Advent (18 page)

 
He tore the ring off the small finger of his right hand, his heart throbbing like the watchmen’s drum.

 
His very first thought was: What have I won?

 
He tried to thank her the next time they met. Summer had ripened the fields ready for autumn to mow them down, and the evenings were becoming cool. They walked by the sea less often. She was as indifferent to the sharp offshore wind as to every other mundane concern, but he felt it keenly, down to his bones. Age was catching up with him. He could not suppress twinges of unruly resentment when he felt her hand in his, thinner and rougher than his own, and noticed that though she was all skin and bones, she never shivered beneath her plain cloak. At first he’d found her hardiness magnificent, a reminder of how miraculously different she was from everyday women, and loved her for it. But now, as the evenings darkened, it seemed to reflect badly on his own frailty.

 
His mortality.

 
Her silence had begun to grate on him too. When once he’d walked beside her in contented quiet, he now found that her paucity of words irritated him. It struck him as a kind of stubbornness. At the beginning of the year, when he’d first found her again, he’d thrown questions at her like a wild boy throwing stones at roosting birds. He’d been so perfectly entranced by the miracle that he’d somehow not minded how rarely she answered, how often she only turned her solemn look on him and said, ‘I don’t know, Johannes.’

 
As the year waned, he wondered how he of all people could have been content with such nothings for so long.

 
It was the same when he tried to thank her. His head was spinning with wonder, his heart brimmed with gratitude, and yet she seemed as unmoved by the gift she’d placed in his keeping as if the ring were no more than the modest hoop of wood it appeared to be.

 
They were in the rutted roads among fields south of the city, the ditches brown and stinking with a summer’s worth of drowning weeds. She walked barefoot as always, the hem of her cloak soiled. It was harder by the week for him to see her for what he knew she was, no more an ordinary woman than he was an ordinary man. Still, he tried to remember whose love he had earned as he spoke. He was, after all, acknowledging a gift whose value could not be measured by the treasuries of all the kings and emperors of the world.

 
But despite his sincerity she only walked on, unsmiling. He felt rebuffed.

 
‘I know now what the gift is worth.’ His right hand clenched and unclenched. ‘I wore it last night. Perhaps,’ he went on, not entirely managing to quell the impatience in his voice, ‘you did not fully understand it yourself when you presented it to me.’

 
At this she stopped, looked at him and gave him an answer at last. It was not one he had looked for.

 
‘I made you no present, Johannes.’ She took his hand. ‘I gave you no gift. I offered you my burden and you accepted it. It is a heavy burden, heavier than you know.’ Embarrassed, he looked away, to the long horizon. He felt her fingers tighten. ‘If you cannot bear it, you must return it to me.’

 
At this he forced his face into a smile and said, ‘For your sake, I would bear anything.’ But for the very first time he knew he was dissembling before her.

 
The truth was that he treasured the ring for his own sake, not hers. Had he not devoted himself with unexampled constancy to seeking out the world’s hidden truths? Was he not the greatest magus since the ancient days? Her ring, he understood, was his reward.

 
That evening, at the window of his observatory, watching the hunter heave his starry bulk above the eastern horizon, turning the ring between his fingers, he contemplated the worth of that prize.

 
He thought of the years he had sacrificed to earn his station. He thought of the strength he had lost in solitary study, the pleasures of life willingly foregone. He watched the stars in their fixed and highest sphere, far above time and decay and death. When he put on the ring, he could feel their sweet influence all around him, wasted on the uncaring city beneath. He was the only one who revered their crystalline glory. In a meagre study in Frombork the canon Copernik readied his hammer, preparing to smash the celestial spheres into nothing. The magus knew of his work. All educated men seemed to know it. All over Europe those who called themselves wise ranged themselves alongside the vandal, eager to slay the universe so they could pick over its broken pieces like so many watchmakers. And meanwhile the rabble shouted the name of the monk Luther, who preached that God was not to be found anywhere in His creation. His followers broke images and painted walls white so they could bring themselves as near as possible to the condition of blindness, and proclaimed their cause a holy crusade.

 
In such a world, was it not his duty to bear the gift of the living creation? And to go on bearing it, as she had? On and on?

 
For many years now he had worried about what would happen after his death. His own pupils had turned out as venial as common apprentices. Their interest in magic extended as far as transmuting base metal into gold and conjuring obedient spirits who promised buried treasure or maidens’ hearts. He knew of no one to whom he could entrust his art.

 
Surely, then, this was the burden he willingly accepted: to defy time and decay and death, like the stars.

 
Immortality.

 
She had endured through inconceivable expanses of time with the ring on her finger. Why should not he?

 
He sought her out less often as autumn drew on. Each time he encountered her his heart would lurch. He hardly knew what to say to her any more, and she had never been afraid of silence. Sometimes they did no more than stand mutely together, hands clasped, reluctance in his face and the same abyssal darkness in hers. She never complained about his reticence. Reproach was not in her nature, any more than any other self-tormenting frailty. Still, where her gaze once exhilarated him, it now caused him discomfort. Those prophetic eyes seemed to look inside him.

 
One late afternoon he was returning from some business outside the city, riding slowly along a straight road under a greenish sky, when he saw her standing ahead, waiting for him. When she pushed back her hood, there was a look of strange disquiet in her face. It reminded him unexpectedly of the first time he had seen her – how beautiful she had been then, how marvellous. He dismounted and embraced her.

 
‘Johannes.’ Her coarse fingers traced the shape of his cheekbones beneath the skin. ‘I have seen you drowned.’

 
He stiffened, then eased her hand away, smiling. ‘No,
carissima
.’

 
‘All that touches me suffers.’ Her mouth was tense as if pulled tight by pain. ‘A woman drowns but death escapes her. It was you I saw, Johannes.’

 
So this was what the surrender of her gift had left her, the magus thought sadly: a driveller. She seemed all of a sudden very frail and small. He stroked the tangled knots of her hair.

 
‘Do not fear for me,’ he said, as he would have reassured any fretful old woman.

 
A cart’s wheels creaked on the road behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the plodding ox approaching, bringing another load of hay into the city. Its hooves rose and fell . . . and then rose but did not fall; the world around the magus and the woman went still, the green-tinted light suddenly luminous and clear like the heart of a gem. He turned back and saw that time had fallen away from her as well. Her face was the same, but now proud, fierce, full of fiery life, the face he had first fallen in love with: the face of a princess. Enraptured, he leaned to kiss her. She stopped him with a finger to his lips.

 
‘You cannot bear what I have offered you,’ she said.

 
It was in that exact instant that the magus determined to escape her.

 
He did not know it at the time, not consciously. All he knew was the rude shock those words gave, but that recoil was the seed that would grow over the next months into his hurried flight on the English vessel. His pride was wounded, and it stung. So suddenly and surprisingly and completely that it was like an emotion felt by another person, he felt a bitter determination to keep what he had won, to keep it for ever.

 
‘You judged me wrongly, then?’ he muttered.

 
‘I do not judge, Johannes. You came to me and did not turn away. You heard me. For that I waited for you and for that I love you. Because of that I asked you to take my burden from me. But it is not lifted. It is still mine. I saw the woman in the water. I saw her drown and not die. Her fate was yours. A terrible fate. You must return what I gave you.’

 
Whatever the magus might have thought of the rest of her speech – and he had rarely heard her speak so many words at once – the final sentence drove every other consideration out of his head. He forgot who she was, her ill-fated name. He forgot what gift had been laid on her. He forgot the idyll of the spring and summer, when he had loved her with his whole soul. The only thought left to him was terror of losing the ring.

 
‘I have accepted your burden,
carissima
,’ he said soothingly, and was astonished at how false his own words sounded. But surely it was the truth, the noble truth? ‘I have considered it and comprehended it.’ No other man alive or dead these thousand years could have said the same; was that not so? ‘I take it upon myself.’

 
‘It will destroy you,’ she said, and now he was equally astonished at how true those two words rang.
Te delebit
, a peal of fateful syllables, even though he knew she was exactly wrong: the ring was his guarantee against destruction. He had seen how. It would open his path to immortality.

 
‘It has sustained you,’ he retorted. And what was she after all but a woman, the weaker vessel? He was stronger as well as wiser.

 
‘Do you envy that, Johannes? Do you envy what I endured?’

 
‘No, certainly.’ The lies had got hold of his tongue. Everything he said to her was the opposite of the truth, though he believed it.

 
‘Then let me suffer again. Spare yourself. Return my gift.’

 
‘It is not with me,’ he said feebly, as if he was a boy caught thieving.

 
She clutched at his hand. ‘You listen, but you do not hear.’

 
‘Calm yourself.’ He disentangled his fingers from hers and looked towards the city, hoping the lateness of the hour would rescue him. ‘The gate will close. Let me consider this.’

 
‘The gate will close,’ she echoed. Her eyelids flickered and an unseasonal shiver ran through her. He doubted she had the city gate in mind. ‘The gate will close. The gate will close.’

 
A straining creak came from behind him, and the splotch of the ox’s hoof into muddy earth. He mounted and rode back to the city, leaving her whispering inaudibly to herself as the evening sky turned sickly yellow.

 
He sat awake all that night.

 
By morning he had determined to cross the sea, to England. It was an outpost remote enough not to be touched by the chaos and bloodshed the planets warned of. There were letters to be written and monies to be raised. He planned it all out while the stars turned, in feverish haste. Despite the sleepless night he began to work at his usual hour the next day, but now he locked and barred the door of his laboratory behind him. He put aside everything he had been studying before that morning, all the instruments of the baser alchemy. A new course consumed him. He unchained tomes he would once have hesitated even to touch, within whose bindings were the shunned and buried secrets of the pagan magicians. Ignorant of heaven, they had devoted themselves to the wisdom of Pythagoras and the Egyptians, who believed that souls might travel from body to body. He began to exhume the most ancient foundation of his art, the forgotten palaces of wisdom, whose only visible remains, like the wave-worn and barnacled spires of a sunken city making strange shapes above the ocean’s surface, were the alchemists’ fraudulent phantoms – the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of youth, grotesque distortions of truths that had been lost since the time of Hermes Trismegistus.

 
Hermes had lived for nearly a thousand years, and so had Mahalalel and Methuselah the ancestors of Noah.