Finally, he exclaimed to Astrid, “To see in two different possible ways! To see alternative connections: that’s what Cammon wants me to do. Instead of an archer and a harp, a saucepan and a crippled cuckoo… He doesn’t know the half.”
He confessed his own secret.
When he was just a baby, a cuckoo had flown into his room—so his mother had assured him. The bird had perched on the head of his cradle. It had cackled, then shat in his eyes. Specifically, upon his nose so that the splash went in both directions. How Baby Jon had squealed. Quickly his mother had cleaned him. She called in a wise-woman to examine his eyes and a mana-priest to diagnose the meaning of the event.
“It’s an omen of great things,” the mana-priest had decided, after a trance. “Yet following upon those great things maybe your son will experience some shit.”
When Jon reached puberty, he became able to see in a different way from other people. At first, the experience was spasmodic and inadvertent—scary. As time passed, he found he could summon the phenomenon by concentration.
“The stars are bright tonight,” he said to Astrid. “The sky is black. But if I focus myself”—and he seemed to do so—“the sky becomes white and the stars are black dots. This is so useful for pinpointing stars, like grains of peppercorn spilled upon a linen tablecloth. Everything’s reversed. Your fair face and hair are dark, as well.”
“If I’m different,” Astrid sang out, “then I’m somebody else—and somebody else is no longer Tycho’s possession.”
“My hand is black…” Jon held his hand out, reversed, toward her cheek, softly to touch, to stroke with his knuckles, with the backs of his fingers.
“Oh, but I feel I’m still swayed to seek the love of men,” sighed Astrid. “Can you show me what you see? Can you sway me to see?”
“I’m no proclaimer—I can’t tell someone to do something.”
Her hand rose to grasp his.
“I’m not speaking about telling someone—”
In the hut, there still remained the camp bed which the scribe had used. Light the lantern, look at one another.
“What if somebody comes?”
“Shut the hatch to the stairs. Drag the chart box over it.”
When Jon returned, he said:
“Your breasts are black, Astrid. Your belly is black, and your legs. The shadows are bright.” He must find her, almost, by feel.
In the subsequent moment of climax she saw—for just a moment—his body as black, and her own body likewise.
Why should Tycho bother to climb all those stairs?
Over the next few weeks, as their bodies grew accustomed to one another’s rhythms, Astrid could see the reversal for five to ten seconds.
As the days grew longer, dark windows of opportunity shrank and shrank. Astrid yearned for autumn, though not for winter when the hut would be too cold, and a brazier lit inside would only make the icy air foul to breathe.
Tycho never discovered about the reversal of vision. He never realized that there was that secret to find. What he found, mounting on impulse to the tower top one night early the following spring, and hurling the hatch open by force of words and muscle, was Astrid and Jon together inside the hut, hastening to dress—and rage clouded any insight Tycho might have had.
The weather had suddenly turned mild. Much snow remained to melt from the countryside. This had been the first love-making for months.
Throughout the winter Jon had shown his patron progress on the new map of the constellations. Jon was forever amending, making alterations, even beginning again from scratch. This didn’t vex Tycho. The continuing presence of a dedicated man of science was a moderating factor in the castle.
Two lovers in disarray were quite a different matter.
Astrid must watch Jon stand stock-still and stare from the parapet into the night. And stare.
Jon needed those eyes of his; or else he would be nothing.
And now they bulged and swelled—
—until they burst.
Tycho released him from the sway. Jon collapsed screaming, more liquid upon his cheeks than any tears could have brought.
Tycho bespoke Jon to leave, to stumble down stairs and more stairs—wood, then stone—and to find his way by memory to the gate. The tyrant stalked him, whistling mischievous directions and misdirections as though Jon was a dog.
Astrid had followed part of the way downstairs. Now she fled back again up to the top of the tower. She took the oil lantern and set fire to all those charts—as if this brief beacon might somehow guide Jon away from Castle Cammon and through the town.
She contemplated the plunge, to ease her own anguish, and maybe forestall Tycho from forcing her to hang by her fingers from the bridge between the towers for as long as she could.
Two things saved her. One was that when Cammon came for her, to haul her downstairs, he was as distraught as if he had thrown an amulet of sanity into the river and had just realized what he had done.
The other was the Dowager Dame. A servant had told her maid what was happening; the maid told her mistress.
“So our astronomer’s gone away!” declared the Dowager Lady. “If I’d known, I’d have packed a fish and fat pork pastie for him, and some clabbered milk—”
It was as if the loss of Jon Kelpo’s eyes was of less consequence than him setting out on a journey without any food.
Tycho gaped at his mother. He howled. He fled to his own chamber, leaving Astrid alone with the Dowager.
“Would you like a pastie?” Tycho’s mother asked Astrid. “I don’t think you’re very welcome here now! You’d better go to the tinsmith’s in town. Mr. Lindblad. He’s an easy sort of man. Then start walking home tomorrow—if you can. I’m sure I don’t know if you can. You can always try to force yourself. Lindblad’ll give you a pastie, although it won’t be a patch on mine. Kallio Keep’s quite a way. Go as you are. Don’t dare take any gifts my son has given you.”
The one gift Astrid cared about remained in the hut: her birthday puzzle in its pouch. It would be sheer madness to climb the tower again. She must catch up with Jon. She must find him.
The Dowager’s word was enough to allow Astrid through the gate.
Melting snow was a mess of jumbled distorted footprints of people and animals. Search as she might, halloo as she might, Astrid couldn’t come across her lover on the road to town or anywhere in the town. Jon might have missed his way and tumbled blindly into the river, treacherous with ice rushing by, bobbing on spate. He may have circled round deliberately and drowned himself.
It must have been two in the morning when Astrid found her way to the tinsmith’s house, shivering convulsively and escorted by a night watchman, who banged on the door with his cudgel.
She knew she wouldn’t go back to Kallio Keep. Wouldn’t, couldn’t. She felt in her bones and her waters that if she did so she would act like a whore in her dad’s town, and that Anniki would spit in her face.
“So you came here instead,” Bosco said to Astrid, “where at least your problem gives you an occupation. A livin’, you might say.”
The naked woman, perched on the stool, turned to him. Daylight was already reasserting itself.
“The man-sway has faded,” she whispered. “The sway to love men: I felt it fade while I was telling you.”
She had unburdened herself. The cuckoo on her breast had cackled, and the pressure was gone.
“Did you see me as white, earlier on tonight?” Bosco asked her. “Do you see all your sailors as white?”
“I saw them all as Jon,” she whispered.