Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Signore?” the boy prompted, sitting again beside me.

  “My friend was an alchemist. And my teacher. He gave me the philosopher’s stone one night when I was upset, cast out of my usual ways of thinking because another friend had died.”

  “What’s the philosopher’s stone?” the boy asked, his eyes widened despite the glare of the sun.

  “A magical elixir of the self,” I said. “An elixir of transformation. It took me inside myself, and I died. And after dying, I saw things….”

  “Yes, that’s what I want to know, what did you see?” he demanded, and scooted closer until his knees were touching my arm.

  I took a deep breath. Even one hundred sixteen years after the events, I feared that to speak of the night of the philosopher’s stone would invoke its magic. “I saw the present and the future. I saw kings and artists and weapons that spit fire. I saw machines that fly through the air or swim deep in the water. I saw an arrow that flew to the moon! And I saw wars and plagues and famines, and new nation-states that change the destiny of the world. Little of what I’ve seen has come to pass, but it will. It takes time for the visions to ripen.”

  “I want to fly,” the boy confessed. “I want to learn how birds and butterflies fly. I love birds. Horses, too, because it feels like flying when a horse canters and I’m perched on his back. I love all animals, but most of all, birds and horses!”

  “Perhaps you’ll be the man to build the flying machine, then,” I murmured, with my eyes still closed.

  “That’s my ambition!” he cried. “I watch birds, trying to learn the secrets of flight, so that I can one day build a flying machine! Did you see that, in your vision? Did you see me?”

  I opened my eyes, jerked as if from a dream by the boy’s question. “I did not see you,” I admitted, sitting up. I looked closely at his fine-boned face, intelligent eyes, and curly gold hair burnished with auburn. “Not as a boy. What will you look like as an old man…?”

  “I will have long flowing hair and a long flowing beard,” he answered with great certainty, “and I will still be handsome, but differently. I have visions of the future, too, during my daydreams, and I’ve seen this. I will be important and respected and everyone will know my name, even after I have died, for a long time. I am Leonardo, son of Ser Piero da Vinci.”

  “I am Luca Bastardo,” I said. “I don’t know who my parents were.” Though I had looked for them again during this latest exile.

  “I’m a bastard, too,” he confided, with an impish twinkle. “My mother is Caterina the barmaid, and she’s pretty and funny and kind and she wet-nursed me herself and I love her very much. But it doesn’t much matter if we’re bastards, does it? Everyone has bastard children, priests and Popes and especially kings. It matters more what you make of yourself, don’t you think? If you sow virtue, you’ll reap honor, and that has nothing to do with your parentage.”

  “I agree,” I said quietly, looking away with uneasy surprise. No one had ever framed bastardy this way for me. This boy too easily evoked the piercing questions I worked so hard to avoid. What had I made of myself in the past hundred years? A wealthy adventurer and a lover of beautiful women. A fine swordsman and a skilled physico. I had been privileged to know men who had shaped the world, visionaries like Giotto and Petrarca and Boccaccio and Cosimo de’ Medici, and to learn from men of genius and insight, like Geber the alchemist, the Wanderer, and Moshe Sforno. I was gifted with beauty and unending youth. With the privilege and learning and gifts, what had I made of myself?

  It was time I stood firm and commanded my destiny. One of the Gods had picked up the thread of His joke again. At that moment, a wolf cub ran across the mountain not far from us, scrambling up and over the sun-warmed rocks in the scree field. A moment later two large, lean wolves followed it. Some distance below us, my horse Ginori whinnied, smelling the creatures, alerting me. I eased my short sword, the squarcina, from my belt. The wolves seemed intent on their errant son, but I always held the opinion that it was best to be prepared for the unexpected actions of divine signs.

  “You can seek your parents,” the boy was saying. He looked over his shoulder at the merrily yapping cub with its parents in pursuit. He said, “Maybe they’re seeking you, and they’ll come to you on some important day in your life, and you’ll be gladdened as never before! What was your friend’s name? The alchemist who gave you the philosopher’s stone.”

  “A friend once told me that it ruined a great story to confine it to specific names,” I said.

  “Unfair!” he said indignantly, scrambling to his feet and putting his arms akimbo. “And untrue! A story is better because of the details, like names!”

  “His name was Geber.” I laughed. “The name he was using then, that is.”

  “Geber the alchemist who was your teacher,” he murmured. He stroked his face, turned to stare inside the cavern, then turned to me with his eyes blazing. “You must be my teacher, Luca Bastardo!” For a moment I stared at him, thinking, No, you will be my teacher, Leonardo. You will teach me about openness. Then, despite my earlier ruminations about staying in Florence, I remembered that my very life was in danger as long as I did so. Openness was a secondary consideration when the Confraternity of the Red Feather still wanted to burn me at the stake. Indeed, its power surged during times of the plague, when people wanted a scapegoat. I had no wish to come under its scrutiny. I was not ready to die.

  “I’m no teacher,” I said firmly, rising to my feet. “You’re an intriguing child, Leonardo son of Ser Piero da Vinci, but I have an obligation to keep. After that, I leave Tuscany. My life depends on it.” I started to walk away from the cavern, saying “Besides, I don’t know what I have to teach you.”

  “You can complete your obligation while you teach me,” he said stubbornly. “And you have much to teach me. Teach me alchemy, as Geber taught you.”

  “I’m a failed alchemist. I never learned how to transmute lead into gold.”

  “Good, I don’t believe in alchemy. You’ll teach me other things.” He paused beneath a cypress tree at the grassy col below the cavern. “Don’t you think teaching and sharing your secrets would be worth the risk to your life? If there really is one? I mean, you don’t act like a murderer or a thief—”

  “I’ve been those things and more. I’ve been dark things you can’t imagine.”

  “—who would have a sentence on his head, and I’ve never heard of a Luca Bastardo who has been exiled for political reasons. Everyone knows who the Medici’s enemies are, they’re very open about that,” he finished, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Stay and teach me!”

  “The risk is too great. Someday I will risk my life, I will give it, but that will be for love, for my one great love who will come,” I said, unsettled.

  “Maybe you’re supposed to look in Florence for her while you teach me,” he said slyly. Leonardo always had an answer for everything.

  I pulled out the dagger I kept sheathed at my thigh and threw it so it landed upright, its point in the ground, at Leonardo’s feet. “Here, there are wolves about. You can take it into the cavern with you, too.”

  Leonardo took the dagger. He marched back toward the cavern, paused at its mouth, and called, “The wolves are here because they are meant to be! As are you, Luca Bastardo. Beneath the surface of everything is a tightly woven fabric of meaning!” He disappeared into the cavern at the same moment that one of the wolves howled mournfully. His lyrical words and the slow, long howl echoed off the rocks in unison and blended together until they were one word tumbling down the mountain. That word bore an uncanny resemblance to the word the Wanderer had whispered into my ear more than a century ago, the night of the philosopher’s stone. Then, the next day, Geber had died after uttering the same sentence to me that Leonardo had just said. I was struck with the sense of time coming back around like a snake on a caduceus to claim me. Perhaps young Leonardo was right, and I was meant to be his teacher; but first I had to go to Florence to pay my respects to t
he aged and ailing Cosimo de’ Medici.

  “THEY’RE ALL GONE, Luca,” called Cosimo, in quavery voice. He lay in a magnificent bed, covered with sumptuous linens embroidered with gold and silver. I stood not in the Medici palazzo in Florence, but in an exquisite villa in Careggi, in the hilly countryside north of Florence. Cosimo was in residence here, avoiding the resurgent plague. As they’d been doing for over a hundred years when bubboni appeared, nobles and rich merchants with country estates fled the city and shut themselves inside their villas; there was still no cure for the dreaded Black Death.

  “I am sorry to see you uncomfortable, Cosimo,” I said, perusing his face sadly. He did not look well, this man who was famed for going nights without sleep and days without food. But he’d always been sallow, and now he was gouty and arthritic. He had high color in his cheeks and a thin sheen of sweat glistening on his brow, and I could tell by looking at him that he wasn’t passing his urine as he ought. The physico skills taught me by Moshe Sforno and practiced in exile came to the fore. I began to think of ways to ease his suffering.

  “I feel better with you here,” he said, and a genuine smile came to his lips. “I’m happy you came. I wanted to see you one last time. We’ve met many times far from Florence, but I wasn’t sure that you’d come home, even for me.”

  “Always for you, Cosimoletto,” I said, and hearing his father’s old nickname for him widened his smile. Then a look of sorrow passed over his face.

  “They’re all gone, Luca,” he repeated. “My son Giovanni died last year. My grandson Cosimino two years ago. He wasn’t even six yet. I couldn’t stay in the palazzo on Via Larga anymore. It was just too large for so small a family as remained.”

  “It’s hard to lose those we love,” I replied softly. I felt Cosimo’s forehead and noted his fever, and then counted his pulse at his wrist.

  “One time, I was meeting with an embassy from Lucca, we were discussing matters of state, you know how fraught it is with Lucca.” He paused, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded. “Cosimino came in and asked me to make him a whistle. A whistle!”

  “I’ll bet you did, right then and there.” I smiled.

  “You know me too well,” he answered, squeezing my hand. “I adjourned the meeting, and we made the whistle together, that boy and me, and only when he was well pleased did I resume the meeting. The Luccan delegates were much put out!” He chuckled softly and I joined him. Then he said, “And I’m so glad I did it, Luca, because I will never have another opportunity to play with him. He’ll never again climb into my lap, or interrupt a meeting, or stick a frog in the pocket of my mantello and laugh when I put my hand on it and scream.”

  “You took advantage of the time you had with your grandson and you loved him well,” I said. “You can take comfort in that.”

  “Yes!” Cosimo cried, his sagging, seamed face lighting up. “I loved him, and love doesn’t end. Love is the only immortality we can have, Luca. I hope you have found it for yourself!”

  “I seek it. And there are old friends for whom I have great affection. You’re one of them, Cosimo. I hate to see my old friends unwell. We must think of a way to mend you.”

  “Mend me, bah, I am ready to go,” he sniffed.

  “Now, that I do not want to hear,” I said sternly. “As a physico, I have always found that a man who is ready to die will die.”

  “And what’s so bad about dying, eh, Bastardo? Accepting death isn’t so terrible.”

  “Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it’s the end of pain and the beginning of freedom. But still, it should not be allowed one minute earlier than it must be,” I said. “Life is too precious to surrender easily to death!”

  “It’s not surrender when a man grows beyond his fears and sheds this, this”—he picked up his shrunken pale quivering arm with his other hand as if it were a stick—“sheds this box! But don’t worry about yourself in the event of my death. I’ve left instructions about your account; your money will always earn the most favorable interest, and you’ll always be able to access it anywhere in the world that you wander, Bastardo,” he teased me, and something of the old sparkle came into his eyes.

  “Listen to how wise you are, we cannot let the world be deprived of a man of such excellent sense,” I returned lightly. I put my hands on the arm that Cosimo had treated so scornfully and felt its frailty, its humanness. Would we not all come to this? Deep down in the bone of his arm, perhaps in its marrow, there was a fading thrum like a song that had played out and was about to end. My heart opened and a delicious warmth ran out of my chest, down my arms, and out my hands into Cosimo. Geber’s consolamentum was moving through me, like soft water flowing through the living pipe that was my body. Cosimo sighed.

  “Your hands feel so good, Luca mio,” he said softly, and his face melted as pain eased out of him. His gray lips parted and some slight color washed into them. I waited until the flow of the consolamentum trickled to a stop, then spoke.

  “Tell me about making water, old friend, how is that going?”

  “Not well.” He shrugged, and turned his large-nosed face away. “I have some wonderful paintings you should see. There are a few panels here by Fra Angelico—”

  “The small, saintly friar you told me about, when I met you in Avignon ten years ago?” I said. “The one who prayed before he touched his brush to holy figures?”

  “The very one,” Cosimo said, delighted that I’d remembered. But of course I did; I never forgot an artist or a work of art. “Fra Angelico wept when he painted Christ on the cross. He was a man of holy simplicity, the easiest artist to work with. Most of them are so difficult, and they commit outrageous actions, like children who never grow up, but they must still be treated with the utmost respect.”

  “They understand and render beauty, so allowances must be made for them.”

  “I learned that from another artist, a man of opposite temperament to Fra Angelico: Fra Filippo Lippi. A talented artist, but he was a beast of earthly and sensual desire, couldn’t stay away from women. Absconded with a nun, even; cost me a pretty sum to buy him out of the clergy, and even his gratitude to me couldn’t induce him to work when lechery took hold of him. I once tried locking him up in his room to get him to finish a painting, but he tore the bedsheets into strips, knotted them together, and escaped down the window!”

  “Men always find ways to escape,” I observed, which made me wonder if I’d truly escaped from Bernardo and Nicolo Silvano; wasn’t that what Leonardo was asking me to do? Leave behind the prison of my fear and anger and create a life here, at home, anew?

  “So they do, eventually.” Cosimo sighed. “From whatever they consider their prison. I think Fra Angelico, pious as he was, thought of life on earth as his prison, and painting was his escape. He did a splendid job at San Marco, when I renovated it.”

  “The old Dominican monastery,” I remembered, suddenly eager to return to Florence the city, to enter in through her strong gates and stand within her incomparable churches and busy piazze, her stone walls and her fine palazzi and her grand, imposing public buildings.

  “I have financed a great deal of public work, as my father did.” Cosimo nodded. “Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion with Saints fills the whole north wall of the chapter hall. It’s an extraordinary painting, three crosses rising into a blue sky, while the saints are spread out in front. It has peace and innocence while showing the tragedy of the Crucifixion. Every artist paints himself; you can see that in Fra Angelico’s faces, which are filled with awe. I look forward to being in the presence of the God who could inspire that awe, Luca. Now that you’re back in Florence, you must see it! That is, if you’re going to stay, Luca mio? To see me through to the end?”

  “I hope it’s not the end,” I said somberly, dodging the question.

  “We’ve been friends too long for us to fool one another,” he said. “I can still remember you saving me from criminals, long ago in the year of the plague, when I was a simple boy.”

  “
Cosimo, of all men, you have never been simple.”

  “That’s a big secret!” Cosimo cried, his eyes flashing. “You must pretend you don’t know that, and listen kindly to the reminiscences of a sick old man! I remember, back then, how you looked like a saint or an angel as you put me on top of that beastly donkey. Then you drew your dagger and killed those men, just as they deserved.”

  “Whatever happened to that donkey?” I wondered.

  “I was fifteen when a Jew with a wild beard showed up, claiming to be a friend of yours; he asked for the animal, so we gave it to him. I still remember him, a big man with a lot of questions. Isn’t it funny what you remember when you get old? Yet here you are, looking exactly the same, not having aged at all. This is some strange gift you’ve been given. I envy you, Luca.”

  “Don’t,” I said shortly. “I would die to know the love, and the family, you’ve known.”

  “You’ll have it.” He smiled, as if he already shared the joke with whichever God was laughing now. “Death, too, because we all get that. But I wonder if you’ll ever know the travails of old age. It’s not for cowards. There’s pain and humiliation. It’s not a condition for one who abhors cages.”

  “I’ve had my share of pain and humiliation,” I said. I gave him a serious look. “What do you hear of the Confraternity of the Red Feather these days?”