Kepler (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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