Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Yes, you and I are old friends,” said the Wanderer, with his broad grin bisecting his wild beard. I shook my head, hoping to forestall a conversation about the transmigration of the soul.

  “It wasn’t necessary for you to bring anything, your presence is gift enough for me!”

  “I thought you’d like it, the Corpus Hermeticum, Ficino’s translation.” Leonardo indicated the book on the table. “A nice copy done by hand, though I’m sure you like those new printed books! We talked about it once…. I see you’ve set yourself up a rather nice workshop, professore. Why? Are you going into the apothecary business, or the manufacture of paints?”

  “I’ll leave paints to you. I’d like to fulfill some old alchemical aspirations.”

  Leonardo shook his head. “Alchemy, ugh, such nonsense, you know what I think about that, but I am intrigued by some of the animals you’ve got here. Like this, what is it, a wildcat? Or a dog?” He indicated one of my recent purchases, procured from a merchant who made forays to the Far East and brought back novelties. In truth, neither the merchant nor I had known what the animal was. I liked the mystery of it and bought it for my workshop.

  “I don’t know what it is, Leonardo. Why?”

  “Mmm, curious,” he said, bending over it. “Would you mind if I cut into it, to look at its innards?” But he was already looking around on the table for a knife to cut with.

  “I guess you’ll be staying for dinner,” I said.

  “Probably longer,” he muttered, turning the dead animal over and examining its spine.

  “I’ll have the maid set up a room for you. Put on an apron so you don’t ruin your lucco.”

  “Look at these claws, and the teeth! How odd!” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. He glanced up. “I’ll work as quickly as I can, but it’ll take me all night to work my way through all its tissues and organs. You know it’s going to start smelling.”

  “Take as long as you need, I don’t mind the odor.” I beamed, happy to have him around.

  “You won’t say that tomorrow when the smell wafts through the whole house.” He laughed. “Smudge pots help, if you set some up with pine or cypress in them.”

  “I hope you like company,” the Wanderer said. “I think you’ll have a lot of it now.”

  And, for the next few years, I did have.

  Chapter 20

  “SODOMY, LEONARDO?” I snapped. I was striding away from the austere Palazzo della Signoria with its stone bell tower pointing up like an angry, admonishing finger. Leonardo walked beside me, having been released by my intervention with a committee that oversaw public morality. If this charge were ever proven, he faced imprisonment.

  “What do you want me to say, professore mio?” he asked quietly, his melodious voice hoarse with emotion. “I am embarrassed enough without your disapproval. This is a shocking indignity. Why should I be singled out for public accusation when there are so many men who engage in congress with other men? Many men are open about their affairs!”

  “You and your friends were going to pay some, some b-boy?” I stuttered, so incensed that I couldn’t look at Leonardo. My stomach twanged like the broken string of a lyre, roiling with sick, unnatural sounds. “Do you know what it’s like for a boy to submit to that? Do you realize that boy will forever see himself as a piece of shit because of his dealings with you?”

  “Not a boy, Luca. A man.”

  “Still! A man! Sodomy!”

  “I am a grown man with passions and needs!”

  “For the love of a man?”

  “Luca, can you not have known?” he said in a taut voice. “All these years we’ve been friends, all the time we’ve spent together—I am twenty-four next week, you’ve been my teacher since I was twelve—you didn’t realize what I am?” He laid his hand on my shoulder and I shrugged it off.

  “It’s insupportable. That you could be…this.”

  “I don’t force my will on anyone, nor does anyone do that to me. This is not about men who desire children. It’s about men who desire other men, equals.”

  “I don’t judge other men often.”

  “Nor should you. You have a different woman every month. You dallied with my mother when my father still bedded her!” His gaze was steady and guileless. I looked away. “I am leaving Verrocchio’s,” he said, pulling his peach and green wool mantello with the ermine lining closer around himself. It was April, overcast and threatening to rain, and a cool wind tunneled through the gray stone streets of Florence. I took a turn toward the Arno, quickened my pace along the flagstones. Leonardo matched his steps to mine and said, “It’s time for me to have my own studio. I’m accepting commissions so that I can afford the rent.”

  “You know if you need money I’ll lend it to you,” I said miserably, sensing the distant strains of divine laughter. Part of me wanted to shun Leonardo; the larger part of me loved him unconditionally. We arrived at the Ponte alla Grazie, which was built entirely of stone and was seven archways long, crossing at the widest part of the river. We passed the little church built on one of its piers and the few little shops on it and then stood and looked out at the Arno, which was bleak and choppy, with peaks that punched up into the air as if to hurt it.

  “No, Luca mio, you would not lend money, you would give it.” He smiled. “I cannot allow that. I’m a man now. I’ll earn my way.” He walked across the bridge toward the Oltrarno. I groaned and followed him. On the other side was a small market. There were stalls with large brown eggs and crusty, fresh-baked breads, dried fruits and salt cod, pickled vegetables and country cheeses and chunks of churned butter wrapped in wax cloth. Leonardo leapt forward and ran to a stand with a dove in a cage. He reached in his pocket and took out a coin, looked at it, and then handed it to the old woman tending the stand.

  “Do you have other money now, or is that the last of it?” I asked with reproach.

  “Look at her face, she would make a marvelous subject, she’s practically deformed with old age!” he whispered. I glanced sharply and it did seem as if time, which had abandoned me, had warped her. It had dragged down her nose and pulled her spotted skin like soft dough into pleats. Leonardo always noticed those kinds of human details. He’d probably show up later to follow her around until he had her physiognomy fixed in his mind. Then he’d go home and sketch her. The old woman had palmed the coin eagerly. She gave him a toothless smile, then shoved the cage at him. Leonardo pulled out the dove. He held it with both hands and brought it to his cheek, so that his beard rested against its wing. He seemed to sing in a voice too low for me to hear. After a moment he closed his eyes and reverently pressed his lips to the bird’s gray head. Then he threw the bird into the air, crying out as it took wing. His beautiful face was alight with joy and yearning, his whole body strained to follow the dove as it soared.

  “Do you remember when you took me to the Medici villa at Careggi for the first time, and we stopped and bought a falcon as a gift for Lorenzo?” Leonardo’s large eyes glowed. “And you let me hold that beautiful bird as we galloped on your red stallion Ginori? With the horse and the bird, it was like flying! Do you remember, Luca Bastardo?”

  I was about to respond when a young voice piped up, “Bastardo, that’s a strange name!” I turned with a smile to the little boy at my elbow. But then my heart froze, and my throat closed up. The pointy, insistent chin and sharp-edged nose: this runty little boy of about six was the exact image of Nicolo Silvano when he had been the same age. The boy looked back at me with a frank, curious gaze. My history with his sinister clan reverberated like wasps singing in the air between us, and he tilted his head as if he felt it, too. “Gerardo, where are you?” called a woman. The boy glanced back over his shoulder.

  I said nothing but turned on my heel and stalked off. Leonardo chased me.

  “Luca, what’s wrong?” he asked, concerned. I gave him an incredulous look. Leonardo drew up short. “My predilections you will have to make peace with, and learn to love me for the man that I am, and not
the man you wish I were. But why did you run from the child?”

  “He looks like someone I used to know,” I muttered.

  “Your past is coming around like a little dog to haunt you today,” he said softly. “Be careful that it does not one day bite you. Since you are entertaining old wounds, I should tell you something. I’ve made new friends of late—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t!” he said, coloring. Then he went on in a voice of total equanimity. “I’ve heard things. Whispers, really, of a plot against Lorenzo de’ Medici. The Pazzi are instigating it.”

  “The Pazzi are happy, they took management of papal finances away from the Medici.”

  “Yes, but Lorenzo retaliated by sponsoring a law that disinherited daughters who have no brothers but who do have male cousins. So Giovanni de’ Pazzi’s wife did not receive her father’s huge inheritance, which they’d counted on. The Pazzi are plotting. The Pope supports the plot, he wants to put Florence under the control of his nephew. And the King of Napoli backs the plot. Many would benefit from Lorenzo’s death. This conspiracy is incomplete, mostly rumors and gossip. But it may bear fruit in a few years. You may want to say something to him.”

  “I haven’t spoken to Lorenzo in four years, since the sack of Volterra. I have no plans to start now,” I growled. “He isn’t well disposed toward me. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t finagle to have me burned at the stake. What do I care if the Pazzi or the Pope want to depose him?”

  “He’s the grandson of a close friend of yours; he could yet do you a good turn, perhaps save you from the stake, if you save him. And I have a feeling that his young son Giovanni will one day be Pope. It would be helpful for you to cultivate friends in high places,” Leonardo said.

  “The boy is a year old, he could be anything,” I said, shaking my head.

  Leonardo shrugged his powerful shoulders. “It’s a feeling I have about the child, from one of my glimpses into the time to come. Listen, I’ll invite you to my studio for a meal, when it’s set up properly to receive visitors. You’ll come, won’t you, Luca? If you can spare some time away from your all-consuming work of changing lead into gold…” And his voice trailed off uncertainly, with his years falling away until he sounded very young, like the boy I had met at the mouth of a dark cave. That boy had changed my life. He had appointed me his teacher and then had taught me the most important lessons: what it meant to be close to someone, how to share thoughts and secrets in total safety. There were people along the way for whom I had cared and whom I had partly trusted, men like Giotto and Petrarca and Cosimo de’ Medici. There was no one, before Leonardo, whom I had trusted fully. I had to accept him with his predilections, despite my bone-deep distaste for them. I didn’t know how to reconcile them with my love for this man who was like a son to me. Somehow I would have to find a way.

  “Of course I’ll come for a meal at your studio,” I said. And it broke my heart but it stretched it, too. Nothing Leonardo did, no matter how repulsive to me, would keep me from being his friend. And, in retrospect, looking over the long years of my life, I see now how choosing love over fear, choosing my love for Leonardo over my fear of men’s desires, finally won for me the approval of the good God, who is love. Thus it made me worthy of Maddalena.

  I CAME FACE-TO-FACE with the grown Maddalena for the first time on a Sunday in April 1478. Leonardo showed up at my palazzo and interrupted my work with the reconstruction of Zosimos’s still. “Come to Mass with me, Luca mio,” he called from the door to my workshop.

  “Mass? I don’t do that.” I dismissed it. “Besides, I’m making progress today, with the sublimation process, and it will lead to better things.”

  “You’re making progress with the sublimation process, and that’s all,” he said, laughing.

  “No, ragazzo, today may be the day I succeed in turning lead into gold! Then I’ll never have to worry about money again!”

  “You don’t have to worry about money, professore, you’re rich as Croesus,” Leonardo said. He eyed the still with which I was fiddling. “You’ve set the flame too high,” he noted. He paced around restlessly, poking at various objects on the coarse-grained tables I’d bought because they reminded me of Geber’s old workshop. I hadn’t managed to replicate that magical place entirely, though. I couldn’t get colored smoke to crawl about like curious fingers or the beakers to rattle antiphonally as if they were speaking to one another. But I had time; I would get it right eventually. Leonardo sighed. “I hope you don’t expect anything more out of your alchemy than entertainment. It’s like astrology. Silly, a waste of men’s time.”

  “You only say that because you have Mars in the sign of the Water Bearer,” I said smugly. “It gives you a rebellious, contradictory nature.”

  “Not astrology, too!” Leonardo groaned.

  “Ficino gives me lessons and books,” I admitted. The flame on the still flared up orange and blue, overboiling the liquid so that the whole apparatus shook, and then the flame, making a sound like a breath exhaling, fanned out. I exclaimed in dismay.

  “Now you have no excuse,” Leonardo sang. “Come with me to Mass. It will be interesting today. Really, I think you should come!”

  “You’re not bringing along any of those pretty men who swarm around you?” I said.

  “It’s just you and me,” he promised, so I went with him. It was always a pleasure to spend time with Leonardo. Just to be in his company and be privy to his thoughts was a treat—even if that meant going to Mass.

  We weren’t far from Santa Maria del Fiore with its vast duomo and we walked at a leisurely pace on Via Larga, the street of the Medici palazzo. “I don’t think either God cares one whit whether or not men go to Mass,” I started darkly, but Leonardo sang a low mournful hymn in his sweet, enchanting tenor before I could fulminate with any satisfaction. We came to the church and spied a gathering of gorgeously attired men.

  “The Cardinal of San Giorgio, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Archbishop of Pisa, the Count of Montesecco, the Pazzi and Salviati,” Leonardo said softly, interrupting his song. He gave me an inscrutable sideways look. “You know that my first loyalty is to you, professore mio? Since that day that I chose you as my teacher.” His voice was fierce and low, almost a whisper. “If someone was your enemy, even if he was my friend, I wouldn’t serve him!”

  “That’s gratifying to hear, ragazzo. I’ve never doubted your loyalty to me,” I said, wondering what he was up to. With Leonardo, there was never any telling. He squeezed my arm, then led me into the church.

  “Giuliano de’ Medici isn’t with them,” he murmured, sounding puzzled. We took seats on pews and after a short time, the Mass started. As I stared up into Brunelleschi’s dome, the Latin words led me off into a daydream about my alchemical inquiries. Transforming base metal into gold had something to do with the proportion of sulfur to mercury, I thought, and then Leonardo poked me in the ribs. “Giuliano’s here!”

  “Ite missa est,” proclaimed the priest. It was followed by a faint cry of “Here, traitor!” Suddenly there was screaming. Leonardo leapt up to stand on the pew so he could see; he yanked on my sleeve until I did the same. Giuliano de’ Medici was stumbling, spurting blood from a puncture in his chest. A number of men with drawn swords closed on him. “The dome is falling!” someone screamed, which was taken up as a chorus. People erupted in screeches and thousands of feet slammed against the marble floor. The vast cathedral was filled with congregants in an uproar, and men, women, and children ran in all directions, bolting from the church. Leonardo pointed at the southern side of the church by the old sacristy, where Lorenzo, short sword drawn and blood spattering his neck, jumped over the low wooden rail into the octagonal choir. A number of men shielded him as he ran in front of the high altar, where the Cardinal of San Giorgio, who looked to be only about seventeen years old, knelt in prayer. One of the Pazzi screamed crazed apologies, while others with bloody daggers ran after Lorenzo.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Leonard
o said. He hopped down, pulling me after him. We bolted, joining the screaming throngs of people who poured out of the great cathedral into the piazza. His hand fell from my arm and he was lost in the crowd. After being pushed and shoved, I came to rest against the Baptistery. I flattened myself back against it to get out of the mob’s way. A woman stumbled out of the crowd and I caught her sleeves to prevent her from falling. I was stunned by the scent that emanated from her: lilacs, lemons, clear light, and every good thing I had ever seen, heard, smelled, touched, or imagined in one hundred fifty years. Then she looked up at me and her variegated eyes met mine. In that single instant, I knew her. All of her, her essence, her vital nature, spirit, soul, whatever name there is for the infinite point of light each person is at the center of his or her being. It was catastrophic and miraculous. It was a lightning bolt that seared through me into the deepest, most hidden places of my own essence. It set up a musical resonance like a silent song between us. It was far more intimate than sexual relations and took place without our flesh touching.

  “Maddalena,” I breathed. She was about nineteen years old now, petite but lithe and strong, and that heart-shaped face that I remembered from Volterra had matured to a marvelous beauty. I clutched her to my chest and felt the vibrance of life like a bubbling stream strumming through her body, which was wrapped in a cottardita of the best pink silk, with large white sleeves, a brocade of gold threads, and lustrous pink-toned pearls sewn along her collar.

  “Signore Bastardo,” she said, flushing. She struggled in my arms, so I pushed her beside me with her back against the Baptistery, then shielded her with my arm. Fear washed through me—I didn’t want her hurt, now that I had found her. I knew with certainty that, in this moment, my life had changed. The promise of the night of the philosopher’s stone was suddenly, when I least expected it, fulfilled. Love and death awaited me, and staring into Maddalena’s eyes, I knew that I had made the right choice all those decades ago.