And yet they were still just two happy people, young parents (one son already squalling in his crib, another in the oven), liable to offend their new subjects and tread on toes, but what could it really matter? In Prague city Elizabeth's gowns shocked the Calvinists, her breasts symbolic of course but also just breasts, and too exposed. The king swam naked in the Moldau, and she and her ladies watched from the bank: that upset the elders. Well, let them mutter, look at him rising from the waves like Leander, like a young river god. More people were shocked when she decided to take down an ancient corpus from his cross in the middle of the Caroline bridge. It had worked wonders for thousands, its nailed foot worn smooth by the kisses of the devout. That naked swimmer, said vengeful Elizabeth.
The former Giordanisti—unrecognizable to their old audiences, before whom they had once played the Faustspiel and the comic inventions of Onorio the ass—played now under the ægis of the king and his queen, before cloths of gold, in Prague's palaces and great houses, with music drawn from ancient sources, in dramas that were great Seals acted out by hypostases of Virtue and hilarious Vice, and the people laughed and wept and resolved to change their lives. They played The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, they played The Wedding of Agent and Patient, they played The Apotheosis of Rudolf II in the Happy Isles. Philip à Gabella and his troupe of actors took no part, though, in the celebratory Pageant of All the World Systems that was held in the streets, maybe prematurely, in honor of the royal couple—how could his infinite universe of suns and planets, forever continuing, be pictured?—but they could watch, and laugh. The scholars from the Carolinum presented the Ptolemaic world, replete with spheres and epicycles and green earth sheltered in God's arms, apple of his eye; Tycho Brahe's vision was produced by the artisans of the Imperial Observatory, with crane-flown acrobats as the circling, leaping planets around the gold-foil sun, but both sun and planets revolving together (the crowd cheered to see them fly) around the same green earth; and then there was Copernicus's great cart, drawn by thirty oxen, with the sun aboard, titanic lamp shining through a sun of glass, all the planets including little earth outflung. A face able to be seen glowing in the glass sun was said to be God Almighty, but some said it looked more like Galileo. And next came Kepler's variant of this, a merry cart, the planetary orbits around the central sun expressed by the five geometric solids, and each of them producing an appropriate liquor, old beer for Saturn, white wine for Venus, golden Tokay for Jupiter—maybe it was these, dispensed too freely, but the pageant by degrees became disordered, pageant carts colliding, oxen and dray horses shunting one another, drivers unable to brake, and finally the World Systems themselves tilting and the flags and explanatory seals and spheres and mappamundi falling together, just plaster and lathe and paper after all, becoming finally inextricably mixed up, with priests, scholars, artisans, and partisans coming to blows, Copernicus's sun put out, the actors dressed as the planets tearing the finery from one another's persons to show the bare human within. So a good time was had by all, though some who witnessed it took it as an unsettling omen: the picture worlds colliding, and if they, why not the worlds they pictured?
Nevertheless the reign of King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth went on evolving. Hand in hand they walked through Rudolf's castle, nourished on Rudolf's jewels and stones, pulling out Rudolf's albums and turning over the gorgeous leaves; Frederick tried to brush away a gilded fly from one page, and found it was painted there! They laughed and laughed. And now what is this room? The ancient antiquary (he had served Rudolf, he was preserved like a mummia of Ægypt by handling precious things forever and ever) opened the tall narrow figured doors and let them into the tetradic chamber in the center of the castle, which was itself in the center of the world (as every true castle is). On the walls the Arcimboldo portraits, Summer Fall Winter Spring; Fire Water Earth Air; North South East West. They took hands.
In the center of the chamber, center of the floor's geometries, there was a humpbacked black ironbound trunk waiting to be opened.
* * * *
Soon enough a Catholic mercenary army was on its way to Bohemia to suppress the rebellion of the Bohemian Estates and eject the so-called king they claimed to have anointed. The combined forces—Silesian, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian, Savoyard, Spanish, Flemish, French—advanced on Prague. As armies will, they left the country through which they passed a Brueghel helclass="underline" naked refugees, corpses of gutted cattle, dead children, the light of burning farmhouses. During the same weeks the Protestant forces of Europe gathered in Prague, and their generals pledged their arms to the queen.
And there were other forces on the way to battle, unseen but perhaps felt by the Catholic combatants as they went—forces shadowing them, or leading them. Cherubim, seraphim, nerozumim. Earthlier forces too, passing through the Böhmerwald by night, through the high forest without misstep: long low four-footed shapes, red and brown, gray and black, eyes alight and long tongues panting. They were themselves—in their waking lives—Catholic, Utraquist, Protestant, Calvinist, Orthodox, but at night they all knew whose side they were on: the side that did not hate them, and would if they helped to win the victory accept their duty, forgive their crimes, and honor them as fighters for the world to come.
On the day of the battle little redheaded Christian of Anhalt commanded the king's forces on the summit of a white hill outside the city, flying the huge royal banner of green and yellow velvet, bearing the words Diverti nescio, I know no different way. No one could read the words, though, for a great dead calm prevailed, as still and clear as glass, here and elsewhere; in the light of dawn the opposing army seemed suddenly shockingly close to them, as though they saw themselves in an unexpected mirror at the turning of a corridor. A terrible clarity: those in the Protestant van could actually see (they never forgot it, those who survived) the teeth and tongues of the Catholic captains as they shouted the word of command.
The battle for the end of the world was long. From the heights of the castle, the ladies and the children gathered with their queen to watch its progress: for the two armies could be seen easily from this distance, toy armies suspended upside down in the middle of the air at the foci of Emperor Rudolf's great parabolic mirrors. The queen and the women wept for the hurt and the slain, cried out the names of their particular champions when they could be picked out from the heaving, thrashing throng. Other combatants seemed to wrestle in the disordered sky around them. And what or who was that now shambling out from the Bohemian rearguard, hugely tall? The ladies gathered at the mirror to see. Look what damage he does! A man? A beast? Ours? Whose?
It's the man made of earth the Great Rabbi has brought to life and released. The Maharal after long thought overcame his persistent doubts, and though he was certain that he could never be forgiven and would now go down in guilt into Sheol, he has asked himself: is it good for the Jews? And it is. The city must not fall; if help is given to King Frederick, the secret promises of old Emperor Rudolf will be kept. If not, not; there will be no mercy for the Jews, no justice either.