, he would have to weld together an explanation of the phenomena. The enormity of the problem terrified him, yet he knew that it was that problem and nothing less that he had to solve, for his intuition told him so, and he trusted his intuition — he must, since it was all he had.

Night after night in the villa during that tempestuous spring he groaned and sweated over his calculations, while outside the storm boomed and bellowed, tormenting the world. His dazed brain reeled, slipping and skidding in a frantic effort to marshal into some semblance of order the amorphous and apparently irreconcilable fragments of fact and speculation and fantastic dreaming. He knew that he was on the point of breaking through, he knew it; time and time over he leapt up from his work, laughing like a madman and tearing his hair, convinced that he had found the solution, only to sink down again a moment later, with a stricken look, having detected the flaw. He feared he would go mad, or fall ill, yet he could not rest, for if he once let go his fierce hold, the elaborate scaffolding he had so painfully erected would fall asunder; and also, of course, should his concentration falter he would find himself sucked once more into the quag of that other unresolved problem of Girolamo.

And then at last it came to him, sauntered up behind him, as it were, humming happily, and tapped him on the shoulder, wanting to know the cause of all the uproar. He had woken at dawn out of a coma of exhaustion into an immediate, almost lurid wakefulness. It was as if the channels of his brain had been sluiced with an icy drench of water. Involuntarily he began to think at once, in a curiously detached and yet wholly absorbed fashion that was, he supposed later, a unique miraculous objectivity, of the two seemingly unconnected propositions, which he had formulated long before, in Bologna or even earlier, that were the solidest of the few building blocks he had so far laid for the foundation of his theory: that the Sun, and not Earth, is at the centre of the world, and secondly that the world is far more vast than Ptolemy or anyone else had imagined. The wind was high. Rain beat upon the window. He rose in the dawning grey gloom and lifted aside the drapes. Clouds were breaking to the east over a sullen waterscape. Calmly then it came, the solution, like a magnificent great slow golden bird alighting in his head with a thrumming of vast wings. It was so simple, so ravishingly simple, that at first he did not recognise it for what it was.

He had been attacking the problem all along from the wrong direction. Perhaps his training at the hands of cautious schoolmen was to blame. No sooner had he realised the absolute necessity for a creative leap than his instincts without his knowing had thrown up their defences against such a scandalous notion, thrusting him back into the closed system of worn-out orthodoxies. There, like a blind fool, he had sought to arrive at a new destination by travelling the old routes, had thought to create an original theory by means of conventional calculations. Now in this dawn, how or why he did not know, his brain, without his help or knowledge, as it were, had made that leap that he had not had the nerve to risk, and out there, in the silence and utter emptiness of the blue, had done all that it was necessary to do, had combined those two simple but momentous propositions and identified with impeccable logic the consequences of that combining. Of course, of course. Why had he not thought of it before? If the Sun is conceived as the centre of an immensely expanded universe, then those observed phenomena of planetary motion that had baffled astronomers for millennia became perfectly rational and necessary. Of course! The verification of the theory, he knew, would take weeks, months, years perhaps, to complete, but that was nothing, that was mere hackwork. What mattered was not the propositions, but the combining of them: the act of creation. He turned the solution this way and that, admiring it, as if he were turning in his fingers a flawless ravishing jewel. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing.

He crawled back to bed, exhausted now. He felt like a very worn old man. The shining clarity of a moment ago was all gone. He needed sleep, days and days of sleep. However, no sooner had he laid down than he was up again, scrabbling eagerly at the drapes. He thrust his face against the stippled glass, peering toward the east, but the clouds had gathered again, and there was to be no sun, that day.

*

Girolamo and he said their farewells in a filthy little inn by the lakeshore; it seemed best to part on neutral ground. They could think of nothing to say, and sat in silence uneasily over an untouched jar of wine amid the reek of piss and the rancid catty stink of spilt beer. Through a tiny grimed window above their heads they watched the thunderclouds massing over the lake.

“Caro Nicolo.”

“My friend.”

But they were only words. Nicolas was impatient to be away. He was returning to Prussia; Italy had been used up. Go! he told himself, go now, and abruptly he rose, wearing his death’s-head grin. Girolamo looked up at him with a faint smile. “Farewell then, uncle.” And as Nicolas turned, something of the past came back, and he realised that once, not long ago, there had been nothing in the world more precious than this young man’s reserved, somehow passionately detached presence by his side. He went out quickly, into the wind and the gauzy warm rain, and mounted up. Riding away from Incaffi was like riding away from Italy herself. He was leaving behind him a world that had begun and ended, that was complete, and immune to change. What had been, was still, in his memory. Someday, fleeing from some extremity of anguish or of pain, his spirit would return to this bright place and find it all intact. The ghostly voices rose up at his back. Do thyself no harm! they cried, for we are all here!