Kepler

V Somnium

Already the light was failing when he arrived in Regens-burg at last. A fine rain drifted slantwise through the November dusk, settling in a silver fur on his cloak, his breeches, the nag's lank mane. He crossed the Steinerne Brücke over the sullen surge of the Danube. Dim figures, faceless and intent, passed him by in the streets. There was an ominous hum in his ears, and his hands, clutching the greasy reins, trembled. He told himself it was fatigue and hunger: he could not afford to be ill, not now. He had come to accost the Emperor, to demand a settlement of what he was owed.

The lamps were lit in Hillebrand Billig's house. From a way off he spied the yellow windows and the taverner and his wife within. It was an image out of a dream, that light shining through the brown gloom and the rain, and folk attending his coming. The old horse clattered to a stop, coughing. Hillebrand Billig peered at him from the doorway. "Why, sir, we did not expect you until the morrow. "

Always the same, too late or too early. He was not sure what day of the week it was.

"Well, " stamping his numbed feet, tears in his eyes from the cold, "here I am!"

He was put to dry by the fire in the kitchen, with a platter of ham and beans and a pint-pot of punch, and a cushion for his seething piles. An elderly dog snoozed at his feet, gasping and growling in its sleep. Billig fussed around him, a large leather-clad man with a black beard. At the stove Frau Billig stood paralysed by shyness, smiling helplessly upon her saucepans. Kepler no longer remembered how or when he had come to know the couple. They seemed to have been always there, like parents. He smiled vacantly into the fire. The Billigs were twenty years younger than he. Next year would be his sixtieth.

"I am bound for Linz," he said. He had just remembered that. There was interest on some Austrian bonds to be collected.

"But you'll bide with us a while?" said Hillebrand Billig, and, with ponderous roguishness: "The rate here, you know, heh, is cheap. " It was his only joke. He never tired of it. "Is that not so, Anna?"

"O yes," Frau Billig managed, "you will be very welcome, Herr Doctor."

"Thank you," Kepler murmured. "I must, yes, spend a few days here. I have to see the Emperor, he owes me moneys."

The Billigs were impressed.

"His majesty will soon be returning to Prague," said Hillebrand Billig, who prided himself on knowing about these matters. "The congress has finished its business, I hear."

"But I will catch him, all the same. Of course, as to whether he will be prepared to settle his account with me, that is another question. " His majesty had larger matters on his mind than the imperial mathematician's unpaid salary. Kepler sat upright suddenly, slopping his punch. The saddlebags! He rose, making for the door. "Where is my horse, what has become of my horse?" Billig had sent it to the stables. "But my bags, my my… my bags!"

"The boy will bring them. "

"O." Kepler, moaning, turned this way and that. All of his papers were in those satchels, including a stamped and sealed imperial order for the payment of 4,000 florins from the crown's debt to him. The merest tip of something unspeakable was shown him briefly with a grin and then whisked away. Aghast, he sat down again, slowly. "What?"

Hillebrand Billig leaned down to him, mouthing elaborately. "I say, I will go out myself and bring them in, your bags, yes?"

"Ah."

"Are you unwell, Doctor?"

"No no… thank you."

He was trembling. He remembered out of his childhood a recurring dream, in which a series of the most terrible tortures and catastrophes was unfolded leisurely before him, while someone whom he could not see looked on, watching his reactions with amusement and an almost friendly attention. Just now that vision, whatever to call it, had been like that, the same slick flourish and the sense of muffled gloating. That was more, surely, than simply fear for his possessions? He shivered. "Eh?" Frau Billig had spoken. "Beg pardon, ma'am?"

"Your family," she said, louder, smiling nervously and plucking at her apron; "Frau Kepler, and the children?"

"O, they are very well, very well. Yes." A faint spasm, almost a pain, passed through him. It took him a moment to identify it. Guilt! As if by now he were not familiar with that. "We have lately had a wedding, you know. "

Hillebrand Billig returned then, with rain in his beard, and set down the saddlebags on the hearth.

"Ah, good," Kepler mumbled, "very kind." He put up his feet on the bags, offering his toes to the blaze: let the chilblains suffer a little too, and serve them right. "Yes, a wedding. Our dear Regina has gone from us. " He looked up into the Billigs' puzzled silence. "But what am I saying? I mean of course Susan. " He coughed, raking up an oyster. His head hummed. "The match was made in heaven, when Venus whispered in the ear of my young assistant, Jakob Bartsch, a stargazer also, and a doctor of medicine." And when the goddess had become discouraged, seeing what a timid specimen was this Adonis, Kepler himself had taken up her task. Pangs of guilt then, too. Such bullying! He wondered if he had done right. There was much of her mother in that girl. Poor Bartsch. "Young Ludwig, my eldest boy, also is going for medicine." He paused. "And neither have I been idle: another little one, last April, a girl," leering sheepishly at the fire. Frau Billig rattled the pots on the stove: she disapproved of his young wife. So had Regina. It would be a marriage, she had written to him, if my Herr Father had no child. A curious way of putting it. He had read much into that letter, too much. Foolish and sinful dreams. She was only hinting again about that damned inheritance. And he had replied that she might mind her own business, that he would marry when, and whom, he liked. But ah, Regina, what I could not say was that she reminded me of you.

Three times the name Susanna had occurred in his life, two daughters, one dead in infancy, one married now, and then at last a wife. Someone had been trying to tell him something. Whoever it was, was right. He had chosen her out of eleven candidates. Eleven! The comedy of it struck him only afterwards. He could no longer remember them all. There had been the widow Pauritsch of Kunstadt, who had tried to use his motherless children in plying her case, and that mother and daughter, each one eager to sell him the other, and fat Maria with her curls, the Helmhard woman who was built like an athlete, and that titled one, what was her name, a very Gorgon: all with advantages, their houses, their rich fathers, and he had chosen a penniless orphan, Susanna Reuttinger of Eferding, despite universal opposition. Even her guardian, the Baroness von Star-hemberg, had considered her too lowly a match for him.

She was twenty-four the first time he met her, at the Star-hembergs' house in Linz: a tall, slightly ungainly and yet handsome girl, with fine eyes. Her silence unnerved him. She spoke hardly a word that first day. He had thought she would laugh at him, a fussy middle-aged little man with weak sight, his beard already streaked with grey. Instead she attended him with a kind of tender intensity, leaning down to him her solemn grey eyes and downturned mouth. It was not that she much resembled Regina, but there was something, an air of ordered self-containment, and he was pierced. She was a cabinetmaker's daughter, like you, like you.

"Anna Maria we have called the baby," he said, and Anna Billig consented to smile. "A pretty name, I think."

Seven children Susanna had borne him. The first three had died in infancy. He wondered then if he had married another Barbara Müller née Müller. She saw him think it, watching him with that sad, apprehensive gaze. Yet he suspected, and was filled with wonder at the notion, that she was not hurt by it, but only concerned for him and his loss, his sense of betrayal.

She asked so little! She had brought him happiness. And now he had abandoned her. "Yes," he said, "a pretty name."

He closed his eyes. Waves of wind washed against the house, and beyond the noise of the rain he fancied he could hear the river. The fire warmed him. Trapped gas piped a tiny tune deep in his gut. This brute comfort made him think again of his childhood. Why? There had been precious few log fires and mugs of punch in old Sebaldus's house. But he carried within him a vision of lost peace and order, a sphere of harmony which had never been, yet to which the idea of childhood seemed an approximation. He belched, and laughed silently at the spectacle of himself, a sodden old dolt dozing in his boots, maundering over the lost years. He should fall asleep, with blubber mouth agape and dribbling, that would complete the picture. But that other roaring fire up his backside kept him awake. The dog yelped, dreaming of rats.

"Well, Billig, you tell me the electoral congress is finished its business?"

"Aye, it has. The princes have left already." "And about time for them to finish, they have had six months at it. Has the young rake's succession been assured?" "They do say so, Doctor. "

"I must be quick then, eh, if I am to have satisfaction of his father?"

The Billigs laughed with him, but weakly. His heartiness, he saw, did not fool them. They were itching to know the real reason why he had fled home and family to come on this lunatic venture. He would have liked to know, himself. Satisfaction, was that what he was after? The promise of 4,000 florins was still in his bag, with the seal unbroken. This time most likely he would receive another, equally useless piece of parchment to keep it company. Three emperors he had known, poor Rudolph, the usurper Matthias his brother, and now the wheel of his misfortune had come full circle and his old enemy Ferdinand of Styria, scourge of the Lutherans, wore the crown. Kepler would never have gone near him, were it not for that unsettled debt. It was ten months to the day since he had last accosted him.

Old it had been that morning, the sky like a bruised gland and a taste of metal in the air, and everything holding its breath under an astonishment of fallen snow. Soiled white boulders of ice lolled on the river. In the dark before dawn he had lain awake, listening in fright to the floes breaking before the bow, the squeaking and the groans and the sudden flurries of cracks like distant musket-fire. They docked at first light. The quayside was deserted save for a mongrel with a swollen belly chasing the slithering hawser. The bargemaster scowled at Kepler, his oniony breath defeating even the stink seeping up from the cargo of pelts in the hold. " Prague," he said, with a contemptuous wave, as if he had that moment manufactured the silent city rising behind him in the freezing mist. Kepler had haggled over the fare.

He had come from Ulm with the first printed copies of the Tabulae Rudolphinae. On the way that time also he had paused at Regensburg, where Susanna was lodging at the Billigs'. It was Christmas, and he had not seen her and the children for almost a year, yet he could not be idle. The Jesuits at Dillengen had shown him letters from their priests in China, asking for news of the latest astronomical discoveries, and now he set himself at once to composing a little treatise for the missionaries' use. The children hardly remembered him. He would stop, feeling their eyes on his back as he worked, but when he turned they would scurry off, whispering in alarrr, to the safety of Anna Billig's kitchen.

He had wanted to continue on again alone, but Susanna would not have it. She was not impressed by his talk of snowstorms, the frozen river. Her vehemence startled him. "I do not care if you are walking to Prague: we shall walk with you. "

"But…"

"But no, " she said, and again, more softly this time: "But no, Kepler dear," and smiled. She was thinking, he supposed, that it was not good for him to be so much alone.

"How kind you are, " he mumbled, "how kind. " Always he believed without question that others were better than he, more thoughtful, more honourable, a state of affairs for which the standing apology that was his life could not make up. His love for Susanna was a kind of inarticulate anguish choking his heart, yet it was not enough, not enough, like everything else that he did and was. Eyes awash, he took her hands in his, and, not trusting himself to speak further, nodded his soggy gratitude.

They lodged in Prague at The Whale by the bridge. The children were too cold to cry. The wharfinger's men rolled his precious barrel of books up from the quay, through the snow and the filth. Fortunately he had packed it with wadding and lined the staves with oilskin. The Tables were a handsome folio volume. Twenty years, on and off, he had devoted to that work! It contained the most of him, he knew, though not the best. His finest flights were in the World Harmony and the Astronomia nova, even the Mysterium, his first. He knew he had wasted too much time on the Tables. A year, two at the most, would have done it, when the Dane was dead and he had the observations, if he had concentrated. It might have made his fortune. Now, with everybody too busy at each other's throats to bother with such works, he would be lucky to recoup the cost of printing. Some there were who were interested still- but what did he care for converting the Chinee, and to popery at that? Sailors, though, would bless his name, explorers and adventurers. He had always liked the notion of those hardy seafarers poring over the charts and diagrams of the Tabulae, their piercing eyes scanning the bleached pages. It was they, not the astronomers, who made his books live. And for a moment his mind would range out over immensities, feel the blast of sun and salt wind, hear the gales howl in the rigging: he, who had not ever even seen the ocean!

He was not prepared for Prague, the new spirit that seemed abroad in the city. The court had returned from its Viennese seat for the coronation of Ferdinand's son as King of Bohemia; at first Kepler was charmed, imagining that the age of Rudolph had returned with it. He had been afraid, coming here, and not only of the ice on the river. The war was going well for the Catholic parties, and Kepler remembered how, thirty years before, Ferdinand had hounded the Protestant heretics out of Styria. At the palace everything was bustle and an almost gay confusion, where he had expected stillness and stealth. And the clothes! The yellow capes and scarlet stockings, the brocades and the frogging and the purple ribbons; he had never seen such stuffs, even in Rudolph's time. He might have been among a spawn of Frenchmen. But it was in the clothes that he quickly saw how wrong he had been. There was no new spirit, it was all show, a frantic paying of homage not to greatness but to mere might. These reds and purples were the bloody badge of the counter-reformation. And Ferdinand had not changed at all.

If Rudolph had reminded Kepler, especially toward the end, of someone's mother come to her dotage, Ferdinand his cousin had the look of a dissatisfied wife. Pallid and paunchy, with delicate legs, he held himself off from the astronomer with a tensed preoccupied air, as if waiting for his taster to arrive and take a nibble before risking a closer approach. He was given to long unnerving silences, a trick inherited from his predecessors, dark pools in the depths of which swam the indistinct forms of suspicion and accusation. The eyes stared out like weary sentinels guarding that preposterous fat nose, their gaze blurred and pale, and Kepler felt not pierced but, rather, palped. He wondered idly if the imperial surliness might be due to a windy gut, for Ferdinand kept bringing up soft little belches, which he caught in his fingertips like a conjuror palming illusory baubles.

He managed the sickly shadow of a smile when Kepler arrived in his presence. The Tables pleased him: he had pretensions to learning. He summoned a secretary, and with a flourish dictated an order for 4,000 florins in acknowledgment of the astronomer's labours and to cover the expense of printing, even adding a memorandum to the effect that 7,817 florins were still owed. Kepler shifted from one foot to another, mumbling and simpering. Imperial magnanimity was always an ominous sign. Ferdinand dismissed him with a not unfriendly wave, but still he tarried.

"Your majesty," he said, "has been most kind, most generous. There is not only the matter of this ample grant. It betokens a noble spirit indeed, that he has maintained me in my position as mathematicus, though I profess a creed which is anathema in his realm. "

Ferdinand, startled and faintly alarmed, turned a poached eye on him. The title of imperial mathematician, which Kepler continued to hold since Rudolph's time, was by now no more than formal, but, in the midst of a confessional war, he meant to keep it. "Yes, yes," the Emperor said vaguely. "Well…" A pause. The secretary watched Kepler with brazen amusement, biting the tip of his pen. Kepler was wondering if he had made a tactical mistake. That was the kind of petitioning, oblique and well sugared with flattery, that Rudolph had expected: but this was Ferdinand. "Your religion, " the Emperor said, "yes, it is, ah, an embarrassment. We understood that you were leaning toward conversion?" Kepler sighed; that old lie. He said nothing. Ferdinand's plump lower lip crept up to nibble a strand of his moustache. "Well, it is no great matter. Every man is entitled to profess as he… as he…" He caught Kepler's eager, harried gaze, and could not bring himself to finish it. The secretary coughed, and they both turned and looked at him, and Kepler was gratified to see how quickly he wiped the smirk off his foxy face. "But, no, it is no matter, " the Emperor said, lifting a bejewelled hand. "The war, of course, makes difficulties. The army, and the people, look to us for guidance and example, and we must be… careful. You understand."

"Yes, of course, your majesty." He understood. There would be no place for him at Ferdinand's court. He felt, suddenly, immensely old and tired. A door at the far end of the hall opened, and a figure entered and came toward them, hands clasped behind him and head bent, considering his brilliant black hip-boots pacing the checkered marble. Ferdinand eyed him with something like distaste. "You are still here, " he said, as if it were an ignoble trick that had been played on him. "Doctor Kepler, General von Wallenstein, our chief commander."

The general bowed. "I think I know you, sir," he said. Kepler looked at him blankly.

"He thinks he knows you, " said Ferdinand; the idea amused him.

"I think, yes, I think we have had some contact, " the general said. "A long time ago-twenty years ago, in fact-I sent by devious routes a request to a certain stargazer in Graz, whose reputation I knew, to draw up a horoscope for me. The result was impressive: a full and uncannily accurate account of my character and doings. It was the more impressive, in that I had warned my agents not to divulge my name."

Tall windows on the left showed them a view down the Hradcany to the snowbound city. Kepler had stood once at just this spot, before this very view, with the Emperor Rudolph, discussing the plan for the Tabulae Rudolphinae. How slyly things rearrange themselves! Stargazer. He remembered. "Well, sir," he said, smiling tentatively, "it was not hard to find, you know, so eminent a name."

"Ah. Then you knew it was I." He shook his head, disappointed. "Even so, you did wonderfully well."

The Emperor grunted and turned morosely aside, abandoning them to each other with the air of a small boy whose ball has been taken from him by a bully. The toy had been not much prized, anyway.

"Come, " said the general, and put a hand on Kepler's arm, "we must have a talk. "

Thus began what was to be a brief and turbulent connection. Kepler admired the neatness of the thing: he had come here to seek an Emperor's patronage, and was given instead a general. He was not ungrateful to the arranging fates. He was in need of refuge. A year ago he had said his bitter last farewell to Linz.

Not that Linz had been the worst of places. True, that town had been his despair for fourteen years, he had thought he would feel nothing but relief at leaving. Yet when the day came, a sliver of doubt got under the quick of his expectations. After all, he had his patrons there, the Starhembergs and the Tschernembls. He had friends too, Jakob Wincklemann the lens grinder, for instance. In that old obscurantist's house by the river he had spent many a merry night drinking and dreaming. And Linz had given him Susanna. It pained him that he, the imperial mathematician, should be reduced again to teaching sums to brats and the blockhead sons of merchants at a district school, yet even in that there was something, an eerie sense of being given a second chance at life, as if it were Graz and the Stiftsschule all over again.

Upper Austria was a haven for religious exiles from the west. Linz was almost a Württemberg colony. Schwarz the jurist was there, and Baltasar Gurald the district secretary, Württembergers both. Even Oberdorfer the physician turned up briefly, a corpulent and troubled ghost, with his stick and his pale eye and poisonous breath, looking not a day older than when, twenty years before, he had officiated at the deaths of Kepler's children. To show that he held no grudge, Kepler invited the doctor to stand as sponsor at the christening of Fridmar, his second surviving child by Susanna. Oberdorfer embraced his friend with tears in his eyes, gasping out his appreciation, and Kepler thought what a spectacle they must be, this old fraud, and the grizzled papa, clasped in each other's arms and blubbering beside the baby's cot.

But then also there was Daniel Hitzler. He was the chief pastor in Linz. Younger than Kepler, he had been through the same Württemberg schools; along the way he had picked up the threads of the scandalous reputation left behind by his turbulent predecessor. Kepler was flattered, for Hitzler seemed to think him a very dangerous fellow. The pastor was a cold stick, who cultivated the air of a grand inquisitor. Little signs, however, gave him away. That black cloak was too black, the beard too pointedly pointed. Kepler had used to laugh at him a little, but liked him all the same, and felt no rancour toward him, which was curious, for Hitzler was the one who had had him excommunicated.

Kepler had known all along that it would come to this. In the matter of faith he was stubborn. He could not fully agree with any party, Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist, and so was taken for an enemy by all three. Yet he saw himself at one with all Christians, whatever they might be called, by the Christian bond of love. He looked at the war with which God was rewarding a quarrelling Germany, and knew he was in the right. He followed the Augsburg Confession, and would not sign the Formula of Concord, which he disdained as a piece of politicking, a formula of words merely, and nothing to do with faith.

Effects and consequences obsessed him. Was there a link between his inner struggles and the general confessional crisis? Could it be his private agonisings in some way provoked the big black giant that was stalking Europe? His reputation as a crypto-Calvinist had denied him a post at Tübingen, his Lutheranism had forced him out of Graz to Prague, from Prague to Linz, and soon those dreadful footfalls would be shaking the walls of Wallenstein's palace in Sagan, his last refuge. Through the winter of 1619, from his look-out in Linz, he had followed the Calvinist Frederick Palatine's doomed attempt to wrest the crown of Bohemia from the Hapsburgs. He shivered at the thought of his own connections, however tenuous, with that disaster. Had he helped to direct the giant's gimlet gaze, by allowing Regina to marry in the Palatinate, by dedicating the Harmonice mundi to James of England, father-in-law to the Winter King Frederick? It was as in a dream, where it slowly dawns that you are the one who has committed the crime. He knew that these were grossly solipsistic conceits, and yet…

Hitzler would not admit him to Communion unless he would agree to ratify the Formula of Concord. Kepler was outraged. "Do you require this condition of every Communicant?"

Hitzler stared at him out of an aquatic eye, perhaps wondering if he were wading into depths wherein he might be drowned by this excitable heretic. "I require it of u, sir. "

"If I were a swineherd, or a prince of the blood, would you require it?"

"You have denied the omnipresence of the body of Christ and admitted that you agree with the Calvinists."

"There are some things, some things, mark you, on which I do not disagree with them. I reject the barbarous doctrine of predestination."

"You are set apart by your action in designating the Communion as a sign for that creed which was set down in the Formula of Concord, while at the same time contradicting this sign and defending its opposite." Hitzler fancied himself an orator. Kepler gagged.

"Pah! My argument, sir priest, is only that the preachers are become too haughty and do not abide by the old simplicity. Read the Church Fathers! The burden of antiquity shall be my justification."

"You are neither hot nor cold, Doctor, but tepid. " It went on for years. They met in Kepler's house, in Hitzler's, arguing into the night. They strolled by the river, Hitzler grave in his black cloak and Kepler waving his arms about and shouting, enjoying themselves despite all, and in a way playing with each other. When the Church representatives of Linz moved to dismiss Kepler from his post at the district school, and he was saved only by the influence of the barons, who approved his stand, Hitzler made no effort to help him, though he was a school inspector. The play ended there. What angered Kepler most was the hypocrisy. When he went out of the city, to the villages around, he was not refused Communion. There he found kind and simple priests, too busy curing the sick or delivering their neighbours' calves to bother with the doctrinal niceties of the Hitzlers. Kepler appealed his case to the Stuttgart Consistory. They sided against him. His last hope was to go in person to Tübingen and seek support from Matthias Hafenref-fer, Chancellor of the university.

Michael Mästlin was greatly aged since Kepler had last seen him. He had a distracted air, as if his attention were all the time being called away to something more pressing elsewhere. As Kepler recounted his latest woes the old man would now and then bestir himself, furtively apologetic, striving to concentrate. He shook his head and sighed. "Such difficulties you bring upon yourself! You are no longer a student, arguing in the taverns and shouting rebellion. Thirty years ago Iheard this talk from you, and nothing has changed. "

"No," said Kepler, "nothing has changed, not I nor the world. Would you have me deny my beliefs, or lie and say I accept whatever is the fashion of the day, in order to be comfortable?"

Mästlin looked away, pursing his lips. In the college grounds below his window the tawny sunlight of late autumn was burnishing the trees. "You think me an old fool and an old pander," Mästlin said, "but I have lived my life honestly and not without honour, as best I could. I am not a great man, nor have I attained the heights which you have-O, you may sigh, but these things are true. Perhaps it is your misfortune, and the cause of your troubles, that you did great things and made yourself prominent. The theologians will not worry if I flout the dogmas, but you, ah, that is a different thing. "

To that, Kepler had no reply. Presently Hafenreffer arrived. He had been Kepler's teacher here at Tübingen, and almost a friend. Kepler had never needed him before as he did now, and it made them shy of each other. If he could win the Chancellor to his side, and with him the theology faculty, the Consistory in Stuttgart would have to relent, for Tübingen was the seat of the Lutheran conscience. But Kepler saw, even before the Chancellor spoke, that his cause was lost. Matthias Hafenreffer also had aged, but with him the accumulation of years had been a refining process, honing him like a blade. He was what Hitzler played at being. His greeting was bland, but he bent on Kepler a keen glance. Mästlin was nervous of him, and began to fuss, calling plaintively for his servants. When none came, he rose himself and set out for his guests a jug of wine and a platter of bread, mumbling apologies for the poor fare. Hafenreffer smiled, eyeing the table. "A very suitable feast, Professor." Mästlin peered at him nervously, quite baffled. The Chancellor turned to Kepler. "Well, Doctor, what is all this I hear?" "That man Hitzler-"

"He is enthusiastic, yes: but scrupulous also, and a fine pastor."

"He has denied me Communion!"

"Unless you ratify the Concord, yes?"

"In God's name, he is excluding me because of the frankness with which I recognise that in this one article, of the omnipresence of the body of Christ, the early Fathers are more conclusive than your Concord! I can name in my support Origen, Fulgentius, Vigilius, Cyril, John of…"

"Yes, yes, no doubt; we are aware of the breadth of your scholarship; But you incline to the Calvinist conception in the doctrine of Communion. "

"I hold it self-evident that matter is incapable of transmutation. The body and soul of Christ are in Heaven. God, sir, is not an alchemist. "

In the stillness there was the sense of phantom witnesses starting back, shocked, their hands to their mouths. Hafenreffer sighed. "So. That is clear and honest. But I wonder, Doctor, if you have considered the implication of what you say? I mean in particular the implication that by this… this doctrine, you diminish the sacrament of Communion to a mere symbol. "

Kepler considered. "I should not say mere. Is not the symbol something holy, being at once itself and something other, greater? It is what may also be said, may it not, of Christ himself?"

That, he supposed afterwards, decided it. The affair dragged on for another year, but in the end Hitzler won, Kepler was excommunicated, and Hafenreffer broke with him. If you love me, the Chancellor wrote, then eschew this passionate excitement. It was sound advice, but ah, without passion he would not have been who he was. He packed his bags and set out for Ulm, where the Tabulae Rudolphinae were to be printed.

Elsewhere too the Keplers had been attracting the gigant's bloodshot glare. In the winter of 1616, after years of muttering and threats, the Swabian authorities moved officially to try his mother for a witch. She fled to Linz with her son Christoph. Kepler was appalled. "Why have you come? It will be taken for an admission of guilt. "

"There has been worse already, " Christoph said. "Tell him, mother."

The old woman looked away, sniffing.

"What worse?" Kepler asked, not really wanting to know. "What has happened?"

"She tried to bribe the magistrate, Einhorn," said Christoph, smoothing a wrinkle from his doublet.

Kepler groped behind him for a chair and sat down. Susanna laid a hand on his shoulder. Einhorn. All his life he had been hounded by people with names like that. "To bribe him? Why? How?"

Christoph shrugged. He was fifteen years younger than the astronomer, short and prematurely stout, with a low forehead and eyes of a peculiar violet tint. He had come to Linz chiefly to see his brother sweat over the bad news. "A wench," he said, "the daughter of this Reinbold woman, claims she suffered pains after our mother touched her on the arm. Einhorn was preparing a report of the matter for the chancery, and she offered him a silver cup if he would omit it. Didn't you, ma?"

"Jesus God," said Kepler faintly. "And what was the result?"

"Why, Einhorn was delighted, of course, since he is very thick with the Reinbold faction, and straightway reported the attempt to buy his silence, along with the other charges. It is a pretty mess."

"We are glad to see, " Susanna said, "that the matter is not so serious as to trouble you greatly."

Christoph stared at her. She met him stoutly, and Kepler felt her fingers tighten on his shoulder. "Hush, hush," he murmured, patting her hand, "we must not fight. "

Katharina Kepler spoke at last. "O no, he is not much put out, for he and your sister Margarete, and her holy husband the pastor, have sworn the three of them that they will desert me willingly if I am found in the wrong. So they told the magistrate. Isn't that a fine thing. "

Christoph reddened. Kepler contemplated him sadly, but without surprise. He had never managed to love his brother.

"We have our own good names to think of, " Christoph said, thrusting his chin at them. "What do you expect? She was warned. This past year alone in our parish they have burned a score of witches."

"God forgive you," Susanna said, turning away.

Christoph soon departed, muttering. The old woman stayed for nine months. It was a trying time. Old age nor her misfortunes had not dulled her sharp tongue. Kepler regarded her with rueful admiration. She had no illusions about the peril that she faced, yet he believed she was enjoying it all, in a queer way. She had never before had so much attention lavished on her. She took a lively interest in the details of her defence which Kepler was busy assembling. She did not deny the evidence against her, only challenged the interpretations being put on it. "And I know," she said, "what they are after, that whore Ursula Reinbold and the rest of them, Einhorn too, they want to get their hands on my few florins when we lose the action. Reinbold owes me money, you know. I say we should ignore them, and they'll get tired of waiting. "

Kepler groaned. "Mother, I have told you, the case has been reported to the ducal court of Württemberg. " He did not know whether to laugh or be angry at the flicker of pride that brightened her ancient eyes. "Far from waiting, we must press for an early hearing. It is they who are delaying, because they know how weak is their case and want more evidence. Enough damage has been done already. Why, I too am accused of dabbling in forbidden arts!"

"O yes," she said, "yes, you have your good name to think of."

"For God's sake, mother!"

She turned her face away, sniffing. "You know how it began? It was because I defended Christoph against the Rein-bold bitch."

"You told me, yes."

She meant to tell him again. "He was in some business with her tribe, and there was a dispute. And I defended him. And now he says he will abandon me. "

"Well, I shall not abandon you."

He was writing off cannonades in all directions, to Einhorn and his gang, to acquaintances in the juridical faculty at Tübingen, to the court of Württemberg. The replies were evasive, and vaguely menacing. He was becoming convinced that the highest powers were conspiring to damage him through the old woman. And behind that fear was another, harder to face. "Mother," he ventured, squirming, "mother tell me, truly, swear to me, that… that…"

She looked at him. "Have you not seen me riding about the streets at night on my cat?"

The trial date was set for September, in Leonberg. Christoph, who lived there, appealed at once to the ducal court and had the proceedings transferred to the village of Guglingen. When Kepler and his mother arrived, the old woman was taken and put in chains with two keepers in an open room in the tower gate. The gaolers, merry fellows, enjoyed theirjob. They were being well paid, from the prisoner's own funds. Ursula Rein-bold, seeing her prospective damages dwindling, demanded that the guard be reduced to one, while Christoph and his brother-in-law, Pastor Binder, reproached Kepler for allowing the expenses to mount alarmingly: he had insisted that her straw be changed daily, and that there should be a fire lit for her at night. The witnesses were heard, and the transcripts sent to Tübingen, where Kepler's friends in the law faculty decided that the evidence was such that the old woman should be questioned further under threat of torture.

It was a tawny autumn day when they led her to the chamber behind the courthouse. A breeze moved lazily over the grass, like a sweeping of invisible wings. Einhorn the magistrate was there, a wiry little man with a drop on the end of his nose, and various clerks and court officials. The party made a slow progress, for Frau Kepler was still suffering the effects of her chains. Kepler supported her, trying in vain to think of some comforting word. The strangest thoughts came into his head. On thejourney from Linz he had read the Dialogue on ancient and modern music by Galileo's father, and now snatches of that work came back to him, like melodies grand and severe, and he thought of the wind-tossed sad singing of martyrs on their way to the stake.

They entered a low thatched shed. It was dark here after the sunlight, except in the far corner where a brazier stood throbbing, eager and intent, like a living thing. A tooth in Kepler's jaw suddenly began to ache. The air was stifling, but he felt cold. The place reminded him of a chapel, the hush, the shuffling of feet and the muffled coughs, the sense of rapt waiting. There was a hot smell, a mingling of sweat and burning coals, and something else, bitter and brassy, which was, he supposed, the stink of fear. The instruments were laid out on a low trestle table, grouped according to purpose, the thumbscrews and the gleaming knives, the burning rods, the pincers. Here were the tools of a craftsman. The torturer stepped forward, a fine tall fellow with a bushy beard, who was also the village dentist.

"Grüss Gott," he said, touching a finger to his forehead, and bent a grave appraising eye upon the old woman. Einhorn coughed, releasing a sour waft of beer.

"I charge you, sir, " he said, stumbling through the formula, "to present before this woman here arraigned the instruments of persuasion, that in God's grace she may bethink herself, and confess her crimes. " He had a wide smudged upper lip, a kind of prehensile flap; the drop at the end of his nose glittered in the glare of the brazier. Not once during all the days of the hearing had he looked Kepler in the eye. He hesitated, that lip groping blindly for words, and then stepped back a pace, colliding with one of his assistants. "Proceed, man, proceed!"

The torturer in silence, lovingly, one by one displayed his tools. The old woman turned away.

"Look upon them!" Einhorn said. "See, she does not weep, even now, the creature!"

Frau Kepler shook her head. "I have wept so often in my life, I have no tears left. " Suddenly, groaning, she fell to her knees in a grotesque parody of supplication. "Do with me as you please! Even if you pull one vein after another from my body, I would have nothing to admit." She clasped her hands and began to wail a paternoster. The torturer looked about uncertainly. "Arn I required to pierce her?" he asked, taking up an iron.

"Leave it now," said Kepler, as if calling a halt to an unruly children's game. The sentence had been that she should be threatened only. A general snuffling and muttering broke out, and everyone turned away. Einhorn scuttled off. Thus years of litigation were ended. The absurdity of the thing overwhelmed Kepler. Outside, he leaned his head against the sun-warmed brick wall and laughed. Presently he realised that he was weeping. His mother stood by, dazed and a little embarrassed, patting his shoulder. The seraph's wings of the wind swooped about them. "Where will you go now?" Kepler said, wiping his nose.

"Well, I will go home. Or to Heumaden, to Margarete's house," where, within a twelvemonth, in her bed, with much complaining and crying out, she was to die.

"Yes, yes, go to Heumaden. " He knuckled his eyes, peering helplessly at the trees, the sky of evenings a distant spire. He realised, with amazement, and a sick heave, that he was, yes, it was the only word, disappointed. Like the rest of them, including even, perhaps, his mother, he had wanted something to happen; not torture necessarily, but something, and he was disappointed. "O God, mother."

"There now, hush. "

By decree of the Duke of Württemberg she was declared innocent and immediately set free. Einhorn and Ursula Rein-bold and the rest were directed to pay the trial costs. It was for the Keplers a great victory. Yet, mysteriously, there was a loss also. When Kepler returned to Linz he found his old friend Wincklemann the lens grinder gone. His house by the river was shuttered and empty, the windows all smashed. Kepler could not rid himself of the conviction that somewhere, in some invisible workshop of the world, the Jew's fate and the trial verdict had been spatchcocked together, with glittering instruments, by the livid light of a brazier. Something, after all, had happened.

Weeks passed, and months, and nothing was heard of the Jew. Kepler was drawn again and again to the little house on River Street. It was a pin-hole in the surface of a familiar world, through which, if only he could find the right way to apply his eye, he might glimpse enormities. He worked a ritual, walking rapidly twice or thrice past the shop with no more than a covert glance, and then abruptly stopping to rap on the door and wait, before giving himself up, with hands cupped about his face, to a long and inexplicably satisfying squint through the cracks in the shutters. The gloom within was peopled with vague grey shapes. If one of them someday should move! Stepping back then he would shake his head and depart slowly in seeming puzzlement.

He laughed at himself: for whose benefit was he performing this dumbshow? Did he imagine there was a conspiracy being waged against him, with spies everywhere, watching him?

The idea, with which at first he had mocked himself, began to take hold. Yet even in his worst moments of fright and foreboding he did not imagine that there was any human power behind the plot. Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existing, will generate effects and influences. So he reasoned, and then worried all the more. A palpable enemy would have been one thing, but this, vast and impersonal… When he made enquiries among the Jew's neighbours he met only silence. The locksmith next door, a flaxen-haired giant with a club foot, glared at him for a long moment, his jaw working, and then turned away saying: "We minds our own affairs down here, squire." Kepler watched the brute clump away into his shop, and he thought of the lens-grinder's wife, plump and young, until his mind averted itself, unable to bear the possibilities.

And then one day something shifted, with an almost audible clanking of cogs and levers, and there was, as it seemed, an attempt to make good his loss.

He recognised him a long way off by his walk, that laborious stoop and swing, as if at each pace he were moulding an intricate shape out of resistant air before him and then stepping gingerly into it. Kepler suddenly remembered a crowded hall at Benatek, and the summoner coming down from his master's table and saying silkily, as so often, you ar wanted, sir, the great head smiling up from its platter of dingy lace and one hand settling stealthily on the edge of the table like saurian jaws. But something was changed with him now. His gait was more tortured than of old, and he advanced with his face warily inclined, clutching jealously the stirrup strap of a piebald pony.

"Why, Sir Mathematicus, is it you?" palping the air with an outstretched hand. Second sight was all that was left him, his eye sockets were empty asterisks: he had been blinded.

It was sixteen years since they had last met, at Tycho's funeral in Prague. Jeppe had not aged. The blinding had drained his face of everything save a kind of childlike attentive-ness, so that he seemed to be listening constantly past the immediate to something far away. He was dressed in beggar's rig. "A disguise, of course, " he said, and snickered. He was on his way to Prague. He showed no sign of surprise at their meeting.

Perhaps for him, Kepler thought, in that changeless dark, time operated differently, and sixteen years was as nothing.

They went to a tavern on the wharf. Kepler chose one where he was not known. He gave it out that he also was passing through on his way elsewhere. He was not sure why he felt the need to dissemble. Jeppe's blank face was bent upon him intently, smiling at the lie, and he blushed, as if those puckered wounds were seeing him. It was quiet in the tavern. In a corner two old men sat playing a decrepit game of dominoes. The taverner brought two mugs of ale. He looked at the dwarf with curiosity and faint disgust. Kepler's shame increased. He should have invited the creature home.

"Tengnagel is dead, you knew that?" Jeppe said. "He did you some wrong, I think."

"Yes, we had differences. I did not hear he had died. What of his wife, the Dane's daughter?"

The dwarf smiled and shook his head, savouring a secret joke. "And Mistress Christine too, dead. So many of them dead, and only you and I still here, sir. " In the tavern window suddenly there loomed the rust-red sail of a schooner plying upriver. The dominoes clattered, and one of the old men mumbled an oath.

"And what of the Italian?" Kepler asked.

It seemed for a moment the dwarf had not heard, but then he said:

"I have not seen him for many years. He took me to Rome when Master Tycho was dead. What times!" It was a garish tale. Kepler saw the pines and the pillars and the stone lions, the sunlight on marble, heard the laughter of painted whores. "He was a hard man in those days, given to duels and scuffles, a great gambler at the dice, spinning from one game to another with a sword at his side and his fool, your humble servant, sir, behind him." He reached out a hand, groping for his mug; Kepler stealthily slid it into his grasp. "You remember when we nursed him, sir, in the Dane's house? That wound never fully healed. He swore he could tell coming changes in the weather by it."

"We thought he would die," Kepler said.

The dwarf nodded. "You had regard for him, sir, you saw his worth, as I did. "

Kepler was startled. Was it true? "There was much life in him," he said. "But he is a scoundrel, for all that."

"O yes!" There was a pause, and Jeppe suddenly laughed. "I will tell you something to cheer you, all the same. You knew the Dane let Tengnagel marry his daughter because the wench was with child? But the brat was none of Tengnagel's doing. Felix had been there before him. "

"And did the Junker know?"

"Surely. But he would not care. His only interest was to share in the Brahe fortune. You above all, though, sir, should appreciate thejoke. What Tengnagel cheated you of is now inherited by the Italian's bastard."

"Yes," Kepler said, "it is a pretty notion, " and laughed, but uneasily; between the cuckold and the cuckoo there was not much to choose. He felt a familiar unease; the dwarf knew too much. "Where is the Italian now?" he asked. "In prison, or on the run again?"

Jeppe called for more ale, and left Kepler to pay for it.

"Why, both, in a manner of speaking," he said. "He could never be at peace, that one. In Rome he might have been a gentleman, for he had friends and patrons, and was favoured even by the Pope, Her Holiness Clement, as he would have it. But he drank too much and diced too much, and spoke too freely, and made enemies. In a brawl one day over the score in a game of racquets he ran a player through the throat and killed him. We fled the city, and took sail for Malta, where he thought the Knights would give us shelter. They put him in prison. He was a turbulent guest, though, as you may imagine, and after a week they were glad to let him escape. " A cat leaped with swift grace on to the counter where the taverner leaned, listening. Jeppe took a drink of ale and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "For months we wandered through the Mediterranean ports, with the Vatican 's spies on our heels. Then we heard talk of a papal pardon, and though I warned him it was a trick he would have nothing but to return to Rome. At Port' Ercole the customs men, Spanish louts, took him for a smuggler and threw him in the cells. When they let him go at last, our ship for Rome had sailed. He stood on the beach and watched it depart, the red sail, I remember it. He wept for rage and for himself, beaten at last. His baggage had been already put aboard, and he had nothing left. "

They left the tavern. A raw wind was blowing off the river, and snowflakes whirled in the air. Kepler helped the dwarf to mount up. "Farewell," Jeppe said, "we shall not meet again, I think." The pony stamped and snuffled nervously, smelling the impending storm. Jeppe smiled, the blind face puckering. "He died, you know, sir, on that beach at Port' Ercole, cursing God and all Spaniards. Old wounds had opened, and he had the fever. I held his hand at the end. He gave me a ducat to buy a Mass for him."

Kepler looked away. Sorrow welled up in him, intense and amazing as tears in sleep, and as brief. "There was much life in him," he said.

Jeppe nodded. "I think you envied him that, sir?"

"Yes," with mild surprise, "yes, I envied him that. "He gave the dwarf a florin.

"Another Mass? You are kind, sir."

"How will you live in Prague? Will you find a position?"

"O but I have a position. "

"Yes?"

"Yes," and smiled again. As he watched him ride slowly away through the snow, Kepler realised that he had not thought to ask who it was had blinded him. Maybe it was better not to know.

That night he had a dream, one of those involuntary great dark plots that now and then the sleeping mind will hatch, elaborate and enigmatic and full of inexplicable significance. Familiar figures appeared, sheepish and a little crazed, dream actors who had not had time to learn their parts. The Italian came forward, clad as a knight of the Rosy Cross. In his arm he carried a little gilded statue, which sprang alive suddenly and spoke. It had Regina 's face. A solemn and complex ceremony was being celebrated, and Kepler understood that this was the alchemical wedding of darkness and light. He woke into the dim glow of a winter dawn. The snow was falling fast outside, the vague shadow of it moved on the wall by his bed. A strange happiness reigned in his heart, as if a problem that had been with him all his life had at last been decided; a happiness so firm and fine it was not dispelled even when he remembered that, six months before, in her twenty-seventh year, in the Palatinate, of a fever of the brain, Regina had died.

The after-image of that dream never entirely faded. Its silvery glimmer was mysteriously present in every page of his book of the harmony of the world, which he finished in a sudden frenzy in the spring of 1618. The empire was charging headlong into war, but he hardly noticed. For thirty years he had been accumulating the material and the tools for this, the final synthesis. Now, like a demented fisherman, he hauled in the lines of his net from all directions. He was entranced. Times he found himself at table, or walking the city wall in the rain, with only the vaguest recollection of how he had come there. Answering a remark of Susanna's, it would dawn on him that an hour had passed since she had spoken. At night the spinning coils of his brain blundered into a sack of sleep, and in the morning struggled out again enmeshed in the same thoughts, as if there had been no interruption. He was no longer a young man, his health was poor, and sometimes he pictured himself a thing of rags and straw dangling limply from a huge bulbous head, like those puppets he had coveted as a child, strung up by their hair in the dollmaker's shop.

The Harmonia mundi was for him a new kind of labour. Before, he had voyaged into the unknown, and the books he brought back were fragmentary and enigmatic charts apparently unconnected with each other. Now he understood that they were not maps of the islands of an Indies, but of different stretches of the shore of one great world. The Harmonia was their synthesis. The net that he was drawing in became the grid-lines of a globe. It seemed to him an apt image, for were not the sphere and the circle the very bases of the laws of world harmony? Years before, he had defined harmony as that which the soul creates by perceiving how certain proportions in the world correspond to prototypes existing in the soul. The proportions everywhere abound, in music and the movements of the planets, in human and vegetable forms, in men's fortunes even, but they are all relation merely, and inexistent without the perceiving soul. How is such perception possible? Peasants and children, barbarians, animals even, feel the harmony of the tone. Therefore the perceiving must be instinct in the soul, based in a profound and essential geometry, that geometry which is derived from the simple divisioning of circles. All that he had for long held to be the case. Now he took the short step to the fusion of symbol and object. The circle is the bearer of pure harmonies, pure harmonies are innate in the soul, and so the soul and the circle are one.

Such simplicity, such beauty. These were the qualities which sustained him through exhaustion and the periodic bouts of rage before the intractability of the material. The ancients had sought to explain harmony by the mysticism of numbers, and had foundered in complexity and worthless magic. The reason why certain ratios produce a concord and others discord is not to be found in arithmetic, however, but in geometry, and specifically in the divisioning of the circle by means of the regular polygons. There was the beauty. And the simplicity was that harmonious results are produced only by those polygons which can be constructed with the compass and ruler alone, the tools of classical geometry.

Man he would show to be truly the magnum miraculum. The priests and the astrologers would have it that we are nothing, clay and ash and humours. But God had created the world according to the same laws of harmony which the swineherd holds in his heart. Do the planetary aspects influence us? Yes, but the Zodiac is no truly existing arc, only an image of the soul projected upon the sky. We do not suffer, but act, are not influenced but are ourselves the influences.

These were airy heights in which he moved. He grew dizzy. His eyesight was worsening, everything he looked on trembled as if under water or smoke. Sleep became a kind of helpless tumbling through black space. Alighting from some high leap of thought, he would find Susanna shaking him in alarm, as if he were a night-walker whom she had saved from the brink.

"What is it, what?" he mumbled, thinking of fire and flood, the children dead, his papers stolen. She held his face in her hands.

"  Kepler, Kepler…"

Now he went all the way back to the Mysterium, and the theory which through the years had been his happiness and his constant hope, the incorporation of the five regular solids within the intervals of the planets. His discovery of the ellipse law in the Astronomia noua had dealt a blow to that idea, but a blow not heavy enough to destroy his faith. Somehow the rules of plane harmony must be made to account for the irregularities in this model of the world. The problem delighted him. The new astronomy which he had invented had destroyed the old symmetries; then he must find new and finer ones.

He began by seeking to assign to the periods of revolution of the planets the harmonic ratios dictated by musical measurement. It would not work. Next he tried to discern a harmonic series in the sizes or volumes of the planets. Again he failed. Then he sought to fit the least and greatest solar distances into a scale, examined the ratios of the extreme velocities, and of the variable periods required by each planet to rotate through a unit length of its orbit. And then at last, by the nice trick of siting the position of observation not on earth but in the sun, and from there computing the variations in angular velocities which the watcher from the sun could be expected to see, he found it. For in setting the two extremes of velocity thus observed against each other, and in combined pairs among the other planets, he derived the intervals of the complete scale, both the major and the minor keys. The heavenly motions, he could then write, are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.

He was not finished yet, not by a long way. In the Mysterium he had asked what is the connection between the time a planet takes to complete its orbit, and its distance from the sun, and had not found a satisfactory answer. Now the question came back more urgent than ever. Since the sun governs planetary motion, as he held to be the case, then that motion must be connected with the solar distances, or else the universe is a senseless and arbitrary structure. This was the darkest hour of his long night. For months he laboured over the problem, wielding the Tychonic observations like the enormous letter-wheels of a cabalist. When the solution came, it came, as always, through a back door of the mind, hesitating shyly, an announcing angel dazed by the immensity of its journey. One morning in the middle of May, while Europe was buckling on its sword, he felt the wing-tip touch him, and heard the mild voice say I am here.

It seemed a nothing, the merest trifle. It sat on the page with no more remarkable an air than if it had been, why, anything, a footnote in Euclid, one of Galileo's anagrams, a scrap of nonsense out of a schoolboy's bad dream, and yet it was the third of his eternal laws, and the supporting bridge between the harmonic ratios and the regular solids. It said that the squares of the periods of evolution of any two planets are to each other as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. It was his triumph. It showed him that the discrepancies in distance which were left over after the insertion of the regular polygons between the orbits of the planets were not a defect of his calculations, but the necessary consequences of the dominant principle of harmony. The world, he understood at last, is an infinitely more complex and subtle construct than he or anyone else had imagined. He had listened for a tune, but here were symphonies. How mistaken he had been to seek a geometrically perfected, closed cosmos! A mere clockwork could be nothing beside the reality, which is the most harmonic possible. The regular solids are material, but harmony is form. The solids describe the raw masses, harmony prescribes the fine structure, by which the whole becomes that which it is, a perfected work of art.

Two weeks after the formulation of that law the book was finished. He set about the printing at once, in a kind of panic, as if fire or flood, his greatest fears, or some other hobgoblin, might strike him down before he could make public his testament. Besides, the printing was a kind of work, and how could he simply stop? The trajectory he had long ago entered on would take time to run down, would sweep him through further books, the scrag-ends of his career. And even if he had been capable of rest, rest was not permissible, for then he would have had to face, in the dreadful stillness, the demon that has started up at his back, whose hot breath was on his neck.

For years the World Harmony had obsessed him, a huge weight pinning him down; now he was aware of a curious feeling of lightness, of levity almost, as if he had drunk again a dose of Wincklemann's drugged wine. That was the demon. He recognised it. He had known it before, the selfsame feeling, when, in the Astronomia nova, he had blithely discarded years of work for the sake of an error of a few minutes of arc, not because he had been wrong all those years-though he had-but in order to destroy the past, the human and hopelessly defective past, and begin all over again the attempt to achieve perfection: that same heedless, euphoric sense of teetering on the brink while the gleeful voice at his ear whispered jump.

 her and far less inviting precipices appeared under his feet. The world that once had seemed so wide was becoming narrower daily. The Palatinate's army had been crushed in the battle of Weisser Berg and Bohemia regained by the Catholics, but the war of the religions still raged. The Empire was ablaze and he was on the topmost storey. He could hear the flames roaring behind him, the crash of masonry and splintering timber as another staircase gave way. Before him there was only the shivered window and the sudden chill blue air. When in the autumn of 1619 the Elector Frederick and his wife Princess Elizabeth entered Prague to accept the crown offered him by the Bohemian Protestants, the World Harmony had been on the presses, and Kepler had had time to suppress only in a few final copies the dedication to James of England, the Princess's father. He had not needed that connection to mark him out as suspect. Even his attacks on the brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, and his dispute with the English Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, had won him no praise: the imperial parties, so he heard, were asking what he had to hide, that he should flaunt this too enthusiastic loyalty to his Catholic Emperor Ferdinand. He despaired, he was no good at politics. He was not even sure any longer who was fighting whom in the war. The Bohemian barons had not accepted the defeat of Weisser Berg, but they were a local disturbance: now there was talk of French and even Danish involvement. Kepler was baffled. Could these far-off kingdoms really care so much for religion and the fate of little Bohemia? It must be all a conspiracy. The Rosicrucians were to blame, or the Vatican.

Presently, as he knew it would, the old wheel turned: all Lutherans were ordered out of Linz. As the Emperor's mathematician, in title at least, Kepler could hope for immunity. He gave up his pilgrimages to Wincklemann's deserted shop, and stayed away from religious services. But the invisible plotters would not be thus easily put off. His library was confiscated by the Catholic authorities. He bitterly admired the accuracy of their aim; it was a hard blow to bear. And then, it was almost comic, Lutheranism threw up a tormentor of its own in the shape of Pastor Hitzler. Kepler felt himself backed into a corner, an old, puzzled rat.

The public turmoil was matched in the darkness of his heart, where a private war was raging. He could not tell what was the cause of battle, nor what the prize that was being fought for. On one side was all that he held precious, his work, his love for wife and children, his peace of mind; on the other was that which he could not name, a drunken faceless power. Was it still, he wondered, the demon that had risen up out of the closing pages of the Harmonia mundi, grown fat on the world's misfortunes? That was when he began to suspect a connection between his inner ragings and Europe 's war, and feared for his sanity. He fled from the battlefield into the numbing grind of the Tabulae Rudolphinae. There, among the orderly marching columns of Tycho Brahe's lifework, he could hide. But not for long. Soon that manoeuvre was exhausted. Then he embarked on the first of his strange frantic wanderings. On the road he felt easier, the clash of battle within him stilled for a while by the pains and frustration of travel. It seemed to be what the demon wanted.

He used as excuse the moneys owed him by the crown. The printing of the Tables would be a costly business. He set out for Vienna and Ferdinand's court. After four months of haggling there he won a grudging part settlement of 6,000 florins. The Treasury, however, cleverer and more careful than the Emperor, immediately transferred responsibility for the payment to the three towns of Nuremberg, Kempten and Memmingen. Once more Kepler set off, seeming to hear Vienna break out in general hilarity behind him. By the end of winter he had collected from the tight-fisted trinity of towns 2,000 florins. It would buy the paper for the Tables. The effort had exhausted him, and he turned wearily towards home.

When he got to Linz he found the city transformed into a military camp. The Bavarian garrison sent in by the Emperor was billeted everywhere. At Plank the printer's a squad of soldiers was sprawled at feed among the presses, their stink overlaying the familiar smells of ink and machine oil. All work had stopped. They watched him incuriously as he danced before them in helpless rage. He might have dropped into their midst from another planet. They were for the most part the sons of poor farmers. When the printing got under way at last they began to display a childlike interest in the work: few of them had ever seen a machine working before. They would gather about Plank's men in silent groups, staring and softly breathing like cattle at a stile. The sudden white flourish of a pulled proof never failed to call forth a collective sigh of surprise and pleasure. Later on, when the amazing fact had soaked into their understanding that Kepler was the sole cause of all this mighty effort, they turned their awed attention on to him. They would jostle to get near him at the benches or the readers' desk, trying to sift out of his talk of fonts and colophons and faces some clue to the secret of his wizardry. And occasionally they would pluck up courage enough to offer him a mug ofbeer or a twist of tobacco, grinning furiously, at their boots and sweating. He grew accustomed to their presence, and ceased to heed them, except that now and then something spoke to him, at once faint and insistent, out of this warm noisome mass of life pressing at his back. Then he would fly into a rage again, and yell into their stunned faces, and stamp out of the shop, waving his arms.

In the spring the Lutheran peasantry revolted, sick of being harried, of being hungry, sick most of all of their arrogant Emperor. They swept across Upper Austria, delirious with success, unable to believe their own strength. By early summer they were at the walls of Linz. The siege lasted for two months. The city had been ill-prepared, and was quickly reduced to horse meat and nettle soup. Kepler's house was on the wall, and from his workroom he could look down across the moats and the suburbs where the fiercest fighting took place. How small the protagonists looked from up here, and yet how vivid their blood and their spilled guts. The smell of death bathed him about as he worked. A detachment of troops was quartered in his house. Some among them he recognised from the printing house. He had thought his children would be terrified, but they seemed to regard it all as a glorious game. One morning, in the midst of a bitter skirmish, they came to tell him that there was a dead soldier in his bed.

"Dead, you say? No, no, he is wounded merely; your mama put him there to rest. "

Cordula shook her head. Such a serious little girl! "He is dead, " she said firmly. "There is a fly in his mouth. "

Towards the end of June the peasant forces breached the wall one night and set fire to a section of streets before being repulsed. Plank's shop was destroyed, and with it all the sheets of the Tables so far printed. Kepler decided it was time to move. By October, the siege long since lifted and the peasants crushed, he had packed up everything that he owned and was on his way to Ulm, excommunicate and penniless, never to return.

In Ulm for a while he was almost happy. He had left Susanna and the children in Regensburg, and, alone once more after so many years, he felt as if time had magically fallen away and he was back in Graz, or Tübingen even, when life had not properly begun, and the future was limitless. The city physician Gregor Horst, an acquaintance from his Prague days, leased him a little house in Raben Alley. He found a printer one Jonas Saur. The work went well at first. He still imagined that the Tables would make his fortune. He spent his days in the printing house. On Saturday nights he and Gregor Horst would get quietly drunk together and argue astronomy and politics into the small hours.

But he could not be at rest for long. The old torment was rising once more in his heart. Saur the printer lived up to his name, and there were quarrels. Yet again Kepler turned his hopes toward Tübingen and Michael Mästlin; could Gruppenbach, who had printed the Mysterium, finish off for him the Tables? He wrote to Mästlin, and getting no reply he set out for Tübingen on foot. But it was February, the weather was bad, and after two days he found himself halted at a crossroads in the midst of turnip fields, exhausted and in despair, but not so far gone that he could not see, with wry amusement, how all his life was summed up in this picture of himself, a little man, wet and weary, dithering at a fork in the road. He turned back. The town council at Esslingen presented him with a horse, got from the town's home for the infirm. The beast bore him bravely enough to Ulm and then died under him. Again he saw the aptness of it, this triumphal entry, on a broken-down jade, into a city that hardly knew him. He made his peace with Jonas Saur, and at last, after twenty years, the Tables were hauled to completion.

Two kinsmen of Tycho Brahe called on him one day at his lodgings in Raben Alley, Holger Rosenkrands the statesman's son and the Norwegian Axel Gyldenstjern. They were on their way to England. Kepler considered. Wotton, King James's ambassador to Prague, had urged him once to come to England. Rosenkrands and Gyldenstjern would be happy to take him with them. Something held him back. How could he leave his homelands, however bad the convulsions of war? There was nothing for him but to go to Prague. He had the Tables at least to offer the Emperor. It was not likely it would be enough. His time was past. Even Rudolph in his latter days had grown bored with his mathematician. But he must go somewhere, do something, and so he took himself aboard a barge bound for the capital, where, unknown to both of them, Wallenstein awaited him.

Now, baking his chilblains at Hillebrand Billig's fire, he brooded on his time in Sagan. It had been at least a refuge, where for a while he had held still, the restlessness of his heart feeding vicariously on his new master's doings. Wallenstein's world was all noise and event, a ceaseless coming and going to the accompaniment of distant cannonades and hoofbeats at midnight: as if he too were in flight from an inexorable demon of his own. Yet Kepler had never known a man who so fitted the shape and size of his allotted space. What emptiness could there be in him, that a stalking devil would seek for a home?

Billig was laboriously doing the tavern accounts at the kitchen table, licking his pencil and sighing. Frau Billig sat near him, darning her children's stockings. They might have been done by Dürer. A draught from the window shook the candlelight. There was the sound of the wind and the rain, the muffled roars of the Saturday night revellers in the tavern, the crackling of the fire, the old dog's snores, but beneath all a deep silence reigned, secret and inviolable, perhaps the silence of the earth itself. Why, dear Christ, did I leave home to come on this mad venture?

At first he had been wary of Wallenstein. He feared being bought for a plaything, for the general's obsession with astrology was famous. Kepler was too old and too tired to take up again that game of guesswork and dissimulation. For months he had held back, worrying at the terms Wallenstein was offering him, wanting to know what would be required of him in return. Conversation, said Wallenstein, smiling, your company, the benefit of your learning. The Emperor, with ill-concealed enthusiasm, urged him to accept the offered post, and took the opportunity to transfer on to Wallenstein the crown's considerable debt to its mathematician. Wallenstein made no protest; his blandness caused Kepler's heart to sink. Also the astronomer would be granted an annual stipend o: 1,000 florins from the Sagan coffers, a house at Gitschin where the general had his palace, and the use of a printing press with sufficient paper for whatever books he might wish to publish, all this without condition or hindrance. Kepler dared to hope. Could it be, at last, could it be..?

It could not. Wallenstein indeed believed he had purchased a tame astrologer. In time, after many clashes, they had come to an arrangement whereby Kepler supplied the data out of which more willing wizards would work up the horoscopes anc calendars. For the rest he was free to do as he wished. He saw no sign of the imperial debt being settled, nor of the printing works and the paper that had been promised. Things might have been worse. There was the house at least, and now and then he was even paid a little of his salary on account. If he was not happy, neither was he in despair. Hitzler's word came back to him: tepid. Sagan was a barbaric place, its people peculiar and cold, their dialect incomprehensible. There were few diversions. Once he travelled down to Tübingen and spent a gloriously tipsy month with old Mästlin, deaf and doddering now but merry withal. And one day Susanna came to him, with a look of mingled amusement and surprise, to announce that she was pregnant.

"By God," he said, "I am not so old then as I thought, eh?" "You are not old at all, my dear, dear Kepler." She kissed him, and they laughed, and then were silent for a moment, a little awkward, almost embarrassed, sharing an old complicity. What a happy day that had been, perhaps the best out of all the days of that amused and respectful, ill-matched and splendid marriage.

Wallenstein lost interest in him, even his conversation. Summonses to the palace grew rare, and then ceased altogether, and Kepler's patron became a stylised and intermittent presence glimpsed now and then in the distance, beyond a prospect of trees, or down the long slope of a hill on a sunlit evening, cantering among his aides, a stiff, rhythmically nodding figure, like a sacred effigy borne in brief procession on a feast-day. And then, as if indeed some mundane deity's memory had been jogged, workmen with a cart trundled up one day and dumped at Kepler's door a great lump of machinery. It was the printing press.

Now he could work again. There was money to be made from almanacs and navigational calendars. But he was ill that winter, his stomach was bad and he suffered much from gravel and the gout. His years were weighing heavily on him. He needed a helper. In a little book sent him from Strasburg he found on the dedication page a public letter addressed to him by the author, Jakob Bartsch, offering his humble services to the imperial astronomer. Kepler was flattered, and wrote inviting the disciple to come to Sagan. Bartsch was a mixed blessing. He was young and eager, and wearied Kepler with his impossible enthusiasms. Kepler grew fond of him, all the same, and would have had fewer misgivings at his marrying into the family if Susanna, his daughter and Bartsch's bride, had not had so much of the Müller strain in her.

The young man willingly took over the drudgery of the almanacs, and Kepler was free to return to a cherished project, his dream of a journey to the moon. The larger part of that last year in Sagan he devoted to the Somnium. None of his books had given him such peculiar pleasure as this one. It was as if some old strain of longing and love were at last being freed. The story of the boy Duracotus, and his mother Fiolxhilda the witch, and the strange sad stunted creatures of the moon, filled him with quiet inner laughter, at himself, at his science, at the mild foolishness of everything.

"You will stay the night, then, Doctor?"

Frau Billig was watching him, her needle poised.

"Yes," he said, "certainly; and thank you."

Hillebrand Billig lifted his troubled head from his accounts and laughed ruefully. "Maybe you will help me with these figures, for I cannot manage them!"

"Aye, gladly."

They want to know what really has brought me here,  yes they do. But then, so do I.

When he finished the Somnium there had been another crisis, as he had known there would be. What was it, this wanton urge to destroy the work of his intellect and rush out on crazy voyages into the real world? It had seemed to him in Sagan that he was haunted, not by a ghost but something like a memory so vivid that at times it seemed about to conjure itself into a physical presence. It was as if he had mislaid some precious small thing, and forgotten about it, and yet was tormented by the loss. Suddenly now he recalled Tycho Brahe standing barefoot outside his room while a rainswept dawn broke over the Hrad-cany, that forlorn and baffled look on his face, a dying man searching too late for the life that he had missed, that his work had robbed him of. Kepler shivered. Was it that same look the Billigs saw now, on his face?

Susanna had stared at him in disbelief. He would not meet her eye. "But why, why?" she said. "What is to be gained?"

"I must go. " There were the bonds to be seen to in Linz. Wallenstein was in disgrace, had been dismissed. The Emperor was sitting with the Diet in Regensburg, ensuring the succession of his son. "He owes me moneys, there is business to be finished, I must go."

"My dear," Susanna said, trying if a joke would work, "if you go, I will expect to see the Last Judgment sooner than your return. " But neither one smiled, and she let fall her hand from his.

He travelled south into wild winter weather. He took no notice of the elements. He was prepared to go on to Prague if necessary, to Tübingen-to Weilderstadt! But Regensburg was far enough. I know he will meet me here, I'll recognise him by the rosy cross on his breast, and his lady with him. Are you there? If I walk to the window now shall I see you, out there in the rain and the dark, all of you, queen and dauntless knight, and death, and the devil…?

"Doctor, Doctor you must go to bed now, and rest, you are ill."

"What?"

"You are shaking…"

111? Was he? His blood sizzled, and his heart was a muffled thunder in his breast. He almost laughed: it would be just like him, convinced all his life that death was imminent and then to die in happy ignorance. But no. "I must have been asleep. " He struggled upright in his chair, coughing, and spread unquiet hands to the fire. Show them, show them all, I'll never die. For it was not death he had come here to meet, but something altogether other. Turn up a flat stone and there it is, myriad and profligate! "Such a dream I had, Billig, such a dream. Es war doch so schön."

What was it the Jew said? Everything is told us, but nothing explained. Yes. We must take it all on trust. That's the secret. How simple! He smiled. It was not a mere book that was thus thrown away, but the foundation of a life's work. It seemed not to matter.

"Ah my friend, such dreams…"

The rain beat upon the world without. Anna Billig came and filled his cup with punch. He thanked her. Never die, never die.