A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.

The Protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers standing behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle to the rearguard, to see who or what was coming through from behind. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing—for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.

The Bohemians and their allies, though in the stronger position, broke quickly, evaporating, in effect, as though it had all been a show, and was now over. Anhalt, screaming hoarse with rage and panic, tried to hold the mob at sword's point, but couldn't. The soldiers and people inside the city locked the gates against them, left them to face the advancing enemy, and in the castle through that day and evening the king and his ministers disputed what to do next. There were reproaches; there were tears. The Bohemian leadership begged, demanded, shouted that the city had to be surrendered or it would be attacked and breached and put to the sword; the king berated them for cowardice—and was shocked to be berated in turn. He went on his knees to pray for guidance, but no one would kneel with him; he left the chamber, he fell into his wife's arms, she (terrified by how frightened he was, the deepest emotion she had ever seen pictured on his face, deeper than love, deeper than faith) could see that they had nothing left, nothing but flight. Anhalt in tears too said the same.

With only what they could push into a couple of coaches—someone thought to gather up the crown jewels, which would support them in exile for years—the Winter King and his Queen left Hradcany palace, nearly forgetting their baby son and heir—a nursemaid ran up at the last moment and thrust the little bundle into the queen's arms. Their people, servants, and followers, who knew what fate now awaited them, ran after the departing coaches, trying to climb aboard or hang on to the running boards, dropping away as the cavalcade careened downhill.

That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size—it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew “far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.

* * * *

The imperial army entered Prague the next day without opposition. The soldiers were released on the city, as the phrase is, with the common results. One of those who entered was René Descartes, who wandered in the old town and up to the Carolinum; he had the idea that he would like to view the famous collection of Tycho Brahe's astronomical instruments that Johannes Kepler had left behind when he too left Prague precipitously. The young man had—would always have—an uncanny ability to pass single-mindedly through scenes that did not pertain to his own business, seeing in effect nothing. The instruments, unfortunately, had already been removed and dispersed, and René walked back again through the town, where snow was now beginning to fall, snow stained red in the squares and alleys. He was thinking again—of a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations of the third and fourth degree, perhaps—and in his notebook that night he wrote: On November 11, 1620, I began to conceive the foundation of an admirable discovery.

In the coming weeks those of the Bohemian leadership who didn't escape abroad were methodically tried and executed by an imperial commission. One cheated them by committing suicide (another tower window, another leap) but his head and right hand were exhibited, nailed to the gallows. Eventually twenty-seven knights, counts, ministers and patriarchs, judges, scholars, and burghers were executed; lesser men were whipped, branded, or lost goods. That Hussite preacher who once led a parade of fellows dressed as sturdy Hussite peasants to welcome Elizabeth to Prague (what a noise they had made with their flails, those false harvestmen, flailing, flailing—what an ungodly noise!) and who had given tongue so long and loud to praise her—he had that tongue nailed to the gallows. Nothing was to be forgiven, or forgotten either.

Through the deepening snows Frederick and Elizabeth struggled toward home. Everyone says they were remarkably brave, clear eyed but calm, all happiness gone, everything lost, spoiled, and themselves to blame: especially Elizabeth. Her mind, said the English ambassador, could not be brought under fortune.

Home slipped out of reach. The Spanish general Spinola, the Spider, left Flanders with his army and moved toward the Rhine and the Palatinate. Soon Mainz had fallen to him (in stories of war, cities fall at the advance of generals, but it's not so; metonymy and synecdoche don't do the fighting and dying, the soldiers and the townspeople do, one at a time, and not in a sentence but for hours and days). Celadon, now with the Protestant forces trying to regroup, wrote to Elizabeth: Voilà, my poor Heidelberg is taken. They have used all sorts of cruelties, pillaged the whole town, burnt all the suburbs, which were the chief beauty of the place. The invaders seized the vast Bibliotheca palatina, which was sent off to Rome; the great librarian Gruter saw all his own lifetime's collection of books and papers thrown into the street and yard where horses were stabled, to be irremediably fouled. It always happens, a calculated insult, endlessly repeated: Protestant soldiery stable their horses in the chapels of saints, Catholics in the courtyards of schools or libraries. What was in poor Gruter's papers? A whole world vanished here, says Dame Yates. What story was lost in that street? None? This one?

There exist a number of broadsides mocking the runaway Winter King, political cartoons as dense with symbols as alchemical texts, let him who does not understand be silent, or learn. In many of them the king is shown with one stocking falling down—he has lost his garter, or Garter, which means his English father-in-law's support. And in one he stands uneasily, fearfully, upon a Y; the Y stands on a Z; the Z, on a wooden ball. Saturn with glass and wings and scythe looks on, old Kronos or Chronos, and he declares: