S Parris - Prophecy

‘Who questioned you?’ Her voice is light, but her eyes fix hard on mine, so that to look away would immediately make me seem shifty.

‘Lord Burghley.’

‘Ah.’ She nods and smiles, then moves to sit beside me on the settle, arranging and smoothing her skirts carefully until she is satisfied. She runs a forefinger along my wrist. ‘You would not lie to me, would you, Bruno?’

My skin shivers and tightens to goosebumps at her touch. ‘Why would I want to lie?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps you have a woman you are hiding from us?’ She glances up sidelong with a mischievous smile.

‘At the court?’ I force myself to smile. ‘I’m afraid not. There is no woman. My life is far less exciting than you imagine, madame. It is mainly spent in libraries among dusty manuscripts.’

She smiles, cat-like, and arranges her hands in her lap. I breathe out slowly; it seems that, for now, the questioning is over.

‘Well, then — let us see if we can liven it up. Come, Bruno. You are the master and I your acolyte. I am in your hands. Mould me as you will.’

Her expression is all sweetness; only the dangerous glitter in her eyes betrays a mischief I prefer not to dwell on. The only way through this is for me to appear as naive and as literal as possible, to keep all conversation on the surface and pretend to be so block-headed as to miss any implied double meanings on her part.

Then there is the matter of my memory system, and how much I should impart. The rumours that chased me from the Parisian court were all true, of course; my ars memoria is so much more than a useful tool for orators or those who wish to improve their powers of recall. It is an art of deep magic, refined over years of study, worked on through all my long months as a fugitive in Italy and later in the libraries and archives of Geneva, Toulouse and Paris. It is, though I say so myself, a profound achievement, though few will have the capacity to comprehend it fully; my system is the first of its kind to marry the classical art of memory with the system taught by Thomas Aquinas and passed down in the teachings of my former order, the Dominicans, but to add to these the most powerful ingredient of all, the ancient Egyptian wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus. Without this element of magic, my work would have held no interest for King Henri of France, a man who hungers after esoteric knowledge with an enthusiasm that almost makes up for his lack of talent. Marie de Castelnau was a confidante of King Henri’s wife; how much, then, might she already know? Again, the sense that this is some kind of trick hangs over me, setting my teeth on edge.

Even so, we must start somewhere. I hold out to her a large sheet of paper on which I have drawn a diagram, and sit back with some satisfaction while she takes it and reads, turning it this way and that as she narrows her eyes to make out the tiny inscriptions.

‘In God’s name, Bruno,’ she says, at last, having turned the paper in a full revolution. ‘How is anyone supposed to make sense of this?’

‘It is not for all to understand.’

She appears to like this.

‘That I can see. It is only for adepts, so King Henri says. I want to become an adept.’ She flicks the paper with a finger, then crosses her ankles and rests her chin on her hand. ‘Where do we begin?’

Where indeed? For a moment I am tempted to laugh. My system is infinitely complex; I have not fully penetrated its mysteries myself. The diagram, laid out according to the rules I explained in my book On the Shadows of Ideas , published in Paris shortly before I left (and one of the principal reasons for my flight), shows a series of concentric wheels, divided according to the twelve signs of the zodiac, separated further into subdivisions, which can be arranged in seemingly limitless configurations to embrace the sum of human knowledge. On these wheels are represented the properties of elements in the natural world — plants, animals, minerals; on a higher plane come the inventions of men, the spectrum of all the arts and sciences; beyond these, the images of the mansions of the moon, the planets, the constellations and the houses of the zodiac. Finally, and most powerful of all, there are the names and images of the thirty-six decans of the zodiac, which no man before me has dared invoke; it was this element that had the learned doctors of the Sorbonne and the ecclesiastical authorities in Paris muttering against me for sorcery, because they lacked the light of true understanding. My system, correctly understood, becomes a means of connecting all that is contained in the universe, in one golden chain of ascent from the lowest substance through the imagination of man and up to the gods of time, who inhabit the infinite space beyond the spheres of the planets, who move and influence everything we know as the heavens and the Earth. And the man who can fully embrace the knowledge contained in this system therefore holds the entirety of the known universe within his own mind, and can rediscover his own divine nature, that part of himself that once communicated freely with the Divine Mind and with the gods of time, before that knowledge was lost to us. He would become more than an adept — he would become like God.

This is what Dee and I mean when we speak of entering the Mind of God, though we disagree about the nature of the decans. He, afraid to stray too far from the conventional forms of the Christian religion, calls these spirits ‘angels’; it is these he seeks to speak to through his misguided faith in Ned Kelley’s scrying. But I know that the likes of Kelley will never find a means to reach the decans. Before the great civilisation of Egypt crumbled and so much of its wisdom was lost, priests and Magi knew the secret of communicating with the gods of time and of harnessing their powers. These secrets were closely guarded in the temple archives, and when the last priests fled, they carried the scrolls that preserved their knowledge with them to far corners of the known world. One of these priests was Hermes Trismegistus — who some believe was the deity Thoth, scribe of the gods. So the names of the decans have been passed down to us through the writings of Hermes, though his precise instructions for communication and ascent are still lost to us, contained — I believe — in the missing fifteenth book of his writings, the book Dee believes could be in the possession of Henry Howard. My memory system is the closest approximation I can devise without the great key described in that book. Even so, it is sufficiently steeped in ancient knowledge to see me burned, as King Henri and I both knew.

Marie is still looking at me. Firelight softens the right side of her face, licking a warm glow along her cheek and collar bone. The room is too dim, or the day is; there is something too intimate about the shadows, the amber light. I lean across, pointing to the outermost wheel of the diagram, uncomfortably aware of her intense gaze in the stillness.

‘Any memory system is based on symbolic pictures, since our minds are better suited to recalling images,’ I begin, not quite meeting her eye. ‘These images here are classified according to their common properties. So, for example, in this circle you see arranged the stones and minerals associated with the planet Mars —‘

‘There was much talk of your knowledge in Paris, you know,’ she interrupts, twisting a stray curl around her finger. ‘They said you were teaching King Henri to call down demons, so that he could side with the heretic Elizabeth against the pope.’

‘Well, the ignorant have to fill their time somehow. Now, these wheels can be turned to create different series of connections —‘

‘It was one of the things the Duke of Guise used to stir up unrest against the king,’ she interrupts again. ‘He said you were manipulating Henri by sorcery, converting him to your heresies so that he would protect you from the Inquisition. That was one of the reasons King Henri banished you from court. Did you know that?’