Doctor Copernicus (9 page)

Ziegler pouted, and a pretty flush spread upward from his cheeks to his pale forehead. “Are you comparing us to that mad monk, that
creature
, who castigated Plato as a source of
immorality? He deserved burning, I say!”

Calcagnini smiled again tolerantly.

“No, my dear Jacob,” he murmured, “of course I make no such comparison. I am merely trying to demonstrate to you that precipitate and rash action on our part can lead us
straight to ruin.”

“—And further,” Ziegler continued hotly, “why do you assume that the power of the Bentivoglios can be challenged only from within Bologna’s walls?”

The hound shut its jaws with a wet snap and rose and loped leanly away. There was an awkward silence. Ziegler glared about him haughtily, flushed and defiant. “Well?” he asked, of no
one in particular. Novara frowned at him with pursed lips, and very slightly shook his head in wordless mild reproof. A scrawny individual, rejoicing in the name of Nono, laughed squeakily.

“L-let us hear the results of L-Luca’s 1-1-labours!” he ventured brightly. The others paid no heed to him, being engrossed in disapproving silently of whatever indiscretion it
was that the unrepentant Ziegler had committed, and Nono turned unhappily to Nicolas and said, very loudly and deliberately, as if addressing a stone-deaf idiot: “H-he has made a
horosc-sc-scope of Cesare, you see.
Il Valentino
, as he is called, ha ha.” Nicolas nodded, smiling hugely, miming extravagant gratitude and encouragement. “Bo-Bo-Borgia, that
is,” Nono finished lamely, and frowned, searching it seemed for that last elusive word, the stammerer’s obsession, that surely would make all come marvellously clear.

Novara stirred. “Yes, Luca, tell us, what do the stars say of our young prince?”

Luca Guarico, he of the large head and hooked nose of a decayed Caesar, sighed fatly, and fatly shrugged. He was fat; he was that kind of fat that conjures up, in the goggling imaginations of
thin fastidious men such as Nicolas, hideous and irresistible visions of quaking copulations, and monstrous labours in water closets, and helpless tears at the coming undone of a shoe buckle. He
thrashed about briefly on the couch where he sat, and panting brought out from beneath his robes a wrinkled scrap of parchment.

“There is little to tell,” he wheezed. “Had I the facts it would be easy, but I have not. A long life, certainly; good fortune at first, as befits—” he smiled
gloomily “—the Pope’s bastard. After his thirtieth year there will come a falling off, but that is not clear. He will conduct a victorious campaign in Lombardy and the Romagna, as
that Sforza bitch will learn to her cost. He should beware the French, if Mars is to be trusted.” He shrugged again apologetically and put away the parchment. “So.”

“O brilliant, brilliant,” Ziegler muttered, plucking fiercely at his moustache. Guarico looked at him. Calcagnini hastened to say:

“Jacob, you are so fiery today! As Luca has told us, he has not the necessary facts—and indeed we may ask, who can know the facts concerning that strange and secretive
dynasty?”

Bland smiles were exchanged. Novara said:

“But Luca, do you have nothing that touches on our concerns?”

“I can tell you this,” the fat man answered, and looked about him dourly, “this I can tell you: he will never sit on the throne of Peter.”

There was the sense of a slow soft crash, and Ziegler sniggered bitterly.

“Well then,” Novara murmured, “there is nothing for us there.”

Suddenly they all relaxed, and looked at Nicolas, a little bashfully it seemed, like players awaiting his applause. He stared back blankly, baffled. He felt he must have missed something of deep
significance. The servants carried on to the terrace small silver trays of choice comestibles, flaked game in aspic, chunks of melon, translucent cuts of the spiced ham of the region. He picked,
not without a faint concealed amusement, at a portion of cold quail. The sun had shifted out of the square of sky above the courtyard, and the light there no longer crackled harshly, but was a
solid cube of hot bluish brilliance. He was acutely aware of his foreignness, and longed for the cold north. This was not his world, this heat, these strident passions, this stale flat air that sat
so heavily in his lungs, like someone else’s breath; nothing touched him here, and he touched nothing. He was a little Prussia in the midst of Italy. An olive-skinned young dandy sitting
opposite was eyeing him peculiarly, with a kind of knowing insolence.

Having eaten, the company retired from the terrace to a cool blue high-ceilinged lavish room, with an open archway at one end, and at the other wide windows giving on to a hazy sunlit distance
of shimmering cypresses and olive-green hills. An air of expectancy was palpable, and presently the desultory talk stopped abruptly on the entrance of a strange distraught emaciated person with a
lyre. He seemed the luckless bearer of a burden of intolerable knowledge, a seer cursed with unspeakable secrets. He stood by patiently, his blurred gaze fixed on some inner vision, while the
servants reverently arranged a bank of cushions for him in the centre of the floor, then he settled himself with great care, crossing his pathetically skinny ankles, and began to sing in a weird
piping voice. A breeze stirred the silken drapes at the windows, and billows of pale pearly light swayed across the shining floor. The black dog returned and lay down throbbing at Novara’s
feet with wet jaws agape. Nicolas felt vaguely alarmed, for what reason he did not know. The song was a sustained sinuous incomprehensible cry that the anguished singer seemed to spin out of his
very substance, slowly, painfully, a thin silver thread of sound rippling and weaving hypnotically above the soft dark plashing of the lyre. The company sat rapt, listening with such intensity that
it appeared they were in some way assisting in the making of this unearthly music.

At length the song ended, and the singer gazed about him with a lost forsaken look, fretfully fingering the lank yellow strands of his hair. The others rose and went to him quickly, cooing and
whispering, solicitous as women. He was given a beaker of wine to drink but took only a sip, and then was helped away, mumbling and sighing. The room was left limp and somehow satiated, as after a
debauch. Novara rose, and with a glance invited Nicolas to follow him. Together they went out under the archway with the black dog padding softly behind them. The singer sat alone in an
antechamber, ravaged and desolate in the midst of a great light. He looked at them blankly out of his strange pale yellowish eyes, and could not answer when Novara spoke to him, and only shook his
head a little and turned away. But he smiled at the dog knowingly, as one conspirator to another. They passed on, and Nicolas asked:

“What is he? Is he ill?”

Novara lifted the lorgnon and looked at him searchingly.

“You do not know? Did you not recognise that music? It was an Orphic hymn to the Sun. He knew Ficino, you see, at the Academy in Firenze. He is not ill, not with what you or I understand
as illness. The ancient knowledge to which he is heir consumes him fiercely. Great passion, great wisdom, these cannot be lightly borne by mortal men.”

Nicolas nodded, and said no more. All this was fraught with deep meaning, it seemed; it meant little to him.

They entered the library and walked among the cases of precious manuscripts and incunabula and priceless first editions from Germany and Venice. Novara caressed with his fingertips tenderly the
polished spines. He was abstracted, and said little. A bent blade of sunlight from a narrow window clove the gloom. The silence throbbed. Novara produced a tiny gold key with which he unlocked a
pearwood chest that Nicolas vaguely felt he had seen somewhere before. Here was the heart of the library, its true treasure, rare and exquisite copies of the
Corpus Hermeticum
along with
Marsilio Ficino’s translations and a host of commentaries and glosses. The Professor began gravely to expatiate on the celestial mysteries. He spoke of decans and angels, of talismans and
sympathetic magic, of the
spiritus mundi
that rules the world in secret. A change came over him and he spoke as one possessed. He was, it seemed, something of a magus.

“Do you believe, Herr Koppernigk?” he asked suddenly.

“I do not know what I believe,
maestro.
”

“Ah.”

Nicolas had already heard of the strange aetherial philosophy of this Thrice-Great Hermes, Trismegistus the Egyptian, wherein the universe is conceived as a vast grid of dependencies and
sympathetic action controlled by the seven planets, or Seven Governors as Trismegistus called them. It was all altogether too raddled with cabalistic obscurities for Nicolas’s sceptical
northern soul, yet he found deeply and mysteriously moving the gnostic’s dreadful need to discern in the chaos of the world a redemptive universal unity.

“The link that bound all things was broken by the will of God,” Novara cried. “That is what is meant by the fall from grace. Only after death shall we be united with the All,
when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at
each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and
eternal!” He fixed on Nicolas his burning gaze. “Is this not what you yourself have been saying, however differently you say it, however different your terms? Ah yes, my friend, yes, I
think you do believe!”

Nicolas smiled nervously and turned away, alarmed by this man’s sudden tentacled intensity. It was mad, all mad! yet when he imagined that fiery soul flying upward, aching upward into
light, a nameless elation filled him, and that word glowed in his head like a talisman, that greatest of all words:
redemption
.

“I believe in mathematics,” he muttered, “nothing more.”

At that suddenly the Professor checked himself, his fire abated, and he was once again his former urbane studied self. “Exactly, my dear fellow,” he said, smiling, “just my
point!” And he touched his guest lightly on the shoulder and led him back to join the waiting company.

Luca Guarico, squatting on a delicate ebony and velvet couch, shifted his vast bulk to make a little space beside him which he patted with a pudgy hand in roguish invitation, and Nicolas had no
choice but to lower himself with a shiver into the faintly perfumed puddle of warmth that the fat man had left behind him. Novara paced the floor deep in thought, tapping the folded lorgnon against
a thumbnail. No one spoke. Nicolas suspected that Guarico was watching him, and he would not turn for fear of what frightful intimacies he might be forced to share by meeting those pinkish porcine
eyes. The insolent dandy who had stared at him before was now deep in whispered dark confabulation with two others of his kind. Celio Calcagnini sighed a brief bored melody and considered the
ceiling, peeling off his immaculate white linen gloves finger by finger. The fiery Ziegler gnawed his nails in a furious abstraction. Nicolas was suddenly beset out of the blue by a sense of
general absurdity. He rose hastily, propelled to his feet by the force of a soft fart inadvertently let slip by Guarico, and at that moment Novara turned to him and said: “Herr Koppernigk . .
.” He stopped, perplexed, finding his guest apparently on the point of fleeing. Nicolas leered apologetically and slowly subsided, while just above his head he fancied he could hear rumblings
of muffled celestial merriment. “Herr Koppernigk,” Novara continued, “I feel I am not wrong in thinking that you are one of us at heart. You have realised by now, of course, that
this is no mere aimless gathering of friends; we are, you may say, men with a purpose. We marked how closely you attended to that brief exchange between Celio here and our dear impetuous Jacob, and
so we suspect that you have some little notion of the nature of our purpose?”

“O yes,” Nicolas said brightly, quite at a loss; finding himself stared at he beat an immediate retreat. “That is to say I feel I understand—”

“Yes yes, I see.” Novara waved a languid hand and resumed his pacing. “Let me explain. I say we have a purpose, but from this you must not imagine that you have stumbled upon a
nest of conspirators. No doubt in the north they tell terrible tales of us here in Italy, but I assure you, we have no stilettos under our cloaks, no poisons secreted in our signet rings. We are,
simply, a group of men dissatisfied with the state of things,
frightened
by the state of things. The world, my dear friend, is flying headlong to disaster, driven thither by the corruption
that is all too evident in Church and State. There is the decay of the aristocracy, and along with it the collapse of the manorial system. There is the diminution of the standards of education, so
that mere tradesmen’s sons are now allowed into our greatest univ . . .” He caught Nicolas’s eye, and winced. “Ahem. In short, Herr
von
Koppernigk, there is the
decadence of the age. Decadence. Ah. Is it not greatly to be feared? Is it not a plague, is it not worse than war? For decadence is the attendant midwife at a brute birth, and the beast that is
being born, here, now, in this very city, is—I shudder to say it—”

“He m-means,” piped Nono, eager as the clever boy in the classroom, “the c-concept of lullul lullul lu-liberty!”

Novara looked at him coldly. “Just so,” he said, and turned away.

Calcagnini was still dreamily considering the ceiling, where pink plaster cherubs rioted in buttocky abandon.

“Ah, liberty,” he murmured, smacking his lips delicately, “that
fearful
word.” For the first time that day he turned his cool sardonic gaze directly on Nicolas,
and smiled. “You see, my dear sir, we believe that when the people are allowed to entertain notions of individual freedom—nay when they are encouraged to it!— then begins the
swift decline of civilised values.”

At that for some reason Guarico chortled. Nicolas’s heart sank into a quag of gloom. He was tired, he wanted to be elsewhere. His glass was full again, and already he had drunk too much.
He shook his head and mumbled dully: