The flagstones gave way to marble, then parquet. Two members of the Papal Guard, more finely dressed than those who provided his escort, flanked a great oak door. Watching it be drawn noiselessly open, Fra Tommaso felt his heart quicken, a bird that started only at the nearest prey. He had not, until this moment, actually believed that it was the-Holy Father who had summoned him: rather one of his aides, a fellow scholar (perhaps) wishing to question him outside the walls of His Holy Office. Candles flickered beyond, twin halos of light framing, one gradually perceived, a bent head at a desk. Squaring his uneven shoulders, Fra Tommaso started forward.
Urban Octavus, Vicar of Christ, Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, and servant of the servants of God, was a small-boned man with patrician features, a neat beard that complemented his cropped skull, and the calm gaze of a snapping turtle, which knows you will come in time within reach. Rising to offer his ring, he was dressed in simple white, as though the great accoutrements of his office had retired at Nones like country priests. Face unlined by physical hardship, he was, Tommaso knew, his own age. Crossing the large room as steadily as he could, Tommaso glanced to either side—a motionless act learned after years of being escorted past cells—and noted with surprise that there was no secretary present.
“Giovanni Domenico Campanella,” said the pontiff in a rustling voice, as though reading it off a page. Tommaso started to hear his baptismal name, unused since his last trial, and wondered at the pontiff’s meaning. Was he denying the friar’s fellowship in the Dominicans, speaking to him as a man simply, or hinting at further proceedings? The end derives from the beginning, thought Tommaso, who had always known the end near.
“Your Holiness,” he murmured, inclining to kiss the ring. It was no more gaudy than a cardinal’s ring, he noticed.
“You have traveled long,” said the primate. Meaning, Tommaso knew, past the frontiers of the Faith, and (perhaps) back. “Sit,” he said, indicating a straight-backed chair.
“Thank you,” Tommaso replied, settling carefully into it. He had not sat on aught but stool or floor in two years, and had to will his body to rest against its polished back.
His Holiness was glancing at papers before him. “Member of the Order of Friars Preachers, anti-Spanish conspirator, accused sodomite… confessed heretic.”
“My errors are freely renounced, Your Holiness, and the vile charge of sodomy unproven.” Tommaso had received no invitation to speak, but would not stand incriminated by his own silence. “As for my dislike of Hispanic rule, my writings—•” he nodded toward the desk—“have been too widely reported for me to deny, even should I desire to.”
He did not add what was most to the point: that Urban was an enemy of Spain as well. This fact, he suddenly knew, had brought him here: not his colleagues’ charges of heresy, nor his friendship with Galileo, but the secular enemy that he and this aristocrat—extravagant nepotist, builder of sumptuous palaces while poverty raged like brushfire—uncomfortably shared.
The pontiff seemed not to have heard. “And,” he continued, turning over a sheet and setting it to one side, “astrologer and magician.”
Tommaso held himself still. Urban, like a child infatuated by a new toy, had in recent years cultivated the habit of having horoscopes cast of his Roman cardinals and then publicly predicting the dates of their death. As Tommaso might have forewarned, this vindictive pastime had drawn the inevitable response from not only Urban’s domestic opponents but also his foreign enemies: astrologers had been lately foreseeing the pontiff’s own death in the stars.
But astrologicus and magus were held different in kind, not degree: and the protections accorded the former would not extend to the latter should other shifts fail. Tommaso had never been called necromancer-can one work magic from a bagnio?—but his late freedom could open him to any number of charges. Prudence urged he watch to see how the Holy Father would play this card; but prudence was not his way.
“The art of opening oneself to benign astrological influences while blocking maleficious ones is no more magic than is the craft of erecting roofs to block rain. Thirty-five years have I said so; and no tribunal, upright or corrupt, has judged otherwise. You have read my letters to you, or your secretaries have, and know well I am no heretic.”
“I have read your Quod Re miniscent ur,” said the pontiff calmly, “and find in its eloquent expressions of remorse for past sins few doctrinal particulars. The records of your long and unhappy dealings with the Holy Office, the Holy See, the Spanish authorities, and with your own order—” he gestured to a pile of ribbon-tied files to one side of his desk—“go back decades, and are in places incomplete. Charges of commerce with spirits remained unproven. But—” the reptile eyes swung to rest their lidless gaze upon him—“no one who believes that the sun is slowly approaching earth, which shall be consumed in its beneficient embrace, will be insensible to the attractions of solarian spirits.”
Fra Tommaso replied stoutly: “Both Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus acknowledge that while man’s free will is not of course subject to the stars, celestial influences can play upon his humors. To note this fact of nature is not to recognize the planetary forces as intelligentsia separata (a very different issue), let alone to enter into dealings with them.”
“Artfully said,” replied the pontiff, a bit dryly. “Listen now, friar, and as you love your own life, let your reason keep grip on the leash of your incautious nature.
“I bring you before me alone, away from Rome, your audience unobserved by bishop or spy.” Tommaso raised his head slightly, as though listening for overtones in Urban’s voice inaudible to common ears. “You have been one year out of Castel Nuovo, and though you managed to get yourself rearrested within a month—” a look of disgust crossed the Pope’s face—“you enjoy the limited freedom of dwelling in loco carceris at the Palace of the Holy Office. You surely enjoy liberty enough to hear the common gossip of the court, the debased news of pontifical affairs that monks repeat like old women.” There was a momentary silence. “Answer, briefly.”
Tommaso spoke to the point. “They say that the Spaniards see death in the stars, and do not scruple to aver so.”
Slowly the Pope nodded. “Its reach extends even to you. Very well, then. Do the gleeful Aragonians see aright?”
“No sign from the heavens is decisive, or its import certain: repeated visitations of the Comet have taught us that. But major astronomical events necessarily cast their powerful influences on corresponding figures in the world below.”
The pontiff had lifted his pen. “And these events?”
“You must know them as well as I, Your Holiness. The lunar eclipse in January, and the solar one following in December, with a second solar eclipse in 1630. Those two years are periods of great danger for your person, and justify the Spaniards’ open preparations for the next conclave.”
Urban had not troubled to jot the dates down. “And these occurrences, being natural phenomena, can be resisted, should one only know how. Without petitioning animae celestes—without entering into commerce with any spiritual force—one can raise a roof, as you put it, against these influences.”