I heard my name called and I looked up to see a pair of ugly gray oxen tramping through the snow at my left. The oxen were yoked to a small two-wheeled cart. The sudden appearance of the animals, their immense black eyes looking accusingly at me, was so startling that I dropped my bags and stumbled backward, falling into a snow bank.
“Master Soren,” Cornelius called. “This is no time for making snow angels.” He and Voltemont jumped from the cart, retrieved my bags from the road, and pulled me out of the snow.
“What is this?”
“The church ox cart,” Voltemont said. “You did not expect us to walk all the way? The weather turns bad and the trunks and packs are heavy. But we must not tarry, sir. The boy must needs return the oxen to their stable before the priests see they are missing.”
The boy who had been in the chapel with Father Maltar sat at the front of the cart, the reins in one hand and a long whip in the other. He was bundled in old woolens much too large for him.
“You must hurry,” the boy said. His voice was high and pure.
We climbed into the carriage, wedging our bodies into what little space there was between the trunks. Cornelius handed me a small jar of wine and I took a drink, grateful to him. The boy cracked his whip over the oxen’s backs and the cart lurched forward. The snow fell heavier now and I could not see far in any direction. The world had disappeared behind a shifting, sparkling veil.
“Can you find the observatory?” I said.
“Do not worry. I can find Brahe’s house in any weather. But pray do not distract me.”
I fell silent, hunched under my cloak, and I looked past the oxen at the snow falling onto the barely visible road. Somewhere within the worsening weather sat Uraniborg, or what was left of it. Tycho had designed the observatory himself and it had been built to last a dozen lifetimes, yet after only four years of disuse people called it a ruin. It was inconceivable that the palace no longer stood. The walls of the keep were four feet thick, the towers rose fifty feet, and the roof was of heavy copper tiles. The huge timbers beneath the floorboards had been sawn from great fir trees felled in Sweden and ferried over the Sound at some expense. Uraniborg was no barn, no shepherd’s hut to collapse upon itself after a few neglected years. Uraniborg was a noble house of many floors, with seven towers and terraces to hold the great brass instruments. Uraniborg was a glittering villa on the highest point of the island. Every angle and measurement that had gone into the construction, from the subcellar laboratories to the Pegasus weathervane on the tall center tower, had been painstakingly computed to produce a structure perfect to eye and soul, a place where all was in harmony within and without, a microcosm of the macrocosm. Uraniborg was beautiful and solid, a shining fortress on the frontier of the future.
“Here is Brahe’s ruin,” the boy said.
{ Chapter Eleven }
THE MASON’S SON
IT WAS SNOWING HEAVILY, AS IF THE SKY ITSELF crumbled and fell down to Earth. I could not see beyond a few yards. Tycho’s castle was a dark shadow standing over us, a vague impression of high walls of brick and marble. The extent of the damage to the villa was hidden by the storm. The ramparts about the gardens had been pulled down and the bricks carted away by farmers, the boy said. I asked about the main building.
“You shall discover that yourself,” he said. As soon as our trunks and bags were out of his cart he drove off into the gloom of snow. He was gone from sight almost instantly. We had not even learned his name.
The doors into the main hall were blocked from within. I circled around to a side door and, after some labor, opened it and stepped into a dark store room, once full of dried meat, sacks of grain, and kegs of ale but now empty. A stair spiraled from floor to ceiling through the center of the room, leading up to an exposed landing outside the offices and bedrooms, and down to the kitchens and laboratories. I called Cornelius and Voltemont in and we cleared the stairs of rubbish and snow to make our way down. A bit of light filtered into the kitchen through