It ended. One day a messenger from Stefan Speidel came galloping to Wincklemann's door out of a stormy dawn. Kepler, barefoot and shivering, still stuffed with sleep, stood in a damp gust and with trembling fingers broke the familiar seal of the secretariat. A fleck of foam from the horse's champing jaws settled on his eyebrow. The Archduke had consented that an exception be made to the order of general banishment. He could go home again.
Later he had time to consider the ravelled mesh of influence that had saved him. The Jesuits, for their own shady reasons, were sympathetic to his work. It was through aJesuit, Fr Grien-berger of Graz, that the Bavarian Chancellor Herwart von Hohenburg, a Catholic and an amateur scholar, had first consulted him on questions of cosmology in certain ancient texts. They corresponded via the Bavarian ambassador at Prague and the Archduke Ferdinand's secretary, the Capuchin Peter Casal. And then, Herwart was the servant of Duke Maximilian, Ferdinand's cousin, and those two noblemen had studied together at Ingolstadt under Johann Fickler, a firm friend of the Jesuits and a native of Kepler's own Weilderstadt. Thus the strands of the web radiated. Why, when he thought about it, he had advocates everywhere! It worried him, obscurely.
He returned secretly disappointed. Given time, he might have made something of exile. The Stiftsschule was still closed, and he was free, there was that at least. But Graz was finished for him, used up. Things were not so bad as they had been, and other exiles had quietly begun to trickle back, but still he thought it prudent to stay indoors. Barbara in November announced another pregnancy, and he retired to the innermost sanctuary of his workroom.
He began to study in earnest, consuming ancients and moderns, Plato and Aristotle, Nicholas of Cues, the Florence academicians. Wincklemann had given him a volume by the cabalist Cornelius Agrippa, whose thinking was so odd and yet so like Kepler's own. He went back to his mathematics, and honed to a fine edge that instrument which up to now he had wielded like a club. He turned to music with a new intensity; Pythagoras's laws of harmony obsessed him. As he had asked why there should bejust six planets in the solar system, now he pondered the mystery of musical relationships: why does for instance the ratio 3:5 produce a harmony, but not 5:7? Even astrology, which for so long he had despised, assumed a new significance in its theory of aspects. The world abounded for him now in signature and form. He brooded in consternation on the complexities of the honeycomb, the structure of flowers, the eerie perfection of snowflakes. What had begun in Linz as an intellectual frolic was now his deepest concern.
The new year began well. At the core of this sudden rush of speculations he was at peace. Then, however, gradually, a fearful momentum gathered. The religious turmoil boiled up again, fiercer than ever. Edict followed edict, each one more severe than its predecessor. Lutheran worship in any form was banned. Children were to be baptised only by the Catholic rite and must attend only Jesuit schools. Then they moved on the books. Lutheran writings were rooted out and burned. A pall of smoke hung over the city. Threats whirred in the air, and Kepler shivered. After the burning of the books, what would there be for them but to burn the authors? Things were out of control. He felt as if, head and shoulders back and eyes starting in mortal fright, he were strapped to an uncontrollable machine hurtling faster and faster toward a precipice. The child, a girl, was born in June. She was called Susanna. He dreamed of the ocean. He had never seen it in waking life. It appeared an immense milky calm, silent, immutable and terrifying, the horizon a line of unearthly fineness, a hairline crack in the shell of the world. There was no sound, no movement, not a living creature in sight, unless the ocean itself were living. The dread of that vision polluted his mind for weeks. On a July evening, the air pale and still as that phantom sea, he returned to the Stempfergasse after one of his rare ventures abroad in the frightened town, and paused before the house. There was a child playing in the street with a hoop, an old woman with a basket on her arm limping away from him on the other side, a dog in the gutter gnawing a knuckle of bone. Something in the scene chilled him, the careful innocence with which it was arranged in that limitless light, as if to give him a sly nudge. Dr Oberdorfer waited in the hall, regarding him with a lugubrious stricken stare. The infant had died. It was a fever of the brain, the same that had killed little Heinrich. Kepler stood by the bedroom window and watched the day fade, hearing vaguely Barbara's anguished cries behind him and listening in awe to his mind, of its own volition, thinking: My work will be interrupted. He carried the tiny coffin himself to the grave, besieged by visions of conflict and desolation. There were reports from the south that the Turk had massed six hundred thousand men below Vienna. The Catholic council fined him ten florins for having the funeral conducted in the Lutheran rite. He wrote to Mästlin: No day can soothe my wife's yearning, and the word is close to my heart: vanity…
Jobst Müller came up again to Graz, demanding that Kepler convert: convert or go, and this time stay away, and he would take his daughter and Regina back with him to Mühleck. Kepler did not deign even to answer. Stefan Speidel was another visitor, a thin, cold, tight-mouthed man in black. His news from court was grim: there would be no exceptions this time. Kepler was beside himself.
"What shall I do, Stefan, what shall I do? And my family!" He touched his friend's chill hand. "You were right to oppose the marriage, I do not blame you for it, you were right-"
"I know that."
"No, Stefan, I insist…" He paused, letting it sink in, and distinctly heard the tiny ping of another cord breaking. Speidel had lent him a copy of Plato's Timaeus on the day they first met, in Rector Papius's rooms; he must remember to return it. "Yes, well…" wearily. "O God, what am I to do."
"There is Tycho Brahe?" Stefan Speidel said, picking a speck of lint from his cloak and turning away, out of Kepler's life forever.
Yes, there was Tycho. Since June he had been installed at Prague, imperial mathematician to the Emperor Rudolph, at a salary of three thousand florins. Kepler had letters from the Dane urging him to come and share in the royal beneficence. But Prague! A world away! And yet where was the alternative? Mästlin had written to him: there was no hope of a post at Tübingen. The century approached its end. Baron Johann Friedrich Hoffmann, a councillor to the Emperor and Kepler's sometime patron, on a visit to Graz, invited the young astronomer to join his suite for the journey back to Prague. Kepler packed his bags and his wife and her daughter into a broken-down carriage, and on the first day of the new century, not un-amused by the date, he set out for his new world.
It was a frightful journey. They lodged at leaky fortresses and rat-infested military outposts. His fever came on him again, and he endured the miles in a dazed semi-sleep from which Barbara in a panic would shake him, looming down like a form out of his dreams, fearing him dead. He ground his teeth. "Madam, if you continue to disturb me like this, by God I will box your ears." And then she wept, and he groaned, cursing himself for a mangy dog.
It was February when they arrived in Prague. Baron Hoffmann settled them at his house, fed them, advanced them monies, and even lent Kepler a hat and a decent cloak for the meeting with Tycho Brahe. But there was no sign of Tycho. Kepler detested Prague. The buildings were crooked and ill-kept, thrown together from mud and straw and undressed planks. The streets were awash with slops, the air putrid. At the end of a week Tycho's son appeared, in company with Frans Gransneb Tengnagel, drunk, the two of them, and sullen. They carried a letter from the Dane, at once formal and fulsome, expressing greasy sentiments of regret that he had not come himself to greet his visitor. Tyge and the Junker were to conduct him to Benatek, but delayed a further week for their pleasure. It was snowing when at last they set out. The castle lay twenty miles to the north of the city, in the midst of a flat flooded countryside. Kepler waited in the guest rooms through a fretful morning, and when the summons came at noon he was asleep. He descended the stony fastness of the castle in a stupor of fever and fright. Tycho Brahe was magisterial. He frowned upon the shivering figure before him and said: