And then it was that Fra Tommaso understood. After years of importuning letters, the intercession of supporters, treatises and apologias written whenever he was allowed paper, his chance for deliverance had come. Not out of love of justice—the manicured pontiff could not possibly care whether Tommaso rotted in prison until he died—but because of what he, Fra Tommaso, knew: learned with difficulty and despite the hindrances of the Church, and carried with him, a tome none could confiscate, on the library shelves of his memory, undamaged despite the decades of torture and abuse. Like the vade mecum that will prove someday invaluable if you only keep it close, his learning had proven his salvation.
“Holy Father,” said Tommaso steadily, “the baleful influence of these great conjunctions can be deflected with God’s approbation and the proper preparations. Let me help you evade these fearful blows.”
The pontiff stared at him balefully, as if the friar had taken a liberty rather than sparing Urban the necessity of commanding his assistance. “Thou treadest unsure ground, monk, and care not for thy footing. Thy latest trials ended well for thee, but thou remainest de vehementi haere-sis suspicione—the strong suspicion of heresy,” he added, as if the Calabrian friar did not know Latin.
Urban took a sheet of heavy paper from a folder, glanced at it and added a few lines, then signed it. Tommaso watched as he folded it up, dripped sealing wax upon the seam, then impressed the papal signet onto the red blob. Like liturgical ritual, he thought; delight with the voluptuous pleasure of the symbols has clouded their original purpose.
The Pope extended the letter without rising. “Give this to Father Niccolo,” he said. “You shall have access to books, and the means to acquire supplies. Say nothing, and do not write of astrology.”
As Fra Tommaso returned to the outer courtyard, his guards glanced uncertainly at each other like nervous horses: they had not known he was to see the Pope either, and now wondered at his status. Tommaso did not wonder. Clutching the papal commission in his sleeve, the shuffling friar barely glanced at the starry sky—more brilliant than one saw in hazy Rome; more brilliant than he had seen in a quarter century—as he approached the waiting carriage, hours before dawn in the chill country air. The shells of the firmament were spinning at the same rate they had been when he was first pulled under the earth, late in the last century. But when the sun rose this morning, it would be slightly larger.
Father Niccolo, whose responsibilities included charge of the intolerable Fra Tommaso, looked distinctly off-balance at their interview next morning, and doubtless not simply because the friar had been so impertinent as to request it rather than being summoned at the priest’s convenience. The good father had plainly been told of Tommaso’s audience, and that a letter had been put into his hands, rather than given to his guards. Watching him, Tommaso observed the administrator’s desire to demand the letter, which warred with his uncertainty over the shifting balance of power.
“The Holy Father asked that I give this to you,” Tommaso said urbanely, producing the letter and holding it for the startled priest to take. Fool, he thought: Niccolo, in the friar’s place, would have held onto the letter as long as he could, to show his strength: but in handing it over at once Tommaso had prevented any suggestion that its eventual surrender was in acquiescence to the father’s wish, or indeed any opportunity for Niccolo to show he knew of it.
The father turned pale as he touched the wonderful paper and saw the great seal. Tommaso, unsurprised to see that the bureaucrat had never encountered one before, thought with satisfaction: I can read you like foolscap. Reading carefully, Father Niccolo began to flush red as an oven brick, as though Rolle’s incendium amoris had taken sportive possession of him.
When he looked up at Tommaso, it was with such naked suspicion that the friar knew the letter’s contents that Tommaso composed a bland expression lest he break into a smirk. “His Holiness has arranged that you should have access to the Palace library,” said the priest at last, “as well as funds to conduct research on a matter of importance to the Holy See. You shall remain in our care throughout this time.”
Tommaso inclined his head and murmured his gratitude to the Holy Father for so honoring him. To do anything less would be blatantly to glory in the father’s discomfiture.
He was in the library thirty minutes later, walking the laden shelves unmindful of the monks’ stares and wishing for his promised paper. Volumes not seen in thirty years, save in his mind’s eye, mingled with new ones—titles not merely in Latin but French and even English—like new faces at a family feast, at once familiar and strange. He appropriated a great table, and was still sitting at it when night came, and he requested a candle and got it. It was near midnight when he found what he sought, in Ficino as he knew by others’ hints it would be; not in any volume he had known (for so he would have remembered), but in the Commentaries on St. Paul. There, in the wavering candlelight, Tommaso found the key, a passing reference to coelicoli daemonesque, the celestial demons that Ficino had insisted in De Vita coelitus comparanda held no place in his natural astrology. So the ancient Magi who set up graven images in their temples were merely erecting talismans for their magical operations, which the ignorant masses superstitiously worshipped! Tommaso curled his lip: the sages of Greece and Egypt were no likelier to suffer their flock to fall into outrageous error than Urban was. Ficino’s preposterous tableau was merely an apology for his fascination with celestial or planetary demons, which could not, on pain of heresy, be the objects of the magic that Ficino insisted was directed merely toward impersonal planetary forces.
Lighting his way with the disclosures of the Commentaries, Tommaso revisited the narrow corridors of the De Vita coelitus comparanda in his memory, and found crannies and recessed shelves previously unnoticed. I know this notion’s spoor, he thought, exultant. Elaborating ideas drawn (prudently unacknowledged) from Asclepius and Picatrix, Ficino had written a veritable love poem to celestial theurgy, disguising it beneath layers of disclaimers, irrelevant citations, and bad logic. Do you think that quoting Aquinas will save you from the inquisitors’ snuffling hounds? But perhaps, in the end, it did.
In any event, the protocols were there. Amid bluff assurances that the operations would merely temper saturnine and martial influences while attracting jovial, venereal, mercurial, and solar ones were tables and lists, descriptions of how to inscribe talismans so to attract benign influxes (Ficino never said numina), and other good and dangerous things. Did Ficino know what he was about? Almost certainly, Tommaso decided; else he would not take such care to hide it. And did he know its dangers? Very likely so: he understood Asclepius well enough to swathe its claws. If one knew that these operations would attract an Intelligence and not just some vaporous force, one could comprehend the perils involved. The inquisitors could finally rend only one’s flesh.
Too tired to study further, Tommaso returned the volume, then let his gaze drift along the farther shelves. The row below, he noticed, was filled with books whose authors’ names began with G: the library had arranged its volumes not according to their subject, but by the name of their author. A sensible system, he realized suddenly, if one’s interest was not what was said but who ventured to say it.