A Calculus of Angels (19 page)

“I am finished with you for the day. The emperor’s boat-wright has a few questions for you. I suggest you go answer them. Good day, Mr. Franklin.”

Ben’s protest was stifled by the slamming of the door.

Halfway to his own rooms he realized that he was crying. It felt as if something were quaking inside him that would soon shake him apart, an awful thing that had no name. He hated it, resented it, for it was weakness, childishness. He quickened his step, determined that no one would see him in such a state.

Once in his room he hastily shut the door and staggered to his bed, nearly blinded by tears, where finally he sobbed aloud; once begun his eyes seemed as loath to stop as the clouds above Noah’s ark. But in time stop they did, leaving behind a sort of watery warmth in his chest. Laconically, he wiped his eyes and nose and set about wondering what to do next, and it was then, lifting his gaze, that he realized the little maid was in the room, sitting quietly on a stool in the corner.

“You!” he said. “Why didn’t you make yourself known?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

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“No, you would rather watch the great apprentice bawling like a child, so that you might spread the report. Well, go about it! What does it matter anyway?”

“Why would I do such a contemptible thing?” she asked.

Ben wiped his eyes again. “Do not pretend you have any love for me,” he muttered. “You made your feelings clear.”

“Did I? Of course I admit I have no love for you, for I do not know you—”

“Oh, but you seemed to know me well,” Ben snapped. “ ‘I have heard about you,” you said. “They speak of you,” you said.“

“Well, then, tell me I was wrong,” she demanded, digging her fists into her hips. “Tell me that you were not after me to lie with you, and then thank you for the privilege of being your whore for a night. Tell me— I’ll take your word.”

“Do not flatter yourself,” Ben returned. “I have beauties in Kleinseit enough to accommodate me, and you, if you pardon me, do not measure well against any of them.”

She colored just a bit at that. “Yet still you do not deny. So you thought me ugly, and no great conquest, and perhaps all the easier for that. Deny it.”

Ben opened his mouth, but in her set expression—or perhaps beyond it—he saw himself, parading about in nothing more than a shirt, whispering sly insinuations. This woman saw him, not as he wanted to be seen—not as most of his conquests saw him—but as he was. It was intolerable.

“I do not deny,” he finally said “I would have seduced you. But that isn’t.

“Isn’t what?”

Ben reached to massage his brow. “I need something from you, something I thought to seduce from you.”

“What have I that you may not obtain without me, save my virtue?”

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“Your keys. The key to Sir Isaac’s private rooms.”

She stared at him. “What? You are his ‘prentice. What possible cause have you to spy on him?”

“He withholds something of grave importance to me.”

“I see. Well, if there is nothing else…” She turned to go.

“No, please—wait,” Ben pleaded. “I am sorry I mistook you the other day. I was indecorous, and I apologize. But I really do need your help.”

“Sir, you ask me to risk my life, and in all honesty you have not moved me to do that. If you wish to explain why this should interest me…”

Ben shook his head. “You do not have the sound of a chambermaid. Whence come you? What is your
name?”

She sighed. “Good day.”

“No—wait again. I would tell you, but I cannot.”

“Ah. Thus he will not trust you, and you will not trust me, and so all secrets stay in their boxes. Perhaps ‘tis best, given the example of Pandora.”

Ben closed his eyes. “Stay, then. Stay.” He sighed and sat back upon the bed.

“A doom is coming to Prague. My master claims that he may have some knowledge to arrest it, but he will not tell me of it, and I cannot judge without seeing his notes.”

“Doom?” She faltered slightly. “But what good can you do if your master cannot?”

“Come here. Come close.”

She hesitated, but came to him.

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“Closer. Lean down.” He rolled his eyes at her skeptical expression. “I will not bite you. Come near.”

She did, lowering her face until their gazes met from a bare foot apart. Her eyes had green in them.

“What you must know,” Ben whispered in a voice that was wispiest air, “is that my master may choose to leave Prague to its fate and give no warning to the populace. I will not do that If I know there is no hope, I will raise alarm. If you love this city, that is your interest in me.”

She continued to stare into his eyes, and then leaned near his ear, so that her warm breath tickled it. “I have not the key,” she said. “But I can get it.”

“I urge you,” Ben said, “do so!”

“Conditions twain,” she replied.

“Name them.”

“That I go with you, so as to see you remain honest.”

“Done. And the second?”

“I should like to gaze through the telescope.”

Ben drew back from her until he could again see her face. Her lips were pursed, slightly wide, and for an instant he had the most powerful urge to kiss them. His brain won the argument with other parts, however, for he knew he would lose all that he had just gained if he did. He nodded, wordlessly.

She nodded in return and then stood. “Tomorrow night I shall come—let us say at midnight—and you shall take me to the telescope. Then we shall speak of keys.” She curtsied, turned on her heel, and made for the door. At the handle she paused and looked back over her shoulder.

“Lenka,” she said, softly. “My name is Lenka.”

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4.

Crecy’s Story

Crecy coughed and tried to smile. “The hand of an angel,” she repeated.

“For want of a better word.”

“So you know that.” Crecy sighed. “Very well. Is there anyone near? Near enough to hear?”

Adrienne went to the door, checked the empty hall, and, closing the heavy oak behind her, returned.

“We are alone,” she assured Crecy.

She tried to sit up, winced, and settled for propping her head higher on the pillow. “You were never initiated into the inner mysteries of the Korai,” she stated.

“Inner mysteries? I have never even heard of such.”

“Yes. After I foresaw your marriage to the king, we decided to wait until after the wedding to initiate you.”

“I see. Then I was never really one of the Korai.”

“Of course you were—but you were kept from the greater mysteries. The mysteries I speak of have to do with the founding of our sisterhood. It is a long story, but I can shorten it.”

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“Be as long-winded as you wish. This is the most you have spoken of the Korai in two years.”

Crecy made as if to speak, and her face crinkled in pain. She cleared her throat and went on. “The Korai teach that in order to create the world, God had to withdraw from it— create a place where he was not—so that finite things like matter could exist. Once created, he could not enter the world without destroying it, so he created servants to do his will. These were races of air and fire—ofanim, cherubim, seraphim—the angels, in short. Through them he created all the physical world—animals and plants, man and woman. The woman was called Lilith.”

“Ah,” Adrienne murmured.

Crecy closed her eyes. “I know you are skeptical, but hear me through. Lilith was too much for Adam. Her craving for the pleasure of flesh was stronger than his, and she was not pliant. She did not lie passive, but straddled from above and took her joy at her pleasure. Moreover, Adam was not her only lover. She seduced some of the angels, learning from them the secret laws of the universe. For this—for being a woman of free will, for being Adam’s superior, for rising above him in bed—she was imprisoned. Adam was given a new, sweet, docile wife—Eve.

“But Lilith had many children, and though some were— like their fathers—creatures of an elemental sort, others hid amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve, growing bolder in time, marrying amongst them, passing on the germ of Lilith from one generation to the next. Athena was the daughter of Lilith, remembered after her lifetime as a goddess. You and I are descended from her.”

“Metaphorically, perhaps,” Adrienne said. “I must say, this story is told differently than I have heard it. Is not Lilith the mother of demons? Are you and I demons, then?”

“Those lies started with Adam and Eve—of course they cast darts at Lilith. But think, Adrienne. Lilith was part of God’s plan. How could she have been a mistake? Why would he imprison her?”

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“And the Korai have some answer to this?”

Crecy nodded. “Indeed. They say that the god who exiled Lilith and created Eve was not God, but an impostor. One of the angels, Lucifer, took this universe—this place without God—and made it his own kingdom.”

“And thus the world is ruled by the devil, and not by God at all. Yes, a pretty philosophy, one that explains the problem of evil very neatly,” Adrienne said.

“I refuse to believe that the intelligent women of the Korai believe such facile nonsense.”

“I cannot say what they actually
believe.
But this is what I was taught. Of course, it may be all lies, a story to exaggerate our own importance. But at the heart of it may be some truth, Adrienne. The angels—do you know the Hebrew name for them, malakim? Do you know the meaning of the word?”

Adrienne sighed. “My interests are in natural philosophy.”

“It means ‘shadow side of God.” The Hebrews knew whom they dealt with, even if our Church has forgotten. They are
real,
Adrienne. You have seen them, been wounded by them, been given a hand by them.“

Adrienne nodded, frowning.

“What do you believe, Adrienne? Do you believe in God?”

Adrienne looked at the redhead, shocked. “Of course. Do you understand how precariously the universe is built, Crecy? How exacting its specifications?

Without gravity and the other affinities, there would be no order, only chaos.

Where there is law, Veronique, there must be a lawmaker.”

“I am no philosopher, but I agree. And you philosophers— you discover these laws of which God has writ the world, and you find how we might use them?”

“Yes.”

“Then why must I convince you of the reality of angels?”

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“I have never doubted their existence, Crecy, for the Bible speaks of them. But the Bible often cloaks the real in obscure symbol. I once speculated that angels represented the elements, gravity, the harmonics of sound, and trajectory. But you are right—that is lost to me now. That creature that guarded the king—angel, devil, fey, or djinn—it was something, something intelligent, malicious.

But I must know what they
are,
Veronique. I must have more than hieroglyphic mysteries. Are they living things, or do they merely resemble life?

Do they have souls? Are they composed of matter?”

Crecy nodded. “I knew you would ask these scientifical questions, but I have little to tell you. Only that God must have made them.”

“If so, they must conform to His laws. They must be understandable in mathematical terms. If they are mysterious, it is only because we have not asked the right questions, not pursued the proper experiments.”

“And how will you experiment on them, my dear? How will you dissect angels in your laboratory?” Another cough rasped from her throat. “No, no, let that pass. I need to tell you something else, before I weary too much.”

“I will not tax you,” Adrienne vowed, suddenly a bit anxious. “If you pledge me you will live, we can continue later. You have already given me much to think about.”

“I haven’t answered your first question, about your hand.”

“Later.”

“Yes, later. But I will say one more thing, now. There are many sorts of malakim. There are those such as you saw near Gustavus, clouds with fire glimmering within. There are those such as guarded the king and burned your hand. There are many who cannot make themselves seen in the world of our senses, or only barely so, but they are there nevertheless. But in a different sense, there are two sorts of them: those who wish to destroy mankind and those who do not.”

“Angels and devils.”

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“No. It is not so simple. In a sense they are all devils—or all angels—it does not matter what you call them. What matters is that they think first of themselves, of their own wishes, of the politics of their realm. They are cut off from God. I do not even think they acknowledge him, have forgotten him. They forget us—mankind—too, for eons at a time, consider us no more than you consider dust in the air. But in certain ages, philosophers arise, and the dust, so to speak, thickens to choking. Men and women begin to learn the laws of God—the real ones, the ones by which the universe operates. This angers the malakim, Adrienne, and worse, it frightens them. And so they work against such people.

They kill them, oftimes.”

“If this is so, how did Huygens and Leibniz and Newton and—and myself, for that matter—live to publish-what we’ve learned? Why weren’t we killed?”

“That comes to two reasons. The first is that it is not easy for them to murder us, to touch us outside their realm.”

“And yet you were just telling me tales of fornication with such spirits, of a human woman bearing their children. The Bible speaks of Jacob wrestling with an angel, of cities being blasted by them to ash.”

Crecy’s grip on her hand tightened almost painfully. “Imagine for a moment that you are God. You have withdrawn yourself from the world in order to create it. You built it of law, of numbers and words, of mathematical affinities.

And then the very servants you send into the world to carry out your will barricade themselves within and begin to do as they wish. What do you do?”

“Destroy the world and begin again.”

“Let us assume that you are the loving God of whom Jesus spoke and cannot bear to undo your creation.”

“Make other servants to deal with the first.”