As Above, So Below Read online

  “Perhaps a soldier,” suggested Bruegel with a yawn. Other people’s love affairs interested him but little. He sat down and began pulling off his boots. “I’ll take you up on your kind offer, Abraham. And, God willing, tomorrow’s tide will carry me forth from this Tower of Babel.”

  Once they were bedded down, Ortelius dropped off to sleep right away. Bruegel lay in the dark for quite some time, thinking.

  In his mind’s eye he saw Italy as if from a great height, with the Mediterranean sun beating gold upon the wrinkled sea. There was a little ship far below, its sails puffed out with wind, and on the ship was an artist, Bruegel himself, alert to the patterns of the rigging and the waves. Yet even as he saw himself upon the ship, Bruegel’s envisioning eye flew higher—so high he could see the verdant curve of Mother Earth, that unimaginable globe upon which he and his fellows played out their lives. Far below, the little ship sailed on.

  Tomorrow he’d sail south to Naples, he’d make friends among the local artists, he’d paint and draw and sail about some more, to Sicily, to the hot, dry, rocky south beyond south. And then, full of pictures, he’d return, across Earth’s haunch to the cold, wet, flat Low Lands. His home.

  Three

  The Battle of Carnival and Lent

  Antwerp, February 1556

  Standing at the top of the Our Lady Cathedral’s white stone bell tower on the last day of February, Abraham Ortelius regarded the view.

  In the middle ground was a swollen, estuarial river, spotted with ice floes and glinting in the weak afternoon sun: the river Scheldt. On the far side of the Scheldt lay flat lands with cows nosing for grass beneath the patchy snow, and beyond the fields was the stormy North Sea with little ships tossed upon it. Ortelius the mapmaker mentally embellished the waves with a gaping whale, its mouth a tiny dot of red.

  On the river Scheldt, barges swung at anchor, alive with tented living quarters and men smoking pipes. Low fish-laden ketches tacked across the icy, roiling stream, and scores of merchant ships were coming in on the tide. The trading ships were two- and three-masted caravels and galleons. With their raised poop decks, they looked like a navy of high-heeled shoes.

  On the near side of the Scheldt lay Antwerp, filling the foreground of Ortelius’s view. It was shaped like half a disk, a semicircle attached to the river along its cut edge. Wrapped all round Antwerp was a thick new city wall that included a solid little castle right down in the water. There were hundreds of ships anchored along Antwerp’s long riverfront; and still more of them floated in the city’s larger canals. The smaller canals were frozen over. The docks were alive with porters and sailors from every land; Ortelius could pick out Turks, Africans, Indians, Malays, and Moors among them—a turban here, a nose-ring there.

  Seen from above like this, Antwerp was a mass of stone and brick buildings topped by spires and turrets and by pink and gray roofs. The moldings and ornaments upon the walls were made vivid by a dusting of snow. Most of the houses had a stairstep outline along the edges of their gables. Ortelius could see people in many of the windows. They stared, gesticulated and beckoned; some leaned out and emptied their chamber pots into the damp cobblestone streets.

  Peering directly down, Ortelius regarded the focus of the scene: the great cathedral square crowded with people celebrating the Carnival season. It was high time for him to join them. He liked crowds. He descended the stairs.

  Down in the square, night was coming on rapidly. There were fires and bagpipes, with people running this way and that, many of them drunk on beer. One fellow had fallen on a patch of ice, or had been clubbed; the back of his head was partly crusted with dark dried blood, with some spots a wet, bright red. He was screaming like a seagull and two of his friends were attempting to close in on him like peasants cornering a maddened pig. A melancholy sight. The trio passed near the huge door of the cathedral, and the bloodied youth heavily jostled a lean Spanish priest who was keeping an eye on who came in and who went out. The priest raised his chin to peer through his spectacles at the cawing bloody man, who favored him with a curse—was it “Stink maggot”?

  Ortelius watched the little encounter, watched as the injured man and his companions disappeared around the corner of the cathedral. The priest wrapped his wool cloak a little tighter against the damp, chill air. Ortelius turned his attention to a waffle vendor: a lively old woman with a gaping, thin-lipped mouth, aided by her son and two daughters. She was wielding a long-handled waffle iron, baking the treats over a crackling fire that her slackly grinning son, evidently a half-wit, was stoking with icy brushwood from the banks of the river Scheldt. The woman’s hair was a straight, gray shock; her motions were quick and businesslike.

  After Ortelius’s long day decorating maps, the woman reminded him of a pen point drawing shapes on a page—her motions were written only upon the air, and invisibly written at that—but even so Ortelius felt that she was very like the tip of a goose-quill pen.

  He watched the woman until she shot him a glance and demanded how many waffles he wanted or was he just going to stand there soaking up heat from her fire? Ortelius sometimes had a tendency to stare at people, speculating upon their thoughts, forgetting that they were going to start wondering why he was looking at them—it was one of the habits his mother nagged him about, not that his mother was anything like this strident ink pen of a waffle woman.

  “I’d like two, please,” said Ortelius with a polite nod of his half-bald head. He’d had no supper, and indeed no food at all today, save for the porridge his maid Helena had made him that morning. Perhaps he was a bit light-headed from hunger. He’d been embellishing prints of Mercator’s map of Flanders all day in the workshop on the top floor of his family’s house, with his sister, Elizabeth, working with colors at his side. Just last week he’d returned from buying two hundred prints of the map from Mercator in the German town of Duisberg. Getting out and making deals was more to his taste than laboring over a table of papers.

  Ortelius loved maps, he took pride in moving them from city to city, spreading the new God’s-eye worldview far and wide. There was a kind of alchemy to a map. First the mapmaker refined the ore of travelers’ and surveyors’ reports into numbers on an ideal mathematical globe—even if some reports were given only as sun positions and hours of travel. Next came the mysterious algorithmic transformations that projected the curved patch of Earth’s ideal globe down into a flat rectangle. And then came the illumination of the map.

  As well as copying the map’s topography, the artist-engraver incised calligraphic labels, thickened the rivers into tapering curves, placed small buildings to represent the cities, decorated the seas with ships and leviathans, and finally constructed a grand caption in a cartouche that looked like the work of a stonemason wrapped round in straps of fine leatherwork. Once his maps were printed, Ortelius colored them in and added still more flourishes, a fairly trivial though time-consuming task. Since the mathematically minded Mercator’s prints had been printed plain, Ortelius’s work with them was considerable.

  Bringing the printed paper of a map to life was tedious work, and Ortelius was glad his long day was past. It was good to be here with the Carnival crowd. Two waffles and a pot of beer would set him right. He planned to have a mild lager, and not the strong sweet lambic ale—but a beer in any case, for in these times, to drink plain water was to ensure days of intestinal flux or even the dreaded sweating sickness. He’d sit in the bustle of a warm inn with handsome men to smile at and think about, yes, he’d play, as usual, the kind and sociable bachelor. He dared not indulge his deeper passions within the small, gossiping half-circle of Antwerp—though more than once he’d been tempted to go and have a look at the male brothel so temptingly situated in the wharf district’s Street of Stews.

  The waffle woman took a large goose egg from a basket held by her younger daughter, who kept the eggs safe from the loose pigs that wandered about eating whatever they could find. Before Ortelius could stop the woman, she cracked the big egg in two. He
would have preferred to have her drain the egg through little holes in its ends so that he might use its surface for sketching a map of the whole earth; it was a fancy of his to try and draw the known globe upon every egg he ate. This particular goose egg was a fine, nicely rounded specimen but now, alas, its shell had already been tossed onto the dirty, slippery cobblestones and had been snouted up by a passing piglet.

  The old woman mixed the egg with some flour and milk in a wooden bowl and, zick-zack, she made two waffles, sprinkled them with powdered mace, and gave them to Ortelius. He paid her, or rather her older daughter, who favored him with a sly-looking simper. Women could sense that he was an odd fish, a permanent bachelor. Even though he was still twenty-eight, Ortelius’s hairline had drastically receded. His chin was covered by a close-cropped beard, and a thick mustache hung over his lips.

  He wandered off, biting into his waffle, enjoying the crisp surface, the sticky dough, and the aromatic mace, smiling at the costumed people in the teeming square. Glancing down at his waffle, the long day’s labor caught up with him, and a set of grid lines seemed to spring out of the waffle, covering the whole square with a cartographer’s graticule.

  Ortelius squeezed shut his eyes to make the lines go away, then opened them and focused on the first human thing he saw: a tall, young, full-bearded man with a long straight nose and shoulder-length hair, kneeling to look at something on the ground. The man had a striking nobility and vigor to him; he was laughing in a way that made Ortelius smile, ignorant though he was of what the jest might be. He drew closer.

  The laughing man was playing dice against a fat man. The two were decked out for Carnival. The fat man wore an executioner’s black hood over his head, and the longhaired man wore a tight green cap and something like a crown, no, it was four waffles, held tight against his head by a leather thong. He wore gray tights and a woolly white tunic beneath a dirty dark leather jerkin, with a strange object strapped across the jerkin to his back. Ortelius had to look twice to make out what it was, then understood that it was a convex mirror set into a hexagonal wooden frame. The mirror held within its bulging surface the whole cathedral square, held all the festively gathered humanity, held the spire of the cathedral and indeed the last bit of the setting sun. How wonderful.

  In a sudden shift of perception Ortelius recognized the man with the mirror. Of course! It was Peter Bruegel, back from his long trip to Italy, and with a new beard.

  “Yaaah!” cried Bruegel, looking at his dice. “Seven! I lose, Hans!” He handed one of his waffles to the stout executioner, who lifted his hood up far enough to feed the Carnival treat into a wide, thin-lipped mouth, crunching the delicacy down in two bites.

  “Hello, Abraham!” said Bruegel, noticing Ortelius. “Well met, old friend. Care to game for your other waffle? To chance your sweet, grid-pressed dough against the fortunes of fat Hans Franckert, chief executioner of beer pots?”

  “No thanks. When did you come back. Peter?”

  “Months ago, busy bee! I got as far as Palermo—I rode a ship thither from Naples. It was wonderful in Sicily, a fairyland of beautiful processions and bright seashells upon the shore. I wandered the south of Italy for another whole year. But one morning I woke with a feeling of having stayed too long. Do you know the fairy tale where a milkmaid falls into a well? She finds a wonderful land down there at the bottom, she spends a day and a night, but when she comes back, she’s been gone for a hundred years. I was starting to feel like that was me. So I started home, and that took another year. I crossed the Tyrolean Alps this summer, and made it back to the Low Lands by harvest time, my jerkin stuffed with drawings and my head filled with more.”

  “Joris Hoefnagel etched and published those two drawings you sold me in Rome,” said Ortelius. “In fact I made a little money on the deal.”

  “Good man,” said Bruegel. “I’ve seen the prints for sale in Jerome Cock’s shop.”

  Their eyes met, and Ortelius silently asked Bruegel the question foremost in his mind. Did Bruegel still think well of him? Or was he disgusted by the knowledge of Ortelius’s forbidden passions?

  “I’m sorry not to have looked you up sooner, Abraham,” said Bruegel, reading the moment. “I’ve been remiss. I have only my work for excuse. You do know Hans Franckert, don’t you?” Bruegel got to his feet, extracted one of the waffles from his headband, and bit into it. “Enough of our gaming, Hans. Abraham Ortelius is a sound and sober man. Like him, I’ll draw sustenance from my holdings, rather than gaming them away.” He took another bite and, mouth full, gestured broadly with his half-eaten waffle. His long hair flopped about with his gestures. The bitten-off corners of the waffle made Ortelius start to think of islands set into an ocean’s grid—but now Bruegel distracted him, saying, “Eating is transubstantiation. This low dough fuels the wonder of human thought. Yes, my gut burns this waffle so that my eyes can touch the colors of the world.”

  “Is that transubstantiation too?” said Franckert, pointing. “What that varken is doing?” The varken, or pig, was eating something unspeakable, and Ortelius silently questioned the delicacy of Franckert’s commenting upon it, especially just now while they were enjoying their waffles.

  “I see it,” said Bruegel, calmly regarding the pig. Ortelius remembered once again how much he enjoyed Bruegel’s skewed view of things. “A pig eats what he finds,” said Bruegel. “I’ve missed our Low Lands.”

  “I’m for another pot of lambic,” said Franckert. “How about it, boys?”

  “We’ll see you later,” said Bruegel. “First Abraham and I must catch up on each other’s lives.”

  Franckert wandered off, linking his arm with a little man dressed in fool’s motley: a costume that was split down the center, yellow-blue stripes on the left and solid red on the right, with soft tiny horns sewn onto the top of his hood. A crowd of children ran past, swinging clattering noisemakers built from wooden gears.

  “Have you ever seen the Alps, Abraham?” asked Bruegel. “Or do you know them only as little lumps upon your maps?”

  “I’ve seen mountains,” said Ortelius with a smile. “I travel a lot, as you know. I just got back from Germany last week. But, no, I’ve never traveled straight through the Alps like you.”

  “You must see my new drawings of them. I’m getting better all the time. Jerome Cock has engraved seven of my Alpine Large Landscapes for his Four Winds press. I’ve published some drawings of ships as well, and next we’ll print some local landscapes. Or perhaps something in the style of Bosch. In return for a steady stream of drawings, Jerome gives me room and board and a bit of money to live on. If I could just get some commissions for paintings I’d be quite comfortable. But there are so many painters in Antwerp. Any chance I can sell you a painting, Abraham? You can pick the size and the subject.”

  Ortelius felt a slight pang, wondering if Bruegel’s only interest in him were financial. “I’m afraid not,” he demurred. “My map business and my trade in antiquities have to support my sister and my mother as well as myself, not to mention our maid. Where did you get that marvelous mirror on your back?”

  “From Franckert,” said Bruegel. “He brought several of them from Venice for our own mirror makers to copy. I traded him a drawing for it.” Despite Ortelius’s refusal to buy something Bruegel still seemed eager to talk. Raising his eyebrows in a friendly way, he slipped the hexagon-framed mirror off his back and stared into it, tilting it so as to reflect as much as possible of the church square. “This mirror is the very emblem of what I want to do in my painting, Abraham. To carry off the whole world upon my back. Look in there; see how the fires flicker! If only I could paint that. Yesterday Anja and I took this glass out into a snowy field with some trees and I was walking around staring into it. Eventually I fell into a ditch. Anja laughed and laughed.”

  “Anja?” asked Ortelius.

  Bruegel took another waffle down from his head and began eating it. “We grew up together. She’s just come to Antwerp from our village: Brueghel near Bre
da. She did something to disgrace herself, and when her family asked her to leave, she thought of coming to me. She’s always been a scamp. I helped her find a position working as a maidservant for the Vanderheyden family, though I don’t think it’s going to last. Anja keeps giving herself extra holidays; she tells the Vanderheydens she has a sick aunt. She’s here tonight, come to see the street plays. Let’s find her!”

  There was a little show taking place in front of each of the square’s two taverns. Ortelius and Bruegel headed towards the closer tavern, which was named the Blue Boat, a place Ortelius frequented to see the sailors and soldiers.

  In the street, six players were putting on a performance of De Vuile Bruid— which meant something like “The Dirty Bride” or “The Hillbilly Bride.” The play was a standard, quite familiar to Ortelius. It featured a vagabond couple named Mopsus and Nisa who were putting on a wedding for themselves. The bridal suite was a patched cloth draped over dirty sticks with pennants on them; the wedding musician was a man banging a knife on a metal coal scuttle; and the bride’s two attendants were women with gauzy white cloths tied around their heads like veils. The attendants had wrapped their bodies in white sheets, and they wore conical straw farm hats atop their heads.

  “Youchhiie!” hollered Mopsus—which was Flemish for, roughly, “Yee-haw!” He kicked out his legs as he danced a fancy jig around Nisa. “Come along, little oyster, and I’ll polish your pearl!”

  Nisa’s unkempt hair hung so far down into her face that all you could see was her nose. She had brown weeds woven into her locks in place of flowers, and she wore a colander as her wedding crown. Her clothes were layers of dirty rags. She took Mopsus by one hand and tried to keep up with his frantic dancing, but her broken-down slippers kept falling off.