DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (64 page)

So Pierce at Arcady dreamed it, afloat on Boney’s chaise longue, and so it was: so it will come to have been.

But then
No no
, Pierce thought, and sat upright. No not that box; not
him
, of course not.
He
is not the one to tell to the future, this present, what it needs to hear. It wasn’t he who walked across Europe bringing
Ægypt into being around him, and the Ægyptians too who met him and helped him everywhere, his brothers all, though indistinguishable
from their countrymen and neighbors.

Yes, Jordanus Brunus Nolanus. Who would somehow have to be got out of prison at the end of the story (
Carcer
), plucked from the burning to be reserved to a different fate, another tomb.
The Jonah that the fish spat out, the brand to be plucked from the burning
, said the angels to John Dee and Edward Kelley, when first they showed them Bruno in the glass;
the stone rejected by the builders that has become the corner of the house. Our pretty rose. Our Bruin sleeping in a cave
through the winter
.

Yes.

By his bare feet was his bag, right where he had left it last evening; and in the bag the book called RECORD, and also (he
rooted deeper) a pencil, no a pen.

Just then in the dark front hallway of Queen of the Angels School (smelling, at this time of the year, of pine branches and
candle smoke) Sister Mary Philomel heard the sounds within the old carved chest come to a stop; and she knew that the heavy
lid could be lifted now, if she chose to lift it, though in fact she seemed hardly to have a choice. She did lift it (see
her long clean pale hands, Pierce and his cousins had marvelled at them, much older now though and the blue veins prominent,
the gold wedding band sunk deep in the
pronubis
, Bride of Christ) and with all her strength heaved it back against the wall. Heart thudding from effort and expectation,
she looked inside.

Pierce in Arcady thought: But who will be chosen in
this
passage time, our own? And into what box shall he or she or it be put? And in what future open her eyes?

A small ghost flitted across his peripheral vision, down at the end of the hall, a white child.

There was after all nothing in the chest down in Pikeville; nothing but—what? A few common nouns maybe: a cup, a key, a ball,
a book.

Pierce waited and watched, guessing whom he had seen, and in a moment Sam reappeared, bare-armed in a white nightgown: sleepwalking
maybe or confused. She stood in the high hall for a time, and lifted the pale curls of her hair with one hand, looking around
herself as though she expected to see something that she did not see; but then she turned toward the light in the study, and
walked right down and in.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Are you up?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“The snow woke me up,” Sam said. She looked up at him frankly, smiling a little.

“Sam, you should be in bed,” Pierce said. “You need your sleep.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m strong, see?” She made a strongman’s arm, and Pierce took it delicately in his fingers; light
as a bird’s wing, warm to his touch. “Wow,” he said. He felt salt fluid burn the orbits of his eyes, oh please no more. He
thought again how easily harm could come to your children, you would never rest; and yet with Sam near him he did rest, as
he hadn’t before.

“My ode house is gone,” she said.

“Yes?”

“This is my house now.”

“Oh. Good.”

“Where’s your house?”

“I don’t think I have one.”

She sat down on the chaise beside him and folded her hands in the lap of her thin gown; Pierce wondered if she shouldn’t be
dressed more warmly, though she didn’t shiver; her bare feet hung down. “We should sing,” she said.

“We should?”

“Sing ‘Silent Night,’” Sam said.

“Oh Sam,” Pierce said. He knew he could not do this, could not even begin. “You sing it. Please.”

She composed herself in rapt solemnity and sang:

—and then collapsed in embarrassed giggles.

“Now you sing,” she said.

“What song.”

“Sing my favorite,” Sam said, and when Pierce didn’t respond, she said its name with both hands displayed, as though it was
obvious: “‘Three Kings.’”

“Oh,” Pierce said. “Right. Sure. I knew that.”

They sang it together sitting on the chaise.

Neither could quite remember the last words, it wasn’t “endless night” or “loving light” or “purple plight” but they hummed
a sound that rhymed. As they sang, rays or waves of quicksilver
pneuma
, the spirit-stuff that enwrapped their souls, were carried out in the song or as the song, tentative and soiled (his) and
pure and clear (hers); and journeyed outward, endlessly. When the song was over, they looked at each other, bass and treble,
and smiled, pleased with their effort. It was not long till dawn, the twenty-second of December, 1979. When Sam was Pierce’s
age, it would be ten years into a new century, no a new
millennium
, and the world would be as it was coming to be: it would not be the way it had all along been, nor yet what we then thought
it would become. It is really, the old alchemists always said, so simple.

On the eighth day of the first February of a new century (1600), Giordano Bruno was taken from his small cell high up in the
Castel St. Angelo and brought before a consistory of Cardinals and Inquisitors General at the Church of St. Agnes in Agony
to hear sentence pronounced on him.

For eight years the Fathers had struggled with the man to convince him to recant the obvious heresies he was guilty of. For
eight years he had variously denied he had said these things, or denied that they were heretical, and insisted on putting
his case before the Pope. All that was now done; now he was pressed to his knees before the Fathers, and his sentence read.
He was firstly to be “degraded,” stripped of all his priestly attributes and privileges; he would then be handed over to the
Governor of Rome, who the Fathers of course prayed would have mercy on him and spare him the full rigor of the law. They also
ordered all his writings to be burned in the Square of St. Peter and placed forever on the Index of Forbidden Books.
And thus we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, degrade, command and ordain, we chase forth and we deliver and we pray, in
this and in every other better method that we reasonably can and should
.

A young German named Gaspar Schopp or Scioppius, a recent convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism of whom the Vatican was
very proud, witnessed this final arraignment and what followed; and he wrote home how when Bruno had heard all this, and when
he was allowed to stand, he said loudly and clearly to the gathered Cardinals
that he was sure it frightened them more to pronounce this sentence than it did him to hear it.

Perhaps it did.

Bruno was taken, then, to an old fortress by Tiber-side belonging to the city, the Tor di Nona, crowds already gathering and
the city news-sheets talking up the coming events. Yet again there was a postponement, ten days, the Governor falling into
paralysis for no known reason or his servants unable to act; and the Pope in his chambers fought back an impulse to read Bruno’s
petition, which he somehow kept stumbling on wherever he went, like a cat that brushed up against his legs; its ribbons had
actually come undone as it lay on his table, and the leaves opened.

Then Time shook himself alert. At two in the morning on the eighteenth, brothers of the Headless John Society assembled at
St. Ursula in the depths of night, as was their habit, and made procession to the Tor to awaken the prisoner, to “offer up
the winter-prayers” and give comfort and correction, maybe even snatch the man back from the abyss at the last instant. But
no, he stayed up through the night with them talking and disputing, “setting his brain and mind to a thousand errors and vaingloryings”
(but what were these really? What did he say at the last?) until the Servants of Justice came to take him.

There was a little gray donkey tied up outside in the dawnlight, where the crowds were being held back by the Servants; Giordano
Bruno clothed only in a white shroud emblazoned at the corners with Andrew crosses (and maybe little devils and hell flames
too, some observers saw them) was led out. What is that on his head and breast? An iron brace that keeps his jaws tight shut,
no more talking ever, and when his books are burned that will be that. He was mounted backward on his steed to cheers of loathing,
and a tall white paper hat put on his head, a fool as well as a devil.

The crowds along the way were vast; it was a Jubilee Year, the first Jubilee Year in which the Papacy could feel sure, really
sure, that it was not about to come to an end and be lost in the sudden ending of the world; all around, the city was being
renewed, just as the Holy Catholic Church itself was. Fifty Cardinals from all over Christendom were assembled here, there
were processions, high masses, new churches dedicated daily. The little ceremony at the square of the flower-sellers was not
even the best attended.

He was stripped naked after being tied to the stake. At the inn La Vacca at the piazza’s end the guests looked out the upper-story
windows. Gaspar Schopp says a cross was held out to Bruno at the last moment, but he turned away from it.

After many years had passed, the Vatican authorities would begin to claim that they hadn’t burned Giordano Bruno at the stake
at all, that what was burned that day on the square was a
simulacrum
or effigy. As all the papers relating to the trial and the execution had disappeared into deep and unbreachable archives,
those who wished to believe this could.

Something burned for sure, for a long time.

The little ass that had borne the man stood by the scaffold; after the man had been dragged from his back the ass had been
forgotten about, his rope not even tied. Jostled by those pushing forward to have a better look, and those pushing back who
had seen enough, the beast kicked once, and pranced away. No one stopped him, no one noticed him. He left the Campo di Fiori
(not pausing even at the unattended stalls where winter vegetables were sold, whose greens hung down temptingly) and entered
the narrow streets beyond, Hatmakers’ Street, Locksmiths’ Street, Crossbow-makers’ Street, Trunk-makers’ Street, out beneath
the high walls of palaces and churches, skirting the crowds that filled the Piazza Navona, finding another way, north, always
north. Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed,
and they laughed and fell behind, none could catch him. Some noticed the sacred Cross on his shaggy back, the Cross that all
asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, Whom one of their kind once carried; but this Cross was not the same, no not the same.

Next day a news-sheet,
Avvisi
, noted that “the wicked Dominican Brother from Nola we gave news of before has been burned alive in the Campo di Fiori; he
said that he died willingly as a martyr, and that his soul would ascend in the smoke to Paradise. Today he knows if he was
right or not.”

But he didn’t say that. He couldn’t speak. No one heard anything.

One certainty consoled me then in my darkest hour
, says Lucius Apuleius the Golden Ass,
that the new year was here at last, and the wildflowers would soon be coming out to color the meadows; and in the gardens
the rosebuds long imprisoned in their thorny stocks would appear, and open, and breathe out their indescribable odor; and
I would eat and eat, and become once again myself
.