Nevertheless the reign of King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth went on evolving. Hand in hand they walked through Rudolf's castle, nourished on Rudolf's jewels and stones, pulling out Rudolf's albums and turning over the gorgeous leaves; Frederick tried to brush away a gilded fly from one page, and found it was painted there! They laughed and laughed. And now what is this room? The ancient antiquary (he had served Rudolf, he was preserved like a mummia of Ægypt by handling precious things forever and ever) opened the tall narrow figured doors and let them into the tetradic chamber in the center of the castle, which was itself in the center of the world (as every true castle is). On the walls the Arcimboldo portraits, Summer Fall Winter Spring; Fire Water Earth Air; North South East West. They took hands.
In the center of the chamber, center of the floor's geometries, there was a humpbacked black ironbound trunk waiting to be opened.
* * * *
Soon enough a Catholic mercenary army was on its way to Bohemia to suppress the rebellion of the Bohemian Estates and eject the so-called king they claimed to have anointed. The combined forces—Silesian, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian, Savoyard, Spanish, Flemish, French—advanced on Prague. As armies will, they left the country through which they passed a Brueghel hell: naked refugees, corpses of gutted cattle, dead children, the light of burning farmhouses. During the same weeks the Protestant forces of Europe gathered in Prague, and their generals pledged their arms to the queen.
And there were other forces on the way to battle, unseen but perhaps felt by the Catholic combatants as they went—forces shadowing them, or leading them. Cherubim, seraphim, nerozumim. Earthlier forces too, passing through the Böhmerwald by night, through the high forest without misstep: long low four-footed shapes, red and brown, gray and black, eyes alight and long tongues panting. They were themselves—in their waking lives—Catholic, Utraquist, Protestant, Calvinist, Orthodox, but at night they all knew whose side they were on: the side that did not hate them, and would if they helped to win the victory accept their duty, forgive their crimes, and honor them as fighters for the world to come.
On the day of the battle little redheaded Christian of Anhalt commanded the king's forces on the summit of a white hill outside the city, flying the huge royal banner of green and yellow velvet, bearing the words Diverti nescio, I know no different way. No one could read the words, though, for a great dead calm prevailed, as still and clear as glass, here and elsewhere; in the light of dawn the opposing army seemed suddenly shockingly close to them, as though they saw themselves in an unexpected mirror at the turning of a corridor. A terrible clarity: those in the Protestant van could actually see (they never forgot it, those who survived) the teeth and tongues of the Catholic captains as they shouted the word of command.
The battle for the end of the world was long. From the heights of the castle, the ladies and the children gathered with their queen to watch its progress: for the two armies could be seen easily from this distance, toy armies suspended upside down in the middle of the air at the foci of Emperor Rudolf's great parabolic mirrors. The queen and the women wept for the hurt and the slain, cried out the names of their particular champions when they could be picked out from the heaving, thrashing throng. Other combatants seemed to wrestle in the disordered sky around them. And what or who was that now shambling out from the Bohemian rearguard, hugely tall? The ladies gathered at the mirror to see. Look what damage he does! A man? A beast? Ours? Whose?
It's the man made of earth the Great Rabbi has brought to life and released. The Maharal after long thought overcame his persistent doubts, and though he was certain that he could never be forgiven and would now go down in guilt into Sheol, he has asked himself: is it good for the Jews? And it is. The city must not fall; if help is given to King Frederick, the secret promises of old Emperor Rudolf will be kept. If not, not; there will be no mercy for the Jews, no justice either.
Look, now it's lost a huge arm, struck and blown to dirt by a cannonball, but seems to be undeterred. Eyeless and noseless it sees and smells and does harm, treading heedlessly on corpses and wounded men; the Catholic forces fall back before it. Darkness comes at last, and then that other troop, those long-tailed ones that have dogged the Catholics through Bohemia, comes upon the field: and in the face of such a horror—a wolvish army—the Catholic army breaks. The battle is over. The dead lie scattered, but though night's ravens are already picking up the good scent of slaughter, these wolves will not feast: like lions, the noble bristle-backs will not touch a dead man. By dawn they are gone away, and the wagons come for the bodies, ours and theirs, dead and near-dead.
* * * *
On that day, while the city rejoiced, in the Giant Mountains far from the battlefield there was carried with simple ceremony a great casket. Its attendants in black, the black wagon hung with faded roses and strewn with papery dry petals. A very large casket, because it contains a great corpse: Philip à Gabella, who despite his human form reached no farther than an ass's age, and who as death approached reverted, feature by feature, to the simple beast he had been. Speechless too finally as the brothers gathered in his byre to weep, and unable to give to them the last blessing they asked of him.
The cave is deep and cold where they inter him, in a cell no larger than the cell of his convent in Naples, his prison in Rome, but glittering with ten thousand carbuncles that have grown up in the still matrix of the earth and encrust the wrinkled walls: Andreas Boethius de Boodt, gem hunter to great Rudolf, discovered this place long years before, and told no one, knowing perhaps that one day a guest would arrive fit to lie in it.
No tears any longer. The brothers know that there is no death, that neither their friend Philip nor the little ass that embodied him nor great Bruno whose spirit found refuge in his body are passed away; the infinitesimals that composed them, in their transmigration across the infinite universe, will form other beings just as strange and plain and wonderful. He had only hoped—he even expected—that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and in their coming together know themselves as they had been. Somewhere, elsewhere, on this world or another, or this world when it would be another. Because you can't be born in the same world twice.
* * * *
Te Deum and Non Nobis were sung that night in the Cathedral of St. Wenceslaus, the king and queen not in red and white any longer but in gold and silver, sun and moon, Apollo and Cynthia, resetting the clocks of creation to the first hour. A flight of putti filled the sanctuary during the service, their voices were heard, everyone saw: it seemed clear to all that this was a sign of God's blessing and congratulation upon them. (Really, though, the angels were only younglings, careless, passing through on their way elsewhere.)
Then to the golden city was summoned the brotherhood of the Monas, those who were not already resident there: men, women, and others, Jews, Italians, Dutchmen, priests, knights, gardeners, beggars, thieves. Those who knew how to handle angels, knew their tricksome and contrary natures; who knew the Artes magnæ lucis et umbræ, the great arts of light and shadow, which are greater even than the goldmakers’ arts, though the goldmakers would be summoned too, and the shape-shifters and nightwalkers, and the daylight healers and the doctors of all sciences: all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rose-Cross, or pretended to be among their number, or believed themselves to be, or knew they ought to be. They were summoned by a worldwide steganography that had long lain waiting to be sent out, an invisible inaudible Messenger, who came forth at just the right astral hour, and on great peacock-eyed wings, robed in blue and stars, bearing her packet of invitations, moved over the earth and the waters even as that Hour itself moved: and he, or is it she, is trumpeter and trumpet call in one, whisper-crying into each ear just the word that causes this heart to turn in the right direction: to go and pack with needful things a ragged bag, or an ironbound trunk, or a train of pack mules, and set out.