BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

by Ian Watson

After the rain of the past few days, the sky over Prague was eggshell blue. A cool breeze tickled at Tycho Brahe. Autumn was on the way. So as to avoid sneezing he cupped the warmth of his hand over his false nose of silver and gold as he headed uphill from the Sign of the Golden Griffin toward the sprawl of the castle dominated by the cathedral. If he sneezed a few times, people might imagine that the plague was returning. A good thing if it did—the court would quit Prague, and so could he!

A warm nose made him think of a living body burning on a bonfire in Rome. Bruno’s body, back in February—burned for claiming that our world circled the sun, and that many inhabited worlds existed. Of course the Copernican notion of a central sun was nonsense, but to be burned for thinking. And now those damned stupid malicious Capuchin monks were accusing Tycho of malice and black magic.

Supposedly the monks’ prayers, emanating from their residence near the palace, had been interfering with Tycho’s alchemical witchcraft, keeping him from turning base metal into gold. Allegedy, as the emperor’s astrological adviser, Tycho had persuaded Rudolph to turn the monks out.

“Gold, indeed!” Tycho snarled to himself in Danish, which no passerby would understand.

Gold, if only. The treasury could dearly use some gold. That’s what the scientific wizards in the Powder Tower were trying to accomplish. Tycho himself was only interested in the alchemy of medicine, which protected him from plague. The monks were very far from the mark. They had the minds of monkeys as well as the appearance.

Who could advise a mentally unstable melancholic such as Rudolph had become? The sheer waste of Tycho’s time, being hauled to the capital from his observatory at Castle Benatky with its indoor plumbing and so many other conveniences and graces, to be crammed into the Golden Griffin along with his family and assistants. Oh, Tycho could draw up astrological charts perfectly well regarding decisions of state, but would the emperor actually make any decisions based on advice? State documents continued to languish unsigned for far too long. Rudolph’s zodiacal sign was the Crab, and he was behaving just like a crab withdrawn into its shell. No, that was how a tortoise behaved. Anyway, Rudolph was in his shell.

This was becoming a serious problem which potentially imperiled Tycho—not merely in the matter of his domestic finances, but also as regards to his safety. Bruno had burned in Rome. The great patron Rudolph could protect the assorted alchemists and magicians and lapidaries and artists and philosophers who crowded Prague—if not always pay them! The Emperor was a moderate Catholic; he needed to be moderate, given his occult and exotic tastes. But if he lost control there might be popish persecution, supposing one took a bleak view—that would please the Spanish Habsburgs. Or there might be Protestant persecution, supposing one took an alternative bleak view—that would please many Germans. Rudolph’s titular Holy Roman Empire was becoming ever more unhinged as, alas, was Rudolph. At least Tycho had been able to leave young Kepler some useful calculations to work with.

Clutching in his free hand astrological charts bound with purple ribbon, barrel-chested, red-bearded, balding Tycho strode onward, his stiff white lace ruff like a splendid halo which had slipped down to circumscribe his neck, his dark velvet cloak revealing a blue doublet in the Spanish mode, threaded with gold. The costs of being a courtier!

As he was heading across the bustling main courtyard adjacent to the cathedral, he was hailed by a dirty individual who might recently have been rolling in the ashes of a dead bonfire. Smudges darkened the man’s cheeks and his eyebrows seemed singed.

Tycho recognized Bartholomew Guarinoni. Most people knew that Guarinoni was in rivalry with his fellow Italian Octavian Rovereto to become Rudolph’s favorite physician, an unlikely ambition when Matthias Borbonius was the most sought-after doctor in Prague. Could Rovereto have discharged a blunderbuss loaded with filth at his colleague? The cause was bound to be a laboratory explosion.

Guarinoni’s eyes were gleaming, not only in contrast to the dirt surrounding them.

“Noble sir,” he said in German, “I may see His Majesty this afternoon at last!”

About money, of course. What else? Especially if the Italian had just wrecked his workplace in the tower.

“In that case I advise you to change your clothes and wash your face.”

Tycho had access to Rudolph—obligatory access, often twice a day. The emperor needed constant astrological guidance about his campaign against the Turks on the Hungarian front. What a tedious bore it was to appease the emperor’s credulity, especially when free will obviously modified the influence of the stars. But at least Tycho could cope excellently. The emperor valued the Dane’s objectivity at a court where everyone else was maneuvering for this or for that whereas Tycho himself only yearned to get back to his observatory.

Oh, yes, he could more than cope with Rudolph’s caprices and anxieties; and being so highly valued was admittedly pleasurable. Tycho preened himself somewhat in front of the Italian, who had little hope of an audience. Except—“How may you see him, signor?”

“At the tournament in the Vladislav Hall.”

Its staircase especially designed for horsemen to ascend, for indoor tourneys.

“Why should His Majesty attend that, when he attends little else?”

The besmirched Italian wagged a finger.

“Because Albrecht the Dwarf will ride the emperor’s giraffe, and that will be a rare sight! Allow me, allow me, to escort you to the zoo to witness preparations. I shall count it an honor.”

Indeed, it would be an honor for Guarinoni to be seen in the prolonged company of someone who had the emperor’s ear. Tongues would wag. However, Tycho’s curiosity was piqued. Momentarily he glanced at the sun, gauging its position. Time enough remained before he needed to meet with Rudolph.

The Italian brushed himself off to little effect, and the two men set out for the royal garden beyond the Brusnice stream, regarded with interest by passersby.

The rhinoceros was looking very rusty. How much had it cost, and what use had it ever been, except for amazement? In the watery climate of Prague, the animal’s great plates of ferrous armor had lost all the sheen and polish gained from African sand and sun. As the beast ambled around its yard, its armored parts shed rust like dandruff. Still, what a remarkable creature, another of the marvels that Rudolph collected. Supposing the rhinoceros died of internal rot, could those plates be scraped clean and polished or oiled and fitted on a big war horse?

If the rhinoceros did die, thank God its fate wasn’t astrologically linked to the fate of the emperor in the way that Rudolph’s pet lion’s was. Chained in the entrance hall of the palace as a jovial challenge to visitors, the lion enjoyed better protection from the weather, as well as good bloody meat and a daily bucket of milk.

Tycho and the Italian strolled past the rhino yard to the little paddock where two grooms had restrained the giraffe. Two other grooms stood on step-ladders strapping the specially constructed saddle to the animal. The seat of the saddle rose high at the rear so that the rider wouldn’t promptly slide down the animal’s steeply sloping dappled back. The destined rider, in protectively padded garb, shouted, “Tighter!” Little Albrecht mightn’t weigh much but he wasn’t about to take any chances. (He was no relation to the great Dürer who had first captured the look of a rhinoceros with such accuracy almost a century earlier in a drawing that Rudolph adored—just as, indeed, the Dutchman Bosch had perfectly depicted a giraffe.) Noticing spectators, Albrecht waddled toward them and bowed low, no great effort for a dwarf. Albrecht eyed the Italian askance as if Guarinoni, clown-faced due to soot, was competing with the dwarf as a buffoon.

Ridden by Albrecht, the giraffe would likely cause much comedy, probably commencing with its indoor ascent of the staircase up to the Vladislav Hall—the giraffe would need to bow its horned head.

Someone had been clever! Rudolph mightn’t put in an appearance for any ordinary tournament in the hall, but the prospect of his giraffe taking part might well entice him from his melancholy seclusion.

“Whose idea was this?” Tycho asked the dwarf.

Someone fairly important, who wanted a chance to speak to Rudolph …

Albrecht shrugged, but Tycho did not feel like dispensing any silver to find out.

“Have you practiced riding the giraffe much?”

“Oh yes. At first she capered about, and I slipped off but I clung upside-down to her neck and she tired of carrying my weight. She won’t bite, although you need to watch out for the hooves. Don’t stand behind her.” The dwarf indicated a wooden contraption resembling a gateway at the end of the paddock. “She learned to lower her head and pass through there to get lettuces.”

“Well,” Tycho said to Guarinoni, “this is all very interesting, but I must meet His Majesty. I assume you do have a change of clothes in your tower.”

The Italian hesitated in the most peculiar way—almost as though he did not wish to shed his alchemy-stained garments and wash himself, or at least not yet.

“Are you hoping to demonstrate devotion to your science, signor? When what you demonstrate is a failure, grime not gold.”

Suddenly the Italian began to talk rapidly in ever more broken German.

“One of my colleagues,” by which he probably meant competitor, “is hinting at erotic ecstasy available at the new Sign of the Jade Dragon. He went there for a take-out meal following a similar mishap as mine—”

Doubtless the Italian hoped to delay Tycho yet further in his company! Well, he succeeded.

“Erotic ecstasy? Jade Dragon? What do you mean by a ‘take-out’ meal?”

Tycho listened to Guarinoni carefully for several minutes, until really he could delay no more.

In the arcaded courtyard of the royal palace hustle and bustle presaged the tourney. Preferring to avoid Rudolph’s chained pet lion, Tycho ascended the staircase intended for riders into Vladislav Hall itself, its ceiling a beauty of reticulated vaulting.

Two-thirds of the way along the floor stood a quintain for tilting. The imperial marshall was thrusting at the target—a shield painted with a Turk’s head—to ensure that the counterweight bag of sand swung around smoothly enough to clobber a lance-man who didn’t follow through smartly although he would also need to halt his horse quickly to avoid colliding with the barrier of mattresses protecting the far wall.

Onward to the antechamber, to be saluted and admitted. Rudolph liked items from his treasury and art gallery to be on display in this part of the palace for a few months at a time. Tycho barely glanced at the large globe and the gilded engraved brass armillary sphere, or at Venus and Adonis on the wall, or the Head Composed of Vegetables.

Thence to the Green Room, where the waiting chamberlain stood with his back to Tantalus on his Wheel.

“His Imperial Highness is expecting you—”

And finally to the royal bedchamber, its windows draped to exclude daylight, many candles lit. Hardly the best conditions for admiring Pan and Venus or The Rape of Helen or a lyre embossed with a mus tached face or a statue of Daphne in gilded silver, coral, and semiprecious stones. In a richly carved chair Rudolph slouched, attired in a fur robe, his delicate lace ruff collar resembling an explosion of pearls from a milky pool.

He looked distinctly autumnal, his pear of a nose overripe on that long sloping face, his abundant mustaches overdue for harvest, his mulberry eyes lugubrious.

“Brahe, have you news of my assassination?”

“Sire, the fact that your noble father was assassinated at the same age as you are now conveys no inevitability for a repetition of the same fate—nor do the stars.”

“I know I am dead and damned,” declared Rudolph. “I’m a man possessed by a devil.”

“In what sense exactly?”

Rudolph tapped his nose.

“A false nose of metals is part of your face, Brahe, ever since you lost your fleshly nose in a duel long ago. I know that in my very soul there is a foreign part—and in my body too! A part that comes from elsewhere evil! A part that I must suffocate and keep confined in darkness, otherwise …

“… otherwise, Brahe, I tell you, I would yearn …

“… to sup your blood to nourish me!” Rudolph pulled himself up hectically while Tycho took a wary step backward. “Do you understand me? It is far better that my own blood should be spilled in an assassination!” Then, in the candlelight, Rudolph seemed to blush with shame at his outburst.

The Holy Roman Emperor added more quietly, “I cannot appear in public, in daylight.”

“Not even to see your jester ride your giraffe in the tourney?” And then, perhaps, to see the ambassador from Muscovy too?

Rudolph shivered and pulled his cloak tightly around himself.

“Borbonius did promise something of the sort. He imagines this will infuse my spirits with hilarity. How wrong he is.”

Oh, so the frolic was a bright idea of Borbonius’—medicine for the mind, where physic could not prevail. That was preferable to this being some other ambitious courtier’s idea.

“Some teeth sink too deeply into the soul,” muttered Rudolph.

Tycho decided to interpret this literally rather than metaphorically and symbolically as Rudolph surely intended.

“What has bitten you, and when?”

Hauntedly, Rudolph whispered, “Our enemy the Turk—in the form of a bat with scimitars on its wings—from Transylvania weeks ago. Borbonius says I do not have rabies or I would be dead.”

Hmm. Rudolph’s mind was possessed by symbols and emblems, yet could there be any truth in this? The emperor’s Hungarian opponents in Transylvania were allies of the Ottomans in Constantinople. A bat biting Rudolph could be a metaphor for some strange visitor who had deranged the credulous emperor’s senses … and maybe his body too? Oh to be able to shine a bright light into Rudolph’s labyrinthine darkness!

Brahe recalled what Guarinoni had told him regarding the Sign of the Jade Dragon and that rumour of the illuminatory ecstasy obtainable there.

Could it be that Guarinoni had exploded his own equipment deliberately, so as to appeal to the Chinese proprietress of that establishment? If so, Guarinoni had chosen an unsuitable time of day … On the subject of suitable and unsuitable times, the horoscope for events in Transylvania certainly needed discussing! And if anything could ever be decided, and if Rudolph could be cured of his mad malaise, and if the Catholics and Protestants in Bohemia could avoid killing each other, maybe, just maybe Tycho could get back to precisely instrumented measurements of the heavens!

When Tycho finally emerged from a tedious audience requiring much soothing of Rudolph, Vladislav Hall was loud with the noise of the tourney.

Ladies and lords looked on as horsemen sat resting in their armor, most being spiky and fluted in Maximilian style, made in Nuremburg. Since the emperor might be attending, they were wearing their smartest metal suits rather than heavy tilting armor. Many breastplates were crested above the sternum with a double eagle.

The marshall accosted Tycho, and Tycho promptly shook his head.

“His Highness will remain in his bedroom.”

So the marshall gave a signal.

The floor was a bit slippery for a giraffe accustomed to a paddock. However, fixed above the Turk’s head on the target of the quintain, was a lettuce, so when Albrecht leaned back and slapped the animal on her rump, she broke into an eager canter.

Albrecht righted his posture, pointing his lance at the target. Aware now of the lance as a possible rival to reach the lettuce, the giraffe lowered its neck, thrusting her head forward. Thus the dappled beast’s mouth reached the lettuce before the tip of the lance could touch the Turk’s head.

As a result the countweight promptly swung around and slapped the giraffe hard on her backside, just as she was about to slow. Legs splaying, she slid onward while Albrecht soared over her head. His lance impaled the mattresses and he hung there briefly, legs pumping. A moment later, lettuce and giraffe snout thwacked him right between those legs—and how he howled as he fell.

Bracing herself, the giraffe succeeded in halting as Albrecht sprawled on the floor beneath her feet, clutching his bollocks.

Howls of laughter arose as riders clashed the shielding vamplates of their upright lances against their breastplates in mock salute.

Having seen enough tomfoolery, Tycho strode off. He must visit that Chinese take-out, down by the river near the Charles Bridge. If what Guarinoni said had any validity, maybe a cure for the emperor might come from an unexpected quarter.

Here was the very house. A dragon of precious green jade, fit for the emperor’s own collections, stood behind slim iron bars in a niche above the doorway. The house was only a stone’s throw from Charles Bridge, crowded with carriages and pedestrians. Not for the first time Tycho thought that the bridge could look really handsome if there were statues along its sides. Statues, perhaps, of famous scientists such as Ptolemy and Pythagoras and Archimedes and Paracelsus and himself.

The door of the Jade Dragon was open, releasing odors of cookery at once unfamiliar and enticing. A front window contained a signboard painted with prices and enigmatic signs such as a beehive and a lemon and a pig. Tycho entered and beheld his first Chinese woman: almond eyes in an oval face, long black hair in strands decorated atop by a pink rose that looked to be made of silk and a long silver hairpin—which she could perhaps wield like a dagger, if need be. Standing behind a low counter, she was wearing a green dress that hugged her slim figure, and a long neckerchief of red silk. She was beautiful and looked no older than twenty-five, although Tycho suspected that people with such smooth tight skin and flat features might appear to age at a different pace from people in Bohemia or in Denmark. Upon the counter Tycho noted a different sort of counter, consisting of beads on thin metal bars inside a framework, that looked mathematically interesting. On the rear wall hung another signboard, just as in the window.

A customer was receiving a take-out which proved to be a simple wooden box the length and breadth of one’s hand, some steam rising from around the lid. A few other such boxes stood on the counter, empty except for what looked like stretched pig bladders—washed and dried ones, of course—fitted as bags gaping open to receive pourings of food, after which evidently a lid would cap the meal. The Chinese woman passed a pair of wooden sticks to the customer and he departed, beating a merry tattoo on the lid of his take-out as if he were a drummer boy. For larger orders, a heap of simple little hessian sacks with handles awaited, into which several boxes would fit.

“Good day,” Brahe said in German to the exotic woman. “I am the Imperial Star Watcher and Adviser, Tycho Brahe. May I ask your name?”

“My name is Su Nü, but you not succeed in pronouncing, so please call me Frau Sonne.” Her accent was twangy.

“Su Nu,” attempted Tycho.

She giggled. “No, no. Oh no.”

“Frau Sonne, then. May I ask how you got here from China?”

“Along Silk Road,” she said, and it seemed to Tycho that a road as smooth as silk could be no ordinary road, but might well be something occult, and definitely better than arriving in Bohemia on a broomstick.

Tycho pointed at the signboard.

“What is a beehive and a lemon and a pig?”

“Sweet and sour pork. Delicious!”

“Hmm, I may try some.”

Now came the difficult part, requiring a certain diplomacy, at which Tycho had at last acquired considerable skill after various contretemps in the past.

“I understand that you offer other services here …”

“Items of private delicacy?”

“Earlier today, I was talking to an alchemist whose laboratory exploded.”

“Another explosion? Ah, your alchemists!” Su Nü sighed with pitying compassion. “So many miss point of true alchemy, which is transformation of person in body and soul, not making of mere gold.”

“I believe,” Tycho remarked huffily, “that superior alchemists strive to create the philosopher’s stone, thus making gold, so as to purify themselves spiritually in the process; and vice versa. Personally I’m mainly interested in medical alchemy.”

Su Nü looked at him intently. “Make love, not gold! That is secret. We Chinese have known for centuries.”

“Indeed?”

“In-deed! Intimate secrets of cinnabar grotto and gully of gold and inner elixir we call nei tan. Would you like private consultation? This evening, my lord?”

Hmm, cinnabar—the red powder efficacious in gold-making—was a mixture of philosophic mercury and philosophic sulphur …

“The cinnabar grotto: that’s the vessel containing the cinnabar powder?”

“Dry powder? My lord, grotto should ooze with juices like mucus of a snail! If not, adept is inept. Cinnabar grotto is part of cunt. Your alchemists miss whole point. They make apparatus. They need skilled woman instead. Consultation, my lord?”

Tycho was not yet a lord in Bohemia. He really must petition Rudolph for citizenship and noble status so that Kirsten and the children could benefit, especially by the children thus being able to inherit and marry into noble families in their adopted homeland. However, he did not at all mind being called a lord.

“I am faithful to my wife,” Tycho told Su Nü̈.

“Good health comes from good sex,” she observed, “and woman is sexually stronger than man, so she assists him through her pleasure to become mystic master of grotto, thus of himself and of his well being.”

Hmm, could this Chinese woman really help restore Rudolph’s well being? Tycho needed to think for a while.

“For the moment,” he said, “may I have some beehive lemon pig?”

“Certainly! On bed of white rice, which sweet sauce stains?” Everything that Su Nü̈ said seemed to have erotic implications. Goodness knows what rice was.

Tycho nodded, and Su Nü̈ slipped away into another room from which the odors issued. She returned very soon with a filled container, lid in place. Then she presented Tycho with two plain wooden sticks.

“Shall I demonstrate, my lord?”

She seized his fingers and placed the sticks within them in a certain way, then manipulated his hand so that the sticks opened and closed. Her touch was at once subtle yet firm.

“You bring box back clean another time, get small refund.”

Tycho sat on a block of sandstone by the end of the Charles Bridge, musing while he mastered the art of eating beehive lemon pig with sticks. Rice looked like maggots but must be a grain of some kind, swollen by boiling. Very tasty stained with sauce. Surely she must use sacks of it. Had the rice slid magically along the Silk Road too?

Reaching a decision, he returned to the Jade Dragon, where, once she had finished serving another customer, Su Nü̈ listened to him intently.

Yes, she would perform a take-out service, of herself, since obviously an emperor could not visit her humble dwelling. Traditionally, in her far-off homeland, she remarked, if an emperor was wary of assassination, a consort for him would be stripped and searched intimately then wrapped in a silk bag and borne to his bedchamber by a eunuch, to be returned home in the same manner after the union. Thus she would carry nothing with which to harm him.

“Must leave hairpin here, my lord!”

Tycho was relieved that she did not expect him to carry her in a silk sack to the castle, but instead would walk along with him.

Traditionally, it transpired, a Chinese emperor’s intercourse was monitored either by a female official or by a eunuch, who would carefully record the number of thrusts made by the emperor and who, if she or un-he deemed these excessive, would halt further activity by reading a cautionary memorandum from a revered ancestor.

“We do things differently here,” said Tycho, although by now he realized that Su Nü̈ was teasing him mischievously—maybe excited by the prospect of every Chinese’s woman’s dream coming true, alhough with a melancholy Holy Roman Emperor, not a Chinese emperor. “An astrologer does not need to be present in the bedroom, nor a doctor either.”

She became serious. “You say he thirsty for blood?”

“So he implies. But he resists the compulsion, and this takes all his energy away from matters of state. Frau Sonne, you may be in a little danger if you’re in bed with him.”

Suddenly Su Nü̈ performed a very wild dance—accompanied by “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—and that long tight dress of hers proved to be slit from thigh to ankle, allowing her legs to kick. Her feet flashed out, and her hands, then silently she mimed riding a horse, then she stood on one leg.

“What is that dance called?” asked Tycho.

“Kung fu,” she replied. “Self-defense and harmonious living. If I expel black bat from him, I must kill it. Hmm, chicken blood mixed with sticky rice can help defeat Chiang-Shih devil, which steals breath from people instead of blood. Therefore chicken breath mixed with rice may help defeat bloodsucker devil.”

“How can you persuade a chicken to breathe on rice without eating the rice at the same time?”

“No, no, use chicken lungs, chopped.”

“Oh I see, the symbol of chicken breath.” That made sense. Particularly with Rudolph, this might be effective.

“I will know best route when his jade stalk rises and his orchid bags sway. Later too, when I smell his yogurt.” What was yogurt? Tycho decided not to ask.

Su Nü̈ continued standing on one leg like a crane. Tycho leaned across the counter and gazed at her embroidered slipper.

“What small feet you have.”

“My golden lotuses. Walking on them strengthens muscles of hidden valley.”

Another customer came in, wanting duck with long worms.

Two audiences with Rudolph in one day was not unusual for Tycho—would that it were, and that the ambassador from Muscovy could enjoy even half an audience!

By the time Tycho reached Vladislav Hall again, it was empty. Some horse turds lay on the floor, or maybe those were giraffe turds if the beast had shat after it skidded. Just as well; Tycho’s mission was a discreet one.

“How is the darkness within, sire?” Tycho enquired.

“Stirring,” whispered Rudolph. “Stretching its wings. I can smell your blood, Brahe.”

“Maybe what you’re smelling is beehive lemon pig on my breath.” Tycho hoped so, at any rate.

“Brahe, the moon is filling.”

Tycho was perfectly aware of this, both as an astronomer and in common with any ordinary person who bothered glancing into the sky by night. Yet how, in this heavily curtained bedroom where candles burned …

“Do you mean that you can feel it filling, within yourself?”

“Yes! It will fill me within, usurping what remains of my will. Soon I must drink blood, or be blessedly assassinated.”

Guarinoni’s information, and the resulting trips to the Jade Dragon, had come none too soon. What else could be done for Rudolph, in his delusion or—Heaven forbid!—in his realization of the cause of his problem, whether that were due to deliberate magical malice by Turks or Hungarians in Transylvania or even by his nephew Leopold or whether it were due to something which had come out of the night, the night of darkness and also of evil?

“Sire, I believe I have discovered a solution to your dark malady.”

“You have found it in the stars?”

No, I found it in a Chinese take-out near Charles Bridge … Tycho did not voice this, yet as the thought passed through his mind it struck him how remarkable it was that Su Nü had come to Prague at such an appropriate time along that Silk Road, almost as if she were a hunter who posed as prey for carnal appetites, while also being an adept instructor seemingly wiser than any other alchemist he had met; except of course for himself.

“Yes, in tonight’s stars!” Tycho fibbed. “Venus is entering the Crab.”

A moon much closer to full than to half hung low over Prague, lighting the climb to the castle, dimming nearby stars. Tycho disliked the term gibbous for such a phase of the moon because the word seemed supernaturally menacing, as if beholding it caused people to gibber with fear.

Yet there was ample reason for trepidation. Su Nü walked with a wobble, which would be strengthening her hidden valley in preparation for onslaught by the imperial jade stalk. Yet Tycho had also seen her leap into action. Consequently he hoped that Rudolph wouldn’t be injured in any way, either as regards his jade stalk or his personal esteem. Su Nü carried one of those little hessian sacks into which she had put a box of sticky rice and chicken blood for the emperor’s nourishment during their encounter.

So N̈ was in the bedchamber for almost two hours, while in the antechamber Tycho variously performed mathematics in his head and contemplated Tantalus on his Wheel. How could erotic activity possibly last for so long? A few times, muffled by the stout door, he heard, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” or some such sound. Maybe that was an outcry of joyful release.

At long last the door of the bedroom opened, and there stood Rudolph and Su N̈, both clad. The emperor glowed, might be the best way of phrasing it, mere candlelight notwithstanding. If he had been late autumn earlier, now he was summer again. His cheeks were red as apples, his nose a pear at its best, his huge moustaches were like corn, and his eyebrows resembled hairy golden caterpillars.

“Be here early tomorrow, Brahe,” he called out. “Much awaits.” The Emperor ushered the Chinese woman courteously from his bedchamber, then he withdrew and shut the door.

Tycho hastened towards Su N̈.

“Was there any need of …”—what was the name of that dance?—“any need of kung fu?”

“Not on this occasion. I must be private quickly, My Lord, to massage vigorously to expel all yogurt.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Tycho knew of a suitable closet. Seizing a candelabrum, he led Su Nü to a spiral stairway, down two turns, threw open a door to a privy room, planted the tree of candles within, then waited outside in the moonlight coming through a narrow window.

Presently Su Nü emerged, clutching her little sack. She whispered, “Expelled much black yogurt.” That word yogurt again. “But I cloak it in my ejaculation.” Whatever was she talking about? Women couldn’t ejaculate—but maybe Chinese women could, from some organ inside themselves? She clutched her little sack tight. “I will throw in river, like abortion, weighted with stones.”

Could it be that the emperor had burst a blood vessel inside himself? Yet Rudolph had looked so radiant and restored, at least compared with how he had been previously, in the depths of despair.

“Frau Sonne, I don’t understand. What exactly did His Majesty expel, and how exactly?” Tycho was forever preoccupied by exactitude. His great quadrant was ten times more exact than any previous instrument for measuring celestial positions.

“Vampire essence, my lord! Evil elixir dirties channels in body. Clever acupressure for long time delays explosion from jade stalk. Thus great pleasure-tension sucks black essence together, bottling like lava under volcano. At last volcano erupts with ten times more bang than ordinary.”

So that was why she took two hours, making the time by now so late …

“Lucky I catch him still living, before become dead and vampire. One more week, woe! Black residue may linger in emperor, make him moody sometimes, not enough change him into blood-drinker.”

“He may need another treatment?”

“Not necessary.”

Tycho wished to know more, but …

“I must go home. It seems I need an early night. First I’ll escort you, Frau Sonne.”

“And payment?”

“Yes, yes. I have the gold with me.”

“See!” She grinned. “Make love makes gold. Best way.”

It was two tedious days of horoscope casting before Tycho had a chance to revisit the Jade Dragon. So many questions to ask! Not least about what other occasions the Chinese woman had been referring to. When had those been, and where?

Drizzle was drifting. For a moment Tycho thought he may have mistaken the building, or even mistaken the cobbled street. But no. This was the place. Above the door, around the niche, were those slim iron bars, yet the dragon of jade was absent. Gone, too, from the window was the signboard promising beehive lemon pig and other delights. Within the room into which he peered: a low counter and nothing more. No counter of beads, no signboard on the wall, no sign that Su N̈ had ever been there as cook and as adept in an alchemy scarcely known to him, and also, he was now sure, as a warrior against darkness, traveling a silken road that she alone perhaps, and some others like her, could perceive and use.

A letter had come from Kepler at Castle Benatky. The problem which Tycho had set Kepler concerned the image of the sun passing through a pinhole onto a screen. The image appeared too large for the moon to be able to eclipse the sun completely, although the moon certainly did so in reality. Kepler wrote of ‘light rays,’ a whole new concept in geometrical optics, or so he claimed. And he whined about money.

Rays of light preoccupied Tycho as he strode away from the empty house of enlightenment. In competition with the actual sun, Frau Sonne was eclipsed.

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