The_Circe_Spell-chapter19

The Circe Spell

by Joe Andriano

"D'accordo." She held the cat out to him, he placed his hands over hers. They both lifted the cat and held her so her hind feet touched the Beast Trump. Oddly, Circe offered no resistance, as Filippo began.

You'll help me break free, won't you Circe? He had memorized every detail of those three damned cards—the Hermit, the Wheel, and the World. With your help, my fate will not be the old man's under the wheel. As though reading his mind, and already obeying the command in his spell, Circe slipped out of the slightly open door and ran across the calle, stopping and staring at him, apparently waiting for him.

Ancilla's vitriol instantly evaporated. "Signor Nolano, please get her and bring her back. Signora Veronica still needs her. That is the least you can do, after all the damage you have caused."

          Perhaps Filippo Nolano's magic worked as he said it would on Veronica's migrating soul, or more likely that noble spirited soul needed no magus's prompting to take it to higher realms. Be that as it may, when it came to his fate, she was the greater prophet. She seemed already to have seen it, no matter how the cards were dealt the end was always the same. After only a few months of living in palatial splendor, he lost the confidence of his host. Mocenigo was an ass incapable of learning the art of memory much less that of magic.
     "I cannot make you a magus, signore," Filippo finally had to tell him. "You lack the initial spark I need to start the fire."
           Of course he blamed Filippo, not his noble self, for his failure as a student. Worse than an ass, he was a weasel, appointed by the Republic to the Inquisition Board to ferret out heretics. Filippo had been careful to present himself to Mocenigo as a good Catholic who wanted very much to return to the fold in spite of a few minor philosophical differences with the church—certainly not amounting to heresy but heterodox enough, he readily admitted, to have gotten him into trouble in the past. Mocenigo grew daily to suspect that his guest's pious exterior was merely a mask, that he was not a magus practicing natural magic but a sorcerer conjuring demons, a Faustian and a Lutheran to boot. For Mocenigo the first hint of the black art was the presence of a black cat that kept following Filippo, who finally asked if they would take her in. When Mocenigo found out the cat had belonged to "that old whore" Veronica Franco, he told a servant to take it away and let it loose at the Rialto.

131.

Three days later the cat showed up again, somehow finding her way to Filippo's room. He managed to convince Mocenigo to let the cat stay at Ciotto's bookshop, but she had a one-track soul, returning again to Filippo's room, this time after only a day. Beginning now truly to suspect the cat was indeed a demon conjured by his guest, Mocenigo snooped through Filippo's papers and found a book of cryptic conjurations, which he immediately confiscated. When Filippo was off tutoring Mocenigo's son, the patrician ordered a servant to hurl the feline fiend into the Grand Canal. Her savior was not present this time to dive in after her, but when he learned of her fate he thought this would be the true test of his power. If she was now immortal due to his spell, she would escape from the canal and continue to track him. He hoped soon to see her again.

Mindful of his promise to Veronica to be vigilant, Filippo noticed the change in his host's demeanor and began making preparations to leave. He told Mocenigo he needed to go to Frankfurt to have a new book printed, and the patrician pretended to give him permission for the visit. But by now, full of spite over his ineptitude for magic, Mocenigo had convinced himself he was harboring a dangerous heretic, whom he could not let escape. He gathered up some servants and burly gondoliers and had them drag Filippo up to an attic room, where they locked him in. The next day they found him in there, sitting on the floor grinning with the black cat in his lap. She darted out the door before anyone could catch her. Shortly after turning Filippo in to the Inquisition, Mocenigo dismissed the servant who was supposed to throw the cat in the canal, even though the servant insisted that he had followed the order. "Bring me back her head and you will have your job back." But Circe was long gone by now.

        The cat bided her time while Filippo spent the next year in a Venetian dungeon, attempting to dodge Mocenigo's accusations of heresy and sorcery. Among the weasel's many calumnies was this claim: "Fra Nolano told me that Christ and his apostles were wizards, and that he himself is more powerful than they." Filippo denied everything he thought might burn him, tried to explain and justify what he could, even recanting a few unorthodox notions. Finally, his spirit broken not by torture but by his own self-flagellation for not heeding Veronica's warning, he groveled, claiming to recognize his errors and to repent. But nothing he said really mattered, for he knew his fate was not in Venice.

         I am too big a fish to be roasted here, he thought in his cell. And sure enough, the pope's Supreme Inquisitor demanded that he be turned over to the Roman Inquisition. After solemnly reminding the Vatican of Venetian sovereignty and independence, the Doge's Council complied. They were happy to be rid of the heretic.

         Eight more years in Roman prison ensued. The long confinement and periodic torture were immaterial, of course, to Filippo Nolano, for he made nightly astral journeys, which he used to mend his spirit after the Venice debacle. The more he was tortured the stronger now grew his spirit, which no tratti di corde, no strappado or thumbscrews could break. At the dawn of the new century he declared once and for all that he would recant nothing, for there was nothing to recant.

It is Ash Wednesday morning and he is naked, on parade as in a dream, on the Campo dei Fiori. Ashy crosses smudge the foreheads of onlooking mockers. They leer at the unrepentant heretic. A monk approaches holding what looks like a muzzle fitted with a long nail. No one even winces when the monk drives the spike right through Filippo’s tongue.

"Just deserts!" someone cries from the crowd. "Now he cannot rant his heresies."

They leave his ashes there to scatter and dissipate on the campo. No one sees the black cat leap into the fire and vanish in the smoke.