Kepler

"Yes, yes, go to Heumaden. " He knuckled his eyes, peering helplessly at the trees, the sky of evenings a distant spire. He realised, with amazement, and a sick heave, that he was, yes, it was the only word, disappointed. Like the rest of them, including even, perhaps, his mother, he had wanted something to happen; not torture necessarily, but something, and he was disappointed. "O God, mother."

"There now, hush. "

By decree of the Duke of Württemberg she was declared i

Weeks passed, and months, and nothing was heard of the Jew. Kepler was drawn again and again to the little house on River Street. It was a pin-hole in the surface of a familiar world, through which, if only he could find the right way to apply his eye, he might glimpse enormities. He worked a ritual, walking rapidly twice or thrice past the shop with no more than a covert glance, and then abruptly stopping to rap on the door and wait, before giving himself up, with hands cupped about his face, to a long and inexplicably satisfying squint through the cracks in the shutters. The gloom within was peopled with vague grey shapes. If one of them someday should move! Stepping back then he would shake his head and depart slowly in seeming puzzlement.

He laughed at himself: for whose benefit was he performing this dumbshow? Did he imagine there was a conspiracy being waged against him, with spies everywhere, watching him?

The idea, with which at first he had mocked himself, began to take hold. Yet even in his worst moments of fright and foreboding he did not imagine that there was any human power behind the plot. Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existing, will generate effects and influences. So he reasoned, and then worried all the more. A palpable enemy would have been one thing, but this, vast and impersonal… When he made enquiries among the Jew's neighbours he met only silence. The locksmith next door, a flaxen-haired giant with a club foot, glared at him for a long moment, his jaw working, and then turned away saying: "We minds our own affairs down here, squire." Kepler watched the brute clump away into his shop, and he thought of the lens-grinder's wife, plump and young, until his mind averted itself, unable to bear the possibilities.

And then one day something shifted, with an almost audible clanking of cogs and levers, and there was, as it seemed, an attempt to make good his loss.

He recognised him a long way off by his walk, that laborious stoop and swing, as if at each pace he were moulding an intricate shape out of resistant air before him and then stepping gingerly into it. Kepler suddenly remembered a crowded hall at Benatek, and the summoner coming down from his master's table and saying silkily, as so often, you ar wanted, sir, the great head smiling up from its platter of dingy lace and one hand settling stealthily on the edge of the table like saurian jaws. But something was changed with him now. His gait was more tortured than of old, and he advanced with his face warily inclined, clutching jealously the stirrup strap of a piebald pony.

"Why, Sir Mathematicus, is it you?" palping the air with an outstretched hand. Second sight was all that was left him, his eye sockets were empty asterisks: he had been blinded.

It was sixteen years since they had last met, at Tycho's funeral in Prague. Jeppe had not aged. The blinding had drained his face of everything save a kind of childlike attentive-ness, so that he seemed to be listening constantly past the immediate to something far away. He was dressed in beggar's rig. "A disguise, of course, " he said, and snickered. He was on his way to Prague. He showed no sign of surprise at their meeting.

Perhaps for him, Kepler thought, in that changeless dark, time operated differently, and sixteen years was as nothing.

They went to a tavern on the wharf. Kepler chose one where he was not known. He gave it out that he also was passing through on his way elsewhere. He was not sure why he felt the need to dissemble. Jeppe's blank face was bent upon him intently, smiling at the lie, and he blushed, as if those puckered wounds were seeing him. It was quiet in the tavern. In a corner two old men sat playing a decrepit game of dominoes. The taverner brought two mugs of ale. He looked at the dwarf with curiosity and faint disgust. Kepler's shame increased. He should have invited the creature home.

"Tengnagel is dead, you knew that?" Jeppe said. "He did you some wrong, I think."

"Yes, we had differences. I did not hear he had died. What of his wife, the Dane's daughter?"

The dwarf smiled and shook his head, savouring a secret joke. "And Mistress Christine too, dead. So many of them dead, and only you and I still here, sir. " In the tavern window suddenly there loomed the rust-red sail of a schooner plying upriver. The dominoes clattered, and one of the old men mumbled an oath.

"And what of the Italian?" Kepler asked.

It seemed for a moment the dwarf had not heard, but then he said:

"I have not seen him for many years. He took me to Rome when Master Tycho was dead. What times!" It was a garish tale. Kepler saw the pines and the pillars and the stone lions, the sunlight on marble, heard the laughter of painted whores. "He was a hard man in those days, given to duels and scuffles, a great gambler at the dice, spi

"We thought he would die," Kepler said.

The dwarf nodded. "You had regard for him, sir, you saw his worth, as I did. "

Kepler was startled. Was it true? "There was much life in him," he said. "But he is a scoundrel, for all that."

"O yes!" There was a pause, and Jeppe suddenly laughed. "I will tell you something to cheer you, all the same. You knew the Dane let Tengnagel marry his daughter because the wench was with child? But the brat was none of Tengnagel's doing. Felix had been there before him. "

"And did the Junker know?"

"Surely. But he would not care. His only interest was to share in the Brahe fortune. You above all, though, sir, should appreciate thejoke. What Tengnagel cheated you of is now inherited by the Italian's bastard."

"Yes," Kepler said, "it is a pretty notion, " and laughed, but uneasily; between the cuckold and the cuckoo there was not much to choose. He felt a familiar unease; the dwarf knew too much. "Where is the Italian now?" he asked. "In prison, or on the run again?"

Jeppe called for more ale, and left Kepler to pay for it.

"Why, both, in a ma