closed his eyes and mouth, crossing his hands over the wound in his chest. Foolish old man. I wondered what would become of Vibeke without him there to protect her from the queen. The prince had done a rash and terrible thing in murdering Ulfeldt.
The Swiss had been busy with Ulfeldt and had not seen the prince come down from the church. Christian was not on the dock. He was not on the ship the Swiss had sailed from Kronberg. A few old fishermen were repairing a net at the western end of the wharf and I questioned them.
“Young man, taller than you, with fine clothes?” one of the fishers said.
“That’s him,” I said.
“I sold him one of my boats. A small one with a stepped sail, not a quarter hour ago. He paid me ten times its worth, he did. Said he was making for Copenhagen and rowed west, then the current took him around the curve of the island. He must be sailing south e’en now.”
I gave this news to the Swiss. Jochen pushed me aside and questioned the fishers himself. He looked at the fistful of coins Christian had paid for the boat and ordered the his own ship to sail around to the southwest and intercept the prince.
They did not find him. The fishing boat Christian bought was discovered within the hour, capsized and unmanned, nearly a mile out from the island and drifting on the current. Another hour was spent searching for Christian among the waves, but he was not discovered. The waters of the Sound are cold and swiftly-flowing. It sometimes takes weeks for a drowned man to wash ashore. Frequently the body lands fifty or more miles away from where the man went into the water. The Swiss towed the fishing boat back to the wharf at Tuna and then sailed to Elsinore, taking their unhappy news with them, along with the frozen corpse of Ulfeldt, to present to the king and queen.
I was content to remain behind on the island for another day. In the fading sunlight I marched through the snow to Uraniborg. I hoped I would manage to light a fire in the stove upstairs. It was very cold.
{ Chapter Eighteen }
THE EARTH DOTH MOVE
A PRIEST WILL CLAIM THAT TO ASK THE ULTIMATE question is to wonder what God requires of us. A king will claim that the ultimate question is whether a man be truly loyal to his lord. A lover will ask if you be faithful or no. All such questions stand below the eternal question, which every philosopher endeavors to answer, the question which does not hide its face behind the mask of priest, king, or lover: what is true?
Our ancestors lived in a primitive world where every event was isolated, terrifying, and miraculous. The sun rose today, but would it rise again tomorrow? The moon sometimes showed her face and sometimes did not. Lightning fell murderously from the sky. Insects devoured a harvest one year, and the next there was an unexpected bounty. Nothing was connected, and all men feared constantly what the unknown could bring. We did not know the cosmos, and in our ignorance we peopled it with invisible gods and demons. We made blood sacrifices to appease them, but we learned nothing of the truth. For four thousand years—so Scripture tells us—did we live thus. In the fifth millennium men began to see that the cosmos was a great machine, that all was connected, that the wheel within a wheel was not just the face of God but was also the shape of reality. Intelligent men began to find answers to the proper questions and we were no longer a world of cave-dwelling beasts. Philosophy was born, and reason with it. Philosophers do not murder each other. Priests, princes, popes, and kings keep at the slaughter because they have no habit of intellectual inquiry. They are no better than the pagans whom God drowned in the Flood, and once again such men are a plague upon the face of the Earth. I place my faith in the Ark of knowledge, and I believe that science will save man from his innate depravity. Thus have I ever bent my knee to the great men of philosophy, alchemy, astronomy, and astrology. Thus did I thrive at university and thus did I crave employment with Tycho Brahe on Hven. Tycho Brahe, I believed, did always pursue answers to the one true question. Tycho sought to reveal