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donkey
grudgingly clip-clopped between the ever-thickening files of
anticipating—if not salivating—celebrants, his life came rushing
back and it simply made the time to be re-lived, in scope if not in
detail.
     
    When the Pope’s tribunal finally, and
officially, pronounced its sentence—the dark and pendulous thing
which had hung over him as an all but certainty for over seven
jailed years—he nonetheless almost fainted, his knees almost
buckled, his heart almost stopped. Almost, but not quite. Not the
Nolan. He refused to give them the satisfaction. Instead, he had
found the will and the resources to stiffen, to gather voice, and
to hurl it at the arrogant asses that had the audacity to judge
him—fools to a man, slaves to the dogmatically triumphant beast of
ignorance and blind doctrine they all served.
    Hurling it thus, with severity, loudly,
clearly, “You, I can see, pronounce sentence against me with a fear
greater than that with which I receive it.”
    And he was pleased that even with death now
a certainty, his voice had held firm, without even a trace of
quiver.
    It had fallen upon Flaminio Adriano, the
Notary of the Inquisition, to do the final honors: the putting into
words what long since had already been decided by the Pope, and so
by the tribunal as well; and it was not without relish that the
absurdly self-important little man almost sang in high-pitched
Latin from the document he held high before him for all to see:
     
    Having invoked the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and of his most Glorious Mother Mary ever Virgin, in the
cause of the aforesaid causes brought before this Holy Office
between, on the one hand, the Procurator Fiscal of the said Holy
Office, and on the other hand, yourself, the aforesaid Giordano
Bruno, the accused, examined, brought to trial and found guilty,
impenitent, obstinate and pertinacious; in this, our sentence,
determined by the counsel and opinion of our advisers, the Reverend
Fathers, Masters in Sacred Theology and Doctors in both laws, we
hereby, in these documents, publish, announce, pronounce, sentence,
and declare you, Brother Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent
heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical
censures and pains of the Holy Canon, the laws and constitutions,
both general and particular, imposed on such confessed impenitent,
pertinacious and obstinate heretics, wherefore as such we verbally
degrade you and declare that you must be degraded.
    And we hereby ordain and command that you
shall be actually degraded from all your ecclesiastical orders,
both major and minor, in which you have been ordained, according to
the Sacred Canon Law; and that you must be driven forth, and we do
drive you forth from our ecclesiastical forum and from our Holy and
Immaculate Church of whose mercy you have become unworthy.
    And we ordain and command that you must be
delivered to the Secular Court, that you may be punished with the
punishment deserved, though we earnestly pray that it will mitigate
the rigor of the laws concerning the pains of your person, that you
may not be in danger of death, or of mutilation of your
members.
     
    Cursed with nearly perfect
memory, he could hear sentence drone on while little echoes
confirmed and confirmed it from among the walls and windows as the
little man continued his pompous singsong, to in the end even
officially wash the hands of the Holy and Immaculate Church of the
fate that was to befall him; “though we earnestly pray…” what
gibberish. What play-acting and pretense, since they all knew that
once he was handed over to the Secular Court, the Holy Standing
Order was but one: to enforce as strictly as possible “the rigor of
the laws concerning the pains of your person,” and the lay court
would certainly ensure that he was put in danger of death, if not, in this particular
instance, of mutilation of his members.
    And so, in vivid memory—as it continued to
make its own time atop the donkey, the little man