Quintessence Sky (9 page)

Finally, they arrived in England, where a
river guide came on board and guided the ship's captain through the
ever-changing currents and shoals of the Thames. They tied up at
Greenwich, where a vast shipping yard crawled with workers. The air
was filled with the sounds of ringing hammers, creaking pulleys,
splashing water, and the shouts of men. Ramos held Antonia's hand
and stood on the dock, blinking in the sunlight.

"Ramos? Ramos de Tavera!" A thin Spaniard
with a trim, triangular beard rushed forward and gripped Ramos by
both shoulders. He kissed Ramos on both cheeks and laughed. "My old
friend, you look half starved."

Ramos grinned. It was Juan Barrosa, secretary
to the king, and an old friend. He returned Barrosa's embrace and
introduced Antonia.

"Antonia! I remember you when you were no
bigger than my knee. My, what a beauty you've become."

Antonia seemed pleased, but whether she
understood the words or not, Ramos couldn't tell. "I've never been
to Africa. It must be a fascinating place," she said.

"Ah," Barrosa said sadly. "She is . . ."

"Yes," Ramos said.

"I am so sorry."

Ramos was bursting with questions about his
summons by the king, but Barrosa waved them away. First they had to
get back on a boat, he said, a wherry this time, and travel the
rest of the way down the Thames into London. Once they were aboard,
he continued to shrug off Ramos's questions, saying only that the
king wanted Ramos to cast Queen Mary's horoscope.

"Truly? It is permitted to forecast for the
queen?" In Spain, it was illegal to cast the king's horoscope or
predict the day of his death.

Barrosa shrugged. "It is if their Majesties
command it."

"Are there no trained astronomers or physics
in all of England, that he dragged me a thousand miles from home
for so simple a task?"

"Do not press me, friend. There is much more
to tell, but without the king's permission, I dare not speak."

Ramos remembered that for Barrosa, coming
here with the king was something of a homecoming. Though a
Spaniard, he had been born in England to one of the
ladies-in-waiting of Queen Katerina, the Spanish first wife of
Queen Mary's father, Henry VIII. He wondered how much of the
country Barrosa remembered.

The watermen pulled on their oars with the
strength of a lifetime plying their trade. The wherry rounded the
Isle of Dogs, and London came into view. It was Ramos's first sight
of the world's largest city, and he wasn't impressed. Sprawling,
dirty, and vast, it had none of the glory of Madrid or Granada. The
decaying St. Paul's Cathedral was big, certainly, but with none of
the pure white splendor of the cathedral in Toledo. London Bridge
sagged out over the river, top-heavy with layers of shops and
houses. The massive starlings that held up the bridge were so wide
they nearly dammed the river, leaving a visible difference in the
water level from one side to the other. The water sluiced through
the passage, forcing the wherry to fight its way against the
current, lurching sickeningly and throwing up sprays of water.
Ramos gripped the side and clutched his stomach, but in a moment
they were through. On the far side, they maneuvered through a
labyrinth of boats and approached Whitehall Palace, where the
queen's swans sailed gracefully near the bank, snapping up morsels
tossed to them by the royal swanherd.

The wherry pulled up to the palace dock and
was met by servants who took their ropes and tied them fast.
Barrosa stood to disembark, and Ramos noticed what he should have
seen earlier.

"Your limp," Ramos said. "It's gone!" Barrosa
had walked with a bad leg since childhood; now he crossed the
uneven dock with ease.

"God has been good," Barrosa said, but an
impish smile played across his face.

"What is it? What are you hiding?"

Barrosa's smile vanished. He helped Ramos
step out of the boat, but held onto his arm, and his voice was
grave. "When you read Her Majesty's horoscope, and the king asks
you what you see, do not lie."

Ramos shrugged him off, stung. "Of course
not."

But Barrosa didn't let go. "No matter what
the horoscope shows you. Tell the truth."

THE QUEEN'S privy chamber was packed with
courtiers: an ocean of silk, velvet, taffeta, camlet, pearls,
tinseled satin, and cloth of gold. A few of the courtiers were the
queen's attendants, loyal friends who had stood beside her in the
difficult days when her father, King Henry VIII, had thrown her
Spanish mother aside for the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Most, however,
were Philip's gentlemen, the vast retinue of Spaniards who had
traveled with him from home.

Queen Mary sat at one end of the room in a
high-backed chair. She was a small, plain woman with red eyes and
deep frown lines at the sides of her mouth. She was noticeably with
child. Her dress was purple, embroidered with silver, and bulged
forward over her abdomen. This pregnancy was crucial to the future
of Philip and Mary's new dynasty, and the whole point of their
marriage. A son would inherit the kingdoms of both Spain and
England. Mary's eyes locked on Ramos, waiting to hear what he would
say. Ramos swallowed, wishing for his quiet home in Valladolid.

Not far from Ramos stood a quiet man in his
mid-thirties, tall and slender, with a long, pointed white beard
draped over a gown like an artist might wear, with long hanging
sleeves, and a black cap. Ramos recognized him as John Dee, the
queen's astrologer and mathematician, essentially the same post
that Ramos himself held under Philip. Why hadn't Dee been asked to
cast this horoscope? Ramos had met him once, years before, in
Paris. He had delivered a brilliant lecture about the use of new
trigonometric ideas to calculate the distance to the stars. Why
such a learned man would want to return to such a backward country
as England, Ramos had no idea, but the man was certainly competent.
Why was he overlooked in favor of Ramos? Didn't the king trust
him?

Ramos was just stalling, and he knew it. He
completed his calculations, and Mary's horoscope lay spread before
him, as accurate as Dee or anyone in Europe could calculate it. The
problem was, it held nothing but bad news. It made him wonder if
Dee had somehow slyly avoided the job, for just this reason.

Barrosa's warning came back to him, and he
had to admit he was tempted. He could say that all was well, that
this pregnancy would end in joy and celebration. Who would know the
difference? But Ramos was no flattering courtier, to tell the king
and queen only what they wanted to hear. Philip had brought him all
the way from Spain to cast this horoscope, so he would tell him and
the queen exactly what he saw.

He looked down at his paper, took a deep
breath, and spoke confidently. "I see no child. Not now or ever. I
see two lines cut short, two pregnancies, but no children. Only
sickness and sorrow. There will be no heir."

Queen Mary barely reacted. Her eyes grew
distant and looked past him to some distant horizon. She was no
stranger to grief, having spent most of her childhood abandoned and
disgraced by her father and pushed to renounce her faith. She had
endured those years, had held fast to the Church, had regained her
rightful throne, had married Philip, all for this purpose: to bear
a son who would rule in the name of the Church, as her father had
not. Only there would be no son.

Ramos looked to King Philip, standing
silently beside her, and tried to gauge his reaction. Philip was
not tall, but he dominated the room, resplendent in a black cloak
lined with leopard fur and a silvered doublet that reflected the
light. His pale blue eyes missed nothing. This was the most
powerful man in the world, the champion of Christendom, his armies
devoted to driving out the Musselman threat in the south and the
cancer of Protestantism eating its way through France, the
Netherlands, and the Germanic states. His rage was fearsome, and
Ramos had seen him punish messengers for bringing bad news.

But Philip did not look furious, or even
surprised. He clapped his hands and waved his fingers in dismissal.
The courtiers who jammed the room began to file out, Ramos along
with them, but Philip stopped him. "Not you," he said in Spanish.
"You stay."

Ramos waited, worried, while the room
emptied. He noticed a finely-worked leather pouch around Philip's
neck, black as night. Barrosa had worn an identical pouch. It
looked out of place on both men: too elegant for Barrosa's dress
and too plain for Philip's.

"Do not fear," Philip said to Mary in Latin.
Since Philip spoke no English, and Mary only a little Spanish, they
communicated mostly in Latin, and when that failed, fell back into
French. "I bring you a relic from the chapel of Santiago de
Compostela," Philip said. He took the odd leather pouch from around
his neck and held it out by its chain. "It contains an ancient worm
that once feasted on the flesh of Saint James. From that blessed
flesh, it received such life and health that it has not died in
over a thousand years." He draped the chain around Mary's neck.
"For you. For the health of our son."

The moment he gave it to her, something
twitched. Ramos wasn't sure what it was, but something in the
corner of his vision had moved. He caught sight of his astrolabe on
the table, and thought maybe it had moved in some subtle way, but
he couldn't tell. Not again, he thought. Not another nova. Then his
eyes drifted to the horoscope, and he saw the mistake.

It wasn't possible. He didn't make mistakes,
certainly not one so basic as this. Venus would be ascendant in
July, not Mars, as he had written. His eyes darted between paper,
astrolabe, and almanac, trying to find an explanation, but there
was none. The horoscope was wrong.

Heart hammering, he dipped his pen and drew a
new line across the paper, correcting one he had made before. But
no, that couldn't be right. He consulted his almanac, and found
another discrepancy. Another blunder. But this couldn't be. Either
he had been mad when he made these calculations, or he was going
mad now. Could he have turned to the wrong page in the almanac?

Angry now, he flipped over the parchment and
began again. He redrew the figures, accounting for the distortion
caused by England's higher latitude. He worked in a fury, finding
mistake after mistake, errors he could not possibly have made. A
very different horoscope formed under his pen.

By the time he finished, he knew that some
new miracle had happened, not another nova, but something else.
Something far beyond the mathematical understanding of a simple
astronomer-priest. He gazed back up at the king and queen, shaken.
The black pouch rested against the purple and silver of Mary's
dress, tiny and ordinary. Ramos believed in miracles, but he had
never seen one before now. Somehow, at the moment Philip draped
that tiny pouch around Mary's neck, the very lines of force in the
universe had shifted. The sovereign will of God, communicated
through the immutable revolutions of the heavenly spheres, had
changed.

"I see a child," Ramos said, unable to keep
his voice from trembling. "Your son will live."

WHEN the king dismissed him, Ramos returned
to the apartments that had been given him in order to check on
Antonia. He had hired a nurse to sit with her, and the old matron,
three times a grandmother, was kind and gentle. Antonia had eaten
her supper, and was calm for the moment. A half-buried idea that he
would return to find her miraculously healed died, and he cursed
himself for foolish hopes.

He left again and prowled the halls until he
found Barrosa. He cornered him, snatched the pouch at Barrosa's
neck, and held it in his face.

"What is this thing? What is happening?"

"Steady, brother," Barrosa said. "The king
gave his permission to tell you everything. In the morning, I'll .
. ."