He remembered all the writings he had written and all those that remained unwritten. He remembered the lands he had crossed, the languages he had mastered, the shoes he had worn out, the meals he had eaten or refused, the women he had coupled with, Venetian, Savoyard, Genevan, Picard, Walloon, English. He remembered the faces in all the crowds in all the squares of all the cities he had added to his own Memory City in the time he had walked the earth.

He remembered the prison in Rome where he had lain for so many years, and all the places he had traveled to while he lay there, on earth, under the earth, in the heavens: he remembered even the small window above, by which he had used to go out. He remembered all those he had summoned to sit with him there, and all the conversations he had had with them, the answers he had got from them. And also the questions they had asked, that he had answered. And lastly he remembered how he had learned from one of them, and from the instructions of his own soul, the means by which he had been able to run away, again.

Freed by his grandfather Hermes, who had told him the plan that he, Giordano, had already known before he was told it. Step by step. And who then said to him: Now go, and free all men.

And so he had gone from Rome and crossed the mountains and the plains and come to this golden city on four legs. Now again he had two, and a new or an old Work to accomplish, in consequence of all that he had been given; a Work he had been saved to do. And if he was not able to accomplish it all to the end, that was no reason not to begin.

—Let's begin, he said to the players gathered around him. He had clothed his nakedness in Faust's scholar's robe from their play, its hem somewhat cinder bitten from the squibs and firecrackers the demons threw on poor Faust at the play's ending. Tom tapped idly on the drum as they spoke. It was midnight in the Heilige drei Königen.

—What is it we are to begin?

—The unbinding of all men from their limits, said the Ass. Since we have begun with ourselves—with myself, I mean—let's continue.

Tap tap.

—And how are we to do such a thing as that?

—I have a plan, said the Ass, the former Ass.

Men can be freed from their bonds, he told them, but not from all bonds, for that would leave men beasts: it is in what binds them that they are men. To decide which of those bonds most leads to happiness is the goal of the sapiens who knows how binding is accomplished. He will give—or seem to give, in this matter there is no real difference, the sign is the thing—to every person what he or she most wants. Unicuique suum, to each his own: and to all as to each, for though every man and every woman is more or less different, the mass of men and women are more or less the same. And what do they want? Stories that end in happiness, weddings after adversity, triumphs of righteousness. Wonders and signs fulfilled. Then Adam returns refreshed and renewed; all is forgiven. Mercy, Pity, Peace. The Golden Age begins again, and lasts forever, until it ends.

—And how, said doubting Tom, are we to seem to give to all men what they most want? How are we to speak to the mass of men and women all at once, and yet give unicuique suum?

—How? said Philip à Gabella, the Ass made Man. We do it every day and twice on holidays. We will (here he lifted his new hands to them, his large gray eyes alight; it was hilarious and sad how they could still recognize in him their former companion), we will put on a play.

—A play?

—Let's, he said clapping, put on a play. A ludibrium, a show, a jest in all seriousness, a seriousness in all jest. Not in one place only but across the world, across this Europe at least. Such a play as has never in the history of the world been seen, a play that will force them all to suspend their disbelief, and not only watch and laugh and weep, but take part as well, and be themselves our actors.

—Who?

—Anyone who can hear. Kings, bishops, knights, magi, ploughmen, wives, nuns, wise men, fools, young, old, not yet born, already dead. All. The kingdom will be our stage, sun our lights, night our curtain.

—A kingdom for a stage! one player cried, and strutted and lifted his hand to raise the eyes and spirits of an imaginary audience. A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

—And what bonds will bring in our audience? asked grinning Thomas. What strengths seen to be ours alone will change the world before their eyes and ears?

—Love, Magic, Mathesis, said the Ass. And the greatest of these is Love.

—Religion, added a player piously. The will of Almighty God swayed by earnest prayer.

—Well said, the Ass proclaimed. Jesus was the greatest of the magicians, and the bond of religion is a strong one: let us decide which, of all religions, will best serve the mass of men now, and which will do the greatest harm. Promote the one, abjure the other. I myself (he added, to the astonishment of the players) prefer the Catholic religion. But the Lutheran is the more useful and commodious now.

—Then let's choose the more commodious and useful, the players said.

—We will be good Christians and Germans, said the Ass.

—Ach du Lieber, said Tom.

—We will condemn the Pope and the Sultan, and love Cabala and prisca theologia and Ægypt and the Jews. We will love the Emperor above all men. We will not blaspheme. We will speak with reverence of the Most High, and the life to come.

—Amen, they said.

—Will we be brothers? cried the Ass, Philip à Gabella, and held out his nine-fingered hands to them. Will we vow loyalty to one another, vow to do no hurt to men, to help, to heal, to make right?

—We will, said the others. We are Giordanisti. We are at your service.

—No more of that, or them, said Filippo: for there is no more Giordano. We are all brothers now. And we are the brothers of all those who have sought for us, dreamed of us, hoped that such ones as we might now live, or might one day come to be; all those who are novatores, and wish to make all new, and all those who long for the return of the prisca theologia of Orpheus, Ægypt, and Pythagoras. We will invite them all. For them the brothers will be both lure and lured, both the bait and the fisher.

—A sign, said the players. We must have a sign for our brotherhood.

The former Ass sat down, gathering his skirts from beneath him with a gesture he hadn't used in years. He put his new elbow on his new knee, and his new chin in his small hand, and drummed his fingers across his new soft cheek.

—A rose, he said at last. And a cross.

The players looked on one another, and nodded, considering. A rose and a cross: good.

—Fraternitas Rosæ-Crucis, he said. The players saw that there were tears in his large gray eyes. A rose, for the roses of many-named Isis that he had fed upon, after growing them in his own heart's hothouse. And a cross, not the Christian one but the cross of Ægypt that he had borne on his hairy back, the cross the players recognized, the Monad that the English doctor had rediscovered, which he had explicated for poor dead Giordano in the inmost room of the high castle above the very city where they now sat: the crux ansata, the little man with arms akimbo, the sign of himself.

—Now let us go, he said, rising, and ourselves bring this cemittá to an end, and usher in another, a better one, Mercy Beauty Peace, made by ourselves for all.

5

There was war in Heaven then.

Edward Kelley had first seen it in chrystallo in the city of Cracow long before: the angel bands issuing from their watchtowers at the four corners of the universe: red as new-smitten blood, he told John Dee, lily white, green and garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin, black as raven hair or bilberry juice, the four kinds of which the world is made, coming together in war: and not long until they met. In the lower heavens the souls of heroes, the great dæmones, the tutelary spirits, the angels of the nations, were thereupon set upon one another. They couldn't know that what was being fought over in Heaven was the shape of the world to come, in which none of them would figure. Yet since the lowest of the rulers of the air are coterminous or contiguous with the highest rulers of the earth, the states and nations, princes and churches, were agitated too, and thought they were plotted against, and had better preempt their enemies, and strike before they were struck.