Doctor Copernicus

III. Cantus Mundi

I, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, called Rheticus, will now set down the true account of how Copernicus came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe. There are not many who will admit that if I had not gone to him, the old fool would never have dared to publish. When I arrived in Frauenburg I was little more than a boy (a boy of genius, to be sure!), yet he recognised my brilliance, that was why he listened to me, yes. Princes of Church and State had in vain urged him to speak, but my arguments he heeded. To you, now, he is Copernicus, a titan, remote and unknowable, but to me he was simply Canon Nicolas, preceptor and, yes! friend. They say I am mad. Let them. What do I care for a jealous world’s contumely? They drove me out, denied me my fame and honoured name, banished me here to rot in this Godforgotten corner of Hungary that they call Cassovia — yet what of it? lam at peace at last, after all the furious years. An old man now, yes, a forlorn and weary wanderer come to the end of the journey, I am past caring. But I don’t forgive them! No! The devil shit on the lot of you.

*

My patron, the Count, is a noble gentleman. Cultured, urbane, brilliant, generous to a fault, he reminds me in many ways of myself when I was younger. We speak the same language — I mean of course the language of gentlemen, for in Latin it’s true he is a little. . rusty. Not like Koppernigk, whose schoolman’s Latin was impeccable, while for the rest, well, his people were, after all, in trade. The Count saw in me one of his own kind, and welcomed me into the castle here (as house physician) when the others chose to forget me and the great work I have done. He dismisses with characteristic hauteur the vile slanders they fling at me, and laughs when they whisper to him behind their hands that I am mad. The Count, unfortunately, is mad, a little. It comes from the mother’s side, I think: bad blood there without a doubt. Yes, I must exercise more caution, for he is capricious. Be less arrogant in his presence, grovel now and then, yes yes. Still, he needs me, we both know that. What, I ask, without me, would he do for the conversation, the intellectual stimulation, which save him from going altogether out of his mind? This country is populated with swineherds and witches and cretinous priests. I was a new star in his sparse firmament. Anyway, why should I worry? — the world is full of Counts, but there is only one Doctor Rheticus. It is not, the world, I mean, full of Counts, so go easy. What was I. ? Copernicus, of course. Forty years ago — forty years! — I came to him.

Frauenburg: that hole. It clings to the Baltic coast up there at the outermost edge of the earth, and someday please God it will drop off, like a scab. My heart sank when first I beheld that grey fortress wall. It was 1539, summer supposedly, although the rain poured down, and there was a chill white wind off the sea. I remember the houses, like clenched fists, bristling within the gates. Clenched is the word: that was Frauenburg, clenched on its own ignorance and bitterness and Catholicism. Was it for this I had abandoned Wittenberg, the university, my friends and confraters? Not that Wittenberg was all that much better, mind you, but the meanness was different; in the corridors of the university they were still jabbering about freedom and change and redemption, parroting the Reformer’s raucous squawks, but behind all that fine talk there lurked the old terror, the despair, of those who know full well and will not admit it that the world is rotten, irredeemable. In those days I believed (or had myself convinced that I did) that we were on the threshold of the New Age, and I took part with gusto in the game, and jabbered with the best of them. How could I do otherwise? At twenty-two I held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the great University of Wittenberg. When the world favours you so early and so generously, you feel it your duty to support its pathetic fictions. I am inside the gates of Frauenburg.

*

Once inside the gates of Frauenburg, then, I went straightway to the cathedral, dragging my bags and books behind me through the sodden streets. From the cathedral I was directed to the chapterhouse, where I encountered no little difficulty in gaining entry, for they speak a barbaric dialect up there, and furthermore the doorkeeper was deaf. At length the fellow abandoned all attempt to decode my immaculate German, and grudgingly let me into a cavernous dark room where bloodstained idols, their Virgin and so forth, peered eerily out of niches in the walls. Presently there came a sort of scrabbling at the door, and an aged cleric entered crabwise, regarding me suspiciously out of the corner of a watery eye. I must have seemed a strange apparition there in the gloom, grinning like a gargoyle and dripping rain on his polished floor. He advanced apprehensively, keeping firmly between us the big oak table that stood in the middle of the room. His gaze was uncannily like that of the statues behind him: guarded, suspicious, hostile even, but ultimately indifferent. When I mentioned the name of Copernicus I thought he would take to his heels (was the astronomer then a leper even among his colleagues?), but he concealed his consternation as best he could, and merely smiled, if that twitch could be called a smile, and directed me to — where? — the cathedral. I held my temper. He frowned. I had been to the cathedral already? Ah, then he was afraid he could not help me. I asked if I might wait, in the hope that he whom I sought might in time return here. O! well, yes, yes of course, but now that he thought of it, I might perhaps enquire at the house of Canon Suchandsuch, at the other end of the town, for at this hour the Herr Doctor was often to be found there. And I was bustled out into the streets again.

Do you know what it is like up there in the grey north? Now I have nothing against rain — indeed, I think of it as a bright link between air and angels and us poor earthbound creatures — but up there it falls like the falling of dusk, darkening the world, and in that wet gloom all seems stale and flat, and the spirit aches. Even in spring there is no glorious drenching, as there is elsewhere, when April showers sweep through the air like showers of light, but only the same dull thin drip drip drip, a drizzle of tangible accidie, hour after hour. Yet that day I marched along regardless through those mean streets, my feet in the mire and my head swathed in a golden mist, ah yes, it has been ever thus with me: when I set my mind on something, then all else disappears, and today I could see one thing only, the historic confrontation (for already I pictured our meeting set like a jewel in the great glittering wheel of history) between von Lauchen of Rhaetia and Doctor Copernicus of Torun. But the Herr Doctor was proving damnably elusive. At the house of Canon Suchandsuch (the name was Snellenburg, I remember it now), the dolt of a steward or whatever he was just looked at me peculiarly and shook his thick head slowly from side to side, as if he felt he was dealing with a large lunatic child.

I ferreted him out in the end, never mind how. I’ve said enough to demonstrate the lengths he would go to in order to protect himself from the world. He lived in a tower on the cathedral wall, a bleak forbidding eyrie where he perched like an old ill-tempered bird, beak and talons at the ready. I had my foot in the door before the housekeeper, Anna Schillings, his focaria, that bitch (more of her later) could slam it in my face — and I swear to God that if she had, I would have burst it in, brass studs, hinges, locks and all, with my head, for I was desperate. I dealt her a smile bristling with fangs, and she backed off and disappeared up the narrow stairs, at the head of which she presently reappeared and beckoned to me, and up there in the half dark (it’s evening now) before a low arched door she abandoned me with a terrible look. I waited. The door with a squeak opened a little way. A face, which to my astonishment I recognised, peered around it cautiously, and was immediately withdrawn. There were some furtive scuffling sounds within. I knocked, not knowing what else to do. A voice bade me come in. I obeyed.

*

At my first, I mean my second — third, really — well, my first as it were official sight of him, I was surprised to find him smaller than I had anticipated, but I suppose I expected him to be a giant. He stood at a lectern with his hands on the open pages of a bible, I think it was a bible. Astronomical instruments were laid out on a table near him, and through the open window at his back could be seen the Baltic and the great light dome of the evening sky (rain stopped, cloud lifting, the usual). His expression was one of polite enquiry, mild surprise. I forgot the speech I had prepared. I imagine my mouth hung open. It was the same old man that had met me at the chapter-house, that is, he was Copernicus, I mean they were one and the same — yes yes! the same, and here he was, gazing at me with that lugubrious glazed stare, pretending he had never set eyes on me before now. Ach, it depresses me still. Did he imagine I would not recognise him in this ridiculous pose, this stylised portrait of a scientist in his cell? He did not care! If his carefully composed expression was not free of a faint trace of unease, that uneasiness sprang from concern for the polish of his performance and not from any regard for me, nor from shame that his contemptible trick had been discovered. He might have been masquerading before a mirror. Copernicus did not believe in truth. He had no faith in truth. You are surprised? Listen—

O but really, all this is unworthy of me, of the subject. Two of the greatest minds of the age (one, at least, was great, is great) met that day, and I describe the momentous occasion as if it were a carnival farce. It is all gone wrong. The rain, the difficulty of finding him, that absurd pose, I did not intend to mention any of this trivia. Why is it not possible to speak of things calmly and accurately? My head aches. I could never achieve the classic style; one must have a grave turn of mind for that, a sense of the solemn pageantry of life, an absolutely unshakeable faith in the notion of order. Order! Ha! I must pause here, it is too late, too dark, to continue. The wolves are howling in the mountains. After such splendours, my God, how have I ended up in this wilderness? My head!

*

Now, where was I? Ah, I have left poor Canon Nicolas petrified all night before his lectern and his bible, posing for his portrait. He was in sixty-sixth year, an old man whose robes, cut for a younger, stouter self, hung about him in sombre folds like a kind of silt deposited by time. His face — teeth gone in the slack mouth, skin stretched tight on the high northern cheekbones — had already taken on that blurred, faded quality that is the first bloom of death. Thus must my own face appear now to others. Ah. . He wore no beard, but the morning blade, trembling in an unsteady grip, had left unreaped on his chin and in the deep cleft above the upper lip a few stray grizzled hairs. A velvet cap sat upon his skull like a poultice. This, surely, was not that Doctor Copernicus, that great man, whom I had come to Frauenburg to find! The eyes, however, intense and infinitely clever, and filled with what I can only call an exalted cunning, identified him as the one I sought.

Nor was his observatory what I had thought it would be. I had expected something old-fashioned, it’s true, a cosy little lair full of scholarly clutter, books and manuscripts, parchments crawling with complex calculations, all this draped in the obligatory membrane of vivid dust. Also, unaccountably, I had expected warmth, thick yellow warmth, like a species of inspirational cheese, in which would be embedded in his mellow old age the master, a jolly old fellow, absent-minded and unworldly, but sharp, sharp, putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece preparatory to unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world. The room I was in, however, was straight out of the last century, if not the one before, and more like an alchemist’s cell than the workroom of a great modern scientist. The white walls were bare as bone, the beamed ceiling too. I saw no more than a handful of books. The instruments on the table had the self-conscious look of things that have been brought out for display. The window let in a hard merciless light. And the cold! Science here was not the cheerful, confident quest for certainties that I knew, but the old huggermugger of spells and talismans and secret signs. A leering death’s-head and a clutch of dried batwings would not have surprised me. The air reeked of the chill sweat of guilt.

I did not take in all this detail at once — although it was all registered in my sense of shock — for at first I was distracted by waiting for him to offer some excuse, or at least explanation, regarding our prior meeting. When I realised, to my surprise and puzzlement (remember, I did not know him yet as I was to come to know him later), that he had no intention of doing so, I knew there was nothing for it but to play, as best I could, the part of the simpering idiot that obviously he considered me to be. In the circumstances, then, something dramatic was required. I crossed the room, I bounded across the room, and with my face lifted in doglike veneration I genuflected before him, crying:

“Domine praeceptor!”

Startled, he backed away from me, mumbling under his breath and trying not to see me, but I hobbled after him, still on one knee, until a corner of the table nudged him in the rear and he jumped in fright and halted. The instruments on the table, quivering from the collision, set up a tiny racket of chiming and chattering that seemed in the sudden silence to express exactly the old man’s panic and confusion. You see? You see? How can I be expected to be grave?

“Who are you?” he demanded petulantly, and did not bother to listen when I told him my name a second time. “You are not from the Bishop, are you?” He watched me carefully.

“No, Meister, I know no Bishop, nor king nor prince; I am ruled only by the greatest of lords, which is science.”

“Yes yes, well, get up, will you, get up.”

I rose, and rising suddenly remembered the words of my speech, which I delivered, in one breath, at high speed. Very flowery. Sat verbum.

Throughout that meeting we moved in circles about the room in a slow stealthy chase, he leading, keeping well out of my reach for fear I might attempt a sudden assault, and I following hard upon his heels uttering shrill cries of adoration and entreaty, throwing my arms about and tripping over the furniture in my excitement. We communicated (communicated!) in a kind of macaronic jabber, for whereas I found German most natural, the Canon was wont to lapse into Latin, and no sooner did I join him than we found ourselves stumbling into the vernacular again. O, it was great fun, truly. He was singularly unimpressed by my academic pedigree; his face took on a look of frank horror when it dawned upon him that I was a Lutheran — holy God, one of them! What would the Bishop say? But hold hard, Rheticus, hold hard now, you must be fair to him. Yes, I must be fair to him. I cannot in fairness blame a timorous cleric, who desired above all not to be noticed, for his dread at the arrival in his tower fortress of a firebrand from Protestant Wittenberg. Three months previous to my coming, the Bishop, Dantiscus the sleek, had issued an edict ordering all Lutherans out of Ermland on pain of dispossession or even death, and shortly thereafter he was to issue another, calling for all heretical — meaning Lutheran, natürlich—books and pamphlets to be burned in public. A nice gentleman, Dantiscus the bookburner: I shall have some more to say of him presently.

(In fairness to myself, I must add that Wittenberg considered Copernicus at best a madman, at worst the Antichrist. Luther himself, in one of those famous after-dinner harangues, amid the belches and the farts, had sneered at the notion of a heliocentric universe, thus displaying once again his unfailing discernment; so also had Melanchton mocked the theory — even Melanchton, my first patron! Therefore you see that the Meister was less than popular where I came from, and I was granted leave of absence to visit him only because of who and what I was, and not because the Wittenberg authorities approved of the Ermlander’s theories. I wanted to make that point clear, for the sake of accuracy.)

So, as I have said, he was not impressed et cetera — indeed, so unimpressed was he, that he seemed not even fully aware of my presence, for he kept on as it were sliding away from me, as though avoiding a distasteful memory, picking at his robe with agitated fingers and grimacing to himself. He was not thinking of me, but of the consequences of me, so to speak (What will the Bishop say!). I was profoundly disappointed, or rather, I was aware that something profoundly disappointing was occurring, for I myself, the essential I, was hardly there. That is not very clear. No matter. Doctor Copernicus, who before had represented for me the very spirit incarnate of the New Age, was now revealed as a cautious cold old brute obsessed with appearances and the security of his prebend. Is it possible to be disconcerted to the point of tears?

And yet there was something that told me all was not lost, that my pilgrimage might not have been in vain: it was a faint uncertainty in his look, a tiny tension, as if there were, deep within him, a lever longing to be pressed. I had brought gifts with me, fine printed editions of Ptolemy and Euclid, Regiomontanus and others, O, there must have been a dozen volumes in all, which I had had rebound (at a cost I do not care even now to recall), with his initials and a pretty monogram stamped in gold on the spines. These books I had cunningly dispersed throughout my luggage for fear of brigands, so that now when I remembered them and fell upon my bags in a final frantic burst of hope, they fell, diamonds amid ashes, out of a storm of shirts and shoes and soiled linen, and There! I cried, and There! near to tears, challenging him to find it in his cold heart to reject this ultimate token of homage.

“What are you doing?” he said. “What are these?”

I gathered the books in my arms and struggled to my feet. “For you — for you, domine praeceptor!”

Hesitantly he lifted the Almagest from atop the pile, and, with many a suspicious backward glance in my direction, took it to the window; I thought of an old grey rat scuttling off with a crust. He held the book close to his nose and examined it intently, sniffing and crooning, and the harsh lines of his face softened, and he smiled despite himself, biting his lip, old pleased grey rat, and click! I could almost hear that lever dip.

“A handsome volume,” he murmured, “handsome indeed. And costly too, I should think. What did you say your name was, Herr. ?”

And then, I think, I did weep. I recall tears, and more groans of adoration, and I on my knees again and he shooing me off, though with less distaste than before, I fancied. Behind him the clouds broke for a moment over the Baltic, and the sun of evening suddenly shone, a minor miracle, and I remembered that it was summer after all, that I was young, and the world was before me. I left him soon after that, with an invitation to return on the morrow, and staggered in blissful delirium into the streets, where even the leaden twilight and the filth in the sewers, the mud, the red gaping faces of the peasants, could not dampen my spirits. I found lodgings at an inn below the cathedral wall, and there partook of a nauseating dinner, that I remember in detail to this day, and, to follow, had a fat and extremely dirty, curiously androgynous whore.

* * *

I was up and about early next morning. Low sun on the Frisches Haff, the earth steaming faintly, wind freshening, the narrow streets awash with light and loud with the shrill cries of hawkers — aye, and my poor head splitting from the effects of that filthy poison which they dare to call wine. At the tower the bitch Schillings greeted me with another black look, but let me in without a word. The Canon was waiting for me in the observatory, in a state of extreme agitation. I had hardly crossed the threshold before he began to babble excitedly, and came at me waving his hands, forcing me to retreat before him. It was yesterday in reverse. I tried to make sense of what he was saying, but the fumes of last night’s revels had not yet dispersed, and phlegm not blood lay sluggish in my veins, and I could grasp only a jumble of words: Kulm. . the Bishop. . Löbau. . the castle. . venite! We were leaving Frauenburg. We were going to Löbau, in Royal Prussia. Bishop Giese was his friend. He was Bishop of Kulm. We would stay with him at Löbau Castle. (What did it mean?) We were leaving that morning, that minute — now! I shambled off in a daze and collected my belongings from the inn, and, when I returned, the Canon was already in the street, struggling into a brokendown hired carriage. I think if I had not arrived just then he would have left without giving me a second thought. The Schillings stuck out her fierce head at the door, the Canon groaned faintly and shrank back against the fusty seat, and as we moved off the focaria yelled after us like a fishwife something about being gone when we returned — on hearing which, I may add, I brightened up considerably.

There is a kind of lockjaw that comes with extreme embarrassment; I fell prey to that condition as we rattled through the streets of Frauenburg that morning. I may have been young, innocent I may have been, but I could guess easily enough the reason for our haste and the manner of our departure. It was not without justification, after all, that Luther had vilified Rome for its hypocrisy and its so-called celibacy, and no doubt now Bishop Dantiscus had instituted yet another drive against indecency among his clergy, as the Catholics were forever doing in those early days of the schism, eager to display their reforming zeal to a sceptical world. Not that I cared anything for that kind of nonsense; it was not the state of affairs between Canon Nicolas and the Schillings that troubled me (it did not trouble me much, at any rate), but the spectacle of Doctor Copernicus in the street, in public, involved in a sordid domestic scene. I could not speak, I say, and turned my face away from him and gazed out with such fierce concentration at drab Ermland passing by that it might have been the wonders of the Indies I beheld. Ah, how intolerant the young are of the frailties of the old! The Canon was silent also, until we reached the plain, and then he stirred and sighed, and there was a world of weariness in his voice when he asked:

“Tell me, young man, what do they say of me at Wittenberg?”

*

That dreary Prussian plain, I remember it. Enormous clouds, rolling down from the Baltic, kept pace with us as we were borne slowly southwards, their shadows stepping hugely across the empty land. Strange silence spread for miles about us, as if everything were somehow turned away, facing off into the limitless distance, and the muted clamour of our passage — creak of axles, monotonous thudding of hoofs — could not avail against that impassive quiet, that indifference. We met not a soul on the road, if road it could be called, but once, far in the distance, a band of horsemen appeared, galloping laboriously away, soundlessly. Through the narrow slit opposite me I could see the driver’s broad back bouncing and rolling, but as the hours crawled past it ceased to be a human form, and became a stone, a pillar of dust, the wing of some great bird. We passed through deserted villages where the houses were charred shells and dust blew in the streets, and the absence of the hum of human concourse was like a hole in the air itself. Thus do we voyage in dreams. Once, when I thought the Canon was asleep, I found him instead staring at me fixedly; another time when I turned to him he smiled a cunning and inexplicably alarming smile. Confused and frightened, I looked away hurriedly, out at the countryside revolving slowly around us, but there was no comfort for me there. The plain stretched away interminably, burnished by the strange brittle sunlight, and the wind sang softly. We might have been a thousand leagues from anywhere, adrift in the sphere of the fixed stars. He was still smiling, the old sorcerer, and it seemed to me that the smile said: this is my world, do you see? there is no Anna Schillings here, no gaping peasants, no bloodied statues, no Dantiscus, only the light and the emptiness, and that mysterious music high in the air which you cannot hear but which you know is there. And for the first time then I saw him whole, no longer the image of him I had carried with me from Wittenberg, but Copernicus himself—itself — the true thing, a cold brilliant object like a diamond (not like a diamond, but I am in a hurry), now all at once vividly familiar and yet untouchable still. It is not vouchsafed to many men to know another thus, with that awful clarity; when it comes, the vision is fleeting, the experience lasts only an instant, but the knowledge gleaned thereby remains forever. We reached Löbau, and in the flurry of arrival I felt that I was indeed waking from a dream. I waited for the Canon to acknowledge all that had happened out on the plain (whatever it was!), but he did not, would not, and I was disappointed. Well, for all I know, the old devil may have put a spell on me out there. But I shall always remember that eerie journey. Yes.

*

Löbau Castle was an enormous white stone fortress on a hill, its towers and turrets looking down over wooded slopes to the huddled roofs of the town. The air up there was crisp with the smell of spruce and pine. I might almost have been back in Germany. We drew into the courtyard and were greeted by an uproar of servants and grooms and hysterical dogs. A grizzled old fellow in a leather jerkin and patched breeches came to receive us. I took him for a steward or somesuch, but I was wrong: it was Bishop Giese himself. He greeted the Canon with grave solicitude. He hardly glanced at me, until, when he offered me the ring to kiss, I shook his hand instead, and that provoked a keen look. The two of them moved away together, the Canon shuffling slowly with bowed head, the Bishop supporting him with a gentle hand under his elbow, and the Canon groaned:

“Ah, Tiedemann, troubles, troubles. .”

I was left to fend for myself, of course, as usual, until one of the serving lads took pity on me. He bounced up under my nose with a saucy grin smeared on his face, Raphaël he was called, hardly more than a child, a pretty fellow with an arse on him like a peach, O, I knew what he was about! — Raphaël, indeed: some angel. But I followed him willingly enough, and not without gratitude. As he scampered along before me, babbling and leering in his childish way, it occurred to me that I should have a chat with him in private, before I left, about the joys of matrimony and so on, and warn him of the tribulations in store for him if he continued to lean in the direction he so obviously leaned, at such a tender age. Had I only known what tribulations were in store for me on his account!

*

And so began our strange sojourn at Löbau. Throughout that long summer we remained there. The magical spell, the first touch of which I had felt out on the empty Prussian plain, settled over all that white castle on its peak, where we, as in an enchanted sleep, wandered amidst the luminous order and music of the planets, dreaming miraculous dreams. Luther had scoffed at Copernicus, calling him the fool who wants to turn the whole science of astronomy upside down, but Luther should have kept to theology, for in the sweat of his worst nightmare he could not have imagined what we would do during those months at Löbau. We turned the whole universe upon its head. We, I say we, for without me he would have kept silent even into the silence of the grave. He had intended to destroy his book: how many of you knew that?

How very skilfully I am telling this tale.

*

Bishop Giese. Bishop Giese was not quite the crusty old pedant I had expected. He was no gay dog, to be sure, but he was not without a certain. . how shall I say, a certain sense of irony — better call it that than humour, for none of those northerners knows how to laugh. In his attitude toward the Canon, a blend of awe and solicitude and an occasional, helpless exasperation that yet was never less than amiable, he revealed a loyal and gentle nature. He was something of an astronomer, and possessed a bronze armillary sphere for observing equinoxes, and a mighty gnomon from England, which I envied. However, it was with an enthusiasm plainly forced that he displayed these and other instruments, and I suspect he kept them chiefly as evidence of the sincerity of his interest in the Canon’s work. He was nearing sixty at the time of which I speak, had been a canon of the Frauenburg Chapter, and was destined one day to take Dantiscus’s place in the Bishopric of Ermland. Of middle height, not stout but not gaunt either, he was one of those middling men who are the unacknowledged proprietors of the world. He was decent, unassuming, diligent — in short, a good man. I loathed him, I still do. He suffered from the ague, which he had contracted in the course of his duties somewhere in the wilds of that enormous bog which is Prussia; Canon Nicolas, playing at medicine (as I do now!), had for some time been treating him for the affliction, hence, officially at least, our presence at Löbau. But it was not on the Bishop alone that the Canon’s skill was to be lavished. .

On the evening of our arrival, after I had lain down briefly to sleep, I awoke drenched in sweat and prey to a nameless panic. My teeth chattered. I rose and for a long time wandered fitfully about the castle, wringing my hands and moaning, lost and frightened in those unfamiliar stone corridors and silent galleries. I knew, but would not acknowledge it, what this mood of mounting urgency and alarm presaged. All my life I have been subject to prolonged bouts of melancholia, which at their most severe bring with them fainting fits and crippling pains, even temporary blindness sometimes, and a host of other lesser demons to plague me. But worst of all is the heartache, the accidie. More than once I have near died of it, and hard to bear indeed would be the fear that at the last the ghost might abandon me in the midst of that drear dark, but, thankfully, my stars have laid in store for me an easier, finer end. The attack that came on that evening was one of the strangest that I have ever known, and was to endure, muted but always there, throughout my stay at Löbau. I have spoken already of enchantment: was it perhaps no more than the effect of viewing the events of that summer through the membrane of melancholy?

Dinner at the castle was always a wearisome and repellent ritual, but on that first evening it was torment. The company gathered and disposed itself hierarchically in a vast hall, whose stained-glass windows trapped the late sunlight in its muddy tints and checked its rude advance into the pious gloom so beloved of popish churchmen. Amid the appalling racket of bells and music and so forth the Bishop entered, in full regalia, and took his place at the head of the highest table. Slatterns with red hands and filthy heels bore in huge trays of pork and baskets of black Prussian bread and jars of wine, and then the uproar began in earnest as the doltish priests and leering clerks stuck their snouts into the prog, gulping and snorting and belching, flinging abuse and gnawed bones at each other, filling the smoky air with shrieks of wild laughter. A bout of fisticuffs broke out at one of the lower tables. In the face of it all, the Bishop, enthroned on my left, maintained a placid mien — and why not? By the standards of the Roman Church his dining-room was a model of polite behaviour. Yes, to him, to them all, everything was just splendid, and I alone could see the ape squatting in our midst and hear his howls. Even if they had seen him, they would have taken him for a messenger from God, an archangel with steaming armpits and blue-black ballocks, and sure enough, after a few prayers directed by the company toward the ceiling, the poor brute would have been pointing a seraphic finger upward in a new annunciation (the Word made Pork!). Thus does Rome transform into ritual the horrors of the world, in order to sustain the fictions. I hate them all, Giese with his mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, Dantiscus and his bastards, but most of all of them I hate — ah but bide, Rheticus, bide! The Bishop was speaking to me, some polite rubbish as usual, but the bread was turning to clay in my mouth, and the plate of meat before me had the look of an haruspex’s bowl of entrails, signifying doom. I could no longer bear to remain in that hall. I rose with a snarl, and fled.

Soulsick and weary, I lay awake for hours by the window of the rathole I had been allotted as a room. Out on the plain faint lights flickered. The sky was eerily aglow. In those northern summers true darkness never falls, and throughout the white nights a pallid twilight endures from dusk to dawn. I longed for kindly death. My eyes ached, my arsehole was clenched, my hands stank of wax and ashes. Here in this barbarous clime was no place for me. Tears filled my eyes, and flowed in torrents down my cheeks. All of my life seemed in that moment inexplicably transfigured, a blackened and useless thing, and there was no comfort for me anywhere. I held my face in my hands as if it were some poor, wounded, suffering creature, and bawled like a baby.

There came a tapping, which I heard without hearing, thinking it was the wind, or a deathwatch beetle at work, but then the door opened a little way and the Canon cautiously put in his head and peered about. He wore the same robe that he had travelled in, a shapeless black thing, but on his head now there was perched an indescribably comic nightcap with a tassle. In his trembling hand he carried a lamp, the quaking light of which sent shadows leaping up the walls like demented ghosts. He seemed surprised, and even a little dismayed, to find me awake. I suspect he had come to spy on me. He mumbled an apology and began to withdraw, but then hesitated, remembering, I suppose, that I was not after all an article of furniture, and that a living creature wide awake and weeping might think himself entitled to an explanation as to why an elderly gentleman in a funny cap should be peering into his room at dead of night. With an impatient little sigh he shuffled in and closed the door behind him, put down the lamp with exaggerated deliberation, and then, carefully averting his gaze from my tears, he spoke thus:

“Herr von Lauchen, Bishop Giese tells me you are ill, or so he thought, when you fled his table so precipitately; and therefore I have come in order to ask if I might be of some assistance. The nature of your ailment is quite plain: Saturn, malign star, rules your existence, filled, as it has been, I’m sure, with gainful study, abstract thought, and deep reflection, which feed the hungry mind, but sap the will, and lead to melancholy and dejection. Nothing will avail you, sir, until, as Ficino recommends, you entrust yourself into the care of the Three Graces, and cleave to things under their rule. First, remember, even a single yellow crocus blossom, Jupiter’s golden flower, may bring relief; also, the light of Sol, of course, is good, and green fields at dawn — or anything, in fact, that’s coloured green, the shade of Venus. Do this, meinherr, shun all things saturnine, surround yourself instead with influences conducive to health and joy and spirits fine, and illness never more shall your defences breach. Ahem. . The Bishop seated you by his side at table: an honour, sir, extended only to the very few. To rise in haste, as you did, is a slur. Perhaps at Wittenberg you have adopted Father Luther’s table manners, and hence the reason why you so disrupted the Bishop’s table. But please understand that here in Prussia we do things differently. Vale. — The dawn comes on apace, I see.”

He waited, with head inclined, as though he fancied that his voice, of its own volition as it were, might wish to add something further; but no, he was quite done, and taking up his lamp he prepared to depart. I said:

“I shall be leaving today.”

He stopped short in the doorway and peered at me over his shoulder. “You are leaving us, Herr von Lauchen, already?”

“Yes, Meister, for Wittenberg; for home.”

“O.”

He pondered this unexpected development, sinking into himself like a puzzled old snail into its carapace, and then, mumbling, he wandered away in an introspective trance, with those ghostly shadows prancing about him. Fool that I was, I should have packed my bags and fled there and then, while all the castle was abed, and left him to publish his book or not, burn it, wipe himself with it, whatever he wished. I even imagined my going, and wept again, with compassion for that stern sad figure which was myself, striding away into a chill sombre dawn. I had come to him in a prentice tunic, humbly: I, Rheticus, doctor of mathematics and astronomy at the great school of Wittenberg, and he had dodged me, ignored me, preached at me as if I were an errant choirboy. I should have gone! But I did not go. I crawled instead under the blankets and nursed my poor forlorn heart to sleep.

* * *

I can see it now, of course, how cunning they were, the two of them, Giese and the Canon, cunning old conspirators; but I could not see it then. I woke late in the morning to find Raphaël beside me, with honey and hot bread and a jug of spiced wine. The food was welcome, but the mere presence of the lithesome lad would have been sufficient, for it broke a fast far crueller than belly-hunger — I mean the fasting from the company of youth and rosy cheeks and laughing eyes, which I had been forced to observe since leaving Wittenberg and coming among these greybeards. We spent a pleasant while together, and he, the shy one, twisted his fingers and shifted from foot to foot, chattering on in a vain effort to stem his blushes. At length I gave him a coin and sent him skipping on his way, and although the old gloom returned once he was gone, it was not half so leaden as before. Too late I remembered that sober talk I had determined to have with him; the matter would have to be dealt with. An establishment of clerics, all men — and Catholics at that! — was a perilous place for a boy of his. . his youth and beauty. (I was about to say innocence, but in honesty I must not, even though I know that thereby I banish the word from the language, for if it is denied to him then it has no meaning anymore. I speak in riddles. They shall be solved. My poor Raphaël! they destroyed us both.)

*

I rose and went in search of the Canon, and was directed to the arboretum, a name which conjured up a pleasant image of fruit trees in flower, dappled green shade, and little leafy paths where astronomers might stroll, discussing the universe. What I found was a crooked field fastened to a hill behind the castle, with a few stunted bushes and a cabbage patch — and, need I say, no sign of the Canon. As I stamped away, sick of being sent on false chases, a figure rose up among the cabbages and hailed me. Today Bishop Giese was rigged out again in his peasant costume. The sight of those breeches and that jerkin irritated me greatly. Do these damn Catholics, I wondered, never do else but dress up and pose? His hands were crusted with clay, and when he drew near I caught a strong whiff of horse manure. He was in a hearty mood. I suppose it went with the outfit. He said:

“Grüss Gott, Herr von Lauchen! The Doctor informs me that you are ill. Not gravely so, I trust? Our Prussian climate is uncongenial, although here, on Castle Hill, we are spared the debilitating vapours of the plain — which are yet not so bad as those that rise from the Frisches Haff at Frauenburg, eh, meinherr? Ho ho. Let me look at you, my son. Well, the nature of your ailment is plain: Saturn, malign star. .” And he proceeded to parrot verbatim the Canon’s little sermon in praise of the Graces. I listened in silence, with a curled lip. I was at once amused and appalled: amused that this clown should steal the master’s words and pretend they were his own, appalled at the notion, which suddenly struck me, that the Canon may not after all have been mocking me, but may have been actually serious about that fool Ficino’s cabalistic nonsense! O, I know well the baleful influence which Saturn wields over my life; I know that the Graces are good; but I also know that a hectacre of crocuses would not have eased my heart-sickness one whit. Crocuses! However, as I was to discover, the Canon neither believed nor disbelieved Ficino’s theories, no more than he believed nor disbelieved the contents of any of the score or so set speeches with which he had long ago armed himself, and from which he could choose a ready response to any situation. All that mattered to him was the saying, not what was said; words were the empty rituals with which he held the world at bay. Copernicus did not believe in truth. I think I have said that before.

Giese put his soiled hand on my arm and led me along a path below the castle wall. When he had finished his dissertation on the state of my health, he paused and glanced at me with a peculiar, thoughtful look, like that of an undertaker speculatively eyeing a sick man. The last remaining patches of the morning’s mist clung about us like old rags, and the slowly ascending sun shed a damp weak light upon the battlements above. The world seemed old and tired. I wanted to find the Canon, to wrest from him his secrets, to thrust fame upon his unwilling head. I wanted action. I was young. The Bishop said:

“You come, I believe, from Wittenberg?”

“Yes. I am a Lutheran.”

My directness startled him. He smiled wanly, and nodded his large head up and down very rapidly, as though to shake off that dreaded word I had uttered; he withdrew his hand carefully from my arm.

“Quite so, my dear sir, quite so,” he said, “you are a Lutheran, as you admi- as you say. Now, I have no desire to dispute with you the issues of this tragic schism which has rent our Church, believe me. I might remind you that Father Luther was not the first to recognise the necessity for reform — but, be that as it may, we shall not argue. A man must live with his own conscience, in that much at least I would agree with you. So. You are a Lutheran. You admit it. There it rests. However, I cannot pretend that your presence in Prussia is not an embarrassment. It is — O not to me, you understand; the world pays scant heed to events here in humble Löbau. No, Herr von Lauchen, I refer to one who is dear to us both: I mean of course our domine praeceptor, Doctor Nicolas. It is to him that your presence is an embarrassment, and, perhaps, a danger even. But now I see I have offended you. Let me explain. You have not been long in Prussia, therefore you cannot be expected to appreciate the situation prevailing here. Tell me, are you not puzzled by the Doctor’s unwillingness to give his knowledge to the world, to publish his masterpiece? It would surprise you, would it not, if I were to tell you that it is not doubt as to the validity of his conclusions that makes him hesitate, nothing like that, no — but fear. So it is, Herr von Lauchen: fear.”

He paused again, again we paced the path in silence. I have called Giese a fool, but that was only a term of abuse: he was no fool. We left the castle walls behind, and descended a little way the wooded slope. The trees were tall. Three rabbits fled at our approach. I stumbled on a fallen bough. The pines were silvery, each single needle adorned with a delicate filigree of beaded mist. How strange, the clarity with which I remember that moment! Thus, even as the falcon plummets, the sparrow snatches a last look at her world. Bishop Giese, laying his talons on my arm again, began to chant, I think that is the word, in Latin:

“Painful is the task I must perform, and tell to one — from Wittenberg! — of the storm of envy which surrounds our learned friend. Meinherr, I pray you, to my tale attend with caution and forbearance, and don’t feel that in these few bare facts you see revealed a plot hatched in the corridors of Rome. This evil is the doing of one alone: do you know the man Dantiscus, Ermland’s Bishop (Johannes Flachsbinder his name, a Danzig sop)? Copernicus he hates, and from jealousy these many years he has right zealously persecuted him. Why so? you ask, but to answer you, that is a task, I fear, beyond me. Why ever do the worst detest the best, and mediocrities thirst to see great minds brought low? It is the world. Besides, this son of Zelos, dim-witted churl though he be, thinks Prussia has but room for one great mind — that’s his! The fellow’s moon mad, certes. Now, to achieve his aims, and ruin our magister, he defames his name, puts it about he shares his bed with his focaria, whom he has led into foul sin to satisfy his lust. My friend, you stare, as though you cannot trust your ears. This is but one of many lies this Danziger has told! And in the eyes of all the world the Doctor’s reputation is destroyed, and mocking condemnation, he believes, would greet his book. Some years ago, at Elbing, ignorant peasants jeered a waxwork figure of Copernicus that was displayed in a carnival farce. Thus Dantiscus wins, and our friend keeps silent, fearing to trust his brilliant theories to the leering mob. And so, meinherr, the work of twoscore years lies fallow and unseen. Therefore, I beg you, do not leave us yet. We must try to make him reconsider—but hush! here is the Doctor now. Mind, do not say what secrets I have told you! — Ah Nicolas, good day.”

We had left the wood and entered the courtyard by a little low postern gate. Had Giese not pointed him out, I would not have noticed the Canon skulking under an archway, watching us intently with a peculiar fixed grin on his grey face. Out of new knowledge, I looked upon him in a new light. Yes, now I could see in him (so I thought!) a man enfettered, whose every action was constrained by the paramount need for secrecy and caution, and I felt on his behalf a burning sense of outrage. I would have flung myself to my knees before him, had there not been still vivid in my mind the memory of a previous genuflection. Instead, I contented myself with a terrible glare, that was meant to signify my willingness to take on an army of Dantiscuses at his command. (And yet, behind it all, I was confused, and even suspicious: what was it exactly that they required of me?) I had forgotten my declared intention of leaving that day; in fact, I had said it merely to elicit some genuine response from that nightcapped oracle in my chamber, and certainly I had not imagined that this thoughtless threat would provoke the panic which apparently it had. I determined to proceed with care — but of course, like the young fool that I was, I had no sooner decided on caution than I abandoned it, and waded headlong into the mire. I said:

“Meister, we must return to Frauenburg at once! I intend to make a copy of your great work, and take it to a printer that I know at Nuremberg, who is discreet, and a specialist in such books. You must trust me, and delay no longer!”

In my excitement I expected some preposterously dramatic reaction from the Canon to this naked challenge to his secretiveness, but he merely shrugged and said:

“There is no need to go to Frauenburg; the book is here.”

I said:

“But but but but but—!”

And Giese said:

“Why Nicolas—!”

And the Canon, glancing at us both with a mixture of contempt and distaste, answered:

“I assumed that Herr von Lauchen did not journey all the way from Wittenberg merely for amusement. You came here to learn of my theory of the revolutions of the spheres, did you not? Then so you shall. I have the manuscript with me. Come this way.”

We went all three into the castle, and the Canon straightway fetched the manuscript from his room. The events of the morning had moved so swiftly that my poor brain, already bemused by illness, could not cope with them, and I was in state of shock — yet not so shocked that I did not note how the old man vainly tried to appear unconcerned when he surrendered to me his life’s work, that I did not feel his trembling fingers clutch at the manuscript in a momentary spasm of misgiving as it passed between us. When the deed was done he stepped back a pace, and that awful uncontrollable grin took hold of his face again, and Bishop Giese, hovering near us, gave a kind of whistle of relief, and I, fearing that the Canon might change his mind and try to snatch the thing away from me, rose immediately and made off with it to the window.

DE REVOLUTIONIBUS ORBIUM MUNDI

— for mathematicians only—

*

How to express my emotions, the strange jumble of feelings kindled within me, as I gazed upon the living myth which I held in my hands, the key to the secrets of the universe? This book for years had filled my dreams and obsessed my waking hours so completely that now I could hardly comprehend the reality, and the words in the crabbed script seemed not to speak, but to sing rather, so that the rolling grandeur of the title boomed like a flourish of celestial trumpets, to the accompaniment of the wordly fiddling of the motto with its cautious admonition, and I smiled, foolishly, helplessly, at the inexplicable miracle of this music of Heaven and Earth. But then I turned the pages, and chanced upon the diagram of a universe in the centre of which stands Sol in the splendour of eternal immobility, and the music was swept away, and my besotted smile with it, and a new and wholly unexpected sensation took hold of me. It was sorrow! sorrow that old Earth should be thus deposed, and cast out into the darkness of the firmament, there to prance and spin at the behest of a tyrannical, mute god of fire. I grieved, friends, for our diminishment! O, it was not that I did not already know that Copernicus’s theory postulated a heliocentric world — everyone knew that — and anyway I had been permitted to read Melanchton’s well-thumbed copy of the Commentariolus. Besides, as everyone also knows, Copernicus was not the first to set the Sun at the centre. Yes, I had for a long time known what this Prussian was about, but it was not until that morning at Löbau Castle that I at last realised, in a kind of fascinated horror, the full consequences of this work of cosmography. Beloved Earth! he banished you forever into darkness. And yet, what does it matter? The sky shall be forever blue, and the earth shall forever blossom in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe it.

*

I read the entire manuscript there and then; that is not of course to say that I read every word: rather, I opened it up, as a surgeon opens a limb, and plunged the keen blade of my intellect into its vital centres, thus laying bare the quivering arteries leading to the heart. And there, in the knotted cords of that heart, I made a strange discovery. . but more of that presently. When at last I lifted my eyes from those pages, I found myself alone. The light was fading in the windows. It was evening. The day had departed, with Giese and Copernicus, unnoticed. My brain ached, but I forced it to think, to seek out a small persistent something which had been lodging in my thoughts since morning, biding its time. It was the memory of how, when in the courtyard I challenged him to surrender the manuscript to me, Copernicus had for an instant, just for an instant only, cast off the timorous churchman’s mask to reveal behind it an icy scorn, a cold, cruel arrogance. I did not know why I had remembered it, why it seemed so significant; I was not even sure that I had not imagined it; but it troubled me. What is it they want me to do? Go carefully, Rheticus, I told myself, hardly knowing what I meant. .

I found Copernicus and Giese in the great hall of the castle, seated in silence in tall carved chairs on either side of the enormous hearth, on which, despite the mildness of the evening, stacked logs were blazing fiercely. The windows, set high up in the walls, let in but little of the evening’s radiance, and in the gloom the robes of the two still figures seemed to flow and merge into the elaborate flutings of the thrones on which they sat, so that to my bruised perception they appeared limbless, a pair of severed heads, ghastly in the fire’s crimson glow. Copernicus had put himself as close to the blaze as he could manage without risking combustion, but still he looked cold. As I entered the arc of flickering firelight, I found that he was watching me. I was weary, and incapable of subtlety, and once again I ignored my own injunction to go carefully. I held up the manuscript and said:

“I have read it, and find it is all I had expected it would be, more than I had hoped; will you allow me to take it to Nuremberg, to Petreius the printer?”

He did not answer immediately. The silence stretched out around us until it seemed to creak. At length he said:

“That is a question which we cannot discuss, yet.”

At that, as though he had been given a signal, the Bishop stirred himself and put an end to the discussion (discussion!). Had I eaten? Why then, I must! He would have Raphaël bring me supper in my room, for I should retire, it was late, I was ill and in need of rest. And, like a sleepy child, I allowed myself to be led away, too tired to protest, clutching the manuscript, baba’s favourite toy, to my breast. I looked back at Copernicus, and the severed head smiled and nodded, as if to say: sleep, little one, sleep now. My room looked somehow different, but I could not say in what way, until next morning when I noticed the desk, amply stocked with writing implements and paper, which they installed without my knowing. O the cunning!

*

A thought, which I find startling, has occurred to me, viz. that I was happy at Löbau Castle, perhaps happier than I had ever been before, or would be again. Is it true? Happiness. Happiness. I write down the word, I stare at it, but it means nothing. Happiness; how strange. When the world, which is populated for the most part by fools and hypocrites, talks of being happy, really it is talking about no more than the gratification of hunger — hunger for love, or revenge, money, suchlike — but that cannot be what I mean. I have never loved anyone, and if I had money I would not know what to do with it. Revenge, of course, is another matter; but it will not make me happy. At Löbau, certainly, I knew nothing of revenge, did not even suspect that one day I would desire it. What am I talking about? I cannot understand myself, these ravings. Yet the thought will not go away. I was happy that summer at Löbau. It is like a kind of message, sent to me from I do not know where; a cipher. Well then, let me see if I can discover what it was that made me happy, and then maybe I shall understand what this happiness meant.

*

Quickly the days acquired a rhythm. In the mornings I was awakened by the sombre tolling of the castle bell, signifying that in the chapel the Bishop was celebrating Mass. The thought of that strange secret ritual of blood and sacrifice being enacted close at hand in the dim light of dawn was at once comical and grotesque, and yet mysteriously consoling. After Mass came Raphaël, sleepy-eyed but unfailingly gay, to feed and barber me. He was such a pleasant creature, and was happy to chatter or keep silent as my mood demanded. Even his silence was merry. I tried repeatedly to elicit from him a precise description of his duties in the Bishop’s household, for it was apparent that he held a privileged position, but his answers were always vague. It occurred to me that he might be old Giese’s bastard. (Perhaps he was? I hope not.) Sometimes I had him accompany me when I went forth to take the air in the woods below the walls, but after that he was banished from my side and warned not to appear again with his distracting ways till evening, for I had work to do.

The astronomer who studies the motions of the stars is surely like a blind man, who, with only the staff of mathematics to guide him, must make a great, endless, hazardous journey that winds through innumerable desolate places. What will be the result? Proceeding anxiously for a while, and groping his way with his staff, he will at some time, leaning upon it, cry out in despair to Heaven, Earth and all the gods to aid him in his anguish. Thus, day after day, for ten weeks, beset by illness and, worse, uncertainty regarding the purpose of my labours, I struggled with the intricacies of Copernicus’s theory of the movements of the planets. This second reading of the manuscript was very different from the first deceptive glance, when, entranced by music, I went straight to the heart of the work, and cheerfully ignored the details. Ah, the details! Crouched at my desk, with my head in my hands, I did furious battle with them, moaning and muttering, weeping, laughing sometimes even, uncontrollably. I remember in particular the trouble caused me by the orbit of Mars, the warlord. That planet is a cunt! It nearly drove me insane. One day, despairing of ever comprehending the mystery of its orbit, I rose and dashed in frantic circles about the room, crashing my head against the walls. At length, when I had knocked myself near senseless, I sank to the floor with laughter booming in my ears, and a mocking voice — I swear it came from the fourth sphere itself! — roared at me: Good, Rheticus, very good! You have found what you sought, for just as you have whirled about this room, just so does Mars whirl in the heavens!

As if all this were not enough, I spent the evenings, when I should have been resting, locked in endless circular arguments with Copernicus, trying to persuade him to publish. These battles took place after dinner in the great hall, where a third carved throne had been provided for me before the fire. I say battles, but assaults would be a better word, for while I attacked, Copernicus merely cowered behind the ramparts of a stony silence, apparently untouchable. A remote grey figure, he sat huddled in the folds of his robe, staring before him, his jaw clenched tight as a gintrap. No matter how hot the fire, he was always cold. It was as if he generated coldness out of some frozen waste within him. Only when my pleading reached its fiercest intensity, when, beside myself with messianic fervour, I leaped to my feet and roared frantic exhortations at him, waving my arms, only then did his stolid defences show a trace of weakness. His head began to jerk from side to side, in a clockwork frenzy of refusal, while that ghastly grin spread wider and wider, and the sweat stood out on his brow, and, like a girl teasing herself with thoughts of rape, he peered down into the depths of the abyss into which I was inviting him to leap, hugging himself in horrified, panic-stricken glee. Sometimes, even, he was pressed so far that he spoke, but only in order to throw an obstacle in the path of my merciless advance, and then he was always careful to seize on some minor point of my argument, steering well clear of the main issue. Thus, when I put it to him that he had a duty to publish, if only to demonstrate the errors in Ptolemy, he shook a trembling finger at me and cried:

“We must follow the methods of the ancients! Anyone who thinks they are not to be trusted will squat forever in the wilderness outside the locked gates of our science, dreaming the dreams of the deranged about the motions of the spheres — and he will get what he deserves for thinking he can support his own ravings by slandering the ancients!”

Giese, for his part, liked to think of himself as the wise old mediator in these one-sided debates, and waded in now and again with some inane remark, which obviously he considered immensely learned and persuasive, and to which Copernicus and I attended in a painful polite silence, before continuing on as if the old clown had never opened his mouth. But he was happy enough, so long as he was allowed to say his piece, for, like all his breed, he saw no difference between words and actions, and felt that when something was said it was as good as done. He was not the only spectator on the battlefield. As the weeks went by, word spread through the castle, and even to the town and beyond, that free entertainment was being laid on each evening in the great hall, and soon we began to draw an audience of clerics and castle officials, fat burghers from the town, travelling charlatans on diplomatic missions to the See of Kulm, and God knows what all. Even the servants came creeping in to hear this wild man from Wittenberg perform. At first it disturbed me to have that faceless, softly breathing mass shifting and tittering behind me in the gloom, but I grew accustomed to it, in time. In fact, I began to enjoy myself. In the magic circle of the firelight, immured in the impregnable fortress high above the plain, I felt that I had been lifted out of the world of ordinary men into some rarefied aetherial sphere, where nothing that was soiled could touch me, where I touched nothing soiled. Outside it was summer, the peasants were working in the fields, emperors were waging wars, but here there was none of that, all that, blood and toil, things growing, slaughter and glory, bucolic pleasures, men dying — in short, life, no, none of that. For we were angels, playing an endless, celestial game. And I was happy.

— And if that is what is meant by happiness, then I want none of it.

* * *

I am getting on, getting on, yes indeed; I am at Löbau still. My arguments won through in the end, and although it was in his own way, to be sure, and on his own terms, Copernicus capitulated. The first hint that he was ready to negotiate in earnest came when one evening he began out of the blue to babble excitedly about a plan, which he knew, he said, would meet with my enthusiastic approval. I must not think that his unwillingness to publish his modest theories sprang from contempt for the world; indeed, as I well knew (I did?), he bore a great love for ordinary men, and had no wish to leave them in ignorance de rerum natura if there was any way in which he could enlighten them. Also, he had a responsibility toward science, and the improvement of scientific method. Having regard to all this, then, he proposed to draw up astronomical tables, with new rules for plotting star courses, which would be an invaluable aid not only to astronomers but also to sailors and map-makers and so forth; these, when he had prepared them, I could take to my printer at Nuremberg. However, I should understand one thing clearly, that while the computational tables would have new and accurate rules, there would be no proofs. He was well aware that his theory, on which the tables would be founded, would, if published, overturn the accepted notions regarding the movements of the spheres, and would therefore cause a hideous commotion, and he was not prepared to lend his name to the causing of such disturbance (my italics). Pythagoras held that the secrets of science must be reserved for the few, for the initiates, the wise ones, and Pythagoras was an ancient, and he was right. So: new rules, yes, but no proofs to support them.

This would not do, of course, and well he knew it, for as soon as I began to put forward my objections he hurriedly agreed, and said yes, it was a foolish notion, he would abandon it. (I confess that, to this day, I still do not understand why he put forward this nonsensical plan only to relinquish it at once, unless he merely wished to signal to me, in his usual roundabout way, that he was now prepared to compromise.) The subject was closed then, which small detail was not, however, going to deter Giese from voicing his objections, the formulation of which, I suppose, cost him a mighty effort that he was fain to see wasted.

“But Doctor,” he said, “these tables would be an incomplete gift to the world, unless you reveal the theory on which they are based, as Ptolemy, for whom you have such high regard, was always careful to do.”

To that, Copernicus, who had once more retreated dreamily into himself, made an extraordinary answer. He said:

“The Ptolemaic astronomy is nothing, so far as existence is concerned, but it is convenient for computing the inexistent.”

But having said it, he recollected himself, and pretended, by assuming an expression meant to indicate bland innocence but which merely made him look a halfwit, that he was unaware of having put forward a notion which, if he believed it to be true, made nonsense of his life’s work (for, remember, whatever they may say about it now, his theory was based entirely upon the Ptolemaic astronomy — was indeed, as he pointed out himself, no more than a revision of Ptolemy, at least in its beginnings). So profound an admission was it, that at the time I failed to grasp its full significance, and only felt its black brittle wing brush my cheek, as it were, as it flew past. However, I must have perceived that something momentous had occurred, that part of the ramparts had collapsed, for immediately I was on my feet and crying:

“Let me take the manuscript, let me go to Nuremberg. We must act now, or forever keep silent — trust me!”

He did not answer at once. It seems to me now, although I am surely mistaken, that there was a vast audience in the hall that evening, for the silence was enormous, the kind of silence which only comes when the multitude for a moment, its infantile attention captured, stops yelping and goggles with mouth agape at some gaudy, gimcrack wonder. Even Giese held his peace. Copernicus was smiling. I don’t mean grinning, not that grin, but a real smile, faint, quite calm, and full of cunning. He said:

“You say that I must trust you, and of course I do, indeed I do; but the journey to Nuremberg is long, and hazardous in these times, and who can say what evils might not befall you on the way? What if you should lose the manuscript in some misadventure, if it should be stolen, or destroyed? All would be lost then, all my work. This book has been thirty years in the writing.”

What was he about? He watched me with cold amusement (I swear it was amusement!) as I wriggled like a stranded fish in my search for the correct, the only answer to the riddle he had set me. This was different to all that had gone before; this was in earnest. With great care I said:

“Then I shall make a copy of the manuscript, and take it with me, while you retain the original. That way, the safety of the book is assured, and also its publication. I see no further difficulty.”

“But you might lose the copy, might you not, and what then? Rather, here is a plan: go now to Nuremberg, and there write down an account of the book from memory, which I have no doubt you could do with ease, and publish that.”

“But it has already been done!” I cried. “You yourself have written an account, in the Commentariolus—”

“That was nothing, worse than nothing, full of errors. You must write an accurate account. You see the advantages for us both in this: your name shall gain prominence in the world of science, while the way shall have been prepared for the publication later of my book. You shall be a kind of—” he smiled again “—a kind of John the Baptist, the one who goes before.”

He had won, and he knew it. I bowed my head, signifying defeat.

“I agree,” I said. “I shall write this account, if it is in my power.”

Ah, his smile, that little smile, how well I remember it! He said:

“This is a splendid plan, I think. Do you agree?”

“Yes, yes — but when will you publish De revolutionibus?”

“Well, when I consider the matter, I see no need to publish, if you ensure that your account is sufficiently comprehensive.”

“But your book? Thirty years?”

“The book is unnecessary.”

“And you intend—?”

“To destroy it.”

“Destroy it?”

“Why, yes.”

How simply and cheerfully it was said! How convincing it sounded!

*

Thus was conceived my Narratio prima, which in the thirty-six years since its publication has gained such fame (for him, not for me, whose work it was!). I have not given here a strictly literal account of how I was inveigled into writing it, but have contented myself with showing how cunningly he worked upon my youthful enthusiasm and my gullibility in order to achieve his own questionable ends. That nonsense about going at once to Nuremberg and writing the account from memory was only a part of the trap, of course, a condition on which he could without harm concede, and thereby appear gracious. Anyway, he had to concede, for I had no intention of leaving his side, having heard him threaten (a threat which, I confess, I did not take seriously — but still. .) to burn his book.

I began the writing that very night. Copernicus’s book is built in six parts, each part more intricate, more difficult than the one before. By that time I was thoroughly familiar with the first three, had some grasp of the fourth, and only a general idea of the last two — but I managed, I managed, and the Narratio prima, as you may judge, while it is not so elegant as I would wish, is yet a brilliant piece of work. Who else — I ask it in all modesty — who else could have made such a compressed, succinct account, in so short a time, of that bristling mesh of astronomical theory, who else but I? And was I aided in my herculean labours by the domine praeceptor? I was not! Each evening, when I had finished work for the day, he came with some flimsy excuse and took away from me the precious manuscript. Did he think I was going to eat it? And how he dithered, and fussed and fretted, and plucked at my sleeve in his nervousness, hedging me about with admonitions and prohibitions. I must not mention him by name, he said. Then how could I proceed? A theory without a theorist? Was I to claim the work as my own? Ah, that made him bethink himself, and he went away and thought about it for a day or two, and came back and said that if I must name him, then let me call him only Doctor Nicolas of Torun. Very well — what did I care? If he wanted to be dubbed Mad Kaspar, or Mandricardo the Terrible, it was all one to me. So I wrote down my title thus:

To the Most Illustrious Dr Johannes Schöner, a First Account of the Book of Revolutions by the Most Learned & Excellent Mathematician, the Reverend Father, Doctor Nicolas of Torun, Canon of Ermland, from a Young Student of Mathematics.

What a start it must have given old Schöner (he taught me in mathematics and astronomy at Nuremberg) to find himself the unwitting target, so to speak, of this controversial work. The dedication was a piece of cunning, for Schöner’s name could not but lend respectability to an account which, I knew, would stir up the sleeping hive of academic bees and set them buzzing. Also, for good measure, and in the hope of placating Dantiscus somewhat, I appended the Encomium Borussiae, that crawling piece in praise of Prussia, its intellectual giants, its wealth in amber and other precious materials, its glorious vistas of bog and slate-grey sea, which had me wracking my brain for pretty metaphors and classical allusions. And since I had decided to print at Danzig, that city being but a day’s ride away, instead of at Nuremberg, and since the Mayor there, one John of Werden, had invited me to visit him, I did not let the opportunity pass to devote a few warm words to the city and the lusty Achilles that it had for Mayor.

The Narratio prima was completed on the 23rd of September, in 1539. By then I had returned with Copernicus to Frauenburg. Although I cannot say that I was overjoyed to find myself once more in that dreary town, I was relieved nevertheless to be away from that fool Giese, not to mention that magicked castle of Löbau. (Leaving Raphaël was another matter, of course. .) Alone with Copernicus in his cold tower, at least the issues were clear, I mean I could see clearly the chasm that lay between his horror of change and my firm faith in progress. But I shall deal with that subject later. Did I say we were alone in the tower — how could I forget that other presence planted in our midst like some dreadful basilisk, whose sullen glare followed my every movement, whose outraged silence hung about us like a shroud? I mean Anna Schillings, frightful woman. She did not fulfil her threat to be gone when we returned, and was there waiting for us grimly, with her arms folded under that enormous chest. O no, Anna, I have not forgotten you. She cannot have been very much younger than Copernicus, but she possessed a vigour, fuelled by bitterness and spite, which belied her years. Me she loathed, with extraordinary passion; she was jealous. I would not have put it past her to try to do me in, and I confess that, faced with those bowls of greenish gruel on which she fed us, the thought of poison oftimes crossed my mind. And speaking of poisoning, I suspect Copernicus may have considered ridding himself thus of this troublesome woman: I remember watching him concocting some noisome medicine which he had prescribed for one of her innumerable obscure complaints, grinding the pestle, and grinding it, with a wistful, horrid little smile, as though he were putting out eyes. Of course, he would not have dreamed of daring so bold a solution. Anyway, most like he feared even more than the harridan herself the prospect of her ghost coming back to haunt him.

He insisted that I lodge with him in the tower. I was flattered, until I realised that he wanted me near him not for love of my company, but so that he would have an ally against the Schillings. In truth, however, I must admit I was not of much use to him in that respect. O I could handle her, no question of that, she soon learned to beware the edge of my tongue, but when she could get no good of me she redoubled her efforts on the unfortunate Copernicus, and fairly trounced him; so that my presence in fact exacerbated his problems. Whenever she drew near he winced, and sank into the carapace of his robe, as though fearing that his ears were about to be boxed. Well, I had little sympathy for him. He had only to take his courage in his hands (what a curious phrase that is) and kick her out, or poison her, or denounce her as a witch, and all would have been well. What, anyway, was the hold she had on him? Apparently he had rescued her from a knocking shop, or so they said; she was a cousin of some sort. I confess it made me feel quite nauseous to ponder the matter, but I surmised that some cuntish ritual, performed years before when they were still capable of that kind of thing, had subjected him to her will. I have seen it before, that phenomenon, men turned into slaves by the tyranny of the twat. Women. I have nothing against them, in their place, but I know that they have only to master a few circus tricks in bed and they become veritable Circes. Ach, leave it, Rheticus, leave it.

When I say I had little sympathy for him in his plight, I do not mean that I was indifferent. The Narratio prima was completed, and I was ready to set off for Danzig, and after Danzig it was imperative that I return to Wittenberg, for I had already overstretched my term of leave; all this would mean that I could not be back in Frauenburg before the beginning of the following summer. By then, God knows what disasters would have occurred. Copernicus was an old man, far from robust, and his will was crumbling. Dantiscus had renewed his campaign, and almost by the week now he sent letters regarding Anna Schillings, bristling with threats under a veneer of sweetness and hypocritical concern for the astronomer’s reputation; each letter, I could see it in Copernicus’s stricken grey countenance, further jeopardised the survival of the manuscript. I knew, remembering what Giese had said that day in the pine wood below the walls of Löbau, that when Dantiscus spoke of his duty to extirpate vice from his diocese et cetera, he was in fact speaking of something else entirely: viz. his burning jealousy of Copernicus. Would the Meister’s nerve hold until I returned, or, alone against the Schillings’s bullying and in the face of Dantiscus’s threats, would he burn his book, and bolt for the safety and silence of his burrow? It was a risk I could not take. If the Schillings could not be got rid of — and I despaired early of shifting that grim mass of flesh and fury — then the one for whom she was a weapon must be persuaded that the war he was waging was already lost. (Another riddle — solution follows.) I made a last, token effort to wrest the manuscript from the old man’s clutches, but he only looked at me, mournfully, accusingly, and spoke not a word; I packed my bags and bade farewell to Frauenburg.

* * *

I shall not dwell upon my stay at Danzig. The Mayor, mine host, Fat Jack of Werden, was a puffed-up boorish burgher, whose greatest love, next to foodstuffs, that is, was the making of sententious speeches in praise of himself. He was pleased as punch to have as his guest that most exotic of beasts, a Lutheran scholar from Germany, and he missed no opportunity of showing me off to his friends, and, more especially, to his enemies. O, I had a rollicking time in Danzig. Still, the printer to whom I brought the manuscript of the Narratio was a civil enough fellow, and surprisingly capable too, for a jobber, I mean, out there in the wilds. The first edition came off his presses in February of 1540. Copies were sent to Frauenburg, and also to Löbau Castle, whence Giese dispatched one to the Lutheran Duke Albrecht of East Prussia at Königsberg — a shrewd move, as I was later to discover, which nevertheless annoyed Copernicus intensely, there being an old grudge there. A piece of shrewdness of my own was well rewarded, when my good friend Perminius Gassarus, on receipt of the copy I sent him, immediately brought out a second edition at Basle, which he financed out of his own pocket, thereby sparing me no little expense. For it was a costly business, this publishing, and, despite what they may say, I got no help, not a penny, from that old skinflint at Frauenburg, for whose benefit it was all done. Remember, these volumes to the Duke et cetera were delivered gratis (although Perminius, to my secret amusement, not only repaid my gift in the manner already recorded, but also sent me a gold piece, the fool), and as well as to Giese and of course Copernicus himself, copies went also to Schöner, and Melanchton, and to many other scholars and churchmen — including Dantiscus, in whose presence, at Heilsberg Castle, I first saw my own book in print. .

*

Yes, it was at Heilsberg that I saw the Narratio prima between boards for the first time. Here is how it came about. Having found the printer trustworthy, I left the completion of the work in his hands, packed my bags, said goodbye to Fat Jack and his household, and set out on the long trek to Heilsberg. I must have been out of my mind to make that hideous journey for the sake of one undeserving of the effort, whose only thanks was a peevish outburst of abuse. But as I have said more than once before, I was young then, and not half so wise as I am now. Howsoever, despite the delicate state of my health, and the foul vapours of that Prussian marsh in winter, not to mention the appalling conditions in which I had to travel (lame horses, lousy inns, so on), I reached Heilsberg at the beginning of March, not too much the worse for wear. Impetuous as ever, I went straightway to the castle and demanded to see the Bishop. I had forgotten, of course, that you do not simply walk up to these papist princelings and grasp them warmly by the arm, O no, first the formalities must be observed. Well, I shall not go into all that. Suffice it to say that it was some days before I made my way at last one morning through the gate into the vast courtyard. There I was met by a cringing cleric, a minor official with ill-shaven jowls, who inspected me with furtive sidelong glances, the tip of his chapped red nose twitching, and informed me that the Bishop had just returned from the hunt, but nevertheless had graciously agreed to receive me without further delay. As we made our way toward the sanctum, we passed by a low cart, drawn up under one of the arched stone galleries of the courtyard, on which was flung the morning’s kill, a brace of boar, one of them still whimpering in agony, and a poor torn doe lying in a mess of her own guts. Whenever now I think of Dantiscus, I think first of that steaming, savaged flesh.

I had expected him to be another Giese, a pompous old fool, thick as pigshit, a petty provincial with no more style to him than an oxcart, but I was mistaken. Johannes Flachsbinder was four-and-fifty when I met him, a vigorous, striking man who wore well his weight of years. Although he was but the son of a Danzig beer brewer, he carried himself with the grace of an aristocrat. In his time he had been a soldier, scholar, a diplomat and a poet. He had travelled throughout Europe, to Araby and the Holy Land. Kings and emperors he listed among his friends, also some of the leading scientists and explorers of the age. His amorous adventures were famous, in legend as well as in his own verses, and there was hardly a corner of the civilised world that could not boast a bastard of his. A daughter, got by a Toledan noblewoman, was his favourite, so it was said, and on this brat he continued to lavish love and money, for all that Rome might say. He feared no one. At the height of the Lutheran controversy he maintained close connections with the foremost Protestants, even while the Pope himself was hurling thunderbolts at their heads. Yes, Dantiscus was a brilliant, fearless and elegant man. And a swine. And a fraud. And a lying, vindictive cunt.

In a blue and gold hall I found him, breakfasting on red wine and venison, surrounded by a gaudy crowd of huntsmen and toadies and musicians. If I thought Giese’s peasant garb ridiculous, this fellow’s outfit was farcical: he was clad in velvet and silk, kneeboots of soft leather, a belt inlaid with silver filigree, and — I do not lie! — a pair of close-fitting purple gloves. A prince, one of those Italian dandies, would have been daring indeed to be seen out hunting in such foppery — but a Prussian Bishop! How odd it is, the value which these Romish churchmen attach to mere show; without it, silk and so forth, they feel naked, apparently. Yet the apparel, and the music, and the Florentine splendour of the hall, could not disguise the true nature of this hard pitiless autocrat. He was a burly, thickset man, balding, with a gleaming high forehead, a great beak of a nose, and eyes of palest blue, like those of some strange vigilant bird. As I entered he rose and bowed, smiling blandly, but the glance with which he swept me was keen as a blade. His manner was warm, urbane, with just a hint of haughtiness, and all the while that he talked or listened, that faint smile continued to play about his mouth and eyes, as though some amusing, slightly ridiculous incident were taking place behind me, of which I was ignorant, and to which he was too tactful to draw attention. O, a polished fellow. He took his seat again, and, with a magisterial gesture, bade me sit beside him. He said:

“Herr von Lauchen, we are honoured. In these remote parts we are not often visited by the famous — O yes, indeed, I have heard of you, although I confess I had not imaged you to be so young. May I enquire what matter it is that brings you here to Heilsberg?”

He had kept me waiting three days for an audience: I was not impressed by his honeyed words. I bent on him a level gaze and said:

“I came, Bishop, to speak with you.”

“Ah yes? I am flattered.”

“Flattered, sir? I fail to see why you should feel so. I have not come on this journey, to this. . this place, to flatter anyone.”

That put a dent in his urbanity. It is not every day that a Bishop is spoken to thus. His smile disappeared so swiftly, I swear I heard the swish of its going. However, he was not at a loss for long; he chuckled softly, and rising said:

“My dear sir, that suits me well! I dislike flatterers. But come now, come, and I shall show you something which I think will interest you.”

The company rose as we left the hall, and at the door Dantiscus bethought himself, and turned with an impatient frown, meant I’m sure to win my Lutheran approval, and daubed upon the air a negligent blessing. In silence we climbed up through the castle to his study, a long low room with frescoed walls, again in blue and gold, situated in a tower in the north-west wing, where a window gave on to what I realised must be the selfsame expanse of sky which Copernicus commanded from his tower way off in Frauenburg. I was startled, and for a moment quite confused, for here was the very model of an observatory that, before coming to Prussia, I had imagined Copernicus inhabiting. The place was stocked with every conceivable aid to the astronomer’s art: globes of copper and bronze, astrolabes, quadrants, a kind of tri-quetrum of a design more intricate than I had ever seen, and, in pride of place, a representation of the universe exquisitely worked in gold rods and spheres, at which I gaped with open mouth, for it was based upon the Copernican theory as propounded in the Commentariolus. Dantiscus, smiling, pretended not to notice my consternation, but went to a desk by the window and from a drawer took out a book and handed it to me. Another shock: it was the Narratio prima, crisp as a loaf and smelling still of the presses and the binding room. Now the Bishop could contain himself no longer, and laughed outright. I suppose my face was something to laugh at. He said:

“Forgive me, my friend, it is too bad of me to surprise you thus. I suppose this is the first you have seen of your book in print? Tiedemann Giese — whom you know, I think? — was kind enough to send me this copy. The messenger arrived with it only yesterday, but I have been through it in large part, and find it fascinating. The clarity of the work, and the firm grasp of the theory, are impressive.”

Giese! who frothed at the mouth when he spoke the name of Dantiscus; who had warned me of this man’s treachery, of his plot against Copernicus and how he had for years tormented our domine praeceptor; this very Giese had sent, on his own initiative, this most extraordinary of gifts to our arch enemy. Why? From nowhere, the words came to my mind: what is it they require of me? But then I chided myself, and put away the formless suspicions that had begun to stir within me. To be sure, there must be a simple explanation. Probably old bumbling Giese, imagining himself a cunning devil, had thought the attempt to melt this hard heart worth the hiring of a messenger to carry his gift post-haste to Heilsberg. I was not a little affected by the fancy, and wondered if my first impression of Tiedemann Giese had been mistaken, if he was not, after all, a kind and thoughtful fellow, anxious only to further my magister’s fortunes. O Rheticus, thou dolt! The Bishop was still talking, and as he talked he moved among his instruments, laying his hands upon them lightly, as if they were the downy heads of his bastards he were caressing. He said:

“This room, you know, was once the Canon’s, when he was secretary to his late uncle, my predecessor, here at Heilsberg. I am but an amateur in the noble science of astronomy, yet I possess, as you see, some few instruments, and when I came here first, and was seeking a place to house them, it seemed only fitting that I should choose this little cell, resonant as it is, surely, with echoes of the great man’s thoughts. I feel I chose wisely, for these echoes, do you not think, might touch the musings of a humbler soul such as I, and perhaps inspire them?”

No, I thought nothing of the sort; the place was dead, a kind of decorated corpse; it had forgotten Copernicus, the mark of whose grey presence had been painted over with these gaudy frescoes. I said:

“Sir, I am glad you have brought up the subject of my domine praeceptor, Doctor Copernicus, for it is of him that I wish to speak to you.”

He paused in his pacing, and turned upon me again his keen, careful glance. He seemed about to speak, but hesitated, and instead bade me continue. I said:

“Since his Lordship, Bishop Giese, has been in communication with you, he will, perhaps, have told you that I, along with Doctor Copernicus, have spent some months past at the Bishop’s palace at Löbau. What he will not have told you, I fancy, is the purpose of our visit there.” Here I turned away from him, so as not to have to meet his eyes during what came next; for I am not a good liar, it shows in my face, and I was about to lie to him. “We travelled to Löbau, sir, to discuss in peace and solitude the imminent publication of the Doctor’s book, De revolutionibus orbium mundi, a work which you may already have heard some mention of.”

He seemed not to notice the sarcasm of that last, for he stared at me for a moment, and then, to my astonishment and indeed alarm, he made a rush at me with outstretched arms. I confess he gave me a fright, for he was grinning like a maniac, which made that great beak of a nose of his dip most horribly, until the tip of it was almost in peril from those big bared teeth, and for an instant it seemed as though he were about to fall upon and savage me. However, he only clapped his hands upon my shoulders, crying:

“Why, sir, this is splendid news!”

“Eh?”

“How have you managed to persuade him? I may tell you, I have for years been urging him to publish, as have many others, and without the least success, but here you come from Wittenberg and win him round immediately. Splendid, I say, splendid!”

He stepped back then, evidently realising that this shouting and back-slapping was not seemly behaviour for a Bishop, and smiled his little smile again, though somewhat sheepishly. I said:

“It is good to find you so apparently pleased to hear this news.”

He frowned at the coldness of my tone. “Indeed, I am very pleased. And I say again, you are to be congratulated.”

“Many thanks.”

“Pray, no thanks are due.”

“Yet, I offer them.”

“Well then, thanks also.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

We disengaged, and shook our blades, but I, making a sudden advance, dealt him a bold blow.

“I have been told, however, Bishop, that Rome would not be likely to greet with great enthusiasm the making public of this work. Have I been misinformed?”

He looked at me, and gave a little laugh. He said:

“Let us have some wine, my friend.”

Thus ended the first round. I was not displeased with my performance so far; but when the wine arrived, like a fool I drank deep, and very soon I was thinking myself the greatest swordsman in the world. That wine, and the hubris it induced, I blame for my subsequent humiliation. Dantiscus said:

“My dear von Lauchen, I begin to see why you have come to Heilsberg. Can it be, you think me less than honest when I say, hearing the news you bring with you today, that I am overjoyed? O, I well know the Canon thinks I hate him, and would, though God knows why, prevent him, if I could, from publishing his book. All this, I see, he has told you. But, my friend, believe me, he is mistaken, and does me grave injustice. To these his charges, I reply just this — come, let me fill your cup — has he forgot how I, this six years past, have ever sought to have him speak, and publicise his theory? Meinherr von Lauchen, truth to tell, I am weary of the man, and cannot help but feel rebuffed when you arrive here and reveal that winning his agreement took but a word from you!”

I shrugged, and said:

“But what, my Lord, about this Schillings woman, eh? It’s said you accuse him of taking her to bed — and she his cousin! I think, my friend, instead of love you bear him malice.”

He hung his head.

“Ah, that. Distasteful business, I agree. But, Meinherr, as Bishop of this See, it is my solemn duty to ensure that Mother Church’s clergy shall abjure all vice. What can I do? The man insists on keeping in his house this cousin-mistress. And anyway, the matter is deeper than you know, as I, if you will listen, shall quickly show. First, the times are bad; the Church, my friend, fears all that Luther wrought, and must defend her tarnished reputation. Second, it’s not the learned Doctor Nicolas at whom my shot is mainly aimed, but one Sculteti, Canon of Frauenburg also — a treacherous fellow, this one. Not only does he live in sin, but also he plots against the Church here, and puts out false reports. Besides, he’s involved with the Germans — ahem! More wine? But this is not germane to my intention, which is that you should know I love the learned Doctor, and would go to any lengths to spare him pain. And please! do not think evil of our Church. All these. . these petty matters all are due to badness in the times. They are but passing madness, and will pass, while certain to endure is the Canon’s master-work, of this I’m sure. And now, my friend, a toast: to you! to us! and to De revolutionibus!”

I drained my cup, and looked about me, and was vaguely surprised to find that we had left the tower, and were standing now in the open air, on a high balcony. Below us was the courtyard, filled with searing lemon-coloured light; odd foreshortened little people hurried hither and thither about their business in a most humorous fashion. Something seemed to have gone wrong with my legs, for I was leaning all off to one side. Dantiscus, looking more than ever like a besotted Italian-ate princeling, was still talking. Apparently I had stopped listening some time before, for I could not understand him now very well. He said:

“Science! Progress! Rebirth! The New Age! What do you say, friend?”

I said:

“Yesh, O yesh.”

And then there was more wine, and more talk, and music and a deal of laughter, and I grew merrier and merrier, and thought what a capital fellow after all was this Dantiscus, so civilised, so enlightened; and later I was feasted amid a large noisy company, which I addressed on divers topics, such as Science! and Progress! and the New Age! and all in all made an utter fool of myself. At dawn I awoke in a strange room, with a blinding ache in my head, and longing for death. I crept away from the castle without seeing a soul, and fled Heilsberg, never to return.

What was I to think now, in sickeningly sober daylight, of this Dantiscus, who had plied me with drink and flattery, who had feasted me in his hall, who had toasted the success of a publication for which, so Giese would have it, he wished in his heart nothing but abject failure? After much argument with myself, I decided that despite all he was a scoundrel — had he not ordered a burning of books? had he not threatened Lutherans with fire and the rack? had he not hounded without mercy my domine praeceptor? No amount of wine, nor flattery, nor talk of progress, could obliterate those crimes. O knave! O viper! O yesh.

*

Before I leave this part of my tale, there is something more I must mention. To this day I am uncertain whether or not what I am about to relate did in reality take place. On the following day, when I was well out on my flight from Heilsberg, and was wondering, in great trepidation, if Dantiscus, finding me gone without a word, might think to send after me, and drag me back to another round of drinking and carousing, suddenly, like some great thing swooping down on me out of a sky that a moment before had been empty, there came into my head the memory, I call it a memory, for convenience, of having seen Raphaël yesterday at the castle — Raphaël, that laughing lad from Löbau! He had been in the courtyard, surrounded by that lemon-coloured sunlight and the hither and thithering figures, mounted on a black horse. How clearly I remembered him! — or imagined that I did. He had grown a little since last I had seen him, for he was at that age when boys shoot up like saplings, and was very elegantly got up in cap and boots and cape, quite the little gentleman, but Raphaël for all that, unmistakably, I would have known him anywhere, at any age. I see it still, that scene, the sunlight, and the rippling of the horse’s glossy blue-black flanks, the groom’s hand upon the bridle, and the slim, capped and crimson-caped, booted, beautiful boy, that scene, I see it, and wonder that such a frail tender thing survived so long, to bring me comfort now, and make me young again, here in this horrid place. Raphaël. I write down the name, slowly, say it softly aloud, and hear aetherial echoes of seraphs singing. Raphaël. I have tears still. Why was he there, so far from home? The answer, of course, was simple, viz. the boy had brought my book from Löbau. Yet was there not more to it than that? I called his name, too late, for he was already at the gate, on his way home, and Dantiscus, taking me by the arm, said: friend, you should be careful, and gave me a strange look. What did he mean? Or did he speak, really? Did I imagine it, all of it? Was it a dream, which I am dreaming still? If that is so, if it was but a delusion spawned by a mind sodden with drink, then I say the imagining was prophetic, in a way, as I shall demonstrate, in its place.

* * *

I returned home then to Wittenberg, only to find to my dismay that it was no longer home. How to explain this strange sensation? You know it well, I’m sure. The university, my friends and teachers, my rooms, my books, all were just as when I had left them, and yet all were changed. It was as if some subtle blight had contaminated everything I knew, the heart of everything, the essential centre, while the surface remained sound. It took me some time to understand that it was not Wittenberg that was blighted, but myself. The wizard of Frauenburg had put his spell on me, and one thing, one only thing, I knew, would set me free of that enchantment. After my ignominious flight from Heilsberg, all interest in Copernicus’s work had mysteriously abandoned me, despite the lie I had told Dantiscus regarding the imaginary triumph I had scored at Löbau; for I had now no intention of continuing my campaign to force Copernicus to publish. I say that interest in his work abandoned me, and not vice versa, for thus it happened. I had no hand in it: simply, all notion of returning to Frauenburg, and joining battle with him again, all that just departed, and was as though it had never been. Had some secret sense within me perceived the peril that awaited me in Prussia? If so, that warning sense was not strong enough, for I was hardly back in Wittenberg before I found myself in correspondence with Petreius the printer. O, I was vague, and wrote that he must understand that there was no question now of publishing the main work; but I was, I said, preparing a Narratio secunda (which I was not), and since it would contain many diagrams and tables and suchlike taken direct from De revolutionibus, it was necessary that I should know what his block-cutters and type-setters were capable of in the matter of detail et cetera. However, despite all my caution and circumlocutions, Petreius, with unintentional and uncanny good aim, ignored entirely all mention of a second Narratio, and replied huffily that, as I should know, his craftsmen were second to none where scientific works were concerned, and he would gladly and with confidence contract to put between boards Copernicus’s great treatise, of which he had heard so many reports.

Although this pompous letter angered and disturbed me, I soon came to regard it as an omen, and began again to toy with the idea of returning to Frauenburg. Not, you understand, that I was ready to go rushing off northwards once more, with cap in hand, and panting with enthusiasm, to make a fool of myself as I had done before, O no; this time if I journeyed it would be for my own purposes that I would do so, to find my lost self, as it were, and rid myself of this spell, so as to come home to my beloved Wittenberg again, and find it whole, and be at peace. Therefore, as soon as I was free, I set out with a stout heart, by post-carriage, on horseback, sometimes on foot, and arrived at Frauenburg at summer’s end, 1540, and was relieved to find Copernicus not yet dead, and still in possession, more or less, of his faculties. He greeted me with a characteristic display of enthusiasm, viz. a start, an owlish stare, and then a hangman’s handshake. The Schillings was still with him, and Dantiscus, need I say it, was still howling for her to be gone. For a long time now he had been using Giese to transmit his threats. Sculteti, Copernicus’s ally in the affair of the focariae, whom Dantiscus had mentioned, had it seemed been expelled by the Chapter, and had flown to Italy. This departure, along with Dantiscus’s increasingly menacing behaviour, had forced Copernicus to make a last desperate effort to get rid of her, but in vain. There had been a furious argument (smashed crockery, screams, pisspots flying through windows and striking passers-by: the usual, I suppose), which had ended with the Mädchen packing up her belongings and sending them off, at great expense (the Canon’s), to Danzig, where some remnant of her tribe kept an inn, or a bawdyhouse, I forget which. However, it seems she considered this so to speak symbolic departure a sufficiently stern rebuke to Copernicus for his ill nature, and in reality had no intention of following after her chattels, which in due time returned, like some awful ineluctable curse. So we settled down, the three of us, in our tower, where life was barely, just barely, tolerable. I kept out of the way of the Schillings, not for fear of her, but for fear of throttling her; between the two of us the old man cowered, mumbling and sighing and trying his best to die. Soon, I could see, he would succeed in doing that. Death was slinking up behind him, with its black sack at the ready. I would have to work quickly, if I were to snatch his book from him before he took it with him into that suffocating darkness. Yet, if his body was weakening, his mind was still capable of withholding, in an iron grip, that for which I had come: the decision to publish.

*

I stayed with him for more than a year, tormented by boredom and frustration, and an unrelenting irritation at the impossible old fool and his ways. He agreed that I might make a copy of the manuscript, and that at least was some occupation; the work might even have calmed my restless spirit, had he not insisted on reminding me every day that I must not imagine, merely because he had relented thus far, that he would go farther, and allow me to take this copy to Petreius. So that there was little more for me in this scribbling than aching knuckles, and the occasional, malicious pleasure of correcting his slips (I crossed out that nonsensical line in which he speculated on the possibility of elliptical orbits—elliptical orbits, for God’s sake!). Various other small tasks which I performed, to relieve the tedium, included the completion of a map of Prussia, which the old man, in collaboration with the disgraced Sculteti, had begun at the request of the previous Bishop of Ermland. This, along with some other trivial things, I sent off to Albrecht, Duke of Prussia, who rewarded me with the princely sum of one ducat. So much for aristocratic patronage! However, it was not for money I had approached this Lutheran Duke, but rather in the hope that he might use on my behalf his considerable influence among German churchmen and nobles, who I feared might make trouble should I win Copernicus’s consent, and appear in their midst with a manuscript full of dangerous theories clutched under my arm. The Duke, I found, was more generous with paper and ink than he had been with his ducats; he sent letters to Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, and also to the University of Wittenberg, mentioning how impressed he had been with the Narratio prima (clever old Giese!), and urging that I should be allowed to publish what he called this admirable book on astronomy, meaning De revolutionibus. There was some confusion, of course; there always is. Albrecht, like Petreius, apparently had found it inconceivable that I should be so eager to publish the work of another, and therefore he assumed that I was attempting some crafty ruse whereby I hoped to put out my own theories in disguise; did I think to fool the Duke of Prussia? thought haughty Albrecht, and put down in his letters what to him was obvious: that the work was all my own. The cretin. I had no end of trouble disentangling that mess, while at the same time keeping these manoeuvres hidden from the Canon, who was wont to spit at the mention of the name of Grand Master Albrecht, as he insisted on calling him.

This was not the only little plot I had embarked upon in secret—and in trepidation, for I was mortally afraid that if he found out, Copernicus would burn the manuscript on the instant. Yet I had lapses, when my caution, which I had learned from him, deserted me. One day, shortly after my return to Frauenburg, I told him in a rash moment of frankness of my visit to Dantiscus. It was one of the rare occasions when I witnessed colour invade the ghastly pallor of his face. He flew into a rage, and gibbered, spraying me copiously with spit, yelling that I had no right to do such a thing, that I had no right! I was, he said, as bad as Giese, that damned meddler, who had sent the Narratio prima to Heilsberg even after he had been expressly warned not even to consider doing such a thing. What was surprising about this outburst was not so much the fury as the fear which I could plainly see, skulking behind the bluster; true, he had cause to be wary of Dantiscus, but this show of veritable terror seemed wholly excessive. What he feared, of course, although I could not know it then, was that I might have said something to Dantiscus that would ruin the plot which the Canon and Giese had been working out against me for years in secret — but wait, I am impetuous; wait.

There were other things that puzzled and surprised me. For instance, I discovered another aspect of his passion for secrecy: the Schillings knew so little of his affairs that she thought his astronomical work a mere pastime, a means of relaxing from the rigours of his true calling, which was, so she believed, medicine! And this woman shared his house, his bed!

And yet, perhaps he did regard astronomy as merely a plaything; I do not know, I do not know, I could not understand the man, I admit it. I was then, and I am still, despite my loss of faith, one of those who look to the future for redemption, I mean redemption from the world, which has nothing to do with Christ’s outlandish promises, but with the genius of Man. We can do anything, overcome anything. Am I not a living proof of this? They schemed against me, tried to ruin me, and yet I won, although even yet they will not acknowledge my victory. What was I saying. .? Yes: I look to the future, live in the future, and so, when I speak of the present, I am as it were looking backward, into what is, for me, already the past. Do you follow that? Copernicus was different, very different. If he believed that Man could redeem himself, he saw in — how shall I say — in immobility the only possible means toward that end. His world moved in circles, endlessly, and each circuit was a repetition exactly of all others, past and future, to the extremities of time: which is no movement at all. How, then, could I be expected to understand one whose thinking was so firmly locked in the old worn-out frame? We spoke a different language — and I do not mean his Latin against my German, although that difference, now that I think about it, represents well enough the deeper thing. Once, when we were walking together on the little path within the cathedral wall, which he paced each day, gravely, at a fixed hour and a fixed pace, as though performing a penance rather than taking the air, I began to speak idly of Italy, and the blue south, where I spent my youth. He heard me out, nodding the while, and then he said:

“Ah yes, Italy; I also spent some time there, before you were born. And what times they were! It seemed as though a new world was on the point of birth. All that was strong and youthful and vigorous revolted against the past. Never, perhaps, have the social authorities so unanimously supported the intellectual movement. It seemed as though there were no conservatives left among them. All were moving and straining in the same direction, authority, society, fashion, the politicians, the women, the artists, the umanista. There was a boundless confidence abroad, a feverish joy. The mind was liberated from authority, was free to wander under the heavens. The monopoly of knowledge was abolished, and it was now the possession of the whole community. Ah yes.”

I was of course astonished to hear him speak thus, astonished and filled with joy, for this, this was that Copernicus whom I had come to Frauenburg to find, and had not found, until now; and I turned to him with tears in my eyes, and began to yelp and caper in a paroxysm of agreement with all that he had said. Too late I noticed that small grey grin, the malicious glint in his look, and realised that I had fallen, O arse over tip, into a trap. He drew back, as one draws back from a slavering lunatic, and considered me with a contempt so profound it seemed near to nauseating him. He said:

“I was speaking less than seriously, of course. Italy is the country of death. You remind me sometimes of my late brother. He also was given to jabbering about progress and renascence, the new age whose dawn was about to break. He died in his beloved Italy, of the pox.”

It was not the words, you understand, but the tone in which they were spoken, that seemed to gather up and examine briefly all that I was, before heaving it all, blood and bones and youth and tears and enthusiasm, back upon the swarming midden-heap of humanity. He did not hate me, nor even dislike me; I think he found me. . distasteful. But what did I care? It is true, when I came to him first there was no thought in my head of fame and fortune for myself; I had one desire only, to make known to the world the work of a great astronomer. Now, however, all that had changed. I was older. He had aged me a decade in a year. No longer was I the young fool ready to fall to his knees before some manufactured hero; I had realised myself. Yet perhaps I should be grateful to him? Was it not his contempt that had forced me to look more closely at myself, that had allowed me to recognise in the end that I was a greater astronomer than he? Yes! yes! far greater. Sneer if you like, shake your empty heads all you wish, but I—I know the truth. Why do you think I stayed with him, endured his mockery, his pettiness, his distaste? Do you imagine that I enjoyed living in that bleak tower, freezing in winter and roasting in summer, shivering at night while the rats danced overhead, groaning and straining in that putrid jakes, my guts bound immovably by the mortar of his trollop’s gruel, do you think I enjoyed all that? By comparison, this place where I am now in exile is very heaven.

Well then, you say, if it was so terrible, why did I remain there, why did I not flee, and leave Copernicus, wrapped in his caution and his bitterness, to sink into oblivion? Listen: I have said that I was a greater astronomer than he, and I am, but he possessed one precious thing that I lacked — I mean a reputation. O, he was cautious, yes, and he genuinely feared and loathed the world, but he was cunning also, and knew that curiosity is a rash which men will scratch and scratch until it drives them frantic for the cure. For years now he had eked out, at carefully chosen intervals, small portions of his theory, each one of which — the Commentariolus, the Letter contra Werner, my Narratio—was a grain of salt rubbed into the rash with which he had inflicted his fellow astronomers. And they had scratched, and the rash had developed into a sore that spread, until all Europe was infected, and screaming for the one thing alone that would end the plague, which was De revolutionibus orbium mundi, by Doctor Nicolas Copernicus, of Torun on the Vistula. And he would give them their physic; he had decided, he had decided to publish, I knew it, and he knew I knew it, but what he did not know was that, by doing so, by publishing, he would not be crowning his own reputation, but making mine. You do not understand? Only wait, and I shall explain.

*

But first I must recount some few other small matters, such as, to begin with, how in the end he came to give me his consent to publish. However, in order to illuminate that scene, as it were, I wish to record a conversation I had with him which, later, I came to realise was a summation of his attitude to science and the world, the aridity, the barrenness of that attitude. He had been speaking, I remember, of the seven spheres of Hermes Trismegistus through which the soul ascends toward redemption in the eighth sphere of the fixed stars. I grew impatient listening to this rigmarole, and I said something like:

“But your work, Meister, is of this world, of the here and now; it speaks to men of what they may know, and not of mysteries that they can only believe in blindly or not at all.”

He shook his head impatiently.

“No no no no. You imagine that my book is a kind of mirror in which the real world is reflected; but you are mistaken, you must realise that. In order to build such a mirror, I should need to be able to perceive the world whole, in its entirety and in its essence. But our lives are lived in such a tiny, confined space, and in such disorder, that this perception is not possible. There is no contact, none worth mentioning, between the universe and the place in which we live.”

I was puzzled and upset; this nihilism was inimical to all I held to be true and useful. I said:

“But if what you say is so, then how is it that we are aware of the existence of the universe, the real world? How, without perception, do we see?”

“Ach, Rheticus!” It was the first time he had called me by that name. “You do not understand me! You do not understand yourself. You think that to see is to perceive, but listen, listen: seeing is not perception! Why will no one realise that? I lift my head and look at the stars, as did the ancients, and I say: what are those lights? Some call them torches borne by angels, others, pinpricks in the shroud of Heaven; others still, scientists such as ourselves, call them stars and planets that make a manner of machine whose workings we strive to comprehend. But do you not understand that, without perception, all these theories are equal in value. Stars or torches, it is all one, all merely an exalted naming; those lights shine on, indifferent to what we call them. My book is not science — it is a dream. I am not even sure if science is possible.” He paused a while to brood, and then went on. “We think only those thoughts that we have the words to express, but we acknowledge that limitation only by our wilfully foolish contention that the words mean more than they say; it is a pretty piece of sleight of hand, that: it sustains our illusions wonderfully, until, that is, the time arrives when the sands have run out, and the truth breaks in upon us. Our lives—” he smiled “—are a little journey through God’s guts. .” His voice had become a whisper, and it was plain to me that he was talking to himself, but then all at once he remembered me, and turned on me fiercely, wagging a finger in my face. “Your Father Luther recognised this truth early on, and had not the courage to face it; he tried to deny it, by his pathetic and futile attempt to shatter the form and thereby come at the content, the essence. His was a defective mind, of course, and could not comprehend the necessity for ritual, and hence he castigated Rome for its so-called blasphemy and idol-worship. He betrayed the people, took away their golden calf but gave them no tablets of the law in its place. Now we are seeing the results of Luther’s folly, when the peasantry is in revolt all over Europe. You wonder why I will not publish? The people will laugh at my book, or that mangled version of it which filters down to them from the universities. The people always mistake at first the frightening for the comic thing. But very soon they will come to see what it is that I have done, I mean what they will imagine I have done, diminished Earth, made of it merely another planet among planets; they will begin to despise the world, and something will die, and out of that death will come death. You do not know what I am talking about, do you, Rheticus? You are a fool, like the rest. . like myself.”

*

I remember the evening very well: sun on the Baltic, and small boats out on the Frisches Haff, and a great silence everywhere. I had just finished copying the manuscript, and had but put down the last few words when the Canon, perhaps hearing some thunderclap of finality shaking the air of the tower, came down from the observatory and hovered in my doorway, sniffing at me enquiringly. I said nothing, and only glanced at him vacantly. The evening silence was a pool of peace in which my spirits hung suspended, like a flask of air floating upon waters, and wearily, wearily, I drifted off into a waking swoon, intending only to stay a moment, to bathe for a moment my tired heart, but it was so peaceful there on that brimming bright meniscus, so still, that I could not rouse myself from this welcome kind of little death. The Canon was standing at my shoulder. The sky outside was blue and light, enormous. When he spoke, the words seemed to come, slowly, from a long way off. He said:

“If at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which, writhing with obscure passions, produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all, what then would life be but despair?”

I said:

“I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.”

He said:

“Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.”

I said:

“If you would know the reality of nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.”

He said:

“It is of the highest significance that the outer world represents something independent of us and absolute with which we are confronted.”

I said:

“The death of one god is the death of all.”

He said:

“Vita brevis, sensus ebes, negligentiae torpor et inutiles occupations, nos paucula scire permittent. Et aliquotiens scita excutit ab animo per temporum lapsum fraudatrix scientiae et inimica memoriae praeceps oblivio.”

Night advanced and darkened the brooding waters of the Baltic, but the air was still bright, and in the bright air, vivid yet serene, Venus shone. Copernicus said:

“When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.”

Dark dark dark.

I said:

“And yet, Herr Doctor, the truth must be revealed.”

“Ah, truth, that word I no longer understand.”

“Truth is that which cannot be concealed.”

“You have not listened, you have not understood.”

“Truth is certain good, that’s all I know.”

“I am an old man, and you make me weary.”

“Give your agreement then, and let me go.”

“The mirror is cracking! listen! do you hear it?”

“Yes, I hear, and yet I do not fear it.”

The light of day was gone now, and that moment that is like an ending had arrived, when the eyes, accustomed to the sun, cannot yet distinguish the humbler sources of light, and darkness seems total; but still it was not dark enough for him, and he shuffled away from me, away from the window, and crawled into the shadows of the room like some poor black bent wounded thing. He said:

“The shortness of life, the dullness of the senses, the torpor of indifference and useless occupations, allow us to know but little; and in time, oblivion, that defrauder of knowledge and memory’s enemy, cheats us of even the little that we knew. I am an old man, and you make me weary. What is it you require of me? The book is nothing, less than nothing. First they shall laugh, and later weep. But you require the book. It is nothing, less than nothing. I am an old man. Take it. .”

*

That was the last I was to see of him, in this world or, I trust, in any other. I left the tower that very night, carrying with me my books and my belongings and my bitter victory. I did not remark the abruptness of this going, nor did he. It seemed the correct way. The inn to which I fled was a pigsty, but at least the air was cleaner there than in that crypt I had left, and the pigs, for all their piggishness, were alive, and snuffling happily in the good old muck. Yet, though I abandoned the tower without a thought, I found it not so easy to do the same with Frauenburg; that was August, and not until September was in did I at last depart. I spent those few final weeks kicking my heels about the town, drinking alone, too much, and whoring joylessly. Once I returned to the tower, determined to see him again, yet at a loss to know what more there was to be said; and perhaps it was as well that the Schillings planted herself in the doorway and said that the old man would not see me, that he was ill, and anyway had given her strict instructions not to let me in if I should dare to call. Even then I did not go, but waited another week, although I should have been in Wittenberg long before. What was it that held me back? Maybe I realised, however obscurely, that in leaving Prussia I would be leaving behind what I can only call a version of myself; for Frauenburg killed the best in me, my youth and my enthusiasm, my happiness, my faith, yes, faith. From that time on I believed in nothing, neither God nor Man. You ask why? You laugh, you say: poor fool, to be so affected by a sick old man’s bitterness and despair; O, you say, you ask, all of you, why, and how, and wherefore, you are all so wise, but you know nothing — nothing! Listen.

* * *

I wished to go straightway to Petreius, but if I were to keep my post at Wittenberg, I needs must return there without further delay, for the authorities at the university were beginning to mutter threateningly over my unconscionably long absence. And indeed they seemed very glad to have me back, for I had hardly arrived before I was elected Dean of the faculty of mathematics! I might have been excused for thinking that it was my own brilliance that had won this honour, but I was no fool, and I knew very well that it was not me, but my connection with the Great Man of Frauenburg that they were honouring, in their cautious way. It was no matter, anyway, for I was confident that before long the goddess Fama would turn her tender gaze on me. However, the promotion imposed new tasks on me, new responsibilities, and it would be spring, I now saw, before I could find the freedom to go to Nuremberg and Petreius; might not the goddess tire before then of waiting for me? With this thought in mind, I decided to have printed immediately, there in Wittenberg, a short extract from the manuscript, which would not reveal the scope of the entire work but only hint at it. (You see how I had learned from the master?) Thus originated De late-ribus et angulis triangulorum. It caused no little stir in the university, and even in the town itself, and helped me to squeeze out of the burghers and the clerics, and even out of Melanchton himself, several valuable letters of recommendation, which I carried with me to Nuremberg.

*

I arrived there at the beginning of May, and at once set about the printing of De revolutionibus orbium mundi in its entirety. Petreius’s craftsmen made swift progress. I lodged in the town in the house of a certain Lutheran merchant, Johann Müller, to whom I had been recommended by Melanchton. He was a bearable fellow, this Müller: pompous, of course, like all his kind, but not unlearned — he even displayed some interest in the work on which I was engaged. Also, his beds were soft, and his wife exceeding handsome, though somewhat fat. All in all, then, I was well content at Nuremberg, and I might even say I was happy there, had not there been lodged in my black heart the ineradicable pain that was the memory of Prussia. From there not a word came, of discouragement or otherwise, until Petreius broached the subject of finance, and I told him it was not my affair, that he should send to Frauenburg. This he did, and after some weeks a reply came, not from Koppernigk, but from Bishop Giese, who said that he had just that day arrived there from Löbau, having been summoned by Anna Schillings to attend the Canon, who was, so Giese said, sick unto death. This news moved me not at all: living or dead, Koppernigk was no longer a part of my plans. True, I spent an anxious week while Petreius underwent an attack of nerves, brought on by the realisation that he would have to finance the publication of the book himself, now that the author was dying, but in the end he went ahead, a decision he was not to regret, since he fixed the price per copy, of the thousand copies that he printed, at 28 ducats 6 pfennigs, the greedy old bastard.

My plans. How cunning they were, how cold and clever, and, in the end, how easily they were brought thundering down in rubble about my ears. The first signals of impending disaster came when I had been but two months in Nuremberg. Petreius had already set up thirty-four sheets, or about two-thirds of the book, and had begun to invite into the printing house some of the leading citizens of the town, so that they might view the progress of the work, and, being impressed, advertise it abroad. Now, it seemed to me only to be expected that these men of influence should above all wish to meet me, the sponsor of this bold new theory, but, though I spent the most part of my days in the caseroom, where the sheets were proofed for their viewing, I found to my surprise, and vague alarm, that they avoided me like the plague, and some of them even fled when I made to approach them. I spoke to Petreius of it, and he shrugged, and pretended not to understand me, and would not look me in the eye. I tried to dismiss the matter, telling myself that businessmen were always in awe of scholars, fearing their learning et cetera, but it would not do: I knew that something was afoot. Then, one evening, the good Herr Müller, twisting his hands and grimacing, and looking for all the world like a reluctant hangman, came to me and said that if it suited me, and if it was not a great inconvenience, and if I would not take his words amiss, and so on and so forth — and, well, the matter was: would I kindly leave his house? He made some lame excuse for this extraordinary demand, about needing the extra room for an impending visit by some relatives, but I was in a rage by then, and was not listening, and I told him that if it suited him, and if it was not a great inconvenience, he might fuck himself, and, pausing only to inform him that I was grateful for the use of his jade of a wife, whom I had been merrily ploughing during the past weeks, I packed my bags and left, and found myself that night once again lodging at an inn. And there, shortly afterwards, Osiander visited me.

*

Andreas Osiander, theologian and scholar, a leading Lutheran, friend of Melanchton, had for some time (despite his religious affiliations!) been in correspondence with Canon Nicolas — had been, indeed, one of those like myself who had urged him to publish. He was also, I might add, a cold, cautious, humourless grey creature, and it was, no doubt, the cast of his personality which recommended him to the Canon. O yes, they were two of a kind. At first, like a fool, I imagined that he had come to pay his respects to a great astronomer (me, that is), and congratulate me on winning consent to publish De revolutionihus, but Osiander soon dispelled these frivolous notions. I was ill when he arrived. A fever of the brain, brought on no doubt by the manner of my parting from Müller, had laid me low with a burning head and aching limbs, so that when he was shown into my humble room I fancied at first that he was an hallucination. The shutters were drawn against the harsh spring light. He planted himself at the foot of my bed, his head in the shadows and bands of light through the slats of the shutters striping his puffed-up chest, so that he looked for all the world like a giant wasp. I was frightened of him even before he spoke. He had that unmistakable smell of authority about him. He looked with distaste at my surroundings, and with even deeper distaste at me, and said in his pinched voice (a drone!) that when he had been told that I was lodging here he had hardly credited it, but now, it seemed, he must believe it. Did I not realise that I was, in a manner of speaking, an ambassador of Wittenberg in this city? And did I think it fitting that the name of the very centre of Protestant learning should be associated with this. . this place? I began to explain how I had been thrown out on the street by a man to whom I had been recommended by Melanchton himself, but he was not interested in that, and cut me short by enquiring if I had anything to say in my defence. Defence? My hands began to shake, from fever or fear, I could not tell which. I tried to rise from the bed, but in vain. There was something of the inquisitor about Osiander. He said:

“I have come this day from Wittenberg, whither I was summoned in connection with certain matters of which I think you are aware. Please, Herr von Lauchen, I would ask you: no protestations of injured innocence. That will only cause delay, and I wish, indeed I intend, to conclude this unfortunate business as swiftly as possible, to prevent the further spread of scandal. The fact is, that for a long time now, we — and I include in that others whose names I need not mention! — for a long time, I say, we have been watching your behaviour with increasing dismay. We do not expect that a man should be without blemish. However, we do expect, we demand, at the very least, discretion. And you, my friend, have been anything but discreet. The manner in which you comported yourself at the university was tolerated. I use the word advisedly: you were tolerated. But, that you should go to Prussia, to Ermland, that very bastion of popery, and there disgrace not only yourself, not only the reputation of your university, but your religion as well, that, that, Herr von Lauchen, we could not tolerate. We gave you every chance to mend your ways. When you returned from Frauenburg, we granted you one of the highest honours at our disposal, and created you Dean of your faculty; yet how did you repay us — how? You fled, sir, and abandoned behind you a living and speaking — I might say chattering—testimony of your pernicious indulgences! I mean, of course, the boy, whose presence fortunately was brought to our attention by the master he deserted, and we were able to silence him.”

“Boy? What boy?” But of course I knew, I knew. Already light had begun to dawn upon me. Osiander sighed heavily. He said:

“Very well, Herr von Lauchen, play the fool, if that is what you wish. You know who I mean — and I know you know. You think to win some manner of reprieve by playing on my discretion; you think that by pressing me to speak openly of these distasteful matters you will embarrass me, and force me to withdraw — is that it? You shall not succeed. The boy’s name is Raphaël. He is, or was, a servant in the household of the Bishop of Kulm, Tiedemann Giese, at Löbau, where you stayed for some time, did you not, in the company of Canon Koppernigk? You behaviour there, and your. . your connection with this boy, was reported to us by the Bishop himself, who, I might add, was charitable enough to defend you (as did Canon Koppernigk himself!), even while you were spreading scandal and corruption throughout his household. But what I want to ask you, for my own benefit, you understand, so that I shall know — what I want to ask you is: why, why did you have this boy follow you across the length of Germany?”

“He did not follow me,” I said. “He was sent.” I saw it all, yes, yes, I saw it all.

“Sent?” Osiander bellowed, and his wasp’s wings buzzed and boomed in the gloom. “What do you mean, sent? The boy arrived in Wittenberg in rags, with his feet bandaged. His horse had died under him. He said you told him to come to you, that you would put him to schooling, that you would make a gentleman of him. Sent? Can you not spare even a grain of compassion for this unfortunate creature whom you have destroyed, whom you could not face, and fled before he came; and do you think to save yourself by this wild and evil accusation? Sent? Who sent him, pray?”

I turned my face to the wall. “It’s no matter. You would not believe me, if I told you. I shall say only this, that I am not a sodomite, that I have been slandered and vilified, that you have been fed a pack of lies.”

He began a kind of enraged dance then, and shrieked:

“I will not listen to this! I will not listen! Do you want me to tell you what the child said, do you want to hear, do you? These are his very words, his very words, I cannot forget them, never; he said: Every morning I brought him his food, and he made me wank him tho’ I cried, and begged him to release me. A child, sir, a child! and you put such words into his mouth, and made him do such things, and God knows what else besides. May God forgive you. Now, enough of this, enough; I have said more than I intended, more than I should. If we were in Rome no doubt you would have been poisoned by now, and spirited away, but here in Germany we are more civilised than that. There is a post at Leipzig University, the chair of mathematics. It has been arranged that you will fill it. You will pack your bags today, now, this instant, and be gone. You may—silence! — you may not protest, it is too late for that: Melanchton himself has ordered your removal. It was he, I might add, who decided that you should be sent to Leipzig, which is no punishment at all. Had I my way, sir, you would be driven out of Germany. And now, prepare to depart. Whatever work of yours there is unfinished here, I shall take charge of it. I am told you are engaged in the printing of an astronomical work from the pen of Canon Koppernigk? He has asked that I should oversee the final stages of this venture. For the rest, we shall put it about that, for reasons of health, you felt you must abandon the task to my care. Now go.”

“The boy,” I said, “Raphaël: what has become of him?” I remembered him in the courtyard at Heilsberg, in his cap and cape, mounted on his black horse; just thus must he have looked as he set out from Löbau to come to me at Wittenberg.

“He was sent back to Löbau Castle, of course,” said Osiander. “What did you expect?”

Do you know what they do to runaway servants up there in Prussia? They nail them by the ear to a pillory, and give them a knife with which to cut themselves free. I wonder what punishment worse than that did Giese threaten the child with, to force him to follow me and tell those lies, so as to destroy me?

*

I could not at first understand why they, I mean Koppernigk and Giese, had done this to me, and I went off to exile in Leipzig thinking that surely some terrible mistake had been made. Only later, when I saw the preface which Osiander added to the book (which, when he was finished with it, was called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium), only then did I see how they had used me, poor shambling clown, to smuggle the work into the heart of Lutheran Germany, to the best Lutheran printer, with the precious Lutheran letters of recommendation in my fist, and how, when all that was done, they had simply got rid of me, to make way for Osiander and the imprimatur of his preface, which made the book safe from the hounds of Rome and Wittenberg alike. They did not trust me, you see, except to do the hackwork.

*

Did I in some way, I asked myself then, merit this betrayal? For it seemed to me inconceivable that all my labours should have been rewarded thus without some terrible sin on my part; but I could not, try as I might, find myself guilty of any sin heinous enough to bring down such judgment on my head. Throughout the book, there is not one mention of my name. Schönberg is mentioned, and Giese, but not I. This omission affected me strangely. It was as if, somehow, I had not existed at all during those past years. Had this been my crime, I mean some essential lack of presence; had I not been there vividly enough? That may be it, for all I know. Frauenburg had been a kind of death, for death is the absence of faith, I hardly know what I am saying, yet I feel I am making sense. Christ! I have waited patiently for this moment when I would have my revenge, and now I am ruining it. Why must I blame myself, search for some sin within myself, all this nonsense, why? No need of that, no need — it was all his doing, his his his! Calm, Rheticus.

Here is my revenge. Here it is, at last.

*

The Book of revolutions is a pack of lies from start to finish. . No, that will not do, it is too, too something, I don’t know. Besides, it is not true, not entirely, and truth is the only weapon I have left with which to blast his cursed memory.

The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, yes yes, that’s better.

The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, which is to say that by the time its creator had completed it, by the time he had, so to speak, hammered home the last bolt, the thing was in bits around him. I admit, it took me some time to recognise this fact, or at least to recognise the full significance of it. How I swore and sweated during those summer nights at Löbau, striving to make sense of a theory wherein each succeeding conclusion or hypothesis seemed to throw doubt on those that had gone before! Where, I asked, where is the beauty and simplicity, the celestial order so confidently promised in the Commentariolus, where is the pure, the pristine thing? The book which I held in my hands was a shambles, a crippled, hopeless mishmash. But let me be specific, let me give some examples of where it went so violently wrong. It was, so Koppernigk tells us, a profound dissatisfaction with the theory of the motions of the planets put forward by Ptolemy in the Almagest which first sent him in search of some new system, one that would be mathematically correct, would agree with the rules of cosmic physics, and that would, most importantly of all, save the phenomena. O, the phenomena were saved, indeed — but at what cost! For in his calculations, not 34 epicycles were required to account for the entire structure of the universe, as the Commentariolus claimed, but 48—which is 8 more at least than Ptolemy had employed! This little trick, however, is nothing, a mere somersault, compared with the one of which I am now about to speak. You imagine that Koppernigk set the Sun at the centre of the universe, don’t you? He did not. The centre of the universe according to his theory is not the Sun, but the centre of Earth’s orbit, which, as the great, the mighty, the all-explaining Book of revolutions admits, is situated at a point in space some three times the Sun’s diameter distant from the Sun! All the hypotheses, all the calculations, the star tables, charts and diagrams, the entire ragbag of lies and half truths and self-deceptions which is De revolutionibus orbium mundi (or coelestium, as I suppose I must call it now), was assembled simply in order to prove that at the centre of all there is nothing, that the world turns upon chaos.

*

Are you stirring in your grave, Koppernigk? Are you writhing in cold clay?

*

When at last, one black night at Löbau Castle, the nature of the absurdity which he was propounding was borne in upon me, I laughed until I could laugh no more, and then I wept. Copernicus, the greatest astronomer of his age, so they said, was a fraud whose only desire was to save appearances. I laughed, I say, and then wept, and something died within me. I do not willingly grant him even this much, but grant it I must: that if his book possessed some power, it was the power to destroy. It destroyed my faith, in God and Man — but not in the Devil. Lucifer sits at the centre of that book, smiling a familiar cold grey smile. You were evil, Koppernigk, and you filled the world with despair.

He knew it, of course, knew well how he had failed, and knew that I knew it. That was why he had to destroy me, he and Giese, the Devil’s disciple.

If I saw all this, his failure and so forth, even so early as the Löbau period, why then did I continue to press him so doggedly to publish? But you see, I wanted him to make known his theory simply so that I could refute it. O, an ignoble desire, certainly; I admit, I admit it freely, that I planned to make my reputation on the ruins of his. Poor fool that I was. The world cannot abide truth: men remember heliocentricity (they are already talking of the Copernican revolution!), but forget the defective theory on which the concept of heliocentricity is founded. It is his name that is remembered and honoured, while I am forgotten, and left to rot here in this dreadful place. What was it he said to me? — first they will laugh, and then weep, seeing their Earth diminished, spinning upon the void. . He knew, he knew. They are weeping now, bowed down under the burden of despair with which he loaded them. I am weeping. I believe in nothing. The mirror is shattered. The chaos

Well I’ll be damned!

— Freunde! What joy! The most extraordinary, the most extraordinary thing has happened: Otho has come! O God, I believe in You, I swear it. Forgive me for ever doubting You! A disciple, at last! He will spread my name throughout the world. Now I can return to that great work, which I planned so long ago: the formulation of a true system of the universe, based upon Ptolemaic principles. I shall not mention, I shall not even mention that other name. Or perhaps I shall? Perhaps I have been unjust to him? Did he not, in his own poor stumbling way, glimpse the majestic order of the universe which wheels and wheels in mysterious ways, bringing back the past again and again, as the past has been brought back here again today? Copernicus, Canon Nicolas, domine praeceptor, I forgive you: yes, even you I forgive. God, I believe: resurrection, redemption, the whole thing, I believe it all. Ah! The page shakes before my eyes. This joy!

*

Lucius Valentine Otho has this day come to me from Wittenberg, to be my amanuensis, my disciple. He fell to his knees before me. I behaved perfectly, as a great scientist should. I spoke to him kindly, enquiring how things stood at Wittenberg, and of his own work and ambitions. But behind my coolness and reserve, what a tangle of emotions! Of course, this joy I felt could not be contained, and when I had enquired his age, I could not keep myself from grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattled in his head, for just at that same age did I, so many years ago, come to Copernicus at Frauenburg. The past comes back, transfigured. Shall I also send a Raphaël to destroy Otho? — but come now, Rheticus, come clean. The fact is, there never was a Raphaël. I know, I know, it was dreadful of me to invent all that, but I had to find something, you see, some terrible tangible thing, to represent the great wrongs done me by Copernicus. Not a mention of my name in his book! Not a word! He would have done more for a dog. Well, I have forgiven him, and I have admitted my little joke about Raphaël and so forth. Now a new age dawns. I am no longer the old Rheticus, banished to Cassovia and gnawing his own liver in spite and impotent rage, no: I am an altogether finer thing — I am Doctor Rheticus! I am a believer. Lift your head, then, strange new glorious creature, incandescent angel, and gaze upon the world. It is not diminished! Even in that he failed. The sky is blue, and shall be forever blue, and the earth shall blossom forever in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe it, I think. Vale.