Immortal (30 page)

“Lorenzo, please,” Contessina chided. She turned to me. “Please excuse my precocious grandson; the Medici have many critics, and Lorenzo’s very protective of his nonno.”

“A laudable quality,” I said politely, meeting the young Lorenzo’s eyes directly. “I am a friend of your grandfather’s, signore. I am Luca Bastardo.”

The suspicion dropped from his face and a canny brilliance came into Lorenzo’s eyes as his gaze traveled from my scalp to my toes and back again. He stepped toward me with his feet spread apart and his chest thrust out. “I’ve heard the name. I’m told you have special gifts. Nonno speaks well of you, signore. Many men would be envious of the lavish praise you receive from Cosimo de’ Medici. He isn’t easily impressed. I myself strive always to excel, just to earn a modicum of the praise he gives so freely to you.”

“I try to be worthy of his good opinion,” I answered, unable to keep the sarcastic edge from my voice. This young Lorenzo was a warrior, a lion more in the likeness of his grandfather than of his sickly, gouty father Piero. Lorenzo, however, had teeth and claws and wanted to show them, whereas Cosimo was a deeply reserved man who hid his power.

“I’m sure you’re worthy of it, as am I. Nonno never makes a mistake,” he said, stepping closer, so that the space between us tingled with a complicated interplay of rivalry and grudging acceptance, curiosity and demand. Lorenzo would soon succeed Cosimo; Lorenzo’s magnificent energy made his ascent to power inevitable. I wanted his protection from the Confraternity of the Red Feather, as I had received it from Cosimo. I didn’t know yet what Lorenzo wanted of me.

“Signore, I stood outside his bedchambers, and I heard my husband talk to you with great liveliness.” Contessina stepped between us. “I was happy to hear that. He spends much of his time alone and in silence. I asked him why he did this, and he answered, ‘When we are going away, you spend a fortnight preparing for the move. Since I soon have to go from this life to another, don’t you understand how much I have to think about?’” Contessina shook her gray head, and her sweet old face drooped. “He dwells too much in the past, in somber thoughts that do not strengthen him. I pray you will come often and distract him!”

I could hear the strains of divine merriment in her plea, which was the question at hand: would I stay in Tuscany? I didn’t know whether it was the good God or the evil one who was laughing, but I realized that I had to stop traveling and find out. I had to know, once and for all, which God it was who had His hand on me.

“For Cosimo, whom I love, of course, anything,” I answered finally, and my decision to stay was made. Whatever the consequences, I would be beside my old friend Cosimo until he died. I was choosing friendship over fear, and though I did not know it then, it would lead to the great love I’d yearned for all my life, as well as to the greatest sorrow. “I will be staying in Anchiano, tutoring a boy there. It’s not far on horseback.”

“I have a splendid idea!” Lorenzo snapped his fingers. “We will have a dinner in your honor, Luca Bastardo, a few days hence! It will be a relief from the plague. I will invite some family friends; have you met the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, my teacher and one of Nonno’s dearest friends, with whom he still plays chess? Ficino is here every day; he can see this villa from his. My brother, Giuliano, arrives tomorrow, and I will invite some of the younger friends and cousins, also. Everyone’s out in the country, anyway, because of the plague. We can have a rousing game of calcio!”

“I’m not much for games,” I said.

“If you don’t know how to play calcio, I’ll teach you; Nonno likes to watch, it’ll be good for his spirits. It’ll be good for everyone’s spirits, with the plague about,” Lorenzo said easily. “A man of your talents will pick it up in no time!” He gave me the direct, nearly contemptuous look of a man issuing a challenge. I knew there was no escaping the calcio, and that it would be a game played in deadly earnest. So did Contessina, who sighed heavily and patted my chest.

“Signore Bastardo, there is no gainsaying this stubborn grandson of mine; you must resign yourself to dinner and calcio here. You seem strong enough with all these hard muscles, I’m sure it will be no problem.” She gave me a broad smile and angled her eyes like a flirtatious young girl, then pulled her plump hand off my chest.

“I have work to do with my new charge,” I said, stalling.

“Bring the boy.” Lorenzo smiled. “He should learn calcio.”

“You’ll stay overnight.” Contessina nodded, fixing her full silk sleeves. “It’s settled.”

IT WAS A TYPICAL JUNE EVENING
in the Tuscan countryside, glowworms lighting up the hills, which exhaled the fragrance of vine and leaf and buds closed for the night. I relaxed into the sweet earthy smells as I waited outside under a flickering lamp for my horse to be brought out to me. He was a tall, handsome chestnut stallion I called Ginori, because the red in his coat reminded me of my old friend from my days as a becchino. The stallion had been washed, curried, and brushed while I was closeted with Cosimo. A new and finely wrought saddle had been placed on him, a gift from Cosimo, I guessed. I ran my hands over it, admiring the expensive, well-tooled leather and expertly crafted metal fittings. It was a saddle fit for a king; it was a saddle upon which to ride proudly into my destiny. It felt good to have it, if I was going to risk my life to stay in Florence. I checked the girth and made ready to mount Ginori.

“You have an eye for horseflesh,” said a high-pitched, cracking voice.

“I paid a fortune for him, and he’s worth every dinari,” I said, swinging myself up onto the horse’s back. “He’s smart, well trained, and has never deserted me in battle.”

“A laudable quality,” Lorenzo returned. He stepped out of the darkness into the lamplight, so that the flickering yellow flames distorted, dissolved, and re-created his bold, ugly features, making him one moment demonic and the next celestially handsome. “Nonno has an eye like that for friends. I’ve tried to develop it; I have to live up to him. Because of my position, I keep friends like your horse about me, friends who’ve been put to the test and shown their mettle. Friends who will stick.”

“Your friends will be kept busy with all the battles you’ll have,” I said. He lifted one side of his mouth in a lopsided smile. I touched my heel to Ginori’s side and the horse flicked his ears forward and moved immediately into a brisk, forward walk.

“Enjoy the saddle. I had it made for myself, but your horse deserved it more than mine!” he called. For a moment I was too surprised to do anything. Then I swung around to thank him, but Lorenzo had melted back into the darkness. Another complicated Medici, I thought, only this one was an unknown quantity. His gift was no gift but a test, and I resolved to bring Lorenzo something to reciprocate when I returned. I also resolved to find out how much power the Confraternity of the Red Feather still possessed. I had to know this, both for my own safety and because Lorenzo would know. He was a man not afraid to exercise power, and my own freedom was too precious to me for me to surrender it willingly to anyone, even a Medici.

Chapter
16

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
with golden and lavender Tuscan sun touching my face like an old friend for the first time in over half a century. I had stayed overnight at the only inn in Anchiano, a ramshackle, ivy-covered place with a serviceable tavern attached. I was relieved to wake, because a long dream had gripped me: Nicolo Silvano was preaching from a pulpit, pointing his finger at me, laughing maniacally. Then I was stuck in a web, a vast outstretched web of pink and green, with people crawling on it. I flailed and tore through the web, and suddenly I was standing in a room, at a masque. Music played for gorgeously costumed people. A slim feminine form approached, and my heart ached: it was the woman from the vision of the philosopher’s stone. She stood in blinding radiance, her face obscured. That gut-level awareness of her that I had felt many times over the last century blossomed into her presence, soft, sweet, smooth. But when I reached for her, she kept receding. My heart beat wildly with longing. Then there were warm fingers on my cheeks, and when I opened my eyes, it was a long beam of light, and not the hand of my beloved.

I felt stripped bare and undefended, but there was no gainsaying the dream. I had known yesterday, when telling the young Leonardo about my vision, that I was invoking it, putting on the noose of its enchantment. I dressed quickly and went downstairs to the tavern for breakfast. Crusty bread, a thick, steaming porridge, chunks of cottardite ham, and a sliced white pear were served to me by a lovely blond woman. I was eager to break the spell of vulnerability that the dream had cast upon me and focused on her to distract myself. She had golden curls worn long down her back in a fashion to make a man’s fingers itch to run through them. Her hazel eyes flicked up at mine and she smiled, showing her full pink lips and even white teeth. I took in the large, widely spaced eyes set in her sculpted oval face, and I knew who she was.

“Caterina,” I said.

“You have the advantage, signore. I don’t know your name,” she replied huskily.

“That’s Luca Bastardo,” sang a musical voice. “He’s my teacher now.” It was Leonardo wearing an emerald-green lucco whose uneven hem looked as if he’d shortened it himself. He skipped in and sat on the bench beside me.

“Is that so, little man?” Caterina asked, ruffling his hair. “I’ll get you some bread and honey,
bambino.
” She went off with her shapely rounded hips swaying beneath her sleeveless giornea.

“I don’t think you should look at my mother that way,” Leonardo said. He placed my dagger on the table beside me and then slid my bowl of porridge over in front of himself. I watched him dig into the food, remembering how I’d always eaten alone at Silvano’s. The food there had always been delicious and plentiful, but the company was scant and tainted: myself. Leonardo had no sense of that kind of poverty of the spirit, or how far one would go to alleviate it. Something else generated his life, something shining and unbounded at his core.

“I didn’t say I was going to teach you,” I temporized. I gazed away from him. Something about Leonardo’s beauty reminded me of the horror to which my own looks had consigned me as a child. After decades of barely recalling the brothel, I now remembered it all too well. Leonardo, so sure of his prerogative, had no notion of that kind of suffering. I would have considered him insolent if he weren’t so serenely warm and gracious, if calm didn’t stream off him the way halos radiated from angels in paintings.

“You’re here, you’re going to teach me,” he said, between spoonfuls of porridge. “Let’s start today. I’m ready to learn, professore.”

“Today I am going into Florence to see the Duomo,” I said, a little crossly, because I never liked the feeling of being maneuvered, and lately that was happening a lot. There was dried blood on my dagger, and I wiped it on my lucco before sliding it into its holster on my thigh.

“Florence, that’s a splendid idea!” he cried. His mother came back with a plate of bread slathered with butter and dripping with honey. “Mama, Luca’s taking me into Florence today!”

“Hold your horses—” I started.

“Oh, yes, is that your beautiful horse in the stable? The chestnut stallion?” Leonardo asked eagerly. “I should like to draw him! I’ll get started before we leave!”

“Don’t you think we should talk to your papa about a new tutor?” Caterina asked. She set the plate down in front of Leonardo and seated herself opposite us. Her full bosom strained against the yellow apron over her plain blue giornea, her collar opened to show her white throat. She smelled of cooked meats and yeasty breads and spilled wine beneath her flowery perfume, and a little slick of honey glistened along her lower lip. I wanted to lick the honey off. She leaned over the table, asking “How much do you propose to charge, signore? Ser Piero is ever mindful of cost.”

“I don’t know what tutors earn,” I said. I took a long draught from my cup of water to conceal the way her charm made my breath accelerate.

“We’ll pay him well, I’ll talk to Papa,” Leonardo said earnestly. “But not so well that Papa gets angry.” He took the ham from my plate, beaming first at his mother and then at me. He was irresistible, and he knew it. I had no idea what to teach him, but he did. I would have to follow his lead. This would have dismayed me with any other person, living or dead. Since liberating myself from the brothel, my own freedom had been of primary importance. There had never before been anyone for whom I was willing to compromise it even slightly. Even the great love of my vision had been relegated to a nebulous future. Now—because Leonardo had asked, and because Cosimo was dying, and because my peripatetic heart cared for them both, and because I wouldn’t flee from the hand of God anymore, whether that hand was cruel or kind—I willingly settled in a city where I could be imprisoned and killed. The whole situation made me cross.

“I have to make arrangements,” I said, rising from the table.

“You’ll be back soon?” he called. I nodded to him over my shoulder, found Caterina holding her son’s hand to her lips as she stared after me. I sucked in my gut, held my shoulders a little wider and my spine a little straighter. Anchiano was going to be an interesting place.

I RODE TO THE LITTLE VINEYARD I OWNED
and introduced myself to my tenants as a descendant of the original Luca Bastardo who owned it. So I became the son of myself, for Leonardo and Cosimo. An older couple with two grown sons tended the place, and they were skeptical at first, but I recited for them the figures from the past ten years, yields of grape harvested and casks sold and which merchants bought the wine for how much and so forth. I was completely accurate because I kept meticulous account of my half-share of the yield. They were soon convinced of my authenticity and fell all over themselves to please me. I explained that I would be staying in Anchiano for an undetermined length of time, and there was some discussion as to where I would live. With the wealth I’d accumulated over many decades, I could have lived anywhere. I did not tell them that because the vineyard suited my requirements. I wanted neither to flaunt my money nor to call attention to myself by setting up a household. The couple and one son lived in the main villa, and the older son, who had a wife and baby, lived in a small cottage on the property. It was agreed that the young family would move back in with his parents and I would take up residence in the cottage. I told them that I expected my horse to be well tended. The younger son, a big, rawboned country lad about Lorenzo’s ago, lit up and promised to treat Ginori “better than husbands do their wives.”

Having arranged things to my satisfaction, I rode back to the tavern. Leonardo was outside on the lawn in front of the inn, playing a skipping game with rocks arranged in a square. He held a fluttering piece of paper in his hand as he leapt around.

“Luca, your horse, want to see?” he called when I dismounted.

“Where did you get the paper?” I asked, because paper was a costly luxury. Little drawings were scattered all over the sheet, faces and birds and insects and the shape of Monte Albano from a distance. A crude charcoal pencil had been used, but the hand guiding the pencil was extraordinarily fine and perceptive, far too advanced to be that of a twelve-year-old boy. The use of shading to show depth and minute gradations of surface, in particular, was eerily sophisticated. “Who drew these?”

“I drew them, of course. Mama buys paper, whenever she has money. Sometimes I can coax Papa into getting me some,” he answered happily, scooping up some round gray stones and dropping them into his pocket. “I like to draw.”

“Where’s the horse?” I asked, bemused and ogling the miniatures, each one a delicious expression of precocious and emotive draughtsmanship. Leonardo’s love for birds showed in every elegant curve of a wing; his delight in people palpitated out from the turn of a cheek or glance of an eye. It would take only minimal training to turn this boy into a master artist. I knew that what I could teach him was limited; he was intended for better teachers, better men, than me.

“Here.” He reached up and turned the paper over, and then upside down. Underneath a sketch of a fat baby and a dog, there was a horse. “Do you like it? What’s your horse’s name? Are we riding him to Florence? When are we leaving? How long will it take? Can we go soon?”

Only the horse’s neck, head, withers, and one leg had been finished. There were some vague strokes indicating the other three legs and its rump. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not finished,” I pointed out. Leonardo shrugged. I looked back at the paper and noticed that most of the sketches had been left incomplete. Half of a face would be superbly drawn, but the other half only suggested, or one wing of a bird would be exquisitely depicted, while the rest of it was implied by a few spare strokes on the paper. “Do you never finish what you start?”

“There’s so much to see,” he said. Impish dimples appeared on both sides of his wide smile, so like his pretty mama’s. “Isn’t the eye wonderful, Luca, the way it takes in images?”

I shook my head. “You must learn to complete things, it’s important.” He gave me a beatific smile, and I thought that, if nothing else, I could at least teach him perseverance, which was a quality of mine. Much later, I was to laugh at my own vanity. Whatever he learned from me, I learned well from Leonardo that teaching is a matter of drawing out from men what is already in their hearts, and that men learn only what they want to.

“You can keep that,” he said, with a wave of his cherubic hand. I had always valued gifts, and this one was no different. I went back into the inn. This sheet of boyish drawings was precious, and I meant to preserve it. I ran up the stairs to my room and opened my leather bag. This portmanteau was only a few years old, having been bought at a bazaar in Constantinople, where goods were cheap since the fall of that city a decade ago. I pulled from it Petrarca’s notebook, which I kept with me always, just as I did the panel of Giotto’s St. John with the reddish-blond dog at his heels and Geber’s eyeglasses. I opened the leather-bound notebook carefully to its center.

“What’s that? A notebook? Why is it blank?” said a lyrical voice at my elbow, and, of course, Leonardo the curious had followed me to my room.

“It’s blank because I haven’t written in it yet,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must,” he insisted. I sighed.

“I’m waiting for something special to happen. Then I’ll write in the book.”

“Something special like what?” he pressed me. “Something from your vision of things to come? Like the great love you told me about, by the cave, when I first met you?”

“You are too inquisitive of matters that don’t concern you,” I said as sternly as I could muster.

“Let me see,” he ordered, taking the notebook. He sat on the floor and looked at each fine vellum page as if it was covered with these very words, and he could read them even though they were far in his future. But then, if ever there was a man who could read the book of the future, it was Leonardo. “I’ll draw something for you. On the first page, to encourage you to write in this book.” He smiled slyly and took a worn and nubby old pencil from his pocket.

“Wait, what will you draw?” I asked.

“Something wonderful, especially for you,” he murmured. He stared at me with his head cocked, and then his hand moved rapidly over the page.

“You’re left-handed,” I observed, sitting on the bed to wait.

“Uhm,” he grunted, bending over the notebook. So I sat there, watching the boy sketch. It was a warm day in June, with a single bird warbling outside the window and the fragrance of wildflowers breathing into the room. Light reflected from peaceful hills and bright sunflowers, from the rocks of Monte Albano and from the rippling surfaces of streams, and softened into a golden mist that permeated the room. I was reminded of that long-ago day in Bosa, Sardegna, when the Wanderer had come for me with Rebecca Sforno’s letter. As on that day, the flickering shadows that were the rest of my life fell away, and all that was left was the single present moment, complete and heartfelt.

Finally he looked up at me. “This notebook is very fine. I should like one just like it. Will you buy me one?” He asked with such a sincere air of entreaty that I found myself saying yes before I had even considered his request. He smiled radiantly. “Very good. Thank you, Luca professore. You are as generous as you are beautiful!”