Astiza
Alchemy comes from the Arab name for Egypt, al-Khemia, and embodies mankind’s oldest quest, the desire for transformation. The Egyptians mummified for their journey to the afterworld. The Norse believed the rainbow was a bridge to the gods. The Babylonians and Persians speculated about angels, or feathered men who pass through star gates from one realm to the other. Francis of Sicily had a criminal locked in a box to watch him die, hoping to see the man’s soul emerge.
No such sight was recorded.
Prophets have foretold the future. Mediums have communed with the dead. Astronomers have mapped the sky. Pythagoras believed that geometry reflected divine wisdom. Gothic architects put such wisdom into stone. The Neoplatonists believed numbers were the key to the cosmos, while the Cabalists deciphered sacred texts, believing that one revealed word actually means another. Artists portray hell far more vividly than heaven. Shamans speak to nature. Scientists weigh and measure.
I believe history is deeper than we remember. A great embryonic civilization flourished and failed ten thousand years ago, leaving our imperfect remnant. In ancient ruins are enigmatic clues to what we lost. The clothing of First Beings shone, legends say. They soared through the air. They walked through walls.
As I read in the Klementinum library, I took painstaking notes. Sometimes Primus Fulcanelli looked over my shoulder like an indulgent father or husband. He stood closer than necessary, and I failed to push him away. He’s a strangely compelling man, his mind as handsome as his body. I remain faithful, but he disturbs me in ways that shame. He’s an intellectual partner very different from my irreverent husband.
It’s my blessing and my curse to wonder. If you’re a woman, simply asking questions means being called a witch, a sorceress, or a heretic. I don’t care. The furnaces of new factories make ever more intricate instruments to take ever more precise measurements, in the faith that truth can be calibrated instead of grasped like a hot coal. I believe truth looks like magic. I believe reality looks like dreams. I believe the stars scribe our lives. I believe that prayer talks to one’s self, but that the self is eternal and sacred; that God is within as well as without. I believe that life has purpose, but it is hidden from all but the purest.
So I climbed the creaking, ladder-steep wooden stairs of the Astronomical Tower, deep in the heart of the Klementinum. I was persuaded to leave Harry in the care of a nun and followed Fulcanelli’s black boots and wine-colored robe upward, floor after floor, the walls plaster and the beams dark and cracked.
“Are the answers in the stars or in our soul, priestess?” my host called down genially as we climbed. “I’d hate to pant this hard for nothing.”
“As above, so below,” I recited. “As within, so without. All is one, and one is all. We study the sky to discern events on earth. We search the cosmos to understand ourselves.”
“So the view from this cold tower becomes a mirror?”
“The stars burn within us. Day needs night, and sun casts shadow. Understanding will come when we comprehend it whole and see the essential unity behind all things. Death is but a door to understanding, I hope. But I want to comprehend while still alive.”
“The Church says the Bible contains all you need to know.”
“Yet I understand that the library of the Vatican is greater than any on earth.”
He looked down with a smile, and my heart skipped a beat. “Beware, Astiza. You are Icarus, flying close to the sun.” He thought me a falcon on his wrist, controllable yet able to fly where he could not.
“I’m a wanderer in the desert, Primus, in the spirit of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Knowledge is my water.”
“Forbidden fruit.”
We climbed past brass instruments that precisely measure the angles to the planets, because astronomers use parallax to calculate their distance. The tower has astrolabes, quadrants, a pendulum, clocks, and telescopes mounted so high that wooden ladders are used to bring the astronomer to the eyepiece. Fulcanelli told me that savants stand there eight hours at a time, freezing or sweating, to measure the position of stars.
To find order, we look for cycles. There’s an astronomical clock on Prague’s city hall that is four centuries old. It measures time, the phases of the moon, the calendar, and the zodiac. Mechanical figures appear on the hour, representing vanity, miserliness, death, and pleasure. Harry has made us wait three times already for the figures to rotate into view. He’s frightened by the skeleton but fascinated, too.
The Astronomical Tower of the Klementinum is less whimsical, illustrating how the world has turned from mystery and astrology to calculation and fact. Ethan’s savant friends swear by the new methods, but I fear that the more we measure, the less we understand. Facts obscure comprehension.
After 172 steps—I had been warned how many—we came at last to a balcony that circles the tower, both of us breathing heavily. On the cupola above, Atlas held a globe topped by a weathervane. From the observation deck I could count the city’s hundred towers, punctuating a folded range of red tile roofs. The fading winter light was yellow on the western horizon, lanterns lighting and stars popping out. They appeared from nothing, like a code. Why is a star in this place, and not that one?
“This is God made manifest, is it not?” asked Primus.
“And us made small,” I replied. “How far are the stars, my wandering bishop?”
“No one knows for certain. Huygens calculated trillions of miles, and some have suggested that the universe is infinite. If God is infinite, why not?”
“How God must laugh at our strivings.”
“I don’t think so. He wants us to understand.”
“She wants us.”
He laughed, indulging me. “Blasphemy again, if one believes in the Trinity. But you believe in a pantheon, don’t you, pretty pagan? How you flirt with heresy even in our liberal age. How you test our partnership!”
I smiled at this mutual teasing. “Yes, I have my own pantheon of goddesses, but each godly being is but a manifestation of the One. We’re not far apart, you and me. Or the pope and me. And Bishop Fulcanelli would be uncomfortable indeed in any church council, I suspect. You have your own goals and, I deduce, your own creed.”
He shrugged. “I speculate. Creation has produced marvelous books, momentous clues, and inquiring minds. We simply have to pay attention. I want to know what everything means. So, yes, we’re alike, Astiza. Doomed by curiosity. Fate has brought us together.”
It was a compliment to my mind, but I knew he meant more than that, despite his vows. Men and women can’t have simple partnerships. His was the kind of comment I dared not answer if I was to remain faithful. Yet how I was tempted! I looked skyward instead. “I like nights when the stars seem close enough to touch. I want to believe that all of them would fit inside our hearts, and that all the eons of history are but a moment. If we had perfect insight, we’d understand that everything there is here, and everything past and future is now.”
“Unity!” It was so dark that Fulcanelli wasn’t embarrassed to stare at me. “It is what lovers seek.” His face was a mask of shadow, but I could feel his intensity like a stove and took a proper half step away. But only a half step. I was using him while remaining confused about my motives. My desire.
“Friends seek unity, too,” he amended. He shifted closer, and this time I let him.
Surely I could trust his pledge of celibacy. But he was a man, as wayward priests have proven again and again. I told myself: I must enlist him but be careful; I need an ally but must be faithful. I am lonely, but I dare not trust too much. I am a woman, with a woman’s vulnerability and calculation, and must pretend to be only a seer. “Christian Rosenkreutz described an allegorical wedding that joined the sun and moon, symbols for sulfur and mercury. A royal couple are ritually killed, and then brought back to life by the blood of the phoenix.”
“Centuries-old superstition,” Primus said.
“Tales of death and resurrection are as old as Egypt. Older. Magic is older than Christianity, and in fact the Romans accused the first Christians of being magicians. They persecuted them because they feared them, as some people fear alchemy today. The alchemists promise power. Science responds with doubt. Yet the gold of alchemical tales is not just bright metal; it’s the gold of spiritual understanding. It’s the promise that with enough study, and enough steps, one can learn the reason of all existence and purify not lead but our own souls.”
“We do that by answering for our deeds.”
I ignored this Christian platitude. “Tell me, Bishop: Astronomers can chart the sky and predict the movement of planets. Do you think medieval man made a machine to chart the human character and predict the movement of people? Do you think the Brazen Head really exists?”
“Astronomers prove prediction is possible. Perhaps perfect knowledge allows perfect foreknowledge. Yet I tremble if such a thing is true. I think it would bring great evil.”
“But what if we knew of future tragedies and could avoid them?”
“Yes,” he conceded, “this automaton could be a mercy as well as a curse. But I don’t think you’ll find it in the clarity of a winter night, madame.”
“I’m trying to imagine where Rosenkreutz might hide it.”
“I think your real hope is a necromancer’s old manuscript.”
“An alchemist. Or astrologer.”
“It sounds like you’re an alchemist yourself.”
“I’ve studied the theory,” I told him. “Teachings about the unity of matter go back to Greece and Egypt. Paracelsus taught that salt, sulfur, and mercury could change one element to another. The alchemist Basilius Valentinus wrote how lead antimony could become a chariot of fire. Hugo Alverda and the Comte de Saint-Germain were said to be hundreds of years old, having achieved purities that allowed immortality. These are the kinds of men Rosenkreutz would have confided in.”
“You’re mad, priestess, like Joan of Arc. Could you conduct alchemical experiments?”
“If I had to. It’s dirty, dangerous work.” The sky was bright with stars now. “Read the sky, Primus. To the untutored eye it has no pattern, and yet to an astronomer or shepherd it tells stories like a book.” I turned to him, his smell like wood, his shoulders broad. I did not forget Ethan, but he felt very far away. “We were brought together for a purpose, you and me. You’re as curious as I am. What question would you put to the android?”
He laughed. “How to build another like him!”
“I would ask how to achieve unity.” I was being shameless. Or did I simply yearn for human comfort? How dashing was this churchman!
Fulcanelli cleared his throat. He knew he was being used. He wanted to use me, in as many ways as he could. “In the precincts of the castle are wizards who live on the Golden Lane, an alley where goldsmiths gild and chemists heat cinnabar to make mercury, hoping it will dance its way to gold. Perhaps they know something of the Brazen Head and the mystery you pursue. Are you brave enough to let me take you there? It’s a strange, heretical place.”
“Discovery requires journeys. Tell me who to seek, Primus.”
Now he moved very close, both of us so cold this winter evening that I could feel his heat. “There’s one peculiar craftsman, a dwarfish warlock named Auric Nachash. He’s studied the Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus. I don’t know how much to believe or trust him, but he claims to know fantastic tales of power and sorcery. He might have heard something. He might point you to Rosenkreutz. And he likes children.”
I clasped the bishop’s arm. A thrill went through us both. I could talk to this man so easily. “Then take me to him. I can master my fears.”
“Of him, or me?”
“Why would I be afraid of you?”
In answer he kissed me, and I let him, and then broke free. “Please don’t.”
He didn’t try again. Our arms had dropped away. But I could feel his intensity in the dark and was encouraged, not defeated. “I’ll take you on one condition,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“That you take me with you when you go to find the Brazen Head.”