Outside the trees of the Stag Moat rustle.
The Emperor nods to me:
“See how fittingly you are guarded. The ‘Red Lion’ stands everywhere at the portal of the mysteries. Any novice will tell you that. Leave me now.”
My ears are bombarded with noise. Raucous dance music. An enormous hall. – Oh, yes; it is the rout that Kelley and I are giving for the city of Prague in the great hall of the City Chambers. My senses are dizzy from the whirling dancers and the racket of the drunken mob. Kelley staggers towards me with a foaming tankard of Bohemian ale. The expression on his face is crude and vulgar; incredibly vulgar. The crooked lawyer’s little rat face is no longer disguised by carefully combed hair. The scars of the cut-off ears glow a disgusting red.
“My brother”, he slobbers drunkenly, “my br-br-brother, let me have the rest of the rep p-p-powder; it’sh t-time, I t-tell you; we’re b-broke, brother!”
Shock and disgust strike me at the same time.
“What? You’ve already squandered all that the Angel gave us after months of praying till our knees bled?!”
“What do I care for your bloody kneesh, b-brother of mine?” blabbers the drunken lout. – “Let me have the red p-p-powder, do you hear, and we’ll be out of this damned messh by m-morning!”
“And then?”
“Then? Count Ursinus Rosenberg, Lord High Constable and Imperial fool, has more money than he knows what to do with; I’ll shoon find a use for it.”
I see red as my fury boils over. I hit out blindly and the tankard falls to the ground, soiling my best coat with good Pilsener ale. Kelley lets out a foul oath. Tongues of hate shoot up from the debauchery all around. The band strikes up:
Two groats and two lips
Are all that I need.
“Show our claws, would we, my fine tom cat?!” screams the quack. “The p-powder I say.”
“The powder is promised to the Emperor.”
“The Emperor can ...”
“Silence, scum!”
“Who do the spheres and the book belong to, Sir Knight of the Light Fingers?”
“Who brought the spheres and the book to life?”
“Who orders the Angel: Fetch, boy! Yah!”
“Shut thy blasphemous mouth!”
“Sanctimonious hassock-warmer!”
“Out of my sight, blasphemer, or ...”
Two arms wrap themselves around me from behind, taking all the force from the dagger-thrust. Jane is clinging to me, the tears streaming down her cheeks...
For a moment I am once more the man sitting at the desk, staring at the polished coal – but only for one, brief moment, and then I become my ancestor, John Dee, again, wandering aimlessly round the oldest, most dilapidated quarters of the medieval city, not knowing where my steps will take me. I feel an instinctive need to sink into the slime of the nameless, lawless, conscienceless masses, that fill their days with the satisfaction of base urges and are content with a full belly and sated lust.
What is the end of all striving? – Weariness ... disgust ... despair. – The dung of the nobles and the dung of the mob is the same excrement. – – The Emperor’s digestive tract is no different from that of the serf who cleans out his cess-pit. What madness to look up to His Imperial Majesty in Hradcany Castle as if you were looking up to heaven! – And what does heaven send? Fog, rain, miles of dirty slush. For hours I have been trudging through heaven’s excrement, the grubby, sticky flakes dropping from a leaden sky. – The end-product of heaven’s digestive system – filth, filth, filth. I see that I have ended up in the ghetto, with the lowest of the low. The choking stench of a whole people crammed mercilessly into the compass of a few streets, a whole people conceiving, giving birth, growing, dying – piling corpse upon rotting corpse in its cemetery and the living on top of each other in its dark, towering houses, like herrings squashed in a barrel. – And they wait and watch and scrape their knees bloody and wait ... wait ... all the long centuries they wait ... for the angel. For the fulfilment of the prophecies ...
John Dee, what is thy waiting and praying, what is thy hope and faith in the promises of the Green Angel compared with the waiting, believing, hoping, praying of these wretched Israelites?! And God, the God of Isaac and of Jacob, the God of Elijah and of Daniel, is He a lesser, a less faithful God than His Servant of the West Window?
I am struck by a burning desire to see Rabbi Löw and to ask him about the terrible mystery of waiting for God.
I know – somehow, I know – I am physically standing in the low chamber of the Cabbalist, Rabbi Löw. We have talked of Abraham’s sacrifice, of the unavoidable sacrifice that God demands from those He would make his own blood-offspring. I have heard dark, mysterious words about a sacrificial knife that can only be seen by one whose eyes have been opened to the things of the other world which are invisible to mortal man: things that have more reality than the things of this earth and which can only be indicated through the symbols of letters and numbers. The enigmatic words from the toothless mouth of the old madman chill me to the marrow ... Mad? Mad like his friend up there in his castle, mad like the Emperor, Rudolf of Habsburg! The monarch and the Jew from the ghetto – brothers in the mysteries ... gods, both of them, under the ridiculous trappings of earthly appearance ... where is the difference?
At my request the Cabbalist has drawn my soul to his. I begged
