Jeppe smiled. "You are a wit, master. "
Tyge looked at him. "Yes, I am." He turned away sulkily and considered the sick man again. "I met him in Rome once, you know. He was a great whoremaster there. Although they say he prefers boys, himself. But then the Italians all are that way." He glanced at Kepler. "You would be somewhat too ripe for him, I think; perhaps the frog here would be more to his taste." He went out, but paused in the doorway. "My father, by the way, wants him well, so he may have the pleasure of kicking him down the Hradcany. You are a fine pair of little nurses. Look to it."
He recovered. One day Kepler found him leaning by the window in a dirty shirt. He would not speak, nor even turn, as if he did not dare break off this rapt attendance upon the world that he had almost lost, the hazy distance, those clouds, the light of summer feeding on his upturned face. Kepler crept away, and when he returned that evening the Italian looked at him as if he had never seen him before, and waved him aside when he attempted to change the crusted bandage on his arm. He wanted food and drink. "And where is the nano? You tell him to come, eh?"
The days that followed were for Kepler an ashen awakening from a dream. The Italian continued to look through him with blank unrecognition. What had he expected? Not love, certainly not friendship, nothing so insipid as these. Perhaps, then, a kind of awful comradeship, by which he might gain entry to that world of action and intensity, that Italy of the spirit, of which this renegade was an envoy. Life, life, that was it! In the Italian he seemed to know at last, however vicariously, the splendid and exhilarating sordidness of real life.
The Brahes, with that casual hypocrisy which Kepler knew so well, celebrated Felix's recovery as ifhe were the first hope of the house. He was brought down from his bare room and given a new suit, and led out, grinning, into the garden, where the family was at feed at a long table in the shade of poplar trees. The Dane sat him down at his right hand. But though the occasion started off with toasts and a slapping of backs, it began before long to ooze a drunken rancour. Tycho, ill and half drunk, brought up again the sore subject of his lost elk, but in the midst of loud vituperation fell suddenly asleep into his plate. The Italian ate like a dog, jealously and with circumspect hurry: he also knew well these capricious Danes. His arm was in a black silk sling that Tycho's daughter Elizabeth had fashioned for him. Tengnagel threatened to call him out with rapiers if he did not stay away from her, and then stood up, overturning his chair, and stalked away from the table. Felix laughed; the Junker did not know, what everyone else knew, that he had ploughed the wench already, long before, at Benatek. It was not for her that he had come back. The court at Prague was rich, presided over by a halfwit, so he had heard. Perhaps Rudolph might have use for a man of his peculiar talents? The dwarf consulted Kepler, and Kepler responded with wry amusement. "Why, I had to wait a year myself before your master would arrange an audience for me, and I have been to the palace only twice again. What influence have I?"
"But you will have, soon,"Jeppe whispered, "sooner than you would guess. "
Kepler said nothing, and looked away. The dwarf's prophetic powers unnerved him. Tycho Brahe suddenly woke up. "You are wanted, sir," said Jeppe softly.
"Yes, I want you," Tycho growled, wiping bleared eyes.
"Well, here I am."
But Tycho only looked at him wearily, with a kind of hapless resentment. "Bah." He was unmistakably a sick man. Kepler was aware of the dwarf behind him, smiling. What was it the creature saw in their collective future? A warm gale was blowing out of the sky, and the evening sunlight had an umber tinge, as if the wind had bruised it. The poplars shook. Suddenly everything seemed to him to tremble on the brink of revelation, as if these contingencies of light and weather and human doings had stumbled upon a form of almost speech. Felix was whispering to Elizabeth Brahe, making the tips of her translucent ears glow with excitement. He was to leave, this time forever, before the year was out, no longer interested in imperial patronage, though by then Jeppe's prophecy would be fulfilled, and the astronomer would have become indeed a man ofinfluence.
Kepler turned again now to his work on Mars. Conditions around him had improved. Christian Longberg, tired of squabbling, had gone back to Denmark, and there was no more talk of their wager. Tycho Brahe too was seldom seen. There were rumours of plague and Turkish advances, and the stars needed a frequent looking to. The Emperor Rudolph, growing ever more nervous, had moved his imperial mathematician in from Benatek, but even the Curtius house was not close enough, and the Dane was at the palace constantly. The weather was fine, days the colour of Mosel wine, enormous glassy nights. Kepler sometimes sat with Barbara in the garden, or with Regina idly roamed the Hradcany, admiring the houses of the rich and watching the imperial cavalry on parade. But by August the talk of plague had closed the great houses for the season, and even the cavalry found an excuse to be elsewhere. The Emperor decamped to his country seat at Belvedere, taking Tycho Brahe with him. The sweet sadness of summer settled on the deserted hill, and Kepler thought of how as a child, at the end of one of his frequent bouts of illness, he would venture forth on tender limbs into a town made magical by the simple absence of his schoolfellows from its streets.
Mars suddenly yielded up a gift, when with startling ease he refuted Copernicus on oscillation, showing by means of Tycho's data that the planet's orbit intersects the sun at a fixed angle to the orbit of the earth. There were other, smaller victories. At every advance, however, he found himself confronted again by the puzzle of the apparent variation in orbital velocity. He turned to the past for guidance. Ptolemy had saved the principle of uniform speed by means of the punctutn equans, a point on the diameter of the orbit from which the velocity will appear invariable to an imaginary observer (whom it amused Kepler to imagine, a crusty old fellow, with his brass tri-quetrum and watering eye and smug, deluded certainty). Copernicus, shocked by Ptolemy's sleight of hand, had rejected the equant point as blasphemously inelegant, but yet had found nothing to put in its place except a clumsy combination of five uniform epicyclic motions superimposed one upon another. These were, all the same, clever and sophisticated manoeuvres, and saved the phenomena admirably. But had his great predecessors taken them, Kepler wondered, to represent the real state of things? The question troubled him. Was there an innate nobility, lacking in him, which set one above the merely empirical? Was his pursuit of the forms of physical reality irredeemably vulgar?
In a tavern on Kleinseit one Saturday night he met Jeppe and the Italian. They had fallen in with a couple of kitchen-hands from the palace, a giant Serb with one eye and a low ferrety fellow from Württemberg, who claimed to have soldiered with Kepler's brother in the Hungarian campaigns. His name was Krump. The Serb rooted in his codpiece and brought out a florin to buy a round of schnapps. Someone struck up on a fiddle, and a trio of whores sang a bawdy song and danced. Krump squinted at them and spat. "Riddled with it, them are," he said, "I know them. " But the Serb was charmed, ogling the capering drabs out of his one oystrous eye and banging his fist on the table in time to thejig. Kepler ordered up another round. "Ah," said Jeppe. "Sir Mathematicus is flush tonight; has my master forgot himself and paid your wages?" "Something of that, " Kepler answered, and thought himself a gay dog. They played a hand of cards, and there was more drink. The Italian was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with a slouch hat. Kepler spotted him palming a knave. He won the hand and grinned at Kepler, and then, calling for another jig, got up and with a low bow invited the whores to dance. The candles on the tavern counter shook to the thumping of their feet. "A merry fellow, " said Jeppe, and Kepler nodded, grinning blearily. The dance became a general rout, and somehow they were suddenly outside in the lane. One of the whores fell down and lay there laughing, kicking her stout legs in the air. Kepler propped himself against the wall and watched the goatish dancers circling in a puddle of light from the tavern window, and all at once out of nowhere, out of every where, out of the fiddle music and the flickering light and the pounding of heels, the circling dance and the Italian's drunken eye, there came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle of uniform velocity is false. He found it very funny, and smiling turned aside and vomited absent-mindedly into a drain. Krump laid a hand on his shoulder. "Listen, friend, if you puke up a little ring don't spit it out, it'll be your arsehole. " Somewhere behind him the Italian laughed. False, by Jesus, yes!