The Queen of Prussia liked to stage operas, when she wasn't inciting riotous dinner-table debates among her friends, and the only sense in which she was ever a tyrant was in ordering some poor physicist to don a mad-cap and warble a role for which he was untrained and ill-suited. Princess Caroline had been dragooned, from time to time, to sing a Nymph or Angel part. Nothing, except perhaps for fighting side-by-side in a war, forged bonds among disparate persons so well as performing together on stage, and so Caroline had become a great friend of these grownups, her fellow-sufferers on the boards of the Charlottenburg.

With wine-glasses and sparklers in hand they had gathered round a pedestal that had been built of polished cherry-wood in the center of the library. Surmounting this, and spreading out above the heads of the revelers, was a large spherical object—

"A cage!" Caroline exclaimed.

Dismay flowed over Leibniz's face. But very soon that emotion gave way to a sort of distracted, intrigued look, as his curiosity had been somehow provoked. He bobbed his head in a way that might have been a nod, or a bow. "C'est juste," he said. "Geometers have, with their parallels and meridians, ruled the globe that, being unmarked, save by irregular coastlines and river-courses, seemed wild to eyes that only in order could see beauty. But one who loves Nature for her variety might see the geometers' devices as a disfigurement—no bird is as beautiful when seen through the bars of a cage, as it is in the wild. But I pray, Highness, that you will construe this rather as an inventory of the known. It is a map of the world, not as flattened out by cartographers, but as it is."

The globe had been set at an angle, as the earth was tilted with respect to the ecliptic. An unexplored portion of the South Pacific bore on the pedestal. Not far away from it, the south pole presented itself just at the level of Caroline's head. This globe was indeed fashioned like a spherical bird-cage, with curving brass bars following the lines of longitude and latitude. Most of it (the oceans) was open-work. But the continents were curved plates of brass riveted to those bars. They were mounted to the inside of the cage, rather than the outside, so that the bars passed in front of them—at least, for the celebrants who were standing around it. An irregular, wholly factitious continent had been placed around the south pole, representing the hypothetical land of Antarctica, and this had a round hatchway cut into it, and steps leading up to it from the floor.

Dr. Krupa (a Bohemian mathematician who had become a sort of permanent houseguest here) said, "Highness, some have proposed that at the world's poles are openings where one may descend into the earth's interior. Here is your opportunity personally to put that hypothesis to the test."

The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick William shut up for a moment, sensing a frisson running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte's doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded—giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. "It begins," she said, "already the boys are vying for Caroline's attention."

"Is that what they're doing?" Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,

SUKKOTH 1701

That Golden Sceptre which thou didst reject

Is now an Iron Rod to bruise and breake

Thy disobedience.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

"C ARAMBA!" EXCLAIMED DIEGO DE FONSECA, "a cucaracha has fallen onto the tortillas of my wife!"

Moseh had seen it before de Fonseca had, and had jumped to his feet even before the initial Caramba! had echoed off the far wall of the prison's courtyard. As he reached over the table, the beads of his colossal rosary—walnut-shells strung on a cowhide thong—whacked the rim of a honey-filled serving-crock. His arm shot free of its sleeve, revealing a ladder of welts and scars, some fresher than others. His shoulder-joint rumbled and popped like a barrel rolling over cobblestones. Most of the men at the table felt twinges of sympathetic pain in their own shoulders, and inhaled sharply. Moseh's ingratiating smile hardened into a scary grimace, but he got a grip on Señora de Fonseca's tortilla-plate and pulled it clear. "Allow me to fetch some fresh ones…"

Diego de Fonseca glanced sidelong at his wife, who had tilted her head back, reducing her chin count to a mere three, and was glaring at the net-work of vines above the table, which was vibrant with six-legged life. The Director, who was not a thin specimen either, leaned slightly towards Moseh and said, "That is most Christian of you…but we prefer our tortillas made with rich lard, and in fact have never seen them made with olive oil before—"

"I could send out an Indian, Señor Director—"

"Don't bother, we are satiated. Besides—"

"I was just about to say it!" Jack put in. "Besides, you and the Señora get to go home tonight!"

Diego de Fonseca adjusted the set of his jaw slightly, and favored Jack with the same look his wife had aimed at the cockroach moments earlier. Fortunately, Señora de Fonseca's attention had been drifting: "Over there, you pay such attention to cleanliness," she observed, casting a look down an adjacent gallery, where several prisoners were sweeping the paving-stones with bundles of willow-branches. "Yet you lay out your feast with nothing to protect you from the sky, save this miserable thatching of infested vines."

"I gather from your tone that you are bemused by our ineptitude where a señora less imbued with Christian charity would be angry at our rudeness," Moseh said.

"Quite! Why, those fellows with the willow-branches are not so much sweeping the pavement as spanking it!"

"Those are from that batch of Jewish monks we arrested at the Dominican monastery three years ago," said Diego.

From any other Inquisition prison warden, this might have sounded judgmental—even condemnatory. But Diego de Fonseca presided over what was widely held to be the mellowest and most easy-going Inquisition prison in the whole Spanish Empire, and he said it in mild conversational tones. Then he popped a honey-dipped pastry into his mouth.

"That explains it!" said Moseh. "Those Dominicans are so rich, each monk hires half a dozen Indians as housekeepers, and consequently they know nothing of the domestick arts." He cupped his hands around his mouth. "Say, Brother Christopher! Brother Peter! Brother Diaz! There are ladies present! Try to move some dirt as long as you are sweeping the courtyard, will you?"

The three monks straightened up and glared at Moseh, then bent their backs again and began scraping dust across the stones. Clouds of volcanic ash built up and rose around their knees.

"As for this wretched covering, I can only beg you pardon, señora," continued Moseh. "We like to lie out in this place and recuperate after a question-and-answer session with the Inquisitor, and so we have been training the vines to grow thus, to shade us from the mid-afternoon sun."