Wolf on a String Read online

  We were both well drunk by now, although of the two of us, he was in a worse way than I.

  “Listen, Stern,” he said. “I hear the Emperor set you the task of finding out who it was that murdered his mistress—what was her name? Kroll, yes, that’s right. So have you solved it yet?” I told him I had not, and he ruminated in silence for a while, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I heard tell the culprit was some young fellow who had a mind for her himself—is that not so?”

  “No,” I answered, “it is not. Jan Madek was his name. He died too.”

  Kepler brooded again for a while.

  “A bad business,” he said. Then he fixed me with a narrowed eye. “You’ll do well to come out of it with your own gizzard intact.”

  This was not a thing I wished to hear, and I hastened to divert him to other matters. I asked him what he knew of Edward Kelley.

  “Dr. Dee’s famous familiar?” he said, laughing. “A foolish fellow, and a rogue. He promised Rudolf the philosopher’s stone and delivered him fool’s gold. Kelley—pah!”

  The secret contempt that Kepler and I shared for that pack of alchemists toiling ceaselessly in the Powder Tower had forged a pact of amity between us. I found in Kepler a like soul to mine, for we both considered a great part of the magic Rudolf believed in to be no more than an elaborate nonsense got up by charlatans to bedazzle and bamboozle him. In particular we agreed that the great aim of transmuting base metal into gold, the alchemists’ Holy Grail, was a fruitless and vulgar fantasy. We never said as much to each other, I think, not in so many words—in Prague you had to keep a guard on your tongue, as I had early come to learn—but each knew that the other knew it, and the knowledge afforded us mild gratification and shared amusement. Yes, he was a great man, was Kepler, and a generous spirit: I miss him still. He died in Regensburg, of all places, where he lies in an unmarked grave. I measured the heavens, he wrote in his self-composed epitaph, now the shadows I measure.

  A fiddler seated by the fireside struck up a tune, and Kepler, who was a wild fellow when he had drink in him, grabbed the innkeeper’s daughter, a little jolly thing, and whirled her about in a crazy dance, stamping his heels and hooting and hallooing like a happy demon. The innkeeper leaned on his arms on the counter and watched the capering pair with a doubtful yet indulgent eye; it was clear that Kepler was a regular customer whose antics were tolerated. .

  At last Kepler came reeling back to the table and flopped down onto a stool, wiping his brow and panting. He called for buttered ale, and we clanked tankards in a toast to Terpsichore, the muse of song and dance, and after that made another toast, this time to the innkeeper’s girl, who, flushed and damp and dizzy, had gone to hide behind her lanky father.

  “My wife will not dance,” Kepler said dolefully, “and calls me a clown when I do, saying I demean myself.” He brooded blearily, gnawing at the inside of his cheek. “Barbara, she is called—I think you haven’t met her? I confess she is a trial to me at times, though she’s a good mother to our babes, I’ll say that for her.” He turned to me with a crooked grin. “And you, sir, you have no wife?”

  “I have not,” I said.

  He laughed, making a phlegmy rattle.

  “But you don’t lack for a warm bed, so I hear.”

  “Oh, yes?” I said, and an arrow of terror came whirring straight through the fog of alcohol and buried itself in my breast. “And where do you hear that, may I ask?”

  He drove an elbow merrily into my ribs and near knocked the wind out of me.

  “My friend,” he said, “do you imagine there are any secrets at this court?” He chuckled. “By God, sir, but you do take risks!”

  Again I saw the scaffold rearing up against a blue sky, and me standing on it, plumed and garlanded in Caterina Sardo’s colors, and about to dance a final jig.

  Kepler was attending to the fiddler again, tapping a toe in time with his tune.

  “Music,” he said, “ah, music. You know the planets move according to its rules? Yes, indeed, there is a music of the spheres, though not as the old Greeks had it. In my great book, with which I shall one day astound the world, I shall show that the laws of musical consonance are to be found not in numbers, but in geometrical ratios. The Lord, as I can prove, is a geometer.”

  He went on then, in rambling and confused mumblings, to relate to me how according to his theory, the mechanism of the solar system, of which our world is a moving part, was designed by God according to the laws that the divine Euclid had long ago discovered, and that the orbits of the six planets circling the sun were fixed upon a kind of geometric grid consisting of the five perfect Platonic solids, from the four-sided tetrahedron to the icosahedron of twenty sides—and so on.

  I thought it all a drunken fantasy, and was too drunk myself, and too ignorant as well, to appreciate the exquisite simplicity of his system.

  I must have fallen into an ale-induced reverie of my own then and stopped listening to him, for presently, with a start, I came to, in the way that one does at such times, sharply and suddenly. He was speaking of music again, though of the earthly and not the celestial kind.

  “It is called,” Kepler said, putting his face up close to mine and jabbing my knee with a bony finger for emphasis, “it is called a wolf on a string. Listen.” He pointed to the fiddler. “Do you hear that fearful buzzing he makes now and then—there, just then, did you hear it? Do you know what it is? No, of course you don’t. It occurs, my friend—are you listening?—when a particular note played on a particular string matches some resonating frequency in the wood of the instrument, producing a cacophonous howl, not unlike that of the wolf. Isn’t that a strange thing, that two parts of the same instrument, instead of making delightful music together, should be so disharmoniously at odds?”

  I said dully that, yes, yes, I did understand. What puzzled me was the portentous tone he had adopted, gazing into my face and nodding. What had this wolfish business to do with me, and why was he telling me of it as if it were a cautionary parable? Ah, if only I had been a better listener in those days, what a deal of trouble I should have saved myself.

  “Do you wonder,” he said, “if the string and the wood are aware of the harsh discord they make together, or is it only others that hear it—eh?”

  He nodded again, solemnly, and, so it seemed, again in a warning way, tapping a finger to the side of his nose.

  Now he rose, meaning to cut another caper, but the innkeeper’s daughter, seeing his intent, fled from him into the back part of the premises, laughing, and slammed the door behind her. The innkeeper came from the counter and put a firm but not unfriendly hand on Kepler’s shoulder and guided him to the door and bade him a curt and unceremonious good night.

  I followed, and together the two of us staggered up the narrow cobbled street, which seemed now as steeply treacherous as the side of a mountain, holding on to each other for support, though it was a question which of us was the drunker. Kepler tried to sing a bawdy song but could manage only the first verse, which he repeated a few times, doggedly, and then gave up.

  We stopped to relieve ourselves against the wall of a house, and an old dame in a mobcap put out her head at an upstairs window and shrieked abuse at us. At that moment I saw, with that sudden access of clarity drink sometimes affords, how like to my own present circumstances was the city itself, in which the grandeur and opulence of a great metropolis, the very center of the world, sat atop a stew of squalor, vice, and violence.

  Stumbling on again, we came to another inn, and there Kepler stopped, saying he must drink a thimbleful of schnapps, to counter the buttered ale and settle his gut, to the unruliness of which, he confided, he had been a martyr all his life. He begged me to stay with him, but I was feeling sick myself by now, and could think of nothing but my bed. We embraced clumsily, though he complained still of my abandoning of him, and I went off, my mind a jumble of geometric figures and whirling stars.

  Behind me I heard Kepler fumbling at the door of th
e inn, which I think must have been shut. Then he made another attempt at remembering the rest of his dirty ditty, but again in vain.

  “Stern!” he shouted after me, with a cackle of bawdy laughter. “Stern von Stern, I admonish you. Remember, remember what I say: wolf on a string. That’s what you are, you whoreson. Ha!”

  17

  I was surprised, and disagreeably so, to discover that I was to be the one who would travel to Most and fetch the sorcerer Kelley back to Prague. Chamberlain Lang mentioned it to me airily, in passing—“It will be but a matter of two days or three”—as if the journey to Most were a short amble beyond the city gates. I thought to protest, but then thought better of it. The Chamberlain’s directives were couched always in such a way as to make them seem the politest and most tentative of suggestions, but there was no mistaking within them the steely cord of command.

  When the Emperor heard of my mission, he grew greatly agitated—Lang by this stage of his grand career was so sure of his position that he often made decisions without bothering to inform his imperial master—and he drew me with him into the most private of his private chambers and sat down with me in a window seat on the shadowed side of the room. About us were displayed some of his most precious possessions, the ones he kept exclusively for his own pleasure. These included a great bowl carved from natural crystal in which supposedly there was embedded the name of Christ—though all I could see was an indecipherable swirl of tints, lapis-blue, acid-green, the tawniest copper—which he believed to be the Holy Grail itself. There were also pictures by Spranger, the court painter, that would have been too lewd to show in public. And there was a singular item that caught my eye at once: a sort of mechanical bronze salt cellar by an Italian master, on the double lid of which were set facing each other a naked man and woman who, when the cellar was operated, would engage in vigorous copulation.

  “Tell us,” Rudolf whispered in his breathy way, “why does the Chamberlain require the presence of Kelley here? Does he forget it was by our specific order that the fellow should be banished to Most?”

  Lately, when he was in a state like this of agitation and alarm, it was his habit to grasp me by the hand and pull me close to him, gazing deep into my eyes like a querulous child. At first such gestures of enforced intimacy had startled and discomfited me, but I had got used to them, as I had got used to so many of his more peculiar ways.

  I told him all I knew, which was that Sir Henry Wotton had inquired of me as to whether I thought he would be permitted to travel to Most, and that when I spoke of this to the Chamberlain he had at once become suspicious, and decided to bring Kelley to Prague and question him.

  “Yes yes yes,” Rudolf said, “but to question him about what?”

  “That, sir, I regret to say, I do not know.”

  He looked away, making that buzzing sound at the back of his throat that he did when he was distracted, his glance darting here and there about the room but seeming to see nothing save the demons crowding in his mind. A moment later, however, he turned and fixed on me with sudden sharpness, his eyes aglitter—it was one of the most disconcerting aspects of the man, how he would switch from seeming a helpless dodderer and in an instant become the shrewd and mindful monarch that he was, the ruler of the world.

  “And what of our dear girl,” he said, “poor Mistress Kroll, what have you discovered of her killing?”

  I swallowed hard, and assured him that my investigations were continuing, that I was proceeding in certain clear directions, following up certain clues, assembling an account of the girl’s last hours—a shameless lie—questioning this person and that, examining the thing minutely from every angle.

  A silence fell. I cleared my throat, avoiding his eye. He sighed. The back of my neck had grown hot.

  “And now you are to go to Most,” he murmured, almost sadly, “at our Chamberlain’s behest.” Then he frowned, and shook his head. “They scheme and scheme, the lot of them,” he said. He fixed on me again, with a hard glint of suspicion. “Does the Chamberlain send messages by you?”

  “Messages, Your Majesty?”

  “Dispatches, I mean—reports, plans.”

  He tightened his moist grip on my hand.

  “No, sir,” I said, “I am not his courier.”

  “Hmm.” He was peering into my eyes, reminding me of Jeppe the dwarf looking in at my window, avid and searching. “He has never sent you to our cousin Ferdinand of Styria, for instance?”

  I felt, when he held me in his grip like this, that we were a pair of skaters halted motionless upon the thinnest of ice, our skates about to buckle beneath us, or the ice to crack, or one of us to fall and bring the other down with him.

  “Forgive me, sir,” I said, “but I know nothing of your cousin, except his reputation.”

  “Oh, yes? And what is that? What is his reputation?”

  “That he is a champion of the Catholic cause,” I said. “To the point,” I added, amazed at my temerity, “to the point, according to some, of being a fanatic.”

  Rudolf had given up peering at me and his glance was skittering about the room again.

  “A fanatic, yes,” he said, “and ambitious, young though he is. I fear him. I fear him as much as I fear my brother Matthias—more, even. When I think of Ferdinand I hear the pyre crackling, and the martyr’s cries.” He nodded, his eyes fixed now, gazing again into his own, inner abyss. “It is only a matter of time before one of them, my brother or Ferdinand, unseats us and steals our crown.”

  “Come, sir,” I said, “this is your imagining. No monarch could be more firmly set upon the throne than you are.”

  He smiled then, strangely, wistfully, and drew my hand to his breast and pressed it there.

  “Ah, Christian,” he said, “how young you are, with all of youth’s certainty. I am old, older than my years. I feel broken, broken upon the wheel of my tormented self.” He released my hand. “Go,” he said, “go to Most, and bring Kelley back to us. We have a soft place in our heart for him, rogue though he be. His boasting amused us, his subterfuges and outrageous claims. You know he stole John Dee’s young wife and got a son by her whom Dee had to adopt? Yes, everyone knows that story. Poor Dee. He was an innocent, in his way. We hear he has fallen on hard times, at home in England, though it’s said the Queen favors him still, and will not see him starve. The mob plundered his house at Mortlake and burnt his library, after someone had told them he was a necromancer. Ah, yes, poor Dee.”

  He went silent and remained so for several minutes. I rose quietly and walked away, leaving him to his musings. I do not think he noticed my going, lost as he was in his fears, his memories, his madness.

  When I told Caterina Sardo of the Chamberlain’s command, she was at once amused and vexed.

  “Why should he send you?” she cried. “What is he up to, the sly brute?” She twisted a button on my jacket, as she liked to do, and fixed her smoky gaze upon me. “What shall I do, when you are gone?” she murmured. “Who will there be for me to play with? Perhaps I shall take another lover, someone handsome and noble, and not rough-hewn as you are. Kiss me now, kiss me, my starry Christian. Baciami, baciami, mio caro.”

  We were in the corridor outside her sewing room, in broad daylight. I looked about fearfully, expecting to see her handmaids peeping through chinks at us, giggling and shoving each other for the best view. Caterina laughed.

  “What a nervous lover you are,” she said, smiling into my face. “Do you fear that Rudi’s guards will come and seize you and take you to the torture rooms? I should like to see you upon the rack, sweating and weeping and crying for your mama. They say”—she pressed herself against me—“they say a man stands up stiff when he is stretched like that. Have you heard tell of such a thing? I would hoist up my petticoats and plant myself astride you, and none would know whether your groans were of pleasure or of pain. Would you like that, my fearful darling? Would you?”

  The threads of the button broke where she had been twisting them, and now sh
e slipped the button into her mouth, and kissed me, and I felt the hard round wafer of bone, wet with her spit, sliding from her lips and passing between mine.

  She leaned her head back a little way, still with her body folded hotly into mine.

  “Swallow it,” she said. “Think that it is the host, the holy host, and this is our Black Mass.” I swallowed, gagging a little, though the button was not large. She kissed me again, the merest peck this time. “Ah, eroe. Now let’s go to your room, and consecrate there our sacred ritual!”

  Ritual it was, sacred it was not, and may God forgive my blasphemous soul.

  Caterina Sardo went at love-making with all the passion and single-mindedness of a votaress at a shrine. She was endlessly inventive, and devised for the two of us dark pleasures the like of which I could not have imagined in my most heated fantasies. Thinking of her even now I feel a lick or two of the flames of those days and nights, and glimpse again the hellish glow they shed. In her arms I seemed to myself to be dwelling in a paradisal Hell.

  That afternoon we had just dismounted from the two-backed beast we had been vigorously making and were lying side by side on my bed, sweating and panting, when there came a sound from outside the door that stopped my breath and set me starting up in fright. It was the same scratching and snuffling I had heard that night outside my house in Golden Lane, as if some animal were rootling about out there. At once I drew on my shirt and was rising from the bed, intending to sneak to the door and wrench it open and surprise whatever it was that was there, but Caterina put a hand on my arm and held me back.

  “Stay,” she said softly. “Stay, my dear.”

  “But there’s something out there,” I whispered. “I must see what it is.”

  “No,” she said, in that same soothing fashion, as if to calm an anxious child. “Don’t fret yourself, it’s nothing. Come, lie down here and hold me in your arms.”