As Above, So Below Page 38

  Mayken looked at Peter, sitting at her side with Little Peter in his lap. The two of them were fascinated. Mayken was happy but exhausted. Her party was a full success. With a sigh she settled back in her chair, letting her eyes drift closed.

  It was well past midnight when Mayken awoke. The wayang kulit show was finished, the Malays were gone home or belowdecks, and the guests were preparing to leave. The plan was to walk to the better part of town in a single large group lest any of them be picked off by waterfront cutthroats and footpads. They set off towards the Grand’ Place, quietly talking. A crescent moon on the horizon lit their way. Peter walked at Mayken’s side, their sleeping son cradled in his arms and Waf at his heels.

  “Did you like your birthday, Peter?”

  “It was wonderful, dear Mayken. Those shadows—a shadow’s even less than a coat of paint. It’s nothing at all. But even so we see it. And what life that man breathed into them. Raos. He told me that in Java, a wayang kulit show lasts till dawn.”

  “Did he tell you what the story was about?”

  “The usual thing. Different men woo the same woman. Evil giants are defeated. Raos says the wayang kulit shows can be used to change the world.”

  “The wayangs teach many lessons,” put in Niay, proud of the success of her countryman’s performance. “At home we say the world itself is a shadow of something higher. We’re wayangs of the gods.”

  “You sound like the philosophers at Leuven,” said Williblad, and gave a rueful laugh. “It’s damned rare I use my fine European education anymore. Not that there’s much to learn from the kind of men who would take Florida and the East Indies for the same place. At least they brought us together, eh, Niay?” He gave his woman a little hug. “Did you notice that some of the wayang shadows were red, Peter? They use very thin hide with paint on it for those ones. Can you imagine a wayang painting that was all moving colors?”

  “On a night like tonight, I imagine all sorts of things,” said Peter genially, his fingers twined in Mayken’s. “But I’m especially taken with the idea that wayangs can change the world.” How comfortable his voice sounded in the dark.

  They were passing through the Grand’ Place, a great open square surrounded by showy stone buildings with ornate cornices. Many of them were occupied by guilds; among those guilds fortunate enough to have a building right upon this central square were the brewers, the tailors, the archers, the tallow merchants, the armorers, the boatmen, the gardeners, the coopers, the tapestry makers, the painters, the butchers, the bakers, and the cabinetmakers. The great town hall of Brussels was there as well, distinguished by the exquisite stonework of its tower, over three hundred feet in height. The tower and the ornamented parapets of the buildings stood out in crisp relief against the moonlit clouds. At night it felt a little spooky, like the backdrop for a Hell painting.

  “The shadow play can be a kind of prayer?” said Mayken, wanting to keep Peter talking.

  “That’s it,” said Peter. “So of course I’m thinking that a painting could do that as well. You know me, everything always comes back to my pictures. I’m a bore.”

  “Oh, go on and tell us what you’re thinking, Peter,” said Williblad in a friendly tone. He’d managed not to get too drunk tonight. “It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

  “All right, then,” said Peter with a smile. “Remember when I painted the toppled idol in the Flight into Egypt? And then Granvelle left. An answered prayer! I’m thinking I should paint something to try and stop Alva before he gets here.”

  “Do it, Peter,” said Mayken, feeling a flicker of hope.

  “I will.” Peter raised his voice. “Hey, Marcus!”

  “Yes, Mijnheer?” Noot’s voice was slow and sleepy. He and old Mayken were a few steps behind them, walking arm in arm.

  “What if I painted you a picture to stop Duke Alva from coming?”

  “That would be nice,” said Noot. “With the canal?”

  “I’ll paint the canal later, Marcus. Right now I’m thinking—I have it! The Apostle Paul. He persecuted the Christians until he saw a light on the road to Damascus. I’ll paint a Conversion of Paul!”

  “A Bible scene?” said Noot.

  “It’ll be soldiers in the Alps,” said Bruegel. “Like Alva! Can you see it, Marcus?”

  “I can’t see anything but flat shadows,” said Noot. “Ask me tomorrow. With so much food in me, I feel like that fat clown thing, what’s-its-name. Semar. Ah, here’s where I turn off. Give me a kiss, Mevrouw Verhulst.” Old Mayken gave Marcus a warm embrace, and then the Maykens, the Peters, Bengt, Niay, Williblad, and Waf headed home to the Coecke house.

  The next day old Mayken worked a little on Marcus, and he good-naturedly agreed to Peter’s proposal. He owned a part interest in a stone quarry, and had made quite a bit of money from the canal construction. Peter was very pleased. He loved nothing better than to work on two paintings at once.

  Bengt readied the panels for Luilekkerland and the Conversion of Paul while Peter feverishly prepared sketches for the two paintings. And then Peter got to work on the backgrounds, with Bengt hard put both to mix paints and to keep his copying work abreast of Peter’s progress.

  The Luilekkerland was a smallish panel, less than three feet by two feet in size. Peter incorporated all the features Franckert had described—the pancake bush, the fence of sausages, the goose on the plate, and so on. In the picture’s center he placed a tree trunk holding a round table of extra food, the table circling the tree like a hub. Three men lay stretched out on the ground like the spokes of a wheel: a sleeping cavalryman, a stunned peasant, and a writer numb with idleness, his mouth slackly open to catch the last drops of wine dripping from a toppled jug upon the table. Nearby a dazed foot soldier lay propped upon a pillow, vacantly gazing at the tree, his mouth hanging open in hopes that a little roast bird would fly into it. A perambulating Luilekkerland pig with a slice out of his back was silhouetted between the four men and the background. And in the upper corner of the background, a purposeful man with a big wooden spoon was crawling out of a hole in a cloudlike mound of white porridge or pudding. Like some devouring worm, the newcomer had eaten himself a tunnel through the cloud; he’d made his way to Luilekkerland from a tiny, white Mediterranean city perched by the sea upon the horizon at the other end of the cloud. The invader was climbing down from the cloud to a tree to the ground—and who knew what he’d do to the paralyzed inhabitants of Luilekkerland.

  Mayken wouldn’t have noticed all these details on her own, but Peter was eager to point them out. In his maturity he was getting more and more voluble about his pictures. Joachim Bueckelaer had taken to stopping by the studio once or twice a week, and when he was present, Peter talked even more.

  The Conversion of Paul was one of Peter’s full-sized panels, some five feet by four feet in size. It showed an army marching through a high Alpine gorge, with the cliffs falling precipitously off to the left to reveal a distant sea and a heart-breakingly lovely stripe of lapis-lazuli blue sky. As always in Peter’s paintings, crows dotted the endless heavens. The right part of the picture was filled with mounting pinnacles of rock, threaded by a trail that led to an oddly solid-looking bit of cloud in the upper right corner. In the foreground several horsemen looked in towards the middle ground of the picture, where a bearded little Paul was having a seizure in the middle of the trail, with a mild ray of light shining down upon him. The most commanding figure of all was a horsemen who sat with his back to the viewer. No fleck of color was visible upon him; he was clothed entirely in black, with even the back of his neck covered over. Alva.

  “The pictures show the two ends of the journey,” said Peter one day when Joachim Bueckelaer was visiting.

  “How do you mean?” asked Joachim.

  “This is where he goes in,” said Peter, pointing at the cloud in the corner of his Conversion of Paul. “And this is where he comes out.” He indicated the man emerging from the cloud in the Luilekkerland. “May Alva see the Lord’s light b
efore he gets here.”

  Above and beyond any hope of changing the events to come, the Conversion of Paul struck Mayken as Peter’s finest masterpiece yet. Working at white heat, he added layer upon layer of detail, filling in the fronds of the sentinel-like evergreens beside the trail to make each tree different from the one beside it, refining the soldiers’ pikes and the horses’ harnesses into an exquisite alchemy of lines, going over each cliff and boulder to model the pits and cracks and shadows of the actual world.

  “When Peter walked to Italy through the Alps all those years ago, he swallowed up the mountains and rocks,” said Joachim Bueckelaer with an admiring laugh. “And now he spits them out whole.”

  Usually when Mayken looked at anything, she tended to talk about it to herself in the privacy of her soul. But when she stared at the Conversion of Paul for a bit, her eye would take over and her inner voice would fall silent. Even the literal-minded Marcus Noot could feel something of the enchantment. Once again, Peter had outdone himself. What kind of painter might he become by the age of fifty?

  But if the Conversion of Paul was meant to stop Alva from coming, it was a failure. On August 22, 1567, almost exactly a year after the image breaking, the Black Duke marched into Brussels with several companies of his troops. His route was to lead from the Leuven Gate to his lodgings in a house near Graaf Egmont’s palace. Mayken and the rest of the Coecke household walked up past the gallows on the hill to a street corner where they could watch the invaders pass.

  First came phalanx after phalanx of foot soldiers: olive-skinned, hard-faced Spaniards clad in finely engraved armor and bristling with weapons. They were variously equipped with swords, crossbows, pikes, javelins, halberds, and harquebuses. Some were armed with a new kind of gunpowder device much larger and heavier than a harquebus; it took two men to comfortably carry one of these seven-foot-long contraptions.

  “What are those?” asked Little Peter from atop Peter’s shoulders.

  “Muskets,” said a thin-lipped man next to them. “They can drop a horse.” He made a noise like a moan. Perhaps he’d meant to sound comical, but he wasn’t able to. “It’s the chopping block for us poor kiekerfretters.”

  “Muskets for the chicken eaters!” echoed Little Peter, watching the parade with simple pleasure.

  Bringing up the rear were the cavalrymen. Their armor was gilded as well as engraved, and their armaments included lances in addition to the other kinds of weapons. Waf grew excited at the sight of so many horses and began barking. Mayken took him by the collar and gave him a good shake. She’d wanted to leave him at home, but as usual he’d wormed his way out and had come along after them.

  “There’s Alva,” said Peter just then, and yes, there in a hollow space in the midst of the cavalry was a man dressed all in black, riding upon a spirited white horse. The Duke was tall, thin, erect, with a small head, a lean yellow face, black, bristling hair, and a silvery beard that hung down upon his chest in two waving streams.

  “I wonder if I could hit him with a cobblestone from here,” murmured Williblad and, as if gifted with preternaturally sensitive hearing, the Duke glanced over towards them. His eyes were dark and cold.

  Waf chose that moment to twist free of Mayken’s grip and to bound forward, barking as if possessed. Alva called out something in Spanish, and the closest cavalryman killed Waf with a single thrust of his sword, knifing in between two ribs of the dog’s chest. So smooth was the rider’s motion that his horse didn’t even break stride. Little Peter shrieked and Mayken buried her face against her husband’s shoulder. Niay began shouting curses, but someone murmured a warning that made her stop. Mayken’s mother was sobbing on Peter’s other shoulder, and Little Peter slid down to be in Mayken’s arms.

  Out in the street, the procession of horses stepped over or around Waf, who lay stock-still, his white fur drenched with the cooling blood from his so easily punctured heart.

  Fifteen

  The Beekeepers

  Brussels, June 1568

  “Vamos,José!” called an aggrieved voice outside Bruegel’s bedroom door. It was the wiry little Carlos, one of the two Spanish soldiers quartered in the Coecke house. Nobody but Niay, who knew some Spanish, was able to talk with them. The family had wanted to lodge the pair in the basement, but the soldiers had insisted upon a room with a window. Bruegel had tried the tactic of having Niay warn them that the attic was haunted by Master Coecke’s ghost, and this had given fat José pause. But Carlos, a demanding man in his early middle age, had insisted that they needed a good view of the streets, so in the end the soldiers had ended up on pallets in a corner of Bruegel’s studio. Bengt had moved to the basement rather than have to associate with them.

  It made Bruegel terribly uneasy to have these unpleasant louts occupying the very core of his life. They viewed his craft as a buffoonery, pointing to and laughing at his new panels. Every now and then the bilious little Carlos would go so far as to snatch up one of Bruegel’s brushes and to mime daubing at the paintings himself, clutching his crotch and chattering in his tongue.

  Bruegel’s stomach had been hurting all winter, and Carlos’s japery brought the pain to a level he hadn’t experienced since Jonghelinck had sent the better part of his life’s work into storage. He began regularly seeing blood in his stool, sometimes fresh and red, sometimes congealed and brown like coffee grounds, sometimes black and tarry. A palette of inner decay.

  To lessen the danger of Carlos actually defacing a picture, Bruegel, Bengt, and Williblad built an enclosure in a corner of the attic, a little room in which to store the paints and brushes out of sight. Although it wasn’t practical to extend the storeroom’s walls all the way up to the high, slanting ceiling, they were a good ten feet in height. Bruegel put a heavy lock on the enclosure’s door and had Niay tell the soldiers that if they were to go in there, a formal complaint of theft would be filed with their captain. That had been over a month ago.

  The stairs creaked and thudded as the fat, blank-faced José came rushing down the steps two at a time, his armor clanking. He was in his twenties, phlegmatic and dull.

  “Vámonos, Carlos,” said José, and then the two of them went pounding down to the kitchen where they always grabbed whatever food they could get their hands on before heading off for duty. A minute later their voices could be heard outside.José talking with his mouth full, and Carlos complaining.

  “They’re early today,” said Mayken, sleepily pressing herself against Bruegel’s back. The bulge of her pregnant belly was like a firm hassock. Bruegel rolled over, and Mayken rolled over as well, so that now they could spoon together more tightly. He breathed in her scent, running his hands over her swollen breasts and big belly. His treasure, his world.

  “They’re going to the Grand’ Place for the executions,” said Bruegel after a while. “Of Graaf Egmont and Filips de Hoorne. A full regiment of Alva’s troops will be there.”

  “And you?” asked Mayken.

  “It’ll be my last chance to see Graaf Filips. Maybe I can bid him farewell as he walks through the crowd. You shouldn’t come.”

  “I don’t want to!” said Mayken. “In any case, it would be a dreadful thing to mix into my humors, what with the baby corning any day. If I saw a beheading, the child might end up as bloodthirsty as Alva. Or take it the other way and grow up a coward. Do you really think she’ll be a girl?” Downstairs in the kitchen, old Mayken was scolding Mienemeuie about something.

  “I can feel her moving,” said Peter, pressing his hand tight against the taut dome of Mayken’s belly. “Bip, bip, our little rabbit.” It was good to have this life to balance against the death around them.

  Their door creaked open and Little Peter came trotting in, still wearing his nightshirt. He hopped onto the bed and snuggled into his mother’s arms.

  “Mienemeuie said Carlos and José are going to chop off Uncle Filips’s head,” said Little Peter in a small voice. “She said he’ll be dead like Waf.”

  “It’s not sure that
Filips is your uncle,” said Mayken, trying to divert the flow of thought. “Papa just likes to say that. Filips’s father was kind to Papa when he was young.”

  “Mienemeuie said they’ll send the head to King Philip in a basket,” said Little Peter. “And then Grandma got angry at her. Will they put Uncle Filips’s head back on after he sees the King?”

  “Not a pleasant way to travel, being a head in a basket,” said Bruegel, reaching across Mayken to stroke his son’s hair. “Did Mienemeuie give you any breakfast with her tales? No? Then let’s you and me get something to nibble on, and fetch something for Mama, and then the two of us will go up and look at my new pictures, eh? We won’t have them with us much longer.”

  Old Mayken was settling into her studio on the second floor, not that she really had any work to do. With everything in turmoil, nobody was ordering art anymore. Her motions were a little angular; she was still huffy from her fight with Mienemeuie.

  Down in the kitchen Mienemeuie was silently serving Bengt some porridge. Bruegel and Little Peter joined him, and Mienemeuie slapped down two more bowls. She was smarting from old Mayken’s tongue-lashing.

  For a few minutes Bengt and the two Peters ate in silence. A gentle breeze wafted in through the open back door. It was a fine day in early June, with the sky pale blue and the trees covered in their vernal greenery. Out in the corner of the yard. Willibald and Niay were sitting on a bench by their shed drinking tea, Williblad enjoying the sun and Niay busy with her essences and herbs. She was something of a medicine woman. Normally Niay and Williblad went to work at noon, but Alva had decreed that all the inns and taverns were to remain closed today, lest there be riots after the executions.