He was still leaning against the door, and the intensity of the sound he’d just heard shook him to his knees. He took air and looked around, intuiting that he ought to be looking for something, but not finding it. Meaning to run, he staggered back to the bed, unsure of the meaning of his visions. He forced himself to lie very still, to not risk another thought intruding into his consciousness. After some minutes of such effort, he was so exhausted that he forgot what he was trying to do and his mind collapsed into a heavy slumber. But anyone who would have sneaked into that room would still have seen the concern in his face. Even in sleep, he knew he would never be able to forget that night, and he knew he would try many times. It was the kind of experience that built a man, and he felt demolished, as if he were five times his age. The sound of the drizzle outside made the inside of his eyelids flash.
Afternoon, November 26 (Gregorian), 1621
Elbe river
René could feel, beneath his sitting body, the continual sway of the boat as the drivers picked at the half-frozen water but barely made any progress toward his destination. He’d had enough of the Book of the World; he’d seen enough of humanity as it stubbornly insisted on being. Their laboriously slow movement on the river would have irritated any man less tired than he felt from his years as a spectator to civilization’s avid ingestion of itself.
He looked at his reflection on the water at the exact moment a stray ripple went across it. His thoughts followed after, and he admitted to feeling glad for the chance to empty his mind from all the hatred and greed and zeal and vindictiveness he’d forced himself to witness in his journey. He was sick of things that made no sense; and in the world he had chanced to be born in, that applied to all things.
He was half-aware of his assistant, sitting next to him, and of the boat drivers conversing in a hush-toned Frisian he could understand but did not care to pay attention to. At some point, one of them made a gesture with his arm in the general direction of the luggage, and René imagined they were worried that the weight might unbalance the boat while they tried to maneuver through the ice, but he was so absorbed in his own worries that he couldn’t open a space in his head to follow the conversation.
His image in the water had barely recomposed itself when another ripple blurred it again, and after more repetitions and more watching, the thought occurred to him that at every given moment, some corner of his liquid mirror had to be distorted, that it was not possible to see his face complete. Wave after wave swept over the false René on the surface, reverberating like approaching footsteps. He saw himself looking at himself from the bottom of the river and thought, one more time, as he had inevitably done all his life whenever his mind was permitted to drift on its own, about that English boy whose story he’d heard from Father Charlet. At least the boy was spared the chaos of this world, René whispered quietly at his double. His journey across the battlefields of Christendom had hardly been worth the years of astonished terror. What had he learned? For what gain had he left the quiet life of the mind? Sometimes he could sense a faint intuition that there was a big lesson hidden in what he had seen and lived, but its truth was not open for him to reach. He felt as if a muddy veil enveloped his mind, forever blocking his sight from what he yearned to discover, even if he had gathered all the facts he needed. It was impossible for him to take the definitive step toward a clear and certain conclusion: his view of the world was already tainted by the despair implied in that English boy’s uncaused, nonsensical death. If it had been possible for him to die for no reason, then there was no reason for anything. It sufficed to have news of one single event that was purely, incontestably devoid of sense for the entire world to be robbed of sense. What then? That juvenile obsession with a life whose bearer had never lived and whom he had never known was a roadblock in his life’s work; at the root of his thirst for understanding was also the poison that blinded his search. What land could he go to, where that persistent worm of digested and excreted thoughts would cease to chase after him? The prospect of spending his remaining years unable to shake that old story off his mind made him feel dizzy with weightlessness.
He believed he could actually feel the weightlessness, feel the boat push him up, feel the river lift them all in the air; and the next moment he heard a splash, looked behind him and saw that the boat drivers had thrown his assistant into the water. One of them was about to jump at him and the other was casting a greedy eye at the luggage.
The shock made him react too slowly. By the time he remembered his training and moved his hand to the hilt of his sword, the first man was already grabbing him by the shoulders and preparing to throw him too. René wasted another precious second in refocusing on the fight; his mind was refusing to leave the comfortable realm of his ruminations and was still too sluggish to respond properly, and he didn’t regain full control of his attention until he was flying overboard and crashing against the floating ice. He tried to hold on to it, but its cold, slick surface numbed his hands and made them useless for grasping anything. In his mind the fear that he’d be unable to swim up if he sank into the icy water crashed with the realization that he was slipping and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. He slowly and inevitably slid across the ice toward the water, and both his boots, now wet and heavy, and his arms, clothed in fur that swept like a brush on the smooth ice, accelerated his fall until he submerged. The cold seized his muscles with merciless speed, and he found himself unable to move, either to find firm footing at the bottom or to swim back to the surface. Before he reached the river’s deep bottom, he lost all sensation in his body, lost track of how much he had sunk, lost count of how long he had tried to hold his breath, and soon afterwards lost all notion of what his thoughts were.
Part 3: Descent
God knows possible futures that will not happen.
“Possible” does not mean “insufficiently real.”
Morning, January 3 (Julian), 1626
London
Ever since old Henry, forever accursed be his memory, had parted ways with Rome, the kingdoms of England and Spain seemed doomed to clash like dueling rams, neither side ceding an inch, neither side making progress. A mighty Spanish fleet had failed already, in spectacularly disastrous manner, to regain England for the Church; a full generation later, England was still repaying in kind, only to be met with an equal measure of catastrophe. The return of the defeated warships to London was not, however, to be the sorriest affair of the year.
Cornelis Drebbel was yanked from his sleep by the sound of cannons. He jumped out of bed, awaking his wife, and ran to the window, which looked over the Thames, and saw legions of foreign ships destroying the British navy and starting to fire on the Parliament. The unexpected attack, vicious beyond measure, shook him awake but left his senses still confounded. His wife sat up in alarm when another cannon fired. Looking at the enemy ships, he recognized the colors of the Danish flag, but that information alone meant little. No rumors had been heard about a war, much less one with a fellow Protestant country. He couldn’t think of a reason why King Christian would all of a sudden decide to capture London with such ferocity. He was joined at the window by his wife, who was as dumbfounded as he was by the invasion. His mind was in the middle of a frantic search for explanations when, beneath the echo of the explosions and the screams of people, the sound of a lock being forced open reached them from downstairs.