likely torn down by the same villagers who had demolished the ramparts to steal the bricks and limestone. The western face of the main floor was badly cracked and the wooden cupolas above the second floor were tilted and falling into the bedrooms through the ceilings. Once the palace had been topped by a weather vane in the form of Pegasus, a great brass thing that was as tall as a man from hooves to wing tips. I could not see the Pegasus and I assumed that it too had been stolen by peasants. My hope of finding any of Tycho’s instruments was not great. In the morning I would walk out to Stjerneborg and see what remained there.
I returned to the kitchen, put my boots near the oven, and lay down on my cloak with a blanket over me. Soon I was asleep.
Voltemont woke me in the morning, giving me a bowl of pottage and an alarmed report.
“There was someone here last night, wandering about. I heard it. The sound woke me.”
“You heard only me. While you good men slept I investigated the exterior. That is all.”
“Nay, the noise was not outside; it was in the upper floor.”
“And you were here, asleep beside us,” Cornelius said.
“What, did both of you hear it?”
“Aye, we did.”
“The wind and nothing more.”
“Nay, I heard a voice, and things being dragged about, Soren.”
“A dream, then.”
“In both of our heads? While we were awake?”
“Tush. The wind.”
Cornelius and Voltemont insisted they had heard something in the small morning hours, and by the time I had eaten my pottage Voltemont had convinced himself that what they had heard was the ghost of Tycho Brahe.
“Tycho died in Prague, and he is buried there,” I said. “It is well known that spirits cannot travel over bodies of water.”
“Then it is some other ghost. Do you know of any man who died here?”
“There was no—See here, Voltemont. You have heard no ghost. Mark me: there is no spirit here, roaming the halls. You men ought take less wine before bed.”
Voltemont grumbled on for a while, but by midmorning he left off with ghosts in the night and I was glad of it.
The day was cloudy and not as cold as it had been, though there was no danger of the snow melting away. We bundled ourselves up and pushed through high drifts across the gardens and out into the field south of Uraniborg, to the Castle of the Stars.
Some of Tycho’s greatest ideas took living form in his large scientific instruments. The equatorial armillary, with its nested rings and compasses, stood nearly twelve feet in height, and with it the most accurate measurements of right ascension and declination in the history of astronomy had been made. The immense wood and brass astronomical sextant, eight feet tall and six across, allowed precise determination of angular distances. Tycho’s quadrants and azimuth angles were smaller but still impressive in size and accuracy. These wondrous machines were too large to be properly used by men on the terraces or towers. They were so heavy that they swayed in the wind and wooden floors shifted beneath their great weight, ruining observational data. Stjerneborg was Tycho’s brilliant solution to the challenges presented by his brilliant inventions.
Stjerneborg was an arrangement of five amphitheaters dug into the earth and lined with granite, into which the great instruments had been lowered and bolted down. The sides of the amphitheaters were stair-stepped and Tycho’s assistants could stand at various heights alongside the machines while making observations. The roofs of these observatories were made in sections to allow full compass of the night sky. I hoped to find in Stjerneborg Tycho’s greatest instruments, and I prayed they were undamaged.
We located the turret which had been built to cover the equatorial armillary and began to dig on the western side of it, searching for the door. My memory had tricked me and it was only after more than an hour that I recalled the actual location of the entrance was to the east.
My assistants said nothing but I knew they were not pleased, and I was glad when Voltemont found the door quickly. The heavy panel was carved from oak and banded in iron, set at an angle into a small limestone crypt.
“We have discovered the root cellar,” Voltemont said. I did not think he was amused.
We cleared away the snow and Voltemont took the iron ring in his hands and pulled. The door came open and we looked into a dark