“I do not deny,” he finally said. “I would have seduced you. But that isn’t …”
“Isn’t what?”
Ben reached to massage his brow. “I need something from you, something I thought to seduce from you.”
“What have I that you may not obtain without me, save my virtue?”
“Your keys. The key to Sir Isaac’s private rooms.”
She stared at him. “What? You are his ’prentice. What possible cause have you to spy on him?”
“He withholds something of grave importance to me.”
“I see. Well, if there is nothing else …” She turned to go.
“No, please—wait,” Ben pleaded. “I am sorry I mistook you the other day. I was indecorous, and I apologize. But I really do need your help.”
“Sir, you ask me to risk my life, and in all honesty you have not moved me to do that. If you wish to explain why this should interest me …”
Ben shook his head. “You do not have the sound of a chambermaid. Whence come you? What is your name?”
She sighed. “Good day.”
“No—wait again. I would tell you, but I cannot.”
“Ah. Thus he will not trust you, and you will not trust me, and so all secrets stay in their boxes. Perhaps ’tis best, given the example of Pandora.”
Ben closed, his eyes. “Stay, then. Stay.” He sighed and sat back upon the bed. “A doom is coming to Prague. My master claims that he may have some knowledge to arrest it, but he will not tell me of it, and I cannot judge without seeing his notes.”
“Doom?” She faltered slightly. “But what good can you do if your master cannot?”
“Come here. Come close.”
She hesitated, but came to him.
“Closer. Lean down.” He rolled his eyes at her skeptical expression. “I will not bite you. Come near.”
She did, lowering her face until their gazes met from a bare foot apart. Her eyes had green in them.
“What you must know,” Ben whispered in a voice that was wispiest air, “is that my master may choose to leave Prague to its fate and give no warning to the populace. I will not do that. If I know there is no hope, I will raise alarm. If you love this city, that is your interest in me.”
She continued to stare into his eyes, and then leaned near his ear, so that her warm breath tickled it. “I have not the key,” she said. “But I can get it.”
“I urge you,” Ben said, “do so!”
“Conditions twain,” she replied.
“Name them.”
“That I go with you, so as to see you remain honest.”
“Done. And the second?”
“I should like to gaze through the telescope.”
Ben drew back from her until he could again see her face. Her lips were pursed, slightly wide, and for an instant he had the most powerful urge to kiss them. His brain won the argument with other parts, however, for he knew he would lose all that he had just gained if he did. He nodded, wordlessly.
She nodded in return and then stood. “Tomorrow night I shall come—let us say at midnight—and you shall take me to the telescope. Then we shall speak of keys.” She curtsied, turned on her heel, and made for the door. At the handle she paused and looked back over her shoulder.
“Lenka,” she said, softly. “My name is Lenka.”
4.
Crecy’s Story
Crecy coughed and tried to smile. “The hand of an angel,” she repeated.
“For want of a better word.”
“So you know that.” Crecy sighed. “Very well. Is there anyone near? Near enough to hear?”
Adrienne went to the door, checked the empty hall, and, closing the heavy oak behind her, returned.
“We are alone,” she assured Crecy.
She tried to sit up, winced, and settled for propping her head higher on the pillow. “You were never initiated into the inner mysteries of the Korai,” she stated.
“Inner mysteries? I have never even heard of such.”
“Yes. After I foresaw your marriage to the king, we decided to wait until after the wedding to initiate you.”
“I see. Then I was never really one of the Korai.”
“Of course you were—but you were kept from the greater mysteries. The mysteries I speak of have to do with the founding of our sisterhood. It is a long story, but I can shorten it.”
“Be as long-winded as you wish. This is the most you have spoken of the Korai in two years.”
Crecy made as if to speak, and her face crinkled in pain. She cleared her throat and went on. “The Korai teach that in order to create the world, God had to withdraw from it—create a place where he was not—so that finite things like matter could exist. Once created, he could not enter the world without destroying it, so he created servants to do his will. These were races of air and fire—ofanim, cherubim, seraphim—the angels, in short. Through them he created all the physical world—animals and plants, man and woman. The woman was called Lilith.”
“Ah,” Adrienne murmured.
Crecy closed her eyes. “I know you are skeptical, but hear me through. Lilith was too much for Adam. Her craving for the pleasure of flesh was stronger than his, and she was not pliant. She did not lie passive, but straddled from above and took her joy at her pleasure. Moreover, Adam was not her only lover. She seduced some of the angels, learning from them the secret laws of the universe. For this—for being a woman of free will, for being Adam’s superior, for rising above him in bed—she was imprisoned. Adam was given a new, sweet, docile wife—Eve.
“But Lilith had many children, and though some were—like their fathers—creatures of an elemental sort, others hid amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve, growing bolder in time, marrying amongst them, passing on the germ of Lilith from one generation to the next. Athena was the daughter of Lilith, remembered after her lifetime as a goddess. You and I are descended from her.”
“Metaphorically, perhaps,” Adrienne said. “I must say, this story is told differently than I have heard it. Is not Lilith the mother of demons? Are you and I demons, then?”
“Those lies started with Adam and Eve—of course they cast darts at Lilith. But think, Adrienne. Lilith was part of God’s plan. How could she have been a mistake? Why would he imprison her?”
“And the Korai have some answer to this?”
Crecy nodded. “Indeed. They say that the god who exiled Lilith and created Eve was not God, but an impostor. One of the angels, Lucifer, took this universe—this place without God—and made it his own kingdom.”
“And thus the world is ruled by the devil, and not by God at all. Yes, a pretty philosophy, one that explains the problem of evil very neatly,” Adrienne said. “I refuse to believe that the intelligent women of the Korai believe such facile nonsense.”
“I cannot say what they actually believe. But this is what I was taught. Of course, it may be all lies, a story to exaggerate our own importance. But at the heart of it may be some truth, Adrienne. The angels—do you know the Hebrew name for them, malakim? Do you know the meaning of the word?”
Adrienne sighed. “My interests are in natural philosophy.”
“It means ‘shadow side of God.’ The Hebrews knew whom they dealt with, even if our Church has forgotten. They are real, Adrienne. You have seen them, been wounded by them, been given a hand by them.”
Adrienne nodded, frowning.
“What do you believe, Adrienne? Do you believe in God?”
Adrienne looked at the redhead, shocked. “Of course. Do you understand how precariously the universe is built, Crecy? How exacting its specifications? Without gravity and the other affinities, there would be no order, only chaos. Where there is law, Veronique, there must be a lawmaker.”
“I am no philosopher, but I agree. And you philosophers—you discover these laws of which God has writ the world, and you find how we might use them?”
“Yes.”
“Then why must I convince you of the reality of angels?�
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“I have never doubted their existence, Crecy, for the Bible speaks of them. But the Bible often cloaks the real in obscure symbol. I once speculated that angels represented the elements, gravity, the harmonics of sound, and trajectory. But you are right—that is lost to me now. That creature that guarded the king—angel, devil, fey, or djinn—it was something, something intelligent, malicious. But I must know what they are, Veronique. I must have more than hieroglyphic mysteries. Are they living things, or do they merely resemble life? Do they have souls? Are they composed of matter?”
Crecy nodded. “I knew you would ask these scientifical questions, but I have little to tell you. Only that God must have made them.”
“If so, they must conform to His laws. They must be understandable in mathematical terms. If they are mysterious, it is only because we have not asked the right questions, not pursued the proper experiments.”
“And how will you experiment on them, my dear? How will you dissect angels in your laboratory?” Another cough rasped from her throat. “No, no, let that pass. I need to tell you something else, before I weary too much.”
“I will not tax you,” Adrienne vowed, suddenly a bit anxious. “If you pledge me you will live, we can continue later. You have already given me much to think about.”
“I haven’t answered your first question, about your hand.”
“Later.”
“Yes, later. But I will say one more thing, now. There are many sorts of malakim. There are those such as you saw near Gustavus, clouds with fire glimmering within. There are those such as guarded the king and burned your hand. There are many who cannot make themselves seen in the world of our senses, or only barely so, but they are there nevertheless. But in a different sense, there are two sorts of them: those who wish to destroy mankind and those who do not.”
“Angels and devils.”
“No. It is not so simple. In a sense they are all devils—or all angels—it does not matter what you call them. What matters is that they think first of themselves, of their own wishes, of the politics of their realm. They are cut off from God. I do not even think they acknowledge him, have forgotten him. They forget us—mankind—too, for eons at a time, consider us no more than you consider dust in the air. But in certain ages, philosophers arise, and the dust, so to speak, thickens to choking. Men and women begin to learn the laws of God—the real ones, the ones by which the universe operates. This angers the malakim, Adrienne, and worse, it frightens them. And so they work against such people. They kill them, oftimes.”
“If this is so, how did Huygens and Leibniz and Newton and—and myself, for that matter—live to publish what we’ve learned? Why weren’t we killed?”
“That comes to two reasons. The first is that it is not easy for them to murder us, to touch us outside their realm.”
“And yet you were just telling me tales of fornication with such spirits, of a human woman bearing their children. The Bible speaks of Jacob wrestling with an angel, of cities being blasted by them to ash.”
Crecy’s grip on her hand tightened almost painfully. “Imagine for a moment that you are God. You have withdrawn yourself from the world in order to create it. You built it of law, of numbers and words, of mathematical affinities. And then the very servants you send into the world to carry out your will barricade themselves within and begin to do as they wish. What do you do?”
“Destroy the world and begin again.”
“Let us assume that you are the loving God of whom Jesus spoke and cannot bear to undo your creation.”
“Make other servants to deal with the first.”
“Ah. But how to prevent them from developing their own wills in this place you cannot reach?”
Adrienne lifted her hands in defeat. “Very well, Crecy, you are God. What is your solution?”
“I am outside the world, a world whose boundaries are made by my very will. You just said that the universe is precariously built. What if I were to change the law, just a tiny bit, a harmony here, a numeral there—not so much that things fall apart or crash together into a great lump, but just enough to deprive my renegade servants of some of their power, make them as ghosts in the world they have stolen. And what if these adjustments to the law allowed my favored creation—Man—to one day rise against his wrongful masters and cast them out of the universe?”
Adrienne remembered the engraving again: God’s hand reaching from the cloud, grasping the cosmic tuning key. Could He twist it, and thus make the universe different?
She shook her head. “But they can kill us.”
“It is difficult. It is easier if they use human agents.”
“You said there was a second reason.”
Crecy leaned her head back. “They have tired of killing you one at a time. The blood of Lilith is everywhere, and will not stay quiet. Age after age, you keep coming back, inquiring after the law. Some malakim think to kill you all, children of Eve and Lilith alike.”
“How?”
“By making you kill yourselves, of course. London, my dear, was only the start.”
That made a horrible sort of sense, and for an instant Crecy’s bizarre explanation seemed perfect, a balanced equation. But then something began to nag at Adrienne, though she could not place what. The wrong integer, somewhere, the wrong operation. At the root, of course, was her distrust of Crecy, but there was something more.
“How do you know all this, Crecy? Did you learn all this from the Korai?”
Crecy chuckled, a sort of bubbling deep in her chest, and her voice faded to a whisper, her eyelids fluttering. “No, my dear. I know these things because I am one of them. One of the malakim.”
Adrienne awoke, sprawled across open books, wondering where she was, trying to recall what had awakened her. Raising her head she found herself peering at the engraving she had fallen asleep regarding: a seraph, four of its six wings hugged around itself and two spread wide. The wings were covered in eyes, and eyes winked from the palms of its hand, from each finger. She recalled that she had been dreaming, and in her dream her hand had blinked at her.
Someone rather near coughed for her attention.
It was Francis of Lorraine, staring at her with an amused and perhaps slightly worried expression.
“I am sorry, Demoiselle. Hercule should never have set you such a demanding task.”
“Oh, no, Your Grace,” Adrienne managed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “The task is no trouble. I hope you approve of the volumes I chose.”
“I wish I could take them all,” Francis complained. “But you picked the best, almost as if you read my mind. But why do you sleep there, when a good bed awaits you?”
“I was reading,” Adrienne said. “You must understand, it has been a very long while since I have had books.”
“But such books!” Francis said. “These are among my favorites.”
“Mine as well,” she said, smiling as brightly as she could.
“Really? How delightful.” He looked shy for a moment, and exactly his fourteen years. “I wonder, Demoiselle, if you would consent to ride with me at times on the journey. I would very much welcome the opportunity to discuss these matters with someone who understands them.”
Adrienne cocked her head. “I would enjoy that very much, sir. Though I must also watch my son and friend.”
“Yes, of course,” the boy said hastily, blushing. “I only meant when it was convenient, and to your liking.”
“I am certain it will be to my liking often,” Adrienne replied, rising and curtsying, fully aware of the view that Francis had of her low-cut bodice. It could not hurt either her or Crecy if the young duke had a boyish infatuation with her. She presented him her hand, which he stared at blankly for an instant before nearly stumbling over to kiss it.
“Good night, Your Grace,” Adrienne said.
“Yes, Mademoiselle, good night. But I should to your bed if I were you—it may be the last time you are able to sleep in one for some time.”
&nb
sp; “We leave soon, then?”
“By the noon, tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
“Oh. But my friend Crecy …”
“She will ride in a carriage, and the doctor shall attend her. I’m afraid it is the best we can do.”
Adrienne curtsied again. “That is all we can ask,” she answered.
It was a long morning for Adrienne, for she and Crecy had no chance to talk, and her mind stung with questions as if full of hornets. The preparations of the last several days collapsed into seeming chaos, and no place or room was still—or safe for conversation—for long.
As Francis had promised, however, midday found them under way, beneath a miraculous sky, a vault of turquoise only lightly veined with clouds, and a golden sun. Despite everything, she felt a surge of happiness so strong that she almost wept. Others felt it, too, and the expedition was in an almost carnival spirit, the duke and his guard in bright coats and plumed hats, the horses shining, the infantry singing bravely. It was like a day from the past, before the world was all mud and gray. She wore a beautiful riding habit, practical of cut and warm against the lingering morning chill, yet fretted with gold braid on face and cuffs.
Even her horse danced beneath her, and on impulse she cantered back to Crecy’s carriage and shouted in through the window. Crecy waved wanly. The doctor was still within, and so there was no chance of them talking. Still almost giddy, Adrienne worked on back through the ranks, smiling brightly at the soldiers who bowed to her, until she came to the wagon where little Nicolas rode with the nurse. Adrienne leaned near and took her son up in her arms, laughing at the excited puzzlement in his eyes, as she raised him toward the heavens.
“Look, Nico!” she cried. “That is the sun!”
Nicolas was silent, but when she brought him back down, she saw that his eyes were shut, and he seemed almost on the verge of tears.
“I know, my darling, my Nico. It is very bright, too bright for your little mole eyes. But it will come back, the sun, and your eyes will learn to love it. The world is getting better! I promise you, little one!” She rode together with her boy, and he liked the bouncing motion of the horse, grasping the coarse hair of its mane and cooing.
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