Amy was trying to remember reports of strange objects in the sky, like the chariot in Ezekiel, or the fiery wheels seen over medieval Nuremberg. Did the Neoplatonists ever mention them? She tapped a note into the keyboard.
Paul watched her type. “Is there a book in this?” he asked.
“A little part of one, maybe.” Amy tried to remember where she had seen medieval reports of flying objects. Probably in some popular book, which she would never be able to check.
“I meant a novel or story,” said Paul. Amy had once won an undergraduate short story prize, and Paul was always encouraging her to write more. He seemed to like the idea of being involved with a novelist.
“About Ficino?” Amy laughed. “He just sat and wrote. If I had to write a story about a Neoplatonist, it would be someone interesting, Tommaso Campanella engaging in sorcery with the Pope, or Pico della Mirandola playing intellectual Icarus and nearly getting burned.”
“Yes?” he encouraged.
“Sorry, that’s another universe,” she told him. “One in which Amy Bunker became a historical novelist.”
Paul was not able to reply, for they had reached their station, and slowed to a stop with an uncharacteristic faint screech. The train doors opened on a long platform, like a quay on the Styx, and commuters streamed through the low echoing passageways to stairwells that promised egress to the XVIIIth arrondissement. Amy recalled that opponents of the Chemin de Fer Metropolitan had called it the Nécropolitain and tried to shout this into Paul’s ear, but the crowd’s murmur and shuffle overrode her. She shifted the strap of her computer case to her far shoulder so it crossed her chest like a bandolier, and put her hand over the machine.
The escalator ascended toward spilling sunlight and a faint drumming, which broke over them as they reached street level. Outside the station, a group of African men were pounding with sticks and palms on drums slung horizontally at their waists. A young woman, dressed in a long red skirt that snapped at her heels as she danced, spun a long veil through the air in a spiraling ribbon like a medieval whirligig.
“Oh, look,” cried Amy. Several people pressed against her as the crowd slowed to take in the performance, and Paul took her elbow. She could not see whether there was a collection plate in front of the troupe, or whether they were playing for sheer pleasure.
“Watch your purse,” said Paul, forgetting for the moment that Amy carried only a fanny-pak on her hip. She shifted the computer case to cover it as she watched the twirling dancer. One of the streets behind her led to that part of Montmartre that contained the city’s art colony in the last century, while the other led into the district that housed most of the city’s immigrant workers. Down which rue had this company come?
“Looks like she’s giving her furores a workout,” Amy remarked.
“Her what?”
“Her furores,” she replied impatiently. She hoped that Paul had failed to hear her over the noise.
“What’s that?” He was trying to edge them past the small crowd of spectators, which had begun to obstruct sidewalk passage.
“Oh, Paul. The four furores were elaborations by Ficino on Plato’s idea of divine ecstasy, and they had all sorts of influence on Renaissance thought. The soul is stimulated by the poetic, religious, prophetic, and erotic furores, and so ascends through the four degrees of the universe to a reunification with God. Have you never heard of this?”
“They knew better by the Enlightenment,” he said, rather grimly.
Amy shook her head; it was a familiar argument. “How can you read your Chateaubriand if you’re repelled by Rabelais? You’re like some cultivated aristocrat who never wonders about what his grandfather did to get rich.”
“All right, so educate me.” He turned to point at the dancing woman. “I suppose that is an example of the erotic fury in action?”
“Oh, no.” Amy took a last look, then hastened after Paul as he made for an opening in the crowd. “That’s the poetic, which for Ficino included the musical. It was the lowest of the four, but—”
She paused as they crossed the street. Glancing to either side to confirm that no cab was about to round a corner and hit her—“Remember Roland Barthes,” she and Paul would admonish each other—Amy caught sight, through a sudden parting of buildings, of the Eiffel Tower, three miles to the southwest. From the high ground of Montmartre the tapering metal fretwork was more than half visible, its upper reaches catching direct sunlight. Soaring like a tipped suspension bridge into the sky, it made the rest of the city seem its embankment.
Paul followed her gaze. “Visible almost everywhere, isn’t it? No wonder they hated it when it went up.” For of course the Eiffel Tower was scarcely older than the Metro, for all that it seemed as familiar as the Cathedral de Notre Dame.
She pointed. “What do you think a medieval observer would make of that?” she asked.
“Babel,” said Paul immediately. “Heading for heaven, and still under construction.”
“I don’t think so.” They were heading up Rue de Clichy, and Amy turned for a last look. “It seems more like a spire.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Spires point, they don’t reach. Even the very tall ones, like Salisbury’s, are pious, not vaunting.” Then she had it. The recollection broke over her like sunlight piercing a cloud, and a smile spilled from her face so broadly that Paul noticed and asked what it was.
Gervase of Tilbury, wasn’t it?, who chronicled the tale: an impeccable scholarly source. The anchor of a great aerial ship had caught in the church steeple at Bristol (if she remembered right), around 1200. But the first reports were of great dirigibles over the American midwest in the nineteenth century, their trailing anchors catching on buildings and things. That she had read—it came back to her now—in some paperback she had taken to summer camp because it had looked to her parents like a science book and not a trashy novel. Stranger than Science, or something by Charles Fort.
“Tell me,” Paul persisted.
But she would not. The airships that appeared in naive skies—not perfect aetheric vehicles, but great corporeal gasbags trailing bits and tendrils like jellyfish—drifted across the heavens of her mind’s eye, making contact, if only by a strand, with the great disk of the earth. The image touched something within her, like three planes slicing through space to intersect at a single point, and she ran her hand along the building’s rough stone and grinned.
The torments of the Inquisitors had not changed him; the decades rotting in prison had not changed him; the death sentence—which he had escaped by feigning madness: abjuring his reason as deliberately as the Protestant Faustus had done his soul—had not finally changed him: did the princes of the church think to move him by the dazzling light of the pontifical presence? Fra Tommaso did not know; he limped along the chill colonnade, unhurried by the guardsmen to either side, with as upright a carriage as his ill-used joints permitted. The stone walls, dank with the condensation of much human breath, renewed the deep ache his bones had acquired in the damp cells of Neapolitan donjons.
The pure tone of a young monk singing antiphon for Compline echoed from an unseen chapel, Tommaso’s first indication of what the hour was. Prisoners were brought to torture at such times of night, or moved (Tommaso had been moved more than fifty times during his years of confinement, usually for reasons he could not imagine), or summoned to interview, that they might come disoriented and fearful. But the instruments of torment would not be laid out at Castel Gandolfo, certainly not while His Holiness was in residence. Whatever the purpose of this wolf’s-hour audience (the guardsmen, though impatient, had not prodded him when his steps faltered, which meant that his fate was uncertain to them as well), be was not brought in chains, either de corporis or de spiritus; which meant someone sought what he knew.