In the year Hugh O’Neill was vested with the earldom of Tyrone, Doctor John Dee and his wife, Jane, and their many children left their house and the isle of Britain for the Continent with trunk-loads of books, an astronomer’s staff, bottles of remedy for every ill, a cradleboard for the newest, and in a velvet bag a small orb of quartz crystal with a flaw like a lost star not quite at its center. In a cold room in a high tower in the golden city in the middle of the Emperor’s land of Bohemia he placed the stone in its frame carved with the names and sigilla that his angelic informants had given to him.
There was war in heaven, he had been told, and therefore war under the earth, and soon enough on the lands and seas of all the kingdoms of men.
It would engulf the States and Empires of Europe; even the Sultan might be drawn in. Spain had overcome the Portingale king and attached his nation and its empire in Great Atlantis to herself, and so Atlantis too would be in play, and Francis Drake’s license as a privateer would be traded for the chain of an Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and Walter Raleigh given one too. The heavenly powers, the armed angelic hosts that must aid the true Christian faith, would go into battle, opposed by other powers great and small. The creatures of the middle realm, of earth and water, hills and trees, shy and self-protective, would surely fight with the old religion: not because they loved the Pope or even knew of him, but only because they hated change. There was little harm they could do, Doctor Dee was sure, though much annoyance. But in the contested Irish Isle where Spain would be welcomed, there were still other powers: warriors who appeared and disappeared after sudden slaughter, bright swords and spears that made no sound. Were they men, had they once been men, were they but empty casques and breastplates? They could be captured, sometimes, imprisoned if you knew the spells, but never for long. It is useless to hang us, they would say to their jailers, we cannot die.
Look now: there was a swirl of winds within the stone, the sense (not the sound) of heavenly laughter, and the clouds parted to show the ocean as though from a sea-bird’s eye, and on the sea small dots that Doctor Dee, bending closer, perceived to be big-bellied ships, or the signs of such ships, the red Spanish crosses just visible or guessable on their sails. In the stone the tiny ships rocked on the main like mock ships in a masque or a children’s show. An angel finger pointed to them, and John Dee heard a whisper: That is not far off from now.
A flotilla in the North Sea, and then in St. George’s Channel, come to throw down Elizabeth and put Catholic Mary Stuart on the throne, with a Catholic consort beside her. It was known that the Spanish Duke of Parma had built a bridge of ships around Antwerp with which to subdue the Dutch; King Philip, fattened on gold and silver from the ransacked empires of dark-peopled Atlantis, had wealth aplenty to begin, and to begin again if his schemes were frustrated. What Doctor Dee had seen in the glass confirmed it: Not far off from now. He must learn more, know more; if he could, he must look into the heart and soul of that cold, crippled king.
The lesser legions of heaven, those assigned to the earth’s business, are gatherers and bearers of messages and news, passing all that they learn here below to the ranks above, where it is transmitted to the highest places, the seats of judgment and foreknowledge. No active interference in earthly things issues from those seats; the will of God had in the beginning made it a law that the children of Adam and of Eve must be free in the choices and elections they make, no matter the consequences: for the singular soul of each one, but also for the life of all in the time to come. The pious could believe that their prayers and appeals to the saints, the Virgin, and God could change the course of things for the better, or bring about the destruction of their enemies and the supposed enemies of God, but the actual calculus of heaven is simple and easily understood: every earthly alteration produced by Man is at the same time and equally a work of God; every appeal to the powers of darkness or of light is fulfilled by the actions of human souls and hands. The Emperor Maximilian once asked a holy abbot why it was that wicked sorcerers and witches could contract for whatever they desired from the devils of Hell, but a pious man could receive nothing of worth from an angel. The Abbot knew—but he didn’t say it to the Emperor—that what the angels gave was knowledge, and a good man could get that for nothing.
The Abbot’s invention of a hundred years ago had in fact been for eliciting that knowledge from the angels, who granted it to anyone who had learned how to ask. From the Abbot’s rare and precious books, suppressed and condemned by orthodoxy but still findable, books that meant twice as much as they seemed to mean, John Dee had learned the art of angelic petitioning; after years of study he had been rewarded, too. Books of common phrases with fixed hidden meanings: every court possessed them, all differing from the books of other courts. The counting of the lines, the numbers of the letters, the variation of typefaces—anyone could do the arithmetic that revealed the meanings. But none of the tricks and devices common to earthly cyphers were of use in angelic communion: the face message might be cast in the most recondite language the writer possesses, only to baffle mere human investigators and spycatchers; the more urgent message beneath or behind the face message is directed to the angels, who flock to the writings of men, which they can never have enough of, because they cannot themselves create such things; even their consumption of them can be said to be more like eating and drinking than the human activity of reading. But the message they alone can carry and deliver, the message merely embodied in the outward paper and ink, is produced like the orderly web of a spider from the writer’s own body and soul, and is transmitted to the angel bearers by the writer’s hope and need as much as by his letters red and black.
All this John Dee knew. And though the cost in toil and waste of substance in the process was great, he was seated now in Prague before his table of practice to bring forth (in the midnight, under a shaded light, with the soft breathing of his wife and children in their beds in the next chamber) a message that the angels might take. He felt them pluck at the meanings even as he put them down, like naughty pupils snatching their teacher’s notes and quill from behind his back. He had no assurances that the answer he required, the answer that would help to save his Queen and nation, would be returned to him: if it came it would come on no paper, but in the opening of his breast and the placing of the answer there where his spirit, like a mirror, could reflect it to his mind and his senses.
He knew by now that each messenger angel can bear a message only as far as to the border of her demesne. There she waits to pass the message to another—Doctor Dee imagined the one reading the letter to the other, who hears and then bears it on, like couriers changing horses at an inn. Of course it isn’t words that are passed but scraps of possibility, futures and presents: and the answers that are returned at the angelic borders are liable to change as they are brought down through the upper air. Though they can only be true, and the angel messengers know them to be true, the truth they hold is a form of knowledge that human persons alone can possess: knowledge that is labile, that bears conviction without proof, that is always shadowed by a different and opposite knowledge, tempting or terrifying.
The Moon was waning gibbous on the night the Doctor cast his message and felt it taken up; it was in its last quarter when he understood he had been answered. He fasted for a day, and when morning was full and his wife had shooed the children to their tasks and their schoolwork, and after he had prayed at his faldstool for a quarter of an hour, asking God and His angels that nothing in the letter that had come for him would harm him or his immortal soul, he opened it.
A windowless hall, arched like an immense tunnel, painted on all sides with scenes of battle. Hundreds of warriors in each of many panels, on the ceiling as well as the walls—they seemed to pass beside the Doctor one after another while he himself put one foot before the other without moving forward. In some panels, commanders accompanied by priests and bishops made obeisance, or knelt in surrender to other commanders; in some, horses and men and weapons, cannon firing, clusters of pikes like aspen groves.
There were also living persons in this hall he walked, Augustinian friars in black, secretaries carrying letter-boxes; but they seemed not to arrive and pass by but to occur and vanish, then occur again a little farther off and vanish again. Though many spoke together, and the booted feet of soldiers struck the stone floor, no sound came that the Doctor could hear. That was not surprising. What was surprising was how he, as message and messenger, was carried along by the people who passed by him: like a leaf on a stream carried backward as the stream goes forward. He was drawn up before a small door, guarded by helmeted men in extravagant attire; he was for a time becalmed there, until the door was knocked upon within and opened by the guards, and men in dark robes, arms full of papers, came out and swept around the place where the Doctor stood. Then, without having taken steps, he was inside.
A spare, low room, holding a long wooden table of no magnificence; no carpet upon the stone floor, no curtains at the small deep windows. Only wide shelves where great folders of papers were held, some leaning on others, some fallen flat and with others stacked upon them. More were piled on each end of the wooden table. As Doctor Dee stood unseen, a monk took away a folder from before the man, all in black, seated at the table. A monk at the table’s other end opened an identical folder and placed it before the man. There was no doubt who the man at the table was; his habits and his dress were known to the world, half of which was his to command. He wore no coronet, no chain. He dipped a pen and began to study and to annotate the pages of the folder before him. John Dee thought of the tales in which a wise child or a hero begs to be transformed into a fly, to spy upon his enemies and their doings. And though he could not himself ask for that, in his state now he thought he could by will alone cause his being to take the form of that insect eye, unnoticeable. For a few moments. Now.
There on the papers where the King scribbled his orders, names came to be, not as though drawn by a pen but rising like bubbles from a pond. The names were of ships, and the ships’ captains: San Felipe, Florencia, San Francesco, Santa Anna, Gran Grifon. Urcas, great-ships, galleons, galleasses, down to small fregatas, zabras, pataches. All presented to the King for his study, the names to be checked off with his pen: the duke of Medina Sidonia, the duke of Parma, the count-duke Olivares. And the names also of angelic hosts whom his friars had identified with this or that fleet or squadron, who would need to be praised in hymns and Masses every day for success to follow.
It was to be: the notes that John Dee perceived on the King’s table named May as the month the vast fleet would be launched. From the lowlands of Holland the great rafts or barges would be filled with soldiers and sent off; that was Parma’s charge. Dee sensed what the man in black perceived, what he himself had imagined: the English Queen imprisoned or dead, Catholic Mary on the throne, Philip’s son her husband. He shuddered, or the free soul that looked on these future things shuddered. So did the King, his hand beginning to tremble, his pen dropping, spoiling his page. A figure in doctor’s robes appeared, placed a thick shawl around the King’s shoulders, and a servant placed a cup before him, heated wine.
Doctor Dee couldn’t tell, and no being could tell him, if the King would live till England was conquered, or if conquest was unavoidable, or was impossible. In that moment the letter that he had opened in his bosom came to an end: it folded itself up small, and he was once more in his study in Prague. It was evening now here, as it had been morning in Spain. A church-bell in the city was pealing slowly, as for one dead; in the house a dinner-bell rang. He began a letter—ordinary paper, a quill and ink—for Walsingham in London, in a simple code they shared. This is to be, the decoded letters would spell. These are the names, these the numbers. It is not far off from now.