by S. T. Joshi
Luciano laughed, parrying the blow. Blue sparks rained down to the cobbles. Again he felt the tingling sensation in his arm. “You don’t have the strength to beat me,” he said.
“I don’t need to,” she said, swinging roundhouse in front of his chest. Luciano jumped back, swinging at her weapon and striking it, attempting to keep her off-balance and continue the rotation. The blades crossed at mid-length, then slid down the length of each to the end, sparks dancing along the metal wherever they touched. “The sword directs me,” she said.
Luciano smiled. “You jest,” he said, stepping forward and slicing against the dark sword as she recovered and attacked again. Perhaps he could force it out of her hand.
His swing went wide, nicking her arm just above the elbow. Had the sword pulled to the right? He stepped back, trying to move out of the fray, but with a tingling sensation, his legs instead moved him to the left, keeping him within striking distance. Mistress Marcelli advanced again.
His brow furrowed.
“I thought you knew their power?” she said, thrusting the sword toward him.
This time, he was able to jump back. She stepped forward and struck at him again.
Again he tried to disarm her. Again the sword pulled right and drew blood.
“Mistress, I am loathe to fight you.” he said. “And I beg pardon for cutting you.”
She attacked and he parried, stepping back and drawing her around the side of the church, away from the palazzo and toward the canal. “Perhaps we can still come to an agreement you spoke of a day ago. An agreement in which I do not have to kill you.”
“We are committed,” she said, jumping forward. This time Vulsini slipped under his guard and sliced his thigh. Luciano felt the burn of the cut, the shock chilling him all over, even as the jagged serrated edge of the blade pulled back from the flesh of his leg. He could not suppress a groan, and he watched her eyes light as she heard it.
“I had no idea you found such pleasure in the pain of others,” he said through gritted teeth, going on the offensive. He boldly marched two steps toward her, swung his blade, piercing her sword arm again – this time on purpose. He felt elation, then mortification, knowing the joy had been thrust upon him by the sword.
She cried out, and shuddered, and he knew he could have had her life. But unlike Mistress Marcelli, he was not committed.
He let her advance again, coming closer to the canal.
“It’s the sword,” she said. “It wishes to be joined with its partner, and …” She raised Vulsini high.
“ …and become the most powerful sword in the universe,” Luciano finished, feeling Peccerillo move even before he could urge his arm in another direction. The blade punctured her high on the rib cage, glancing off bone before hitting something vital. She crumbled.
Luciano released Peccerillo, catching Mistress Marcelli as she fell to the stone. He eased her down, kicked Vulsini from her hand, and held her until she drew her final breath.
* * *
A sword in each hand, he walked down the steps to the San Giorgio Maggiore Canal, grateful that now, at low tide, his task might be accomplished more quickly. He didn’t feel the dread Copernicus was said to feel when he touched both swords simultaneously. But Copernicus had not been flush with anger from the senseless taking of a life. He felt no power; only disgust …at first.
Then he felt the tingling in both arms, felt them drawn to push the blades together, flat to flat, hilt to hilt. He resisted.
Mate us.
He could almost hear the words aloud, so clear were they in his mind.
Mate us.
He paused at the water’s edge, the urge to join the swords even greater. He tensed his wrists, lifting the points of each sword, pushing them almost near enough to touch.
What harm could it do, he thought, to touch the ends briefly? What would absolute power taste like, if for only an instant?
The tips moved closer.
What would absolute power taste like for an eternity?
Mate us.
Luciano felt himself grow cold all over, realizing the swords could make him do anything, think anything, and make him believe it were his own actions and his own thoughts.
What made him think he was a better man than Copernicus?
Luciano pulled the swords away from each other and thrust them away from himself, dropping them into the canal. Free of their sustaining influence, he sank to his knees and covered his face in his hands. He knelt there for a moment, feeling their power over him wane.
Once composed, he stood and dove in after the weapons, laying a hand on Peccerillo, the bad sword, he thought, when he touched the bottom. Peccerillo’s jewel glowed, casting blue light in the water. By its light, he found Vulsini a few feet away, leaving it for the moment, to lay where it fell.
He felt his way to the foundation wall of San Giorgio Maggiore Church, and knelt.
He hurried, using the sword like a spade to dig a hole at the edge of the marble. The mud was soft, pliable, and he found that if he applied direct pressure to the weapon, it slid to the hilt beneath the stone wall of the church. He released the sword and the glow faded. Then, he grasped handfuls of the silky mud and heaped them atop the hilt, burying it.
One down, he thought, feeling around for Vulsini.
Luciano grasped the hilt and dragged it closer, pulling it into the palm of his hand as if he meant to fight, tilting the tip of the sword up, so that it would break free of the water before him.
Lungs burning, he pushed hard on the bottom of the canal, forcing himself to the surface. He shot up, coughing and gasping for air. He tossed the sword onto the cobblestone, and pulled himself over the edge of the canal to face the rear entrance of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore.
He felt a momentary pang for what he planned to do with Vulsini. He could do so much with it. He could …No, he could not. He smiled, realizing that perhaps Peccerillo hadn’t been the bad sword after all.
Or, perhaps both were bad.
Luciano shook the water from his hair, stamped the water from his boots, and walked up the marble risers to the church entrance. The pink light of dawn colored the morning sky, and he could smell bread baking in one of the trattorias off the palazzo.
He had buried Peccerillo, and he would take Vulsini half a world away and bury it as well. In time, perhaps their names would be forgotten, and men would cease to search for the pair. Only time could bury them deeper than he could.
Now, he must take up his collection and leave.
The Artist of the Beautiful
Nathaniel Hawthorne
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade lamp, appeared a young man.
“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man whose occupation he was now wondering at. “What can the fellow be about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”
“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest in the question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has ingenuity enough.”
; “Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better than a Dutch toy,” answered her father, who had formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. “A plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child’s toy!”
“Hush, father! He hears you!” whispered Annie, pressing the old man’s arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings; and you know how easily disturbed they are. Do let us move on.”
So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith’s shop. Within was seen the forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now confining its lustre to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the intervals of brightness it was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and the horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space. Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding gloom.
“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker. “I know what it is to work in gold; but give me the worker in iron after all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter Annie?”
“Pray don’t speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie, “Robert Danforth will hear you.”
“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden. “I say again, it is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my case, and finds himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money. And then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?”
“Well said, uncle Hovenden!” shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. “And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady’s watch than to forge a horseshoe or make a gridiron.”
Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.
But we must return to Owen Warland’s shop, and spend more meditation upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably his daughter Annie, or Owen’s old school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn or watermills across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick, as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron laborer; for the character of Owen’s mind was microscopic, and tended naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness. The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow. But, at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Warland’s genius. The boy’s relatives saw nothing better to be done – as perhaps there was not – than to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.
Peter Hovenden’s opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed. He could make nothing of the lad. Owen’s apprehension of the professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick; but he altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker’s business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his old master’s care, Owen’s lack of sturdiness made it possible, by strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out, and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden’s failing eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a family clock was intrusted to him for repair, – one of those tall, ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by measuring out the lifetime of many generations, – he would take upon himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of figures across its venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours. Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker’s credit with that steady and matter-of-fact class of people who hold the opinion that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the medium of advancement and prosperity in this world or preparation for the next. His custom rapidly diminished – a misfortune, however, that was probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Warland, who was becoming more and more absorbed in a secret occupation which drew all his science and manual dexterity into itself, and likewise gave full employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This pursuit had already consumed many months.
After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out of the obscurity of the street, Owen Warland was seized with a fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon.
“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have known it, by this throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father’s voice. Ah, how it throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite mechanism tonight. Annie! Dearest Annie! Thou shouldst give firmness to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus; for if I strive to put the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied dre
ams which will leave me spiritless tomorrow.”
As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the shop door opened and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart figure which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and shadow of the blacksmith’s shop. Robert Danforth had brought a little anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the young artist had recently bespoken. Owen examined the article and pronounced it fashioned according to his wish.
“Why, yes,” said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as with the sound of a bass viol, “I consider myself equal to anything in the way of my own trade; though I should have made but a poor figure at yours with such a fist as this,” added he, laughing, as he laid his vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen. “But what then? I put more main strength into one blow of my sledge hammer than all that you have expended since you were a ‘prentice. Is not that the truth?”
“Very probably,” answered the low and slender voice of Owen. “Strength is an earthly monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever there may be of it, is altogether spiritual.”
“Well, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old school-fellow, still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist shrink, especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as the absorbing dream of his imagination. “Folks do say that you are trying to discover the perpetual motion.”
“The perpetual motion? Nonsense!” replied Owen Warland, with a movement of disgust; for he was full of little petulances. “It can never be discovered. It is a dream that may delude men whose brains are mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were possible, it would not be worth my while to make it only to have the secret turned to such purposes as are now effected by steam and water power. I am not ambitious to be honored with the paternity of a new kind of cotton machine.”
“That would be droll enough!” cried the blacksmith, breaking out into such an uproar of laughter that Owen himself and the bell glasses on his work-board quivered in unison. “No, no, Owen! No child of yours will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won’t hinder you any more. Good night, Owen, and success, and if you need any assistance, so far as a downright blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I’m your man.”
