Prompt #13 - Are you superstitious? Character: Cesare Borgia Fandom: Cantarella/history Prompt: #13 - Are you superstitious? Rating: PG *****
No. Yes. Of course. Aren't we all? I recall paying Messer Behaim a good many ducats to cast my horoscope, even if I stopped reading it after a certain point.
He was a most learned man, Lorenz Behaim. My tutor of old, and a great friend of Pirckheimer's in Nuremberg. It was he who added a splendid copy of Schedel's World Chronicle to the Papal Libraries, too. Burchard hated his guts - the endless squabbles of Rome's German community, you see - so of course I liked Behaim immediately, out of sheer principle.
But that wasn't all. Behaim was a great humanist, even if you've all but forgotten him.
It was he who he instilled my young mind with curiosity and an eagerness to learn. No longer did we have to fear God as the petty, vengeful, limiting power of the Old Testament, he said; God wanted mankind to achieve greatness. But, Behaim insisted, there were Fate and Fortune to be contended with, fickle both, and hard to please.
Therefore, you see, it was important to consult the stars, impartial as they were, to find what day was suitable to cross a river, start a campaign, claim a throne. We all had our astrologers, and we trusted them. Which makes me believe that some of them had to be liars or cowards. Think of Ludovico Sforza's astrologer, or Guidobaldo's: what did they tell their lords on the eve before they lost their domains? Did they dissimulate what they'd found, did they cloak the coming desaster in Houses and Ascendents their employers would never understand?
Trust me, I thought about that. I thought about that a lot. Which is one of the reasons I started to wave Behaim away, at full pay.
The other reason was that... my 26th year looked bad. Very bad. I joked about it, and would pepper my speech with phrases like "unless I die a violent death before the year is out", etcetera. Deep down, the thought had me scared shitless. That I might be cut short by a whim, by capricious Fate, an unlucky twist of the Heavens... no, the thought didn't suit me well.
Then I turned twenty-seven. And instead of breathing easier, I continued to worry. Behaim worried, too; I could see it on his face when he explained the charts to me. His grandiose, old-fashioned Latin couldn't quite hide what he saw - a swift rise to power, followed by a brusque and pointless end.
I nodded at his curteous, cautious words and listened closely to the things he didn't say. Some time later I stopped calling on him. But, you know, I wouldn't call that superstititous.
Superstitious was when my father and I went to out to dine one August, and a tawny owl dropped dead in front of my father's feet. Dead, just like that, fallen from the sky like a small feathered star.