1When Johannes Kepler was six years old, a great comet hung over Germany with a tail like a sword. People said it meant plague, or war, or the death of kings. His mother took him by the hand, at night, and led him up a hill outside the town so that he could see it properly.
2He remembered that all his life. He remembered little else that was gentle. His father was a soldier for hire who beat them and then went off to a war and never came back. His mother, Katharina, was a small, thin, dark woman with a sharp tongue, who quarrelled with her neighbours and forgave nothing. He wrote that down about her himself, when he was grown, for he could not write a false thing even about his mother.
3But she knew herbs. She gathered them and made drinks for the sick, as her aunt had taught her, and the poor of the town of Leonberg came to her when they could not pay a doctor. And she had taken a child up a hill to look at a thing everyone else was hiding from.
4Now hear what happened when that child was famous and that mother was old.
5There was a woman of Leonberg named Ursula, the wife of a glazier. She had been Katharina's friend once, and they had fallen out over money. Ursula had a sickness that came and went and gave her great pain. One day she began to say that it dated from a drink Katharina had given her, years before, out of a tin jug. The old woman had witched her.
6In another year it might have been only talk. But that was a bad time in that country. The harvests had failed. The churches were at each other's throats, and a great war was coming that everyone could smell. When people are frightened, they look for the hand that did it. In Leonberg that same winter the magistrate had six women burned as witches.
7Ursula had a brother who was barber to the prince's court. One night he and the magistrate were drinking together, and they sent for Katharina. She came, an old woman of nearly seventy, into a room of drunken men. The barber drew his sword and set the point against her chest. He told her to take the spell off his sister, now, or he would run her through.
8Think what she had to choose. If she said the words to lift a spell, she would live through the night. And she would have owned before the magistrate that she had cast one.
9She said she had put no sickness on anyone, and so could take none away. She stood there with the point on her breastbone and said it again. In the end they let her go home.
10Her children did a brave thing then, and it turned out a foolish one. They went to law against the glazier's wife for slander. They thought the truth would clear their mother's name. But the magistrate who would hear the case was the man who had sat drinking in that room. He let it lie for years. And while it lay, the stories grew.
11Everyone in town remembered something now. A schoolmaster had drunk wine at her house long ago, and now he was lame. A girl carrying bricks to the kiln had felt the old woman brush against her arm, and by evening the arm was numb. She had been seen to come through a locked door.
12And one thing more, which was true. She had gone to the gravedigger and asked for her dead father's skull, to have it set in silver as a drinking cup for her son the astronomer. She had heard a preacher tell of such a custom among the peoples of old, and thought it a fine remembrance. The gravedigger said no, and she let it drop.
13Her son was in Austria through those years, in the town of Linz. He was the Emperor's mathematician still, though the Emperor seldom paid him. He was finishing the great work of his life.
14Listen to what that work was, for it came in the same months as the worst of this, and he did both with the one mind.
15He had found, years before, the shape of each planet's road. Now he wanted the thing that tied the roads together. There were six planets known, at six distances from the sun, going round in six different times. The far ones went slower. But how much slower? Was there a rule, or had each simply been set going as it happened?
16He hunted that rule for twenty years. He tried it by music and by solid shapes and by every sum he knew. In the spring that the great war began, with his little daughter three months dead in the house, he found it.
17Take the time a planet needs to go round the sun, and multiply it by itself. Take that planet's distance from the sun, and multiply it by itself, and then once more. For every planet the two answers stand in the same measure. Tell him how far out a planet was, and he could tell you its year. They were not six wanderers. They were one family, keeping one law.
18He wrote that he could not hold in his joy. He wrote that he did not care whether his book was read now or by those who came after; it could wait a hundred years for a reader.
19Two years later the letter came from his sister. Their mother had been taken.
20They had come for her at night, at the pastor's house where she was sleeping. She was seventy-three. So as not to wake the village they carried her out of the house shut in a linen chest.
21Kepler told no one in Linz why he was leaving. A man whose mother is charged as a witch does not keep the Emperor's favour long. He put his wife and children in a cart and his papers in a box, and went out of the town so quietly that people said he had run from his debts. The war had begun, and the roads were full of soldiers. He was most of a month on the way.
22He found her in the town of Güglingen, in a cold cell of the tower. He went to the prince's court, and got her moved to a room at the town gate where a fire could be lit. More he could not get. She was kept on a chain. Two men guarded her day and night, and she was made to pay their wages herself, out of what little she had. She complained to her son that they burned too much of her firewood. That was the first thing she said to him. Then she asked if he was eating.
23His own brother, a tinsmith, had asked the court to hold the trial away from Leonberg, for the shame of it.
24Kepler did not argue with them. He sat down to do what he knew how to do.
25There were forty-nine charges. He took them one at a time, as he had once taken the positions of Mars.
26The glazier's wife was sick: but when had the sickness begun? He found witnesses. She had been ill before ever she drank from the tin jug, and had taken strong medicines from a quack, and he showed what those medicines do. The schoolmaster was lame: he had hurt his back jumping a ditch, and half the town had seen him carried home. The girl's arm was numb: she had been hauling bricks to the kiln all day, more than a grown man's load. Carry such a load yourself, he wrote, and see how your arm feels by evening.
27For each thing there was a cause, and the cause was of the common kind. Bodies sicken for reasons. Pigs die for reasons. You do not need a witch to lame a man who jumps ditches. He wrote a hundred and twenty-eight pages of it in his own hand. The officers of the court complained that the accused came to her hearings, sadly, with her son the mathematician beside her.
28The trial dragged through a year. The old woman was in the tower fourteen months in all, through a winter. She did not bend. Her accusers said that itself was a sign: she did not weep, and everyone knew that witches cannot shed tears. She told the court she had wept so much in her life that she had none left.
29At last the papers were sent to the men of law at the university, who must decide. Their answer was a careful one. There was not proof enough to burn her. There was too much talk to let her go. So she was to be put to the question in the lightest way the law knew. She would be taken to the chamber, and shown the instruments, and told what each would do to her. If she confessed in terror, she was guilty. If she did not, she was free.
30Her son was not allowed in. He waited outside in the street on a morning at the end of September.
31Inside, the magistrate led her down. The torturer stood ready by his tools and named them for her, one by one, and what part of the body each was for. She was seventy-four years old and had been a year in a cell. It was explained to her that she had only to say yes.
32The clerk of the court wrote down her answer, and the paper is still kept. She told them to do with her what they liked. If they drew every vein out of her body one after another, she said, she would have nothing to confess. She would not say a false thing against herself to save herself pain. Then she went down on her knees on the stone floor and said the Lord's Prayer aloud. She said that God would bring the truth to light after she was dead.
33The magistrate had her taken back to her cell. Six days later the prince's order came. She was to be set free.
34Kepler led her out of that place. She could not go home. The people of Leonberg let it be known they would kill her in the street if she showed her face. She went to a daughter's house, worn to the bone, and in the spring she died. She had been free for six months.
35No stone was put up for her that has lasted. What is left of her is that one answer, in a clerk's hand, in the papers of the court.
36Now look at the two of them together, the mother and the son.
37She could not have followed one page of his books. She signed with a mark. She believed in witches herself, as nearly everyone did; she only knew she was not one. And when a sword was at her breast, and again when the irons were laid out before her, she did the very thing that he did with the eight minutes. She would not say what was not so. Not to end the fear. Not to buy her life.
38He, for his part, was no stranger to fear. He was a small, sickly, anxious man. The war was closing on every town he lived in. He had buried a wife and five children. He had no church that would feed him at its table. And he had gone into the hardest year of his life with a new law of the heavens in his head, and used that same head to ask where a schoolmaster had hurt his back.
39It was one habit, in the sky and in the courtroom. What happened? When? What came before it? Is there a nearer cause? Show me. He did not have one way of thinking for the stars and another for his neighbours. That is rarer than cleverness, and it saved a life.
40And see what the other habit had done in Leonberg. The people there were not wicked. They were afraid, and fear wants a face. A sick woman wanted a reason for her pain, and a reason with a name is easier to bear than no reason. So they took what was nearest: the sharp-tongued old woman at the edge of things. Every ache in town went looking for her. When a whole town has agreed upon a lie, it feels exactly like the truth.
41Six women had burned in that town the winter it began. No one had stood beside them with a hundred and twenty-eight pages.
42The war that began in those years went on for thirty, and before it was done a third of the people of Germany were dead. Kepler dragged his family and his box of papers from town to town ahead of it. He finished the tables of the planets that Tycho had begged for on his deathbed, and saw them through the press, though the first printing house was burned over them in a siege and he had to begin again in another town.
43He died on a journey, at fifty-eight, riding a worn-out horse through the November rain to ask for wages the Emperor had owed him for years. He was buried outside the walls of a town that was not his own. A few years later the armies fought over that ground, and the churchyard was torn up, and the grave was lost.
44His laws were not lost. They were in print, in a hundred libraries on both sides of the war. Three rules: the long round road, the sweeping line, the measure that binds the times to the distances. He had found that the planets keep them. He never found why. He guessed there must be some power in the sun that drove them, as a lodestone moves iron.
45That was left open, for a child who would not be born until twelve years after his death, in a country he never saw.
46But first there is the matter of the professor from Padua, who had gone home to Florence so sure that the truth, once seen, would be enough. In the year the old woman walked out of her tower, he was fifty-seven and at the height of his fame, and his friend had not yet been made Pope. Now hear what came after.