“Cut it out!” says the boy.
And now she can’t help laughing and wonders how he knows what she was thinking. But it worked; the bread is gone.
Pirmin has sunk forward. He is lying on the ground like a heavy sack, his back is rising and falling, and he is snoring like an animal.
The fearful children look around.
It is cold.
Soon the fire will be out.
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
At most times, Adam Olearius, the Gottorf court mathematician, curator of the ducal cabinet of curiosities and author of an account of a grueling mission to Russia and Persia, from which he had returned a few years earlier nearly unscathed, had a quick tongue, yet today in his nervousness he found speaking difficult. For before him, ringed by half a dozen secretaries in black cowls, deliberate, attentive, and bearing his incomprehensible wealth of learning like a light burden, stood none other than Father Athanasius Kircher, professor of the Collegium Romanum.
Although it was their first meeting, they treated each other as if they had known each other for half their lives. This was customary among scholars. Olearius inquired what had brought his venerable colleague here, intentionally leaving unclear whether he meant the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or Holstein or Gottorf Castle towering behind them.
Kircher reflected for a while as if he had to retrieve the answer from the depths of his memory before he replied with a soft and somewhat too-high voice that he had left the Eternal City for the sake of various undertakings, the most important of which was to find a cure for the plague.
“God help us,” said Olearius, “is it in Holstein again?”
Kircher was silent.
Olearius was disconcerted by how young the man standing opposite him was: it was hard to conceive that this head with the soft features had solved the mystery of magnetic force, the mystery of light, the mystery of music, and supposedly even the mystery of the writing of ancient Egypt. Olearius was aware of his own significance and was not known for his modesty. But in the presence of this man his voice threatened to fail.
It went without saying that no religious enmity reigned between scholars. Almost twenty-five years ago, when the great war had begun, it would have been different, but things had changed. In Russia the Protestant Olearius had befriended French monks, and it was no secret that Kircher corresponded with many Calvinist scholars. Except that a short while ago, when Kircher mentioned in passing the death of the Swedish king at the Battle of Lützen and in this connection spoke of the grace of the good Lord, Olearius had to inwardly force himself not to reply that Gustav Adolf’s death had been a catastrophe in which any reasonable person had to recognize the hand of the devil.
“You say that you want to cure the plague.” Olearius, still without an answer, cleared his throat. “And you say that you have come to Holstein for this purpose. So, then, has the plague come back to us?”
Kircher let another moment pass and, as was apparently his wont, contemplated his fingertips before he replied that he naturally would not have come here to find a cure for the plague if the plague were raging in this region, for where it raged was precisely not where to find the means to hinder its spread. God’s goodness had so splendidly decreed that the searcher for a remedy, instead of exposing his life to the danger, should visit the very places to which the disease had not spread. For only there was that which countered it by the force of nature and the will of God to be found.
They were sitting on the only stone bench of the castle park that had not been destroyed and dipping candy canes in diluted wine. Kircher’s six secretaries stood at a respectful distance and observed spellbound.
It was not good wine, and Olearius knew that the park and the castle were not exactly impressive either. Marauders had felled the old trees, the lawn was covered with scorch marks, and the hedges were as damaged as the façade of the building, which was even missing part of its roof. Olearius was old enough to remember days when the castle had been a jewel of the north, the pride of the Jutish dukes. At the time he had still been a child and his father a simple craftsman, but the duke had recognized his talent and allowed him to become a student, and later he had sent him as an envoy to Russia and to distant, dazzling Persia, where he had seen camels and griffins and towers of jade and talking snakes. He would have liked to stay there, but he had sworn allegiance to the duke, and his wife too was waiting at home, or so he believed at least, for he hadn’t known that she had died in the interim. Thus he had returned to the cold Empire, to the war, and to the sad existence of a widower.
Kircher pursed his lips, took another sip of wine, almost imperceptibly screwed up his face, wiped his lips with a red-stained little handkerchief, and went on to explain why he was here.
“An experiment,” he said. “The new way of achieving certainty. One does tests. For example, one ignites a ball of sulfur, bitumen, and coal, and immediately one senses that the sight of the fire provokes anger. If one stays in the same room, one reels with rage. This is due to the fact that the ball reflects qualities of the red planet Mars. In a similar way one can use the watery qualities of Neptune to calm excited tempers or the confusing qualities of the treacherous moon to poison the mind. A sober man need only stay close to a moonlike magnet for a short time to get as drunk as if he had emptied a skin of wine.”
“Magnets make you drunk?”
“Read my book. In my new work there will be even more about it. It’s called Ars magna lucis et umbrae and answers the open questions.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them. As for the ball of sulfur: The experiment gave me the idea of having a decoction of sulfur and snail’s blood administered to a plague victim. For on the one hand the sulfur drives the Martian components of the disease out of him, while on the other hand the snail’s blood as a dracontological substitution sweetens that which sours the humors.”
“Excuse me?”
Kircher again contemplated his fingertips.
“Snail’s blood is a substitute for dragon’s blood?” asked Olearius.
“No,” Kircher said forbearingly, “dragon’s bile.”
“And what brings you here now?”
“The substitution has its limits. The plague victim in the experiment died despite the decoction, which clearly proves that real dragon’s blood would have cured him. Thus we need a dragon, and one of the last dragons of the north lives in Holstein.”
Kircher looked at his hands. His breath formed little vapor clouds. Olearius shivered. Inside the castle it was no warmer, there were no trees left far and wide, and the duke used what little firewood there was for his bedroom.
“Has it been sighted, then, the dragon?”
“Of course not. A dragon that had been sighted would be a dragon that did not possess the most important quality of dragons—that of making itself undetectable. For this very reason one must treat all reports by people of having sighted dragons with extreme skepticism, for a dragon that let itself be sighted would be recognized a priori as a dragon that is no real dragon.”
Olearius rubbed his forehead.
“In this region, evidently, a dragon has never before been witnessed. Hence I am confident that there must be one here.”
“But none have been witnessed in many other places too. So why here in particular?”
“First of all, because the plague has withdrawn from this area. That is a strong sign. Secondly I used a pendulum.”
“But that’s magic!”
“Not if one uses a magnetic pendulum.” Kircher looked at Olearius with gleaming eyes. The slightly disparaging smile disappeared from his face as he leaned forward and asked with a simplicity that astounded Olearius: “Will you help me?”