Kepler

II

Enough is enough. He plunged down the steep steps and stopped, glaring about the courtyard in angry confusion. A lame groom trundling a handcart hawked and spat, two scullery maids upended a tub of suds. They would make him a clerk, by God, a helper's helper! "Herr Kepler, Herr Kepler please, a moment…" Baron Hoffmann, panting unhappily, hurried down to him. Tycho Brahe remained atop the steps, strenuously indifferent, considering a far-off prospect.

"Well?" said Kepler.

The baron, rheum-eyed grey little man, displayed a pair of empty hands. "You must give him time, you know, allow him to consider your requests."

"He, " raising his voice against a sudden clamour of hounds, "he has had a month already, more. I have stated my conditions; I ask the merest consideration. He does nothing." And, louder again, turning to fling it up the steps: "Nothing!" Tycho Brahe, still gazing off, lifted his eyebrows a fraction and sighed. The pack ofhounds with an ululant cheer burst through a low gate from the kennels and surged across the courtyard, avid brutes with stunted legs and lunatic grins and tiny tight puce scrotums. Kepler scuttled for the steps in fright, but faltered halfway up, prevented by Tycho the Terrible. The Dane glanced down on him with malicious satisfaction, pulling on his gauntlets. Baron Hoffmann turned up to the master of Schloss Benatek a last enquiring glance and then, shrugging, to Kepler:

"You will not stay, sir?" "I will not stay. " But his voice was unsteady. Tengnagel and young Tyge came out, squinting in the light, sodden with the dregs of last night's drinking. They brightened, seeing Kepler in a dither. The grooms were bringing up the horses. The dogs, which had quietened, hunched with busy tongues over their parts or ruminatively cocked against the walls, were thrown into a frenzy again by the goitrous blare of a hunting horn. A haze of silvery dust unfurled its sails to the breeze and drifted lazily gatewards, a woman leaned down from a balcony, laughing, and in the sky a panel slid open and spilled upon Benatek a wash of April sunlight that turned the drifting dust to gold.

The baron went away to fetch his carriage. Kepler considered. What was left if he refused Tycho's grudging patronage? The past was gone, Tübingen, Graz, all that, gone. The Dane, thumbs hitched on his belt and fat fingers drumming the taut slope of his underbelly, launched himself down the steps. Baron Hoffmann alighted from the carriage, and Kepler mumbling plucked at his sleeve, "I want to, I want…" mumbling.

The baron cupped an ear. "The noise, I did not quite..?" "I want-" a shriek "-to apologise." He closed his eyes briefly. "Forgive me, I-"

"O but there is no need, I assure you." "What?"

The old man beamed. "I am happy to help, Herr Professor, in any way that I can. "

"No, no, I mean to him, to him. " And this was Bohemia, my God, repository of his highest hopes! Tycho was laboriously mounting up with the help of two straining footmen. Baron Hoffmann and the astronomer considered him doubtfully as with a grunt he toppled forward across the horse's braced back, flourishing in their faces his large leather-clad arse. The baron sighed and stepped forward to speak to him. Tycho, upright now and puffing, listened impatiently. Tengnagel and the younger Dane, downing their stirrup cups, looked on in high amusement. The squabble between Tycho and his latest collaborator had been the chief diversion of the castle since Kepler's arrival a month ago. The bugle sounded, and the hunt with Tycho in its midst moved off like a great rowdy engine, leaving behind it a brown taste of dust. Baron Hoffmann would not meet Kepler's hungry gaze. "I will take you into Prague," he muttered, and fairly dived into the sanctuary of his carriage. Kepler nodded dully, an ashen awfulness opening around him in the swirling air. What have I done?

They rattled down the narrow hill road. The sky over Benatek bore a livid smear of cloud, but the hunt, straggling away across the fields, was still in sunlight. Kepler silently wished them all a wasted day, and for the Dane with luck a broken neck. Barbara, wedged beside him on the narrow seat, pulsated in speechless anger and accusation (What have you done?). He did not wish to look at her, but neither could he watch for long thejoggling view beyond the carriage window. This country roundabout of countless small lakes and perennially flooded lowlands (which Tycho in his letters had dubbed Bohemian Venice!) pained his poor eyesight with its fractured perspectives of quicksilver glitter and tremulous blue-grey distances.

"… That he will of course," the baron was saying, "accept an apology, only he, ah, he suggests that it be in writing."

Kepler stared. "He wants…" and eye and an elbow setting up together a devil's dance of twitches "… he wants a written apology of me?"

"That is, yes, what he indicated." The baron swallowed, and looked away with a sickly smile. Regina at his side watched him intently, as she watched all big people, as if he might suddenly do something marvellous and inexplicable, burst into tears, or throw back his head and howl like an ape. Kepler regarded him too, thinking sadly that this man was a direct link with Copernicus: in his youth the baron had hired Valentine Otho, disciple of von Lauchen, to instruct him in mathematics. "Also, he will require a declaration of secrecy, that is, that you will swear an oath not to reveal to… to others, any astronomical data he may provide you with in the course of your work. He is especially jealous, I believe, for the Mars observations. In return he will guarantee lodgings for you and your family, and will undertake to press the Emperor either to ensure the continuation of your Styrian salary, or else to grant you an allowance himself. These are his terms, Herr Kepler; I would advise you-"

"To accept? Yes, yes, I will, of course." Why not? He was weary of standing on his dignity. The baron stared at him, and Kepler blinked: was that contempt in those watery eyes? Damn it, Hoffmann knew nothing of what it was to be poor and an outcast, he had his lands and title and his place at court. Sometimes these bland patricians sickened him.

"But what, " said Barbara, choking on it, "what of our conditions, our demands?" No one replied. How was it, Kepler wondered, with a twinge of guilt, that her most impassioned outbursts were met always by the same glassy-eyed, throat-clearing silence. The carriage lurched into a pothole with a mighty jolt, and from without they heard the driver address a string of lush obscenities to his horse. Kepler sighed. His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.

The baron's house stood on Hradcany hill hard by the imperial palace, looking down over Kleinseit to the river and the Jewish quarter, and, farther out, the suburbs of the old town. There was a garden with poplars and shaded walkways and a fishpond brimming with indolent carp. On the north, the palace side, the windows gave on to pavonian lawns and a fawn wall, sudden skies pierced by a spire, and purple pennons undulating in a cowed immensity. Once, from those windows, Kepler had been vouchsafed an unforgettable glimpse of a prancing horse and a hound rampant, ermine and emerald, black beard, pale hand, a dark disconsolate eye. That was as near as he was to come to the Emperor for a long time.

In the library the baron's wife sat at an escritoire, sprinkling chalk from an ivory horn upon a piece of parchment. She rose as they entered, and, blowing lightly on the page, glanced at them with the distant relation of a smile. "Why Doctor-and Frau Kepler-you have returned to us, " a faded eagle, taller than her husband but as gaunt as he, in a satin gown of metallic blue, her attention divided equally between her visitors and the letter in her hand.

"My dear," the baron murmured, with a jaded bow.

There was a brief silence, and then that smile again. "And Dr Brahe, is he not with you?"

"Madam," Kepler burst out, "I have been cruelly used by that man. He it was urged me, pleaded with me to come here to Bohemia; I came, and he treats me as he would a mere apprentice!"

"You have had a falling out with our good Dane?" the baroness said, suddenly giving the Keplers all her attention; "that is unfortunate," and Regina, catching the rustle of that silkily ominous tone, leaned forward past her mother for a good look at this impressive large blue lady.

"I set before him," said Kepler, "I set before him a list of some few conditions which he must meet if I was to remain and work with him, for example I deman-I asked that is for separate quarters for my family and myself (that place out there, I swear it, is a madhouse), and that a certain quantity of food-"

Barbara darted forward-"And firewood!"

"And firewood, to be set aside expressly-"

"For our use, that's right."

"-For our, yes, use," blaring furiously down his nostrils. He pictured himself hitting her, felt in the roots of his teeth the sweet smack of his palm on a fat forearm. "I asked let me see I asked, yes, that he procure me a salary from the Emperor-"

"His majesty," the baron said hastily, "his majesty is… difficult."

"See, my lady, " Barbara warbled, "see what we are reduced to, begging for our food. And you were so kind when we first arrived here, accommodating us…"

"Yes," the baroness said thoughtfully.

"But," cried Kepler, "I ask you, sir, madam, are these unreasonable demands?"

Baron Hoffmann slowly sat down. "We met upon the matter yesterday," he said, looking at the hem of his wife's gown, "Dr Brahe, Dr Kepler and myself."

"Yes?" said the baroness, growing more aquiline by the moment. "And?"

"This!" cried Barbara, a very quack; "look at us, thrown out on the roadside!"

The baron pursed his lips. "Hardly, gnädige Frau, hardly so… so… Yet it is true, the Dane is angry. "

"Ah," the baroness murmured; "why so?"

Drops of rain fingered the sunlit window. Kepler shrugged. "I do not know. "Barbara looked at him. "… I never said, " he said, "that the Tychonic system is misconceived, as he charges! I… I merely observed of one or two weaknesses in it, caused I believe by a too hasty acceptance of doubtful premises, that a bitch in a hurry will produce blind pups. " The baroness put a hand up quickly to trap a cough, which, had he not known her to be a noble lady fully conscious of the gravity of the moment, he might have taken for a snigger. "And anyway, it is misconceived, a monstrous thing sired on Ptolemy out of Egyptian Herakleides. He puts the earth, you see, madam, at the centre of the world, but makes the five remaining planets circle upon the sun! It works, of course, so far as appearances are concerned- but then you could put any one of the planets at the centre and still save the phenomena. "

"Save the..?" She turned to the baron to enlighten her. He looked away, fingering his chin.

"The phenomena, yes, " said Kepler. "But it's all a trick our Dane is playing, aimed at pleasing the schoolmen without entirely denying Copernicus-he knows it as well as I do, and I'm damned before I will apologise for speaking the plain truth!" He surged to his feet, choking on a sudden bubble of rage. "The thing, excuse me, the thing is simple: he is jealous of me, my grasp of our science-yes, yes," rounding on Barbara violently, though she had made no protest, "yes, jealous. Andfurther-more he is growing old, he's more than fifty-" the baroness's left eyebrow snapped into a startled arc "-and is worried for his future reputation, would have me ratify his worthless theory by forcing me to make it the basis of my work. But…" But there he faltered, and turned, listening. Music came from afar, the tune made small and quaintly merry by the distance. He walked slowly to the window, as if stalking some rare prize. The rain shower had passed, and the garden brimmed with light. Clasping his hands behind him and swaying gently on heel and toe he gazed out at the poplars and the dazzled pond, the drenched clouds of flowers, that jigsaw of lawn trying to reassemble itself between the stone balusters of a balcony. How innocent, how inanely lovely, the surface of the world! The mystery of simple things assailed him. A festive swallow swooped through a tumbling flaw of lavender smoke. It would rain again. Tumty turn. He smiled, listening: was it the music of the spheres? Then he turned, and was surprised to find the others as he had left them, attending him with mild expectancy. Barbara moaned softly in dismay. She knew,  she knew that look, that empty, amiably grinning mask with the burning eyes of a busy madman staring through it. She began rapidly to explain to the baron and his pernous lady that our chief worry, our chief worry is, you see… and Kepler sighed, wishing she would not prattle thus, like a halfwit, her tiny mouth wobbling. He rubbed his hands and advanced from the window, all business now. "I shall," blithely drowning Barbara's babbling, which ran on even as it sank, a flurry of bubbles out of a surprised fish-mouth-"I shall write a letter, apologise, make my peace," beaming from face to face as if inviting applause. The music came again, nearer now, a wind band playing in the palace grounds. "He will summon me back, I think, yes; he will understand, " for what did any of that squabbling matter, after all? "A new start!-may I borrow a pen, madam?"

By nightfall he had returned to Benatek. He delivered his apology, and swore an oath of secrecy, and Tycho gave a banquet, music and manic revels and the fatted calf hissing on a spit. The noise in the dining hall was a steady roar punctuated by the crimson crash of a dropped platter or the shriek of a tickled serving girl. The spring storm that had threatened all day blundered suddenly against the windows, shivering the reflected candlelight. Tycho was in capital form, shouting and swilling and banging his tankard, nose aglitter and the tips of his straw-coloured moustaches dripping. To his left Tengnagel sat with a proprietory arm about the waist of the Dane's daughter Elizabeth, a rabbity girl with close-cropped ashen hair and pink nostrils. Her mother, Mistress Christine, was a fat fussy woman whose twenty years of concubinage to the Dane no longer outraged anyone save her. Young Tyge was there too, sneering, and the Dane's chief assistant Christian Longberg, a priestly pustular young person, haggard with ambition and self-abuse. Kepler was angry again. He wanted not this mindless carousing, but simply to get his hands on-right away, now, tonight-Tycho's treasure store of planet observations. "You set me the orbit of Mars, no let me speak, you set me this orbit, a most intractable problem, yet you give me no readings for the planet; how, I ask, let me speak please, how I ask am I to solve it, do you imagine?"

Tycho shrugged elaborately. "De Tydske Karle," he remarked to the table in general, "ere allesammen halv gale, " and Jeppe the dwarf, squatting at his master's feet under the table, tittered.

"My father," said Mistress Christine suddenly, "my father went blind, you know, from swilling all his life like a pig. Take another cup of wine, Brahe dear."

Christian Longberg clasped his hands as if about to pray. "You expect to solve the problem of Mars, do you, Herr Kepler?" smiling thinly at the idea. Kepler realised who it was this creature reminded him of: Stefan Speidel, another treacherous prig.

"You do not think me capable of it, sir? Will you take a wager-let us say, a hundred florins?"

"O splendid," cried young Tyge. "An hundred florins, by Laertes!"

"Hold hard, Longberg, " Tengnagel growled. "Best set him a certain time to do it in, or you'll wait forever for your winnings."

"Seven days!" said Kepler promptly, all swagger and smile without while his innards cringed. Seven days, my God. "Yes, give me seven days free of all other tasks, and I shall do it- provided, wait, " and nervously licked his lips, "provided I am guaranteed free and unhindered access to the observations, all of them, everything."

Tycho scowled, seeing the trick. He had let it go too far, all the table was watching him, and besides he was drunk. Yet he hesitated. Those observations were his immortality. Twenty years of painstaking labour had gone into the amassing of them. Posterity might forget his books, ridicule his world system, laugh at his outlandish life, but not even the most heartless future imaginable would fail to honour him as a genius of exactitude. And now must he hand over everything to this young upstart? He nodded, and then shrugged again, and called for more wine, making the best of it. Kepler pitied him, briefly.

"Well then, sir, " said Longberg, his look a blade, "we have a wager."

A troupe of itinerant acrobats tumbled into the hall, whizzing and bouncing and clapping their hands. Seven days! A hundred florins! Hoop la.

Seven days became seven weeks, and the enterprise exploded in his face. It had seemed so small a task, merely a matter of selecting three positions for Mars and from them defining by simple geometry the circle of the planet's orbit. He delved in Tycho's treasures, rolled in them, uttering little yelps of doggy joy. He selected three observations, taken by the Dane on the island of Hveen over a period of ten years, and went to work. Before he knew what had hit him he was staggering backwards out of a cloud of sulphurous smoke, coughing, his ears ringing, with bits of smashed calculations sticking in his hair.

All of Benatek was charmed. The castle hugged itself for glee at the spectacle of this irritating little man struck full in the face with his own boast. Even Barbara could not hide her satisfaction, wondering sweetly where they were to find the hundred florins, if you please, which Christian Longberg was howling for? Only Tycho Brahe said nothing. Kepler squirmed, asked Longberg for another week, pleaded penury and his poor health, denied that he had made any wager. Deep down he cared nothing for the insults and the laughter. He was busy.

Of course he had lied to himself, for the sake of that bet and the tricking of Tycho: Mars was not simple. It had kept its secret through millenniums, defeating finer minds than his. What was to be made of a planet, the plane of whose orbit, according to Copernicus, oscillates in space, the value for the oscillation to depend not on the sun, but on the position of the earth? a planet which, moving in a perfect circle at uniform speed, takes varying periods of time to complete identical portions of its journey? He had thought that these and other strangenesses were merely rough edges to be sheared away before he tackled the problem of defining the orbit itself; now he knew that, on the contrary, he was a blind man who must reconstruct a smooth and infinitely complex design out of a few scattered prominences that gave themselves up, with deceptive innocence, under his fingertips. And seven weeks became seven months.

Early in 1601, at the end of their first turbulent year in Bohemia, a message came from Graz that Jobst Müller was dying, and asking for his daughter. Kepler welcomed the excuse to interrupt his work. He detached its fangs carefully from his wrist-wait there, don't howl-and walked away from it calm in the illusion of that sleek tensed thing crouching in wait, ready at the turn of a key to leap forth with the solution to the riddle of Mars clasped in its claws. By the time they reached Graz, Jobst Müller was dead.

His death provoked in Barbara a queer melancholy lassitude. She shrank into herself, curled herself up in some secret inner chamber from which there issued now and then a querulous babbling, so that Kepler feared for her sanity. The question of the inheritance obsessed her. She harped on it with ghoulish insistence, as if it were the corpse itself she was nosing at. Not that there were not grounds for her worst fears. The Archduke's interdicts against Lutherans were still in force, and when Kepler moved to convert his wife's properties into cash the Catholic authorities threatened and cheated him. Yet it was with trumpetings of acclaim that these same authorities welcomed him as a mathematician and cosmologist. In May, when it seemed the entire inheritance might be confiscated, he was invited to set up in the city's market place an apparatus of his own making through which to view a solar eclipse which he had predicted. A numerous and respectful crowd gathered to gape at the magus and his machine. The occasion was a grand success. The burghers of Graz, lifting a puzzled and watering eye from the shimmering image in his camera obscura, bumped him indulgently with their big bellies and told him what a brilliant fellow he was, and only afterwards did he discover that a cutpurse, taking advantage of the ecliptic gloom at noonday, had relieved him of thirty florins. It was a paltry loss compared to what was thieved from him in Styrian taxes, but it seemed to sum up best the whole bad business of their leavetaking of Barbara's homeland.

She burst into a torrent of tears on the day of their departure. She would not be comforted, would not let him touch her, but simply stood and wound out of her quivering mouth a long dark ribbon of anguish. He hovered beside her, heart raw with pity, his ape arms helplessly enfolding hoops of empty air. Graz had meant little to him in the end, Jobst Müller even less, but still he recognised well enough that grief which, under a grey sky on the Stempfergasse, ennobled for a moment his poor fat foolish wife.

Returning to Bohemia, they found Tycho and his circus in temporary quarters at the Golden Griffin inn, about to move back into the Curtius house on the Hradcany, which the Emperor had purchased for them from the vice chancellor's widow. Kepler could not credit it. What of the Capuchins' famous bells? And what of Benatek, the work and the expense that had been lavished on those reconstructions? Tycho shrugged; he thrived on waste, the majestic squandering of fortunes. His carriage awaited him under the sign of the griffin. There Would be a seat in it for Barbara and the child. Kepler must walk. He panted up the steep hill of the Hradcany, talking to himself and shaking his troubled head. A troupe of imperial cavalry almost trampled him. When he gained the summit he realised he had forgotten where the house was, and when he asked the way he was given wrong directions. The sentries at the palace gate watched him suspiciously as he trotted past for the third time. The evening was hot, the sun a fat eye fixed on him with malicious glee, and he kept looking over his shoulder in the hope of catching a familiar street in the act of taking down hurriedly the elaborate scenery it had erected in order to fox him. He might have sought help at Baron Hoffmann's, but the thought of the baroness's steely gaze was not inviting. Then he turned a corner and suddenly he had arrived. A cart was drawn up before the door, and heroically encumbered figures with splayed knees were staggering up the steps. Mistress Christine leaned out of an upstairs window and shouted something in Danish, and everyone stopped for a moment and gazed up at her in a kind of stupefied, inexpectant wonder. The house had a forlorn and puzzled air. Kepler wandered through the hugely empty rooms. They led him back, as if gently to tell him something, to the entrance hall. The summer evening hesitated in the doorway, and in a big mirror a parallelogram of sunlit wall leaned at a breathless tilt, with a paler patch in it where a picture had been removed. The sunset was a flourish of gold, and in the palace gardens an enraptured blackbird was singing. Outside on the step the child Regina stood at gaze like a gilded figure in a frieze. Kepler paused in shadow, listening to his own pulse-beat. What could she see, that so engrossed her? She might have been a tiny bride watching from a window on her wedding morning. Footsteps clattered on the stairs behind him, and Mistress Christine came hurrying down clutching her skirts in one hand and brandishing a fire iron in the other. "I will not have that man in my house!" Kepler stared at her, Regina with her head down walked swiftly past him into the house, and he turned to see a figure on a brokendown mule stop at the foot of the steps outside. He was in rags, with a bandaged arm pressed to his side like a beggar's filthy bundle of belongings. He dismounted and plodded up the steps. Mistress Christine planted herself in the doorway, but he pushed past her, looking about him distractedly. "I went first to Benatek," he muttered, "the castle. No one there anymore!" The idea amused him. He sat down on a chair by the mirror and began slowly to unpack his wounded arm, lowering to the floor loop upon loop of bandage with a regularly repeated, steadily swelling bloodstain in the shape of a copper crab with a wet red ruby in its heart. The wound, a deep sword-cut, was grossly infected. He studied it with distaste, pressing gingerly upon the livid surround. "Porco Dio," he said, and spat on the floor. Mistress Christine threw up her hands and went away, talking to herself.

"My wife, perhaps," said Kepler, "would dress that for you?"

The Italian brought out from a pocket of his leather jerkin a bit of grimy rag, tore it with his teeth and wrapped the wound in it. He held up the ends to be tied. Kepler leaning down could feel the heat of the festering flesh and smell its gamey stink.

"So, they have not hanged you yet, " the Italian said. Kepler stared at him, and then, slowly lifting his eyes to the mirror, saw Jeppe standing behind him.

"Not yet, master, no," the dwarf said, grinning. "But what of you?"

Kepler turned to him. "He is hurt, see: this arm…"

The Italian laughed, and leaning back against the mirror he fainted quietly into his own reflection.

Felix was the name he went by. His histories were various. He had been a soldier against the Turks, had sailed with the Neapolitan fleet. There was not a cardinal in Rome, so he said, that he had not pimped for. He had first encountered the Dane at Leipzig two years before, when Tycho was meandering southward towards Prague. The Italian was on the run, there had been a fight over a whore and a Vatican guard had died. He was starving, and Tycho, displaying an unwonted sense of humour, had hired him to escort his household animals to Bohemia. But the joke misfired. Tycho had never forgiven him the loss of the elk. Now, alerted by Mistress Christine, he came roaring into the hall in search of the fellow to throw him out. Kepler and the dwarf, however, had already spirited him away upstairs.

It seemed that he must die. For days he lay on a pallet in one of the big empty rooms at the top of the house, raving and cursing, mad with fever and the loss of blood. Tycho, fearing a scandal if the renegade should die in his house, summoned Michael Maier, the imperial physician, a discreet and careful man. He applied leeches and administered a purgative, and toyed wistfully with the idea of amputating the poisoned arm. The weather was hot and still, the room an oven; Maier ordered the windows sealed and draped against the unwholesome influence of fresh air. Kepler spent long hours by the sickbed, mopping the Italian's streaming forehead, or holding him by the shoulders while he puked the green dregs of his life into a copper basin, which each evening was delivered to the haru-spex Maier at the palace. And sometimes at night, working at his desk, he would suddenly lift his head and listen, fancying that he had heard a cry, or not even that, but a flexure of pain shooting like a crack across the delicate dome of candlelight wherein he sat, and he would climb through the silent house and stand for a while beside the restless figure on the bed. He experienced, in that fetid gloom, a vivid and uncanny sense of his own presence, as if he had been given back for a brief moment a dimension of himself which daylight and other lives would not allow him. Often the dwarf was there before him, squatting on the floor with not a sound save the rapid unmistakable beat of his breathing. They did not speak, but bided together, like attendants at the shrine of a demented oracle.

Young Tyge came up one morning, sidled round the door with his offal-eating grin, the tip of a pink tongue showing. "Well, here's a merry trio. " He sauntered to the bed and peered down at the Italian tangled in the sheets. "Not dead yet?"

"He is sleeping, young master," said Jeppe.

Tyge coughed. "By God, he stinks." He moved to the window, and twitching open the drapes looked out upon the great blue day. The birds were singing in the palace grounds. Tyge turned, laughing softly.

"Well, doctor," he said, "what is your prognosis?"

"The poison has spread from the arm," Kepler answered, shrugging. He wished the fellow would go away. "He may not live."

"You know the saying: those who live by the sword…" The rest was smothered by a guffaw. "Ah me, how cruel is life, " putting a hand to his heart. "Look at it, dying like a dog in a foreign land! "He turned to the dwarf. "Tell me, monster, is it not enough to make even you weep?"

Jeppe smiled. "You are a wit, master. "

Tyge looked at him. "Yes, I am." He turned away sulkily and considered the sick man again. "I met him in Rome once, you know. He was a great whoremaster there. Although they say he prefers boys, himself. But then the Italians all are that way." He glanced at Kepler. "You would be somewhat too ripe for him, I think; perhaps the frog here would be more to his taste." He went out, but paused in the doorway. "My father, by the way, wants him well, so he may have the pleasure of kicking him down the Hradcany. You are a fine pair of little nurses. Look to it."

He recovered. One day Kepler found him leaning by the window in a dirty shirt. He would not speak, nor even turn, as if he did not dare break off this rapt attendance upon the world that he had almost lost, the hazy distance, those clouds, the light of summer feeding on his upturned face. Kepler crept away, and when he returned that evening the Italian looked at him as if he had never seen him before, and waved him aside when he attempted to change the crusted bandage on his arm. He wanted food and drink. "And where is the nano? You tell him to come, eh?"

The days that followed were for Kepler an ashen awakening from a dream. The Italian continued to look through him with blank unrecognition. What had he expected? Not love, certainly not friendship, nothing so insipid as these. Perhaps, then, a kind of awful comradeship, by which he might gain entry to that world of action and intensity, that Italy of the spirit, of which this renegade was an envoy. Life, life, that was it! In the Italian he seemed to know at last, however vicariously, the splendid and exhilarating sordidness of real life.

The Brahes, with that casual hypocrisy which Kepler knew so well, celebrated Felix's recovery as ifhe were the first hope of the house. He was brought down from his bare room and given a new suit, and led out, grinning, into the garden, where the family was at feed at a long table in the shade of poplar trees. The Dane sat him down at his right hand. But though the occasion started off with toasts and a slapping of backs, it began before long to ooze a drunken rancour. Tycho, ill and half drunk, brought up again the sore subject of his lost elk, but in the midst of loud vituperation fell suddenly asleep into his plate. The Italian ate like a dog, jealously and with circumspect hurry: he also knew well these capricious Danes. His arm was in a black silk sling that Tycho's daughter Elizabeth had fashioned for him. Tengnagel threatened to call him out with rapiers if he did not stay away from her, and then stood up, overturning his chair, and stalked away from the table. Felix laughed; the Junker did not know, what everyone else knew, that he had ploughed the wench already, long before, at Benatek. It was not for her that he had come back. The court at Prague was rich, presided over by a halfwit, so he had heard. Perhaps Rudolph might have use for a man of his peculiar talents? The dwarf consulted Kepler, and Kepler responded with wry amusement. "Why, I had to wait a year myself before your master would arrange an audience for me, and I have been to the palace only twice again. What influence have I?"

"But you will have, soon,"Jeppe whispered, "sooner than you would guess. "

Kepler said nothing, and looked away. The dwarf's prophetic powers unnerved him. Tycho Brahe suddenly woke up. "You are wanted, sir," said Jeppe softly.

"Yes, I want you," Tycho growled, wiping bleared eyes.

"Well, here I am."

But Tycho only looked at him wearily, with a kind of hapless resentment. "Bah." He was unmistakably a sick man. Kepler was aware of the dwarf behind him, smiling. What was it the creature saw in their collective future? A warm gale was blowing out of the sky, and the evening sunlight had an umber tinge, as if the wind had bruised it. The poplars shook. Suddenly everything seemed to him to tremble on the brink of revelation, as if these contingencies of light and weather and human doings had stumbled upon a form of almost speech. Felix was whispering to Elizabeth Brahe, making the tips of her translucent ears glow with excitement. He was to leave, this time forever, before the year was out, no longer interested in imperial patronage, though by then Jeppe's prophecy would be fulfilled, and the astronomer would have become indeed a man ofinfluence.

Kepler turned again now to his work on Mars. Conditions around him had improved. Christian Longberg, tired of squabbling, had gone back to Denmark, and there was no more talk of their wager. Tycho Brahe too was seldom seen. There were rumours of plague and Turkish advances, and the stars needed a frequent looking to. The Emperor Rudolph, growing ever more nervous, had moved his imperial mathematician in from Benatek, but even the Curtius house was not close enough, and the Dane was at the palace constantly. The weather was fine, days the colour of Mosel wine, enormous glassy nights. Kepler sometimes sat with Barbara in the garden, or with Regina idly roamed the Hradcany, admiring the houses of the rich and watching the imperial cavalry on parade. But by August the talk of plague had closed the great houses for the season, and even the cavalry found an excuse to be elsewhere. The Emperor decamped to his country seat at Belvedere, taking Tycho Brahe with him. The sweet sadness of summer settled on the deserted hill, and Kepler thought of how as a child, at the end of one of his frequent bouts of illness, he would venture forth on tender limbs into a town made magical by the simple absence of his schoolfellows from its streets.

Mars suddenly yielded up a gift, when with startling ease he refuted Copernicus on oscillation, showing by means of Tycho's data that the planet's orbit intersects the sun at a fixed angle to the orbit of the earth. There were other, smaller victories. At every advance, however, he found himself confronted again by the puzzle of the apparent variation in orbital velocity. He turned to the past for guidance. Ptolemy had saved the principle of uniform speed by means of the punctutn equans, a point on the diameter of the orbit from which the velocity will appear invariable to an imaginary observer (whom it amused Kepler to imagine, a crusty old fellow, with his brass tri-quetrum and watering eye and smug, deluded certainty). Copernicus, shocked by Ptolemy's sleight of hand, had rejected the equant point as blasphemously inelegant, but yet had found nothing to put in its place except a clumsy combination of five uniform epicyclic motions superimposed one upon another. These were, all the same, clever and sophisticated manoeuvres, and saved the phenomena admirably. But had his great predecessors taken them, Kepler wondered, to represent the real state of things? The question troubled him. Was there an innate nobility, lacking in him, which set one above the merely empirical? Was his pursuit of the forms of physical reality irredeemably vulgar?

In a tavern on Kleinseit one Saturday night he met Jeppe and the Italian. They had fallen in with a couple of kitchen-hands from the palace, a giant Serb with one eye and a low ferrety fellow from Württemberg, who claimed to have soldiered with Kepler's brother in the Hungarian campaigns. His name was Krump. The Serb rooted in his codpiece and brought out a florin to buy a round of schnapps. Someone struck up on a fiddle, and a trio of whores sang a bawdy song and danced. Krump squinted at them and spat. "Riddled with it, them are," he said, "I know them. " But the Serb was charmed, ogling the capering drabs out of his one oystrous eye and banging his fist on the table in time to thejig. Kepler ordered up another round. "Ah," said Jeppe. "Sir Mathematicus is flush tonight; has my master forgot himself and paid your wages?" "Something of that, " Kepler answered, and thought himself a gay dog. They played a hand of cards, and there was more drink. The Italian was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with a slouch hat. Kepler spotted him palming a knave. He won the hand and grinned at Kepler, and then, calling for another jig, got up and with a low bow invited the whores to dance. The candles on the tavern counter shook to the thumping of their feet. "A merry fellow, " said Jeppe, and Kepler nodded, grinning blearily. The dance became a general rout, and somehow they were suddenly outside in the lane. One of the whores fell down and lay there laughing, kicking her stout legs in the air. Kepler propped himself against the wall and watched the goatish dancers circling in a puddle of light from the tavern window, and all at once out of nowhere, out of every where, out of the fiddle music and the flickering light and the pounding of heels, the circling dance and the Italian's drunken eye, there came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle of uniform velocity is false. He found it very funny, and smiling turned aside and vomited absent-mindedly into a drain. Krump laid a hand on his shoulder. "Listen, friend, if you puke up a little ring don't spit it out, it'll be your arsehole. " Somewhere behind him the Italian laughed. False, by Jesus, yes!

They went on to another tavern, and another. The Serb got lost along the way, and then Felix and the dwarf reeled off arm in arm with the bawds into the darkness, and Krump and the astronomer were left to stagger home up the Hradcany, falling and shouting and singing tearful songs of Württemberg their native land. In the small hours, his elusive quarters located at last, Kepler, a smouldering red eye in his mind fixed on the image of a romping whore, attempted with much shushing and chuckling to negotiate Barbara's rigid form into an exotic posture, for what precise purpose he had forgotten when he woke into a parched and anguished morning, though something of the abandoned experiment was still there in the line of her large hip and the spicy tang of her water in the earthen pot under the bed. She would not speak to him for a week.

Later that day, when the fumes of the charnel house had dispersed in his head, he brought out and contemplated, like a penniless collector with a purloined treasure, the understanding that had been given to him that the principle of uniform orbital velocity was a false dogma. It was the only, the obvious answer to the problem of Mars, of all the planets probably, and yet for two thousand years and more it had resisted the greatest of astronomy's inquisitors. And why had this annunciation been made to him, what heaven-hurled angel had whispered in his ear? He marvelled at the process, how a part of his mind had worked away in secret and in silence while the rest of him swilled and capered and lusted after poxed whores. He experienced an unwonted humility. He must be better now, behave himself, talk to Barbara and listen to her complaints, be patient with the Dane, and say his prayers, at least until the advent of new problems.

They were not long in coming. His rejection of uniform velocity threw everything into disarray, and he had to begin all over again. He was not discouraged. Here was real work, after all, fully worthy of him. Where before, in the Mysterium, there had been abstract speculation, was now reality itself. These were precise observations of a visible planet, coordinates fixed in time and space. They were events. It was not by chance he had been assigned the study of Mars. Christian Longberg, that jealous fool, had insisted on keeping the lunar orbit; Kepler laughed, glimpsing there too the quivering tips of angelic wings, the uplifted finger. For he knew now that Mars was the key to the secret of the workings of the world. He felt himself suspended in tensed bright air, a celestial swimmer. And seven months were becoming seventeen.

Tycho told him he was mad: uniform velocity was a principle beyond question. Next he would be claiming that the planets do not move in perfect circles! Kepler shrugged. It was the Dane's own observations that had shown the principle to be false. No no no, and Tycho shook his great bald head, there must be some other explanation. But Kepler was puzzled. Why should he seek another answer, when he had the correct one? There stood at the hatch of his mind an invoice clerk with a pencil and slate and a bad liver, who would allow no second thoughts. Tycho Brahe turned away; what little chance there had been that this Swabian lunatic would solve Mars for him was gone now. Kepler plucked at him, wait, look-where is my compass, I have lost my compass-the thing was as good as done! Even assuming a variable rate of speed, to define the orbit he had only to determine the radius of its circle, the direction relative to the fixed stars of the axis connecting aphelion and perihelion, and the position on that axis of the sun, the orbital centre, and the punctum equans, which for the moment he would retain, as a calculating device. Of course all this could only be done by a process of trial and error, but… but wait! And Tycho swept away, muttering.

He made seventy attempts. At the end, out of nine hundred pages of closely-written calculations, came a set of values which gave, with an error of only two minutes of arc, the correct position of Mars according to the Tychonic readings. He clambered up out of dreadful depths and announced his success to anyone who would listen. He wrote to Longberg in Denmark, demanding settlement of their wager. The fever which he had held at bay with promises and prayers took hold of him now like a demented lover. When it had spent itself, he returned to his calculations to make a final test. It was only play, really, a kind of revelling in his triumph. He chose another handful of observations and applied them to his model. They did not fit. Arrange matters as he would, there was always an error of eight minutes of arc. He plodded away from his desk, thinking of daggers, the poison cup, a launching into empty air from a high wall of the Hradcany. And yet, in a secret recess of his heart, a crazy happiness was stirring at the prospect of throwing away all he had done so far and starting over again. It was the joy of the zealot* in his cell, the scourge clasped in his hand. And seventeen months were to become seven years before the thing was done.

His overloaded brain began to throw off sparks of surplus energy, and he conceived all kinds of quaint ingenious enterprises. He developed a method of measuring the volume of wine casks by conic section. The keeper of the Emperor's cellars was charmed. He tested his own eyesight and made for himself an elaborate pair of spectacles from lenses ground in Linz by his old friend Wincklemann. The prosaic miracle of water had always fascinated him; he set up water clocks, and designed a new kind of pump which impressed the imperial engineers. Others of his projects caused much hilarity among the Brahes. There was his design for an automatic floor-sweeper, worked by suction power from a double-valved bellows attached to the implement's ratcheted wheels. He consulted the scullery maids on a plan for a laundry machine, a huge tub with paddles operated by a treadle. They ran away from him, giggling. These were amusing pastimes, but at the end of the day always there was the old problem of Mars waiting for him.

He liked to work at night, savouring the silence and the candleglow and the somehow attentive darkness, and then the dawn that always surprised him with that sense of being given a glimpse of the still new and unsullied other end of things. In the Curtius house he had burrowed into a little room on the top floor where he could lock himself away. The summer passed. Early one October morning he heard a step outside his door, and peering out spied Tycho Brahe standing in the corridor, his arms folded, gazing down pensively at his large bare feet. He was in his nightshirt, with a cloak thrown over his shoulders. Behind him, by the far wall, Jeppe the dwarf was creeping. They had the air of weary and discouraged searchers after some hopelessly lost small thing. Tycho looked up at Kepler without surprise.

"Sleep, " said the Dane, "I do not sleep. "

As if at a signal, there arose in the sky outside a vehement clanging. Kepler turned an ear to it and smiled. "Bells," he said. Tycho frowned.

Kepler's room was a cramped brown box with a pallet and a stool, and a rickety table aswarm with his papers. Tycho sat down heavily, fussing at his cloak; Jeppe scuttled under the table. Rain spoke suddenly at the window: the sky was coming apart and falling on the city in undulant swathes. Kepler scratched his head and absently inspected his fingernails. He had lice again.

"You progress?" said Tycho, nodding at thejumbled papers by his elbow.

"O yes, a little."

"And you still hold to the Copernican system?"

"It is a useful basis of computation…" But that was not it. "Yes," he said grimly, "I follow Copernicus."

The Dane might not have heard. He was looking away, toward the door, where on a hook there hung a mildewed court uniform, complete with sash and feathered hat, a limp ghost of the previous householder, the late vice chancellor. Under the table Jeppe stirred, muttering. "I came to speak to you, "Tycho said. Kepler waited, but there was nothing more. He looked at the Dane's big yellow feet clinging to the floorboards like a pair of purblind animals. In his time Tycho Brahe had determined the position of a thousand stars, and had devised a system of the world more elegant than Ptolemy's. His book on the new star of 1572 had made him famous throughout Europe.

"I have made," said Kepler, picking up his pen and looking at it with a frown, "I have made a small discovery regarding orbital motion."

"That it is invariable, after all?" Tycho suddenly laughed.

"No," Kepler said. "But the radius vector of any planet, it seems, will sweep out equal areas in equal times. " He glanced at Tycho. "I regard this as a law."

"Moses Mathematicus, " said Jeppe, and sniggered.

The rain was still coming down, but the clouds to the east had developed a luminous rip. There was a sudden beating of wings at the window. Kepler's steelpen, not to be outdone by the deluge outside, deposited with a parturient squeak upon his papers a fat black blot.

"Bells," said Tycho softly.

That night he was brought home drunk from dinner at the house of Baron Rosenberg in the city, and relieved himself in the fireplace of the main hall, waking everyone with his yelling and the stench of boiled piss. He kicked the dwarf and staggered away upstairs to his bed, from which Mistress Christine, gibbering in rage, had already fled. The household was no sooner settled back to sleep than the master reared up again roaring for lights and his fool and a meal of quails' eggs and brandy. At noon next day he summoned Kepler to his bedside. "I am ill. He had a mug of ale in his hand, and the bed was strewn with pastry scraps.

"You should not drink so much, perhaps," said Kepler mildly.

"Pah. Something has burst in my gut: look at that! He pointed with grim pride to a basin of bloodied urine on the floor by Kepler's feet. "Last night at Rosenberg 's my bladder was full for three hours, I could not leave the table for fear of seeming gross. You know what these occasions are. "

"No," said Kepler, "I do not."

Tycho scowled, and took a swig of ale. He looked at Kepler keenly for a moment. "Be careful of my family, they will try to hinder you. Watch Tengnagel, he is a fool, but ambitious. Protect my poor dwarf. " He paused. "Remember me, and all I have done for you. Do not let me seem to have lived in vain.

Kepler ascended laughing to his room. All he has done for me! Barbara was there before him, poking among his things. He edged around her to the table and plunged into his papers, mumbling.

"How is he?" she said.

"Eh? Who?"

"Who!"

"O, it's nothing. Too much wine."

She was silent for a moment, standing behind him with her arms folded, nursing enormities. "How can you," she said at last, "how can you be so… so… "

He turned to stare at her. "What. "

"Have you thought, have you, what will become of us when he dies?"

"Good God, woman! He was dining with his fine friends, and drank too much as always, and was too lazy to leave his chair to pee, and injured his bladder. He will be over it by tomorrow. Permit me to know enough of doctoring to recognise mortal illness when-"

"You recognise nothing!" shrieking a fine spray of spit in his face. "Are you alive at all, with your stars and your precious theories and your laws of this and that and and and…" Fat tears sprang from her eyes, her voice broke, and she fled the room.

Tycho failed rapidly. Within the week Kepler was summoned again to his chamber. It was crowded with family and pupils and court emissaries, poised and silent like a gathering in the gloom on the fringes of a dream. Tycho was enthroned in lamplight upon his high bed. The flesh hung in folds on his shrunken face, his eyes were vague. He held Kepler's hand. "Remember me. Do not let me seem to have lived in vain." Kepler could think of nothing to say, and grinned uncontrollably, nodding, nodding. Mistress Christine plucked at the stuff of her gown, looking about her dazedly as if trying to remember something. The dwarf, blotched with tears, made to scramble on to the bed but someone held him back. Kepler noticed for the first time that Elizabeth Brahe was pregnant. Tengnagel skulked at her shoulder. There was a commotion outside the door of the chamber and Felix burst in, spitting Italian over his shoulder at someone outside. He strode to the bed and, thrusting Kepler away, took the Dane's hand in his own. But the Dane was dead.

He was buried, after an utraquist service, in the Teynkirche in Prague. The house on the Hradcany had an air of pained surprise, as if a wing had suddenly and silently collapsed. One morning it was discovered that the Italian had departed, taking Jeppe with him, no one knew to where. Kepler considered going too; but where would he go? And then a message came from the palace informing him that he had been appointed to succeed the Dane as imperial mathematician.

Everyone said the Emperor Rudolph was harmless, if a little mad, yet when the moment had come at last for Kepler to meet him for the first time, a spasm of fright had crushed the astronomer's heart in its hot fist. That was ten months before the Dane's death. Kepler by then had been in Bohemia nearly a year, but Tycho's grand manner was impervious to hints. He only shrugged and began to hum when Kepler ventured that it was a long time to have held off from this introduction. "His majesty is… difficult."

They trundled up the Hradcany and turned in between the high walls leading to the gate. Everywhere about them lay the economy of snow: a great white and only the black ruts of the road, the no-colour wall. The sky was the colour of a hare's pelt. Their horse stumbled on packed ice, and a scolopendrine beggar scuttled forward and opened his mouth at them through the carriage window in speechless imprecation. On the wooden bridge before the gate they skated ponderously to a halt. The horse stamped and snorted, blowing cones of steam out of flared nostrils. Kepler put his head out at the window. The air was sharp as needles. The gateman, a fat fellow in furs, waddled forth from his box and spoke to the driver, then waved them on. Tycho flung him a coin.

"Ah, "said the Dane, "ah, I detest this country. "He fussed at the sheepskin wrap about his knees. They were in the palace gardens now. Black trees glided slowly past, bare limbs thrown up as if in stark astonishment at the cold. "Why did I ever leave Denmark?"

"Because.

"Well?" staring balefully, daring him. Kepler sighed.

"I do not know. Tell me."

Tycho transferred his gaze to the smoky air outside. "We Brahes have ever been ill-used by royals. My uncle Jörgen Brahe saved King Frederick from drowning in the Sund at Copenhagen, and died himself in the attempt, did you know that?" He did. It was an oft-told tale. The Dane was working himself up into a fine fit of indignation. "And yet that young brat Christian was bold enough to banish me from my island sanctuary, my fabulous Uraniborg, granted to me by royal charter when he was still a snot-nosed mewler on his nurse's knee-did you know that?"  he did, he did, and more. Tycho had ruled on Hveen like a despotic Turk, until even the mild King Christian could no longer countenance it. "Ah, Kepler, the perfidy of princes!" and glared at the palace advancing to meet them through the icy light of afternoon.

They were left to wait outside the chamber of the presence. There were others there before them, dim depressed figures given to sighing, and a crossing and recrossing of legs. It was bitterly cold, and Kepler's feet were numb. His apprehension had yielded before a grey weight of boredom when the groom of the chamber, an immaculately costumed bland little man, approached swiftly and whispered to the Dane, and already there was a hot constriction in Kepler's breast, as if his lungs, getting wind a fraction before he did of the advent at last of the longed-for and dreaded moment, had snatched a quick gulp of air to cushion the shock. He needed to urinate. I think I must go and-will you excuse-?

"Do you know, " said the Emperor, "do you know what one of our mathematici has told us: that if the digits of any double number be transposed, and the result of the transposition be subtracted from the original, or vice versa of course, depending on which is the greater value, then the remainder in all instances shall be divisible by nine. Is this not a wonderful operation? By nine, always." He was a short plump matronly man with melancholy eyes. A large chin nestled like a pigeon in a bit of soft beard. His manner was a blend of eagerness and weary detachment. "But doubtless you, sir, a mathematician yourself, will think it nothing remarkable that numbers should behave in what to us is a strange and marvellous fashion?"

Kepler was busy transposing and subtracting in his head. Was this perhaps a test to which all paying court for the first time were subjected? The Emperor, slack-jawed and softly panting, watched him with an unnerving avidity. He felt as if he were being slowly and ruminatively devoured. "A mathematician, I am that, your majesty, yes," smiling tentatively. "Nevertheless I admit that I cannot say what is the explanation of this phenomenon…" He was discussing mathematics with the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, the anointed of God and bearer of the crown of Charlemagne. "Perhaps your majesty himself can offer a solution?"

Rudolph shook his head. For a moment he mused in silence, a forefinger palping his lower lip. Then he sighed.

"There is a magic in numbers," he said, "which is beyond rational explanation. You are aware of this, no doubt, in your own work? May be, even, you put to use sometimes this magic?"

"I would not attempt," said Kepler, with a force and suddenness that startled even him, "I would not attempt to prove anything by the mysticism of numbers, nor do I consider it possible to do so."

In the silence that followed, Tycho Brahe, behind him, coughed.

Rudolph took his guest on a tour of the palace and its wonder rooms. Kepler was shown all manner of mechanical apparatuses, lifelike wax figures and clockwork dummies, rare coins and pictures, exotic carvings, pornographic manuscripts, a pair of Barbary apes and a huge spindly beast from Araby with a hump and a dun coat and an expression of ineradicable melancholy, vast dim laboratories and alchemical caves, an hermaphrodite child, a stone statue which would sing when exposed to the heat of the sun, and he grew dizzy with surprise and superstitious alarm. As they progressed from one marvel to the next they accumulated in their train a troupe of murmurous courtiers, delicate men and elaborate ladies, whom the Emperor ignored, but who yet depended from him, like a string of puppets; they were exquisitely at ease, yet through all their fine languor it seemed to Kepler a thread of muted pain was tightly stretched, which out of each produced, as a stroked glass will produce, a tiny note that was one with the tone of the apes' muffled cries and the androgynous child's speechless stare. He listened closely then, and thought he heard from every corner of the palace all that royal sorceror's magicked captives faintly singing, all lamenting.

They came into a wide hall with hangings and many pictures and a magnificent vaulted ceiling. The floor was a checkered design of black and white marble tiles. Windows gazed down upon the snowbound city, of which the tiled floor was a curious echo, except that all out there seemed a jumble of wreckage under the brumous winter light. A few persons stood about, motionless as figurines, marvellously got up in yellows and sky blues and flesh tints and lace. This was the throne room. Cups of sticky brown liqueur and trays of sweetmeats were carried in. The Emperor neither ate nor drank. He seemed ill at ease here, and glanced at his throne, making little feints at it, as if it were a live thing crouching there that he must catch off guard and subdue before he might mount it.

"Do you agree," he said, "that men are distinguished one from another more by the influence of heavenly bodies than even by institutions and habit? Would you agree with this view, sir?"

There was something touching in this dumpy little man, with his weak mouth and haunted eyes, that avid attentiveness. And yet this was the Emperor! Was he perhaps a little deaf?

"Yes," said Kepler, "yes, I do agree; but casting horoscopes, all that, an unpleasant and begrimed work, your majesty." He paused. What was this? Who had said anything of horoscopes? But Rudolph, according to the Dane, had nodded assent to Kepler's plea for an imperial stipend; he must be made to understand that a few florins annually would not purchase another wizard to add to his collection. "Of course," he went on, "I believe that the stars do, yes, influence us, and that it is permissible a ruler be allowed once in a while to take advantage of such influence. But, if you will permit me, sir, there are dangers…" The Emperor waited, smiling vaguely and nodding, yet managing to convey a faint unmistakable chill of warning. "I mean, your majesty, there is, " with deliberate emphasis, while Tycho Brahe raked together the ingredients of another cautionary cough, "there is a danger if the ruler should be too much swayed by those about him who make star magic their business. I am thinking of those Englishmen, Kelley and the angel-conjuror Dee, who lately, I am told, deceived yo- your court, with their trickery."

Rudolph had turned slowly away, still with that pained vacant smile, still nodding, and Tycho Brahe immediately jumped in and began to speak loudly of something else. Kepler was annoyed. What did they expect of him! He was no crawling courtier, to kiss hands and curtsy.

The day waned, the lamps were lit, and there was music. Rudolph took to his throne at last. It was the only seat in the room. Kepler's legs began to ache. He had expected much of this day. Everything was going wrong. Yet he had done his best to be upright and honest. Perhaps that was not what was required. In this empire of impossible ceremony and ceaseless show Johannes Kepler fitted ill. The music of the strings sighed on, an unobtrusive creaking. "It was the predictability of astronomical events," the Dane was saying, "which drew me to this science, for I saw, of course, how useful such predictions would be to navigators and calendar makers, also to kings and princes…" but his efforts were not succeeding either, Rudolph's chin was sunk on his breast, and he was not listening. He rose and touched Kepler's arm, and walked with him to the great window. Below them the city was dissolving into the twilight. They stood in silence for a moment, gazing down upon the little lights that flickered forth here and there. All at once Kepler felt a rush of tenderness for this soft sad man, a desire to shield him from the world's wickedness.

"They tell us that you have done wonderful works," the Emperor murmured. "We care for such things. If there were time…" He sighed. "I do not like the world. More and more I desire to transcend these… these…" His hand moved in a vague gesture toward the room behind him. "I think sometimes I might dress in rags and go among the people. I do not see them, you know. But then, where should I find rags, here?" He glanced at Kepler with a faint apologetic smile. "You see our difficulties."

"Of course, certainly."

Rudolph frowned, annoyed not at his guest it seemed but with himself. "What was I saying? Yes: these tables which Herr Brahe wishes to draw up, you consider them a worthwhile venture?"

Kepler felt like a hamfisted juggler, diving frantically this way and that as the balls spun out of control. "They would contain, your majesty, everything that is known in our science. "

"Facts, then, you mean, figures?"

"Everything that is known."

"Yes?"

"The Tychonic tables will be the foundation of a new science of the sky. Herr Brahe is a great and diligent observer. The material he has amassed is a priceless treasure. The tables must be made, they shall be, and those who come after us will bless the name of any who had a hand in their making. "

"I see, I see, yes," and coughed. "You are an Austrian, Herr Kepler?"

"Swabia is my birthplace; but I was in Graz for some years before I-"

"Ah, Graz."

"But I was driven out. The Archduke Ferdinand-"

" Graz," Rudolph said again. "Yes, our cousin Ferdinand is diligent."

Kepler closed his eyes. His cousin, of course.

The music ceased, and a parting glass was distributed. Tycho took Kepler's arm, trying it seemed to crush it in his fist. They bowed, and backed off towards the doors that were drawing open slowly behind them. Kepler halted, frowning, and trotted forward again before the Dane could stop him, muttering under his breath. "Nines, nines of course! Your majesty, a moment. See, sire, it is because of the nines, or I mean the tens, because we count in tens, and therefore the result will always be divisible by nine. For if we computed by nines, now, it would be eight, divisible by eight that is, and so on. You see?" sketching a triumphantly gay figure eight on the air. But the Emperor Rudolph only looked at him, with a kind of sadness, and said nothing. As they went out Tycho Brahe, sucking his teeth, turned on Kepler savagely. "The wrong thing you say, always the wrong thing!"

In the lamplight at the gate a few absent-minded flakes of snow were falling. The horse's hoofs rang on the cold stones, and somewhere off to the left the watch called out. At Kepler's side the Dane snorted and struggled, trying to contain the unwieldy parcel of his rage. "Have you no sense of of of," he gasped, "no understanding of-of anything? Why, at times today I suspected that you were trying, trying to anger him."

Kepler said nothing. He did not need Tycho to tell him how badly he had fared. Yet he could not be angry at himself, for it was not he had done the damage, but that other Kepler shambling at his heels, that demented other, whose prints upon his life were the black bruises that inevitably appeared in the places whereon Johannes the Mild had impressed no more than a faint thumb-print of protest.

"Well, it is no matter, in the end," said Tycho wearily. "I convinced him, despite your clumsiness, that you should work with me in compiling the tables. I am to call them the Tabulae Rudolphinae. He believes that those who come after us will bless his name!"

"Yes?"

"And he will grant you two hundred florins annually, though God knows if you will ever see it, he is not renowned either for generosity or promptness."

On the bridge the carriage halted, and Kepler gazed for a long time into the illusory emptiness outside. What would be his future, bound to a protector in need of protecting? He thought of that woebegone king immured in perpetual check in his ice palace. Tycho elbowed him furiously in the ribs. "Have you nothing to say?"

"O-thank you." The carriage lurched forward into the darkness. "He does not like the world. "

"What?"

"The Emperor, he told me that he does not like the world. Those were his words. I thought it strange. "

"Strange? Strange? Sir, you are as mad as he."

"We are alike, yes, in ways…"

That night he fell ill. An insidious fever originated in the gall, and, bypassing the bowels, gained access to the head. Barbara forced him to take a hot bath, though he considered total immersion an unnatural and foolhardy practice. To his surprise the measure brought him temporary relief. The heat, however, constricted his bowels; he administered a strong purgative, and then bled himself. He decided, after careful investigation of his excreta, that he was one of those cases whose gall bladder has a direct opening into the stomach. This was an interesting discovery, though such people, he knew, are shortlived as a rule. The sky was catastrophic at that time. But he had so much still to do! The Emperor sent good wishes for his recovery. That decided him: he would not die. The fever abated at last. He felt like one of those neatly parcelled flies that adorn spiders' webs. Death was saving him up for a future feast.

Was there a lesson for him in this latest bout of illness? He was not living as he knew he should. His rational self told him he must learn continence of thought and speech, must practise grovelling. He set himself diligently to work at the Rudolphine Tables, arranging and transcribing endless columns of observations from Tcyho's papers. In his heart the predictability of astronomical events meant nothing to him; what did he care for navigators or calendar makers, for princes and kings? The demented dreamer in him rebelled. He remembered that vision he had glimpsed in Baron Hoffmann's garden, and was again assailed by the mysteriousness of the commonplace. Give this world's praise to the angel! He had only the vaguest notion of what he meant. He recalled too the squabbling when he had come first to Tycho, the farce of that flight from Benatek and the ignominious return. Would it be likewise with Rudolph? He wrote to Mästlin: I do not speak like I write, I do not write like I think, I do not think like I ought to think, and so everything goes on in deepest darkness. Where did these voices come from, these strange sayings? It was as if the future had found utterance in him.