The Astrologer

{ Chapter Eleven }

THE MASON’S SON


IT WAS SNOWING HEAVILY, AS IF THE SKY ITSELF crumbled and fell down to Earth. I could not see beyond a few yards. Tycho’s castle was a dark shadow standing over us, a vague impression of high walls of brick and marble. The extent of the damage to the villa was hidden by the storm. The ramparts about the gardens had been pulled down and the bricks carted away by farmers, the boy said. I asked about the main building.

“You shall discover that yourself,” he said. As soon as our trunks and bags were out of his cart he drove off into the gloom of snow. He was gone from sight almost instantly. We had not even learned his name.

The doors into the main hall were blocked from within. I circled around to a side door and, after some labor, opened it and stepped into a dark store room, once full of dried meat, sacks of grain, and kegs of ale but now empty. A stair spiraled from floor to ceiling through the center of the room, leading up to an exposed landing outside the offices and bedrooms, and down to the kitchens and laboratories. I called Cornelius and Voltemont in and we cleared the stairs of rubbish and snow to make our way down. A bit of light filtered into the kitchen through windows set high in the walls. Snow billowed over the floor when Cornelius discovered that the glass was missing from all these windows and he packed them full with snow again to keep out the wind. There were no coals in the bin nor split wood in the rack, but Voltemont broke apart an oak table and built a fire in the central oven.

One of Tycho’s Italian architects had designed a clever system of pipes to bring water from a nearby spring to the castle and he had installed in almost every room a tap for fresh water, the copper spigots cast in marvelous shapes of Neptune and Venus, of dolphins and carp. This copper piping and all of the taps had been ripped out of the kitchen walls and taken away. I would find out later that islanders had stolen Tycho’s amazing aqueduct works from every room in his house. Voltemont boiled snow down into water and we dined on a hasty pottage with dried fruits and dark bread and then drank from Cornelius’s jar of wine. The kitchen was large and drafty but eventually warmed up, and we hung our cloaks on pegs and even pulled our boots off and sat them on the brick lip of the oven to dry.

“Why cannot these labors be delayed until springtime?” Cornelius asked. “This weather is a misery, and this house is ready to collapse upon us.”

“The king commands it,” I said. This was not true, for he had not told me to begin the task immediately. It was Captain Marcellus’s idea that I should be kept away from Ulfeldt until the war party returned from Copenhagen. Marcellus thought me such an idiot that I would reveal my intentions to any who observed me. That Marcellus had declared himself my ally did not go far in making me fond of him.

“The worst of winter is not even upon us,” Voltemont said. “January can freeze the very blood in a man’s heart.”

“We will not be here in January,” I said. “But I have endured many winters in this latitude.”

“Ah, yes. You are a son of Elsinore.”

“I am.”

“So are we,” Cornelius said, punching Voltemont’s shoulder. “And as the three of us are so neighbored in age and origin, you ought to treat us more kindly, Soren.”

“On Hven, I am your master.”

“I see. My mother is a baker, and you will have eaten her bread your entire youth. The very bread I also ate. But as a man, you are my better, are you? Soldiers such as I did guard Elsinore’s walls while you played in your father’s garden.”

Voltemont waved Cornelius to silence.

“My father owns the hostel in the center of Elsinore, by the market square. Do you know it? When my father is dead I shall inherit the inn and retire into that noble profession. Cornelius here will be a soldier until he dies or is cashiered. These are the honorable employments of Elsinore’s sons.”

“And fathers,” Cornelius said. “You are the mason’s son. Master Willem. Was that not your father’s name?”

“Aye.”

“Will you visit his grave? Is it not at the church here?”

“He was buried in Elsinore.” I stood and walked around the oven, to the shadows behind it.

“But he was killed on Hven, was he not?”

“Let us speak of other things.”

“It was that Brahe’s fault, was it not?”

“Nay, it was not.”

“Indeed, sir. It was. We have all heard how he—”

“Enough on this.” I would not discuss Tycho with these buffoons. “I am no son of Elsinore,” I said.

Cornelius nodded.

“You are an educated man.”

“University of Wittendon,” Voltemont said.

“Wittenberg,” I corrected him.

“A son of Germany,” Cornelius said. “No longer a son of Elsinore. Well. Do you think, son of Wittendon, that you can encamp yourself in this frozen and snow-filled monument, clear the wreckage, build your own fires, and cook your meals? With neither Voltemont’s assistance nor my own? I dare say you’d not last the night, sir.”

“Do you threaten me?”

“Nay, sir. I but point you to the obvious. Your trunks are much smaller than ours, and I wonder if you have food in them, or only parchment, ink, and books.”

“Yes,” I said, and sat with them before the open oven. “I cannot survive without you fellows. Therefore let we three sons of Elsinore all be friends, not master and servants. Your hands, good sirs. And more of that wine, good Cornelius.”

This speech pleased them, and I was relieved. I am a small man, and I cannot wield an axe to break up wood for a fire, nor can I dig my way through drifting snow should a blizzard lay itself against the observatory doors. I smiled at the men and we drank, and I wondered that I did not feel as if I had come home again. Perhaps when I saw the great instruments or the laboratories, my heart would be content.

After we had declared ourselves friends and drank half a jug of wine, we began to explore the cellars. The kitchens led to the alchemical laboratories through a heavy oaken door against which Cornelius and Voltemont struggled for nearly an hour without success.

“Shall I take the axe to it?” Voltemont asked.

“Nay,” I said. “On the morrow we will find the stairs down from the main hall.”

“If that part of the building is passable.”

“Aye.”

The daylight was fading, the kitchen windows shifting from gray to blue. Darkness filled the corners of the room. Cornelius peered into the gathering blackness beyond the oven’s glow.

“Where are the bed chambers?”

“Upstairs, above the main hall.”

“Shall we see if the staircase will hold a man’s weight?”

“As you like,” I said.

The stair led up into a large, round terrace surrounded by a brick parapet. I was surprised to find the space filled with waist-deep snow. Tycho had designed the terrace roof with care, having it fashioned from triangular wooden panels that could each be opened or closed as desired to allow observation of any portion of the night sky. Most of those panels were gone and the terrace had lain open to the elements for I knew not how long. It was half an hour’s work clearing away enough snow that the three of us could climb up the stairs and onto the landing. The door from the terrace into the second floor of the main building was behind a tall drift. We had not put on our cloaks for this work and I could not labor much longer. The air was very cold.

“Shall we leave off this heavy task and go make up our pallets by the oven downstairs?” I asked. Cornelius and Voltemont thought this a better plan than digging through more snow and ice. I let them descend the stairs first, as they had done most of the work to clear the snow. The blizzard had stopped while we had been eating and patches of starry black showed though gaps in the clouds. I had stood on that very spot under that very roof with Tycho, measuring the ascension and declination of Mars. Now Tycho’s clever roof was broken. The great brass sextant that Tycho had placed in the terrace to stand proudly above us was no longer there. Likely it had been beaten into plows or melted down into spoons.

I followed Cornelius and Voltemont down the spiral stair into the kitchen. Voltemont had some cured mutton and potatoes, out of which he cooked a sort of stew.

“Our food will not outlast the week,” he said. “How shall we get more provisions? Will Marcellus send supplies from Kronberg?”

“We will need no more provisions,” I said. “We sail to Kronberg when the king returns in a day or so from Copenhagen. You shall have Christmas Mass at your own church in Elsinore.”

“I am most glad to hear it,” Cornelius said.

“Mark me: home by Christmas. Now let us get to our pallets. There will be much work on the morrow.”

We laid ourselves down on rough pallets made from our furs and woolen blankets, on the floor before the mouth of the oven. The fire burned down to glowing coals and soon my assistants slept. I lay awake listening to the men’s heavy breathing, the moaning of the wind, and the creaking of the upper floors. After an hour I sat up and stirred the coals, unable to sleep. For some time I sat looking into the fire and then I pulled on my boots, gloves, and cloak. Cornelius and Voltemont snored loudly, huddling against each other for warmth like puppies in a barn.

I climbed the stairs to the storeroom and slipped outside through the cook’s door as quietly as I could. It was not so cold as I thought it would be and it was not snowing. The sky was full of clouds, but they were high up and thin enough that moonlight broke through in ragged shafts of pale yellow.

The snow was deep and fought against me, but I wanted to see the building. As I circled around Uraniborg I could make out that the western towers were gone, likely torn down by the same villagers who had demolished the ramparts to steal the bricks and limestone. The western face of the main floor was badly cracked and the wooden cupolas above the second floor were tilted and falling into the bedrooms through the ceilings. Once the palace had been topped by a weather vane in the form of Pegasus, a great brass thing that was as tall as a man from hooves to wing tips. I could not see the Pegasus and I assumed that it too had been stolen by peasants. My hope of finding any of Tycho’s instruments was not great. In the morning I would walk out to Stjerneborg and see what remained there.

I returned to the kitchen, put my boots near the oven, and lay down on my cloak with a blanket over me. Soon I was asleep.

Voltemont woke me in the morning, giving me a bowl of pottage and an alarmed report.

“There was someone here last night, wandering about. I heard it. The sound woke me.”

“You heard only me. While you good men slept I investigated the exterior. That is all.”

“Nay, the noise was not outside; it was in the upper floor.”

“And you were here, asleep beside us,” Cornelius said.

“What, did both of you hear it?”

“Aye, we did.”

“The wind and nothing more.”

“Nay, I heard a voice, and things being dragged about, Soren.”

“A dream, then.”

“In both of our heads? While we were awake?”

“Tush. The wind.”

Cornelius and Voltemont insisted they had heard something in the small morning hours, and by the time I had eaten my pottage Voltemont had convinced himself that what they had heard was the ghost of Tycho Brahe.

“Tycho died in Prague, and he is buried there,” I said. “It is well known that spirits cannot travel over bodies of water.”

“Then it is some other ghost. Do you know of any man who died here?”

“There was no—See here, Voltemont. You have heard no ghost. Mark me: there is no spirit here, roaming the halls. You men ought take less wine before bed.”

Voltemont grumbled on for a while, but by midmorning he left off with ghosts in the night and I was glad of it.

The day was cloudy and not as cold as it had been, though there was no danger of the snow melting away. We bundled ourselves up and pushed through high drifts across the gardens and out into the field south of Uraniborg, to the Castle of the Stars.

Some of Tycho’s greatest ideas took living form in his large scientific instruments. The equatorial armillary, with its nested rings and compasses, stood nearly twelve feet in height, and with it the most accurate measurements of right ascension and declination in the history of astronomy had been made. The immense wood and brass astronomical sextant, eight feet tall and six across, allowed precise determination of angular distances. Tycho’s quadrants and azimuth angles were smaller but still impressive in size and accuracy. These wondrous machines were too large to be properly used by men on the terraces or towers. They were so heavy that they swayed in the wind and wooden floors shifted beneath their great weight, ruining observational data. Stjerneborg was Tycho’s brilliant solution to the challenges presented by his brilliant inventions.

Stjerneborg was an arrangement of five amphitheaters dug into the earth and lined with granite, into which the great instruments had been lowered and bolted down. The sides of the amphitheaters were stair-stepped and Tycho’s assistants could stand at various heights alongside the machines while making observations. The roofs of these observatories were made in sections to allow full compass of the night sky. I hoped to find in Stjerneborg Tycho’s greatest instruments, and I prayed they were undamaged.

We located the turret which had been built to cover the equatorial armillary and began to dig on the western side of it, searching for the door. My memory had tricked me and it was only after more than an hour that I recalled the actual location of the entrance was to the east.

My assistants said nothing but I knew they were not pleased, and I was glad when Voltemont found the door quickly. The heavy panel was carved from oak and banded in iron, set at an angle into a small limestone crypt.

“We have discovered the root cellar,” Voltemont said. I did not think he was amused.

We cleared away the snow and Voltemont took the iron ring in his hands and pulled. The door came open and we looked into a dark passageway with limestone steps leading down into the earth.

“We have no lamp,” Cornelius said.

“There are windows in the turret,” I said. “There will be light below.”

I moved past Voltemont and walked down into the depths of my dead master’s observatory. There was some ice and snow in the passage, and a strange smell like frozen meat that made me think some animal had recently taken the chamber as its den and had died not long after. The stairway went down twenty feet beneath the surface. As I had hoped, the main chamber was lit by gray light shafting down from the row of small windows that pierced the turret overhead. In the middle of these streams of soft light stood the equatorial armillary, upright and undamaged.

Voltemont and Cornelius hurried behind me down the steps and I heard them each take a surprised breath as they saw the armillary. Even to men who have no idea what its purpose is, such a machine is a most impressive sight.

Imagine four nested rings of brass, set within each other at alternating right angles to form a giant hollow sphere eight feet across. The great sphere stands on legs of steel and brass that are almost a man’s height. This wondrous machine towered above us in the half light, like some ancient monument, some lost holy relic. I nearly crossed myself.

“Marry, what is this?” Cornelius whispered.

“This is why we have come,” I said. “And there are other instruments like it in the neighboring chambers. We must dig down to them all and discover their condition.”

“What does it do?”

“One measures the motion of the planets with it,” I said. “Come. Let us excavate the rest.”

We labored all morning but only uncovered the entrances to two more chambers. Cornelius and Voltemont were less impressed with the sextants we unearthed, and by noon their enthusiasm was gone, replaced by hunger. We returned to Uraniborg, built up a fire in the kitchen, and ate boiled onions and carrots with bread and wine.

In the afternoon we tried and failed once more to open the doors to the main hall. The windows all lacked glass and Voltemont fashioned a ladder from planks of wood. We climbed in through the windows and I looked around the entrance hall of Tycho’s manor. The furnishings had been stripped away and weather had played freely with the place over the last years. Ice and snow was everywhere and the plaster walls were crumbling. A section of the ceiling had fallen; hundreds of pounds of plaster, cement, and lath blocked the door. Wide cracks ran the length of the remaining ceiling, some of the cracks continuing down the walls.

“Let us hope we are not buried alive,” Voltemont said, surveying the damage.

“Let us touch nothing,” Cornelius said. “I have little faith in these walls.”

There were a few broken chairs lying on their backs and held fast by ice, some stray bits of paper with the ink blurred and unreadable, and a few bits of other rubbish. The door to the west wing, through which I had hoped to access the laboratories in the cellar, would not open. I had seen the night before that the wing had fallen in upon itself and I was certain that even if we forced the door, the stairway behind it was full of debris and impassable. There were three other doors in the hall. One led to Tycho’s private office, and it would not open. I put my shoulder hard against it and a new crack spidered through the plaster above the frame. Cornelius pulled me away from the door.

“Let us not try that room,” he said.

Another door opened into a small room I could not remember at all, a chamber six paces or so long with a dark tile floor, a high window missing its panes, irregular waves of snow underfoot, and nothing else. Behind the last door, I knew, was Tycho’s library, and I greatly desired to see it again. We pushed on the door but managed to move it only an inch. I heard something fall over inside the room.

“The ceiling within has likely come down, worse than in this hall.” Cornelius stood away from the door and looked up. “I will be much impressed if the floor above us holds our weight, should we manage to find a way up to it.”

“Very dangerous, this building,” Voltemont said.

“And very cold.” Cornelius waved a hand at the immense fireplace taking up most of the great hall’s eastern end. “We could perhaps make our fire here tonight, but the hall is open to the winds. I also fear that the ice is all that holds the ceiling in place, and to thaw this room will cause it to fall down and kill us all.”

“Aye, we are safer in the kitchen.”

“And warmer. We have labored the afternoon away in this ice cave. Let us return to the comfort of the cook’s den.”

We climbed out through the windows and the rest of the day was spent in the kitchen next to the fire, eating bread and cheese, drinking wine, and listening to Voltemont’s apparently endless store of bawdy songs. I made notes regarding what we had found, the instruments discovered and those yet missing.

Cornelius and Voltemont were soldiers, but at Kronberg they spent most of their time watching ships drop anchor to pay taxes and then sail away. Neither man was much used to a day’s hard labor. Nor was I, and so it was not long after sunset that we spread our cloaks on the floor and slept. Very near the witching hour, my dreams were broken by a voice in the dark.

“You must awaken, Soren.”

It was Cornelius, whispering in my ear and shaking my arm. I sat up.

“What is the matter?”

“Peace. Listen.” He pointed to the stairwell.

“I hear nothing.”

“Quiet!”

Then I did hear noises. Something was being dragged around upstairs, and then dropped, the noise immense in the darkness. We rose and put on our boots and gloves. Cornelius and Voltemont strapped their swords about their waists and we crept up the stairs to the second floor terrace. From behind the door, which we had left sealed by the high snow drift, we heard things being moved, and the floor creaked under the feet of the intruder. I held my breath and listened hard enough to detect a voice, though I made out none of the words.

“The ghost,” Voltemont whispered.

I pointed to the snowdrift before the door. “We will dig. Quietly.”

Voltemont shook his head, eyes full of fear. Cornelius and I stepped around him and dug away at the snow. It was very cold and my hands ached from all the digging we had done earlier in the day, but we worked quickly and soon the door was exposed. I took the handle in my fist. Cornelius and Voltemont drew their swords. Voltemont crossed himself.

“This had best be a ghost,” Cornelius whispered. “Else I shall surely make a ghost of him who dared disturb my sleep. I was dreaming of many beautiful women.”

I pulled on the door. It resisted. I pulled with all my might and the door let loose a shrill creak and then it flew open.