Immortal (48 page)

“I’m ready,” I said.

“Do you understand what is required? What will happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will declare my name and the length of my years, and the cardinal will have me executed for being a witch.” My worthless life without Maddalena would come to an end. I would be spared the agony of the loss of my wife and daughter. A vast relief flooded through me; I would finally be with them. It was beautiful to me, a joke worthy of Divine Providence, that a Silvano would be the agent of my deliverance. I looked upon Gerardo Silvano with reverence and gratitude. Hearing now with greater clarity the divine peals that had accompanied me for almost two hundred years, I realized finally, at long last, what my strange life had been trying to teach me: God laughs not with cruelty, but with love. In even the worst of situations, God’s grace is complete. It may not be easily articulated in the language of man, or apparent from the outside. It certainly isn’t logical. But it can be felt, sensed, understood, in that larger, wordless part of the human soul that belongs to Him anyway. God is one, God is good, God is love, only love.

I STOOD IN THE PIAZZA DEL DUOMO
with the shadow of Brunelleschi’s incomparable dome falling over me. There was a red feather tied under my lucco. Gerardo had carefully instructed me in what I was to do, and I understood. I was eager, even. Lorenzo’s son Giovanni, who was an important cardinal, was visiting Florence with members of the Inquisition. They would emerge from Santa Maria del Fiore after Mass. When they did, I would accost them.

The day was warm and breezy, one of those delightful Tuscan days when the sky soars up in endless spiraling scrims of azure and white and the contado around Florence bursts into the bright hues of spring flowers. I stood on a small wooden box, trembling with eagerness. I was clean and well fed and I wore a good silk lucco. My heart beat freely in an open chest, and I felt a delirious happiness. Soon I would join Maddalena. Soon my love would merge me with her and sweet Simonetta in the great river of love’s beingness that was God. Congregants emerged from the immense cathedral, women in silk and velvet cottardite with their girlchildren clinging to their skirts, shopkeepers and wool-workers, a handful of mercenary soldiers, notaries and bankers and goldsmiths and blacksmiths and armorers and merchants and a few street urchins who sat in the back pews and then begged for coins at the end of the service, hoping Christian charity had been inspired by the Mass.

The gorgeously attired Giovanni, son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, walked out of the cathedral. Prescient Leonardo had once told me that Giovanni would be Pope. All I saw was a tall, heavyset man with a pasty face, snub nose, and nearsighted squint. He looked like his Roman mother, Clarice. He moved slowly, surrounded by plainly dressed priests with serious faces who I knew were Inquisitors. Gerardo Silvano was among them, and I regarded him with affection.

“I am Luca Bastardo!” I yelled. People stopped and turned to face me, including the somber group with the cardinal. I cried, “I have lived over one hundred eighty years! I worship the Laughing God, and Him only! I am Luca Bastardo!”

EXCEPT THAT I MADE A SPECIFIC CHOICE,
long ago during a night of alchemy and transformation, the story of my incarceration and torture is the same as that of any of thousands of other victims of the Inquisition. I was taken to a cell and questioned. Pope Innocent VIII had issued a papal bull against witchcraft in 1484, and the Dominicans maintained a set of procedures for handling witches which they followed with precision and seriousness of purpose. I was stripped and shaved and examined for the marks of the devil. Nothing was found on my body, so two priests jabbed me all over with needles, looking for insensitive spots that would prove sorcerous invulnerability. There was some discussion about whether to use the rack, which would have me tied across a board by wrists and ankles and then stretched until every one of my joints dislocated, or the
strappado,
which consisted of tying my arms together behind my back and securing the rope to a scaffold, then throwing me down off the scaffold repeatedly until my arms came out of their sockets and my shoulders dislocated. Gerardo Silvano favored using the
turcas
to tear out my fingernails, and then poking the quicks of my nails with heated needles. Giovanni, who came to watch for a while, grew impatient and had me horsewhipped: two hundred lashes. He didn’t have the stomach for more and left when pincers glowed red in the fire and were deemed hot enough to burn me.

The end of the first day came, which was really the end of the second day, because I had been questioned through the night. Finally the Inquisitors tired of their sport and desisted. I wasn’t much fun for them, anyway. I readily admitted to whatever they asked. Yes, I was a witch and a sorcerer; yes, I worshipped the devil; yes, I practiced necromancy; surely I drank the blood of Christian infants in a satanic ceremony that mocked the Holy Communion. I was thrown into a small cell, bleeding from the whip-welts all over my body, pus oozing from the burns. My left toes had been broken in a thumbscrew, my left ankle had been shattered by a hammer until the bone was mush and the skin was in tatters. I lay on the floor breathing hard, not caring about the tears dripping from my eyes. In fact, I felt lucky to still have my eyes. Gerardo had wanted them put out with a hot iron.

Time passed, a day, maybe two, while I was ignored. Water and moldy bread crusts were shoved through the bars of my door. Then I heard an urgent voice calling my name. “Luca, Luca mio!” Even through my pain I recognized Leonardo’s musical voice. I pulled myself up painfully to sit with my back against the stone wall of my cell.

“Ragazzo mio, how are you?” I croaked.

“Better than you are,” Leonardo said. He reached his arm through the bars of my cell to touch my head gently. His beautiful eyes filled with tears, his noble face twisted with grief. “I will do my best for you, caro. I will have Sforza send word to the Pope begging for your life, I will have rich noblemen intervene, anything!”

“How is it you’re here?” I asked, blinking from the intensity of the pain, which came in vast palpitating waves.

“Filipepi sent a messenger to Milano when you were arrested. It took a few days for the messenger to find me. I came immediately. I bribed the jailer and priests to get in to see you. Oh, Luca, how could this have happened?” he murmured brokenly.

“I don’t care.” I sighed. “I don’t want to live without Maddalena and Simonetta.”

“Why didn’t you send for me when they died?” he cried, agonized. “I would have been there to comfort you! I found out months after, and, by then, you had disappeared!”

“I went mad,” I said softly, reaching to take his hand. “I’ve been waiting to be free so I could join them. I cursed my long life that kept me away from them.”

“Life is no curse,” he said, weeping. “And you’re no witch, Luca. We must save you!”

“Why shouldn’t I be a witch?” I asked. “I’m marked by this damned youthfulness that I’ve tried for so long to hide. Maybe the Dominicans are right, some evil sorcery keeps me unnaturally young, some evil magic that endangers the world.”

“No! There’s an explanation in nature for your life! Your organs and fluids regenerate, something! I don’t know what it is now, but in the future, men of science would study you and discover how your anatomy functions!”

“Who knows, nature is capricious, maybe it took pleasure in creating someone like me.” I shrugged. “Someone who lived longer than he ought, who lived too long. And ‘too long’ arrives for a man when his wife and child die.”

He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Maybe the Cathars were right, and your spirit has been imprisoned in your physical body. And nature wanted to watch it struggle with its longing to return to its Source.”

“Now my spirit will be free.” I smiled despite the pain. “They’re burning me at the stake tomorrow.”

THROUGH BRIBERY AND CAJOLERY,
Leonardo received dispensation to bring me fresh clothes. He left and returned with clothes, with Petrarca’s notebook, Geber’s eyeglasses, and Giotto’s panel, the latter two of which I bequeathed to him. He was distraught and didn’t want to take them, but I pleaded. Finally he left, and as much as I love him, I was relieved to see him go. His sorrow weighed on me.

I set to work chronicling my life, not one moment of which I regret, despite my suffering now. I do not even regret the horrors I endured at Silvano’s brothel because they made me yearn for love, to love. And I have loved Maddalena, so that is everything. That she loved me back was the grace of God. Some people go without such a love, and they seek the world over for a longevity like mine or for a wealth like the one I accumulated. They do not realize that the greatest treasure is that of the heart.

I have been writing through the night on the fine vellum pages of Petrarca’s notebook. It is almost dawn of the day I will be led to the stake. I am sitting with my excoriated back against the stone walls of this cell. A pool of my own blood congeals around me.

There is a shuffling at the bars to my cell, and a brute of a guard looks in. “They’ve paid well to see you, witch, I hope you’re worth it!” He spits at me and then stomps away. My eyes close as I wonder who could have come to see me during my penultimate indignity.

“Luca!” calls a brisk female voice. I look up, and a beautiful young woman with dark hair and intelligent violet-blue eyes stands at the bars. I stare at her, and then I recognize her as the woman who brought me bread as I sat by the river. At her side are a mature man and woman who look to be in their forties. They are fine-boned and handsome, well dressed in clothes that are not Florentine, and there are tears in their eyes. The woman has hair the color of mine, with some gray; the man’s features are shaped like mine. I know who they are even before they speak, and I put my hands against the rough stone surface of the wall and struggle to my feet. I am weeping, but not from the terrible pain, which is much worse than anything I could have imagined, even when I lived at the brothel. I plead with myself, will myself, to stay conscious. Soon enough, the pain, and everything else, will be gone.

The older woman sobs as she reaches her hand through the bars. I lurch toward her on my broken and burned legs, fall most of the way, land on my knees, and cannot rise. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“Please!” she says, and there is a soft accent in her voice. She kneels down, running her hand down along the bars, stretches mightily, and finally grasps my hand. “I am your mother.”

“I am your father,” says the man, with a catch in his throat. He kneels next to my mother, stretches his arm through, and grips my shoulder. Their touch is soft, kind, full of the tenderness I had always longed for and given up on ever knowing. I peruse them, and it gives me an incongruous happiness to see the similarities between us. God is kind to bring my origins to me when I am soon to come to my end.

“I have to know from your own lips,” I croak. “I was stolen as a babe, wasn’t I? You didn’t cast me out into the street. And are you as different from other people as I am?”

Over the next hour, as the light brightens from indigo through lavender into gold, they tell me my story.

“We are the sons of Seth,” my father says. His voice is grave and he doesn’t take his strong, warm hands from my shoulder. “We trace our lineage directly back to Seth’s descendants who did not perish in the Deluge. There are other families like ours. For a long time we lived side by side with ordinary mortals. Then they began to fear and threaten us, so we scattered and hid ourselves. Over the last few centuries we’ve come together again, and we’ve been gathering our strength, so that one day we can live openly again.”

“Better days are coming,” I say, knowing I won’t live to see them.

My father nods. “It’s been hard for us, though we’ve been protected for millennia by the Cathars, who conceal our secret.”

“I heard stories about foreign nobles who had lost a son and who traveled in the company of Cathars,” I say. “There was a letter about them.”

“That was us, that foreign couple!” my mother cries. “You heard of us!”

“The original Cathars were cousins to Seth’s sons, and have served us since the beginning times, which were far different from what history records,” my father says. “Man’s history on earth is unimaginably long and strange. People aren’t yet ready to know the true history, how Gods came from the stars and mixed their seed with the primitive beings on earth to create the first humans. The first such man was Adam, and he had three sons. Seth’s seed was mixed again with that of the Gods from the stars, creating our race. Other men fear us because of our gifts.”

“We were all created by Gods from the stars,” I say with wonder.

“We Sethians have been entrusted with secrets from those Gods, because we are most like them,” my father continues. “At various points they return and we are in contact with them. Man’s true history is full of these encounters, which kings and Popes have concealed, or passed off as visitations by angels. They did not want ordinary humans to know about man’s true origins and the existence of a secret race of men. They feared this knowledge would destroy their authority, that it would destroy civic order and law, which, because of man’s immaturity, depends on seeing God as a vengeful judge who lives outside them.”

“I used to wonder about God’s vengefulness,” I remark. “Now I see that God is love, inside everything, within each of us.”

“The Cathars know this, too, and tried to keep this knowledge alive in the world during times of ignorance and barbarism,” my father answers.

“People say the Cathars have treasures that are coveted by those in power,” I say.

“Treasures which we entrusted to them.” My father nods. “For instance, the creators from the stars told us how to make the Ark of the Covenant, which we gave to the Cathars for safekeeping just before the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem. Then it was our turn to help them after the crusades. We hid them and helped them find hiding places for all the artifacts, relics, and documents that chronicle the true history. One day, in a few more centuries, we will reveal all of this, when we take our rightful place as guides and advisers to mankind.”