Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1940

by Twice In Time (v1. 1)

  "I count myself lucky," I said, and Giuliano ran out to support my limping steps. "My ankle will mend of itself. But my wings, being broken, would take much more labor and time."

  "You have not a complete loss of labor to show," Lorenzo was considerate enough to say. "You came to ground a good ten paces beyond the house, farther than you might have leaped unaided."

  "And had you leaped without wings you would have had worse hurt than your ankle," added Giuliano, though he had first disputed my theory of man's ability to fly. "For those two moments you were above ground, methought I saw your fabric hold you aloft. It broke your fall, at least."

  This encouragement heartened me. "I shall yet succeed," I made bold to say, while a physician plucked the shoe from my injured foot. "It is not the fault of my theory, nor the weakness of my arms. I must learn, as a fledgling bird learns."

  But my sprained ankle kept me for days at Fiesole, where I could practice no art save lute playing and repartee among those silken courtiers. Lisa insisted on remaining with me, most prettily concerned over my injury.

  After a day or so Guaracco appeared with some of his healing salves, to care for me with the apparent soliditude of a kinsman, to bow and utter compliments to the ladies, to discuss poetry with Poliziano, weapons with Giuliano, science and government with Lorenzo.

  "I submit that my young Cousin Leo makes progress with his flying," he told the company. "Who can hold these first failures against him? Can he learn as a science, in a few days, the behavior that has been a born instinct of birds since the Creation?"

  WITH more such talk, Guaracco helped to convince Lorenzo that I should continue my labors in the field of aviation. I came to realize that it was to Guaracco's interest that I do so. He wanted me to stay out of his way. He was carefully arranging that I not re-learn too much of the science I remembered only when in a trance.

  The rest of that summer I was able to put off a third experiment with my wings—not that I did not want to fly, but that I dreaded failing and falling again before the eyes of my patron.

  During the winter I achieved several substitute offerings. These included a plan for draining some nearby swamps, which Lorenzo approved but did not act upon at once; a brief written outline of a new system of sword play for the palace guardsmen, which Lorenzo in high good humor caused me to demonstrate upon two very surprised and glum fencing-masters; and a suggestion, rather vague, about the use and purpose of antiseptics, at which Lorenzo laughed and which I could not demonstrate at all.

  I made several attempts at fashioning both a microscope and a telescope, but I did not understand the accurate grinding of lenses, and nobody was skillful enough to show me. Also, even when I secured from Andrea Verrocchio's spectacle maker a pair of indifferent lenses that would serve, I could not bring them into proper relationship in a tube.

  One thing I remembered well from my century, or rather the one before it, was Mark Twarn's pleasant novel about the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. I was failing signally to duplicate the exploits of that hardheaded and blithe hero. Perhaps the

  Yankee, being an adroit and impassioned mechanic, knew the principles of all things from the ground up.

  My science, first of all, had been sketchy and too derived. Second, I had been too interested in art, so that my less loved studies in chemistry, engineering and physics had been shoved too far back in that now clouded brain of mine. Without Guaracco's hypnotism, hardly anything of real complex practicality could be evoked. And with Guaracco's hypnotism, I was unable to see or appreciate the very things I was caused to remember.

  Poor Andrea Verrocchio, who had hoped for so much from my drawing, dared to shake his untidy head over these scientific gropings of mine.

  "His Magnificence will ruin a master painter to make a convenient philosopher," he mourned. And it was true that I had little or no opportunity that winter to paint the picture I had once visioned as my footprint in the sands of Renaissance time.

  As for the time reflector, which Guaracco worked on with phenomenal energy and understanding, it took form and power as the cold weather passed us by. Among the things it lacked was a piece of alum large enough to make a lens, but the most notable alum mines of our knowledge were not far away—fifty miles to the southwest in the ancient town of Volterra.

  At that time, however, the Volterrans chose to refuse any trade or tribute to Lorenzo; even to defy him.

  It began to look as if the only alum we could get must be secured by theft or force.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Fate of Volterra

  HERE was, indeed, what seemed a full stop to our hopes for completing the mechanism. I could think of nowhere to get alum in a large enough portion but in a mine. True, crystals may be built or fed, but I did not know how; and the only available mine was the one at Volterra.

  That defiant city was a small one, but plucky and proud, with splendid defenses. As I mused, into my mind drifted a few lines of a poem I had heard very often in my other existence

  . . . lordly Volterra

  Where stands the far-famed hold.

  Filed high by hands of giants

  For god-like kings of old,*

  Whether Volterra's defenses were giant-built and god-begun I cannot say; but they were tremendously old and strong, what I was to see of them, walls of rough-cut stone that were said to go back to ancient Etruscan times. The city thus enclosed stood upon a huge olive-clad height, from which the sea was visible, a score of miles distant. Near at hand opened the dark mouths of the alum mines which were so suddenly forbidden to us. In fact, the Volterrans forcibly ejected certain Florentine commissioners who claimed a tribute for Lorenzo.

  His Magnificence undoubtedly meant what he had once told me about wishing to avoid war as costly, dangerous and ignoble. But this was too loud a challenge for even his considerable patience. In the spring of 1472 he called a meeting of the Signoria—the lot-chosen body of citizens who acted as public council—for discussion of the problem. It so happened that Guaracco himself, a Florentine resident by virtue of that house near Verrocchio's bottega was a member of this jury-like group of governors, and present at the meeting.

  * These lines are from "Horatius at the Bridge." by Thomas Babington Macauley. The alum mines referred to are still workable.

  I, too, would have liked to attend, but it was impossible. Lorenzo had called for a secret session—proof of his concern over the matter. All I knew was that one of the Signoria, a conservative old fellow by the name of Tomasco Soderino, was intending to speak strongly for conciliation and peace. Perhaps he could restore friendship with the Volterrans, make it possible for me to secure my alum.

  I wished Lisa were there, to talk serenely and pleasantly to me. But with Guaracco's permission she was visiting a friend, the abbess of a convent near Venice.

  The meeting lasted all morning, and all afternoon, and at the end of it Guaracco came to seek me at Verrocchio's.

  "It is all settled," he informed me, grinning triumphantly.

  "Settled?" I repeated. "Peace, you mean?"

  "War," he replied. "We take your needful alum by force."

  I felt a little shocked. "But Soderino was going to—"

  "Aye, and he did," Guaracco anticipated the end of the sentence. "Bleated about soft answers to turn away Volterran wrath, bleated for hours. I had an answer ready. I told

  Lorenzo that we could not make your flying machine without alum, and plenty of it."

  "Alum is not for the flying machine," I protested, "but for the time reflector."

  He gestured idly with a big hand. "Do you not think I know, boy? But we need alum, and what matter under which pretext we get it? Lorenzo is obsessed with desire to see men fly. My word was the final ounce in the balance to make him decide for war."

  After that, things moved fast in Florence, because word arrived that the town of Volterra had employed a round thousand tough mercenaries to defend her ancient walls. Lorenzo immediately gathered four times that
number of troops, and as thejr commander engaged Federigo d'Urbino, one of the most noteworthy soldiers of the Italian peninsula.*

  HE did not deign to take command himself, and restrained the younger and more fiery Giuliano fromdoing so.

  *This famous general of mercenaries later commanded an army that fought against Lorenzo. War, to these soldiers of fortune, was a game and a business. There was no more lasting enmity between such mercenaries than there is today between lawyers who may have opposed each other in lawsuits, volunteering to lead the mounted lancers.

  But the brothers did lead the force in procession through the chief streets of the city.

  To me that glittering sepectacle was somehow ironic. The cavalry was, for the most part, French and Navarrese, the pike-trailing infantry largely Swiss and Swabian, the crossbow companies from Sicily, the artillery and seige train Spanish, and the whole cosmopolitan host sprinkled here and there with Scots, Hungarians, Englishmen and Moors. If any element was really missing, it was Florentine.

  Yet that was the way the city-states of Italy fought—not with their own blood, but with professional adventurers.

  Perhaps something can be said for the system. Battles lacked the extreme ferocity of deadly enmity, for opposing generals were often old friends and comrades in arms, who were willing to win or lose, so to speak, on points. At any rate, the Florentine shopkeepers and artisans seemed pleased, and cheered those foreign soldiers as loudly as though a force of native Tuscans was marching away to war.

  Guaracco, as leader of the party that advocated strife, went to the palace for permission to accompany the mercenaries. I was with him as he found Lorenzo, writing busily at his desk in the audience chamber.

  "Go if you will," the ruler told Guaracco, without raising his eyes from the page. "I trust that this campaign is final."

  "You mean, destruction of Volterra?" prompted Guaracco, like a lawyer wrenching an admission from a witness.

  Lorenzo seemed to hear him only by half. "That physician is often most cruel," he murmured, as he resumed writing what looked to be a verse, perhaps a sonnet, "who appears most compassionate."

  To this moment I am sure that what he said was being fitted into his poem, and had nothing to do with the campaign. Even if I am wrong, it was a most equivocal answer. But Guaracco bowed as though he had received specific and welcome orders. Then he hurried away.

  Perhaps I should have gone with him then, but I had no stomach for battle. I felt some uneasy guilt because with Federigo d'Urbino's train of seige ordnance went my multiplecannon arrangement for battering down walls, and many of the crossbowmen carried weapons with Guaracco's lever improvement which I had clarified in a sketch.

  A day I lingered in the town, which buzzed with excitement about the campaign. A whole night I lay wakeful in the cell-like room I still kept at Verrocchio's bottega. Something indefinable made me woefully nervous.

  Dawn had barely become bright before I dressed, drew on thigh-boots and leather riding-coat, girded myself with a sword and hurried to where my gray horse was stabled.

  It was as if a voice called me to Volterra.

  Yet, for all my strangely risen anxiety, I could not ride my poor horse to death. I did no more than thirty-five miles the first day, stopping the night at a peasant's hut. When in the morning I continued, before I had ridden an hour I met another horseman, galloping in the direction of Florence. He was a half-armored French lancer, with the velvet-edged sleeves of an under officer. Also, he was three-quarters drunk, and waved a grubby wine bottle at me.

  "Way! Way!" he bawled. "I bear messages to Lorenzo!"

  BUT I spurred forward and managed to seize his bridle.

  "Tell me," I said earnestly, "how goes the fighting at Volterra?"

  He started to laugh, and finished by hiccoughing. "Fighting?" he echoed scornfully. "Now nay, there was no fighting."

  "How's that?" I persisted.

  "We marched under the walls of the town, and bade them surrender. And"—he broke off to swig wine—"and they did!" More gulping laughter over something he deemed a joke. "Now, let me ride on with my dispatches, young sir,"

  "One word more," I begged, but he struck at me with the bottle. It was of stone, and heavy, but I flung up my forearm to save my head and sustained only a musty drenching.

  With a prick of the spur, I forced my gray horse close against his mount, shifting my hand ftom his bridle to his collar, and with the other hand I wrenched the bottle away from him.

  "Why is the army not returning?" I demanded, and shook him hard.

  He lost his fierceness, but not his joy over what had happened.

  "You cannot guess?" he flung back, with a soldier's contempt for one who does not understand military routine.

  "The lads are plundering. What else? So should I be plundering, if—"

  I pushed the wine bottle back into his fist, and let him go. With whip and

  spur I sped on my way.

  But when I arrived I was too late, even if I had had the power and knowledge to divert that misdeed.

  Volterra gushed flame from within her walls. Around the town capered the victorious troops, some of them drunker than the courier I had met, others staggering under burdens of loot. Even from afar I heard yells and laughter. The camp, a great field of tents beneath the hill that supported the town, was almost deserted, and into it I spurred. By chance I came almost at once to the commander's pavilion and there I found Federigo d'Urbino, sitting alone.

  He slouched forward on his folding chair, his long, black-tufted chin clutched in a hard hand. His face was as somber as his armor was bright. He glared up as I swung out of the saddle, "You come with dispatches from Florence, I make no doubt," he growled. "Ride back and tell that blood-drinker, Lorenzo, that I will never draw sword for him again, not

  if he seek to buy me with all the treasure of Croesus."

  "What is this drivel?" I snapped back. "Is not this atrocity your bidding?" In my revulsion, I forgot that I was calling to account the foremost soldier of the peninsula. But he only shook his head.

  "Not my bidding. Lorenzo's. I—I have a reputation as a gentleman and a merciful Christian."

  "To be sure it was Lorenzo's bidding," said a voice behind me, a voice that often had a way of breaking in on conversations. "You, my dear young Cousin, heard Lorenzo speak to me, give me a message."

  I whirled upon Guaracco, thrusting my angry face into his.

  "You dared order this pillage and destruction, as though you were Lorenzo's agent?"

  "Aye, that," he admitted with the utmost good cheer. "You can bear me witness before Ser Federigo. His Magnificence was plain: 'That physician is often most cruel—'"

  "So you interpreted his thoughtless speech, you murdering dog!" I almost choked, and out of my scabbard I swept my blade. "Draw, before I cut you down and rid Earth of your eternal deviltry!"

  The red beard rustled in his old smile of mockery. "I have no sword, "I bear only—this."

  FROM under the fringe of his mantle his hand stole into view, with his self-invented pistol ready cocked. Even at that, I might have fallen upon him and forced him to shoot, perhaps killing me, but Federigo d'Urbino, who did not recognize that deadly little weapon for what it was, sprang up and caught my arm.

  "Do not add one more murder to this massacre, young sir," he begged me. "It is possible that Ser Guaracco truly misunderstood. Yet—" he turned away. "Somehow I must stop these fiends at their hell's work."

  Left alone with me, Guaracco stepped warily out of my reach, pistol still leveled. "It is true that I urged Lorenzo's words upon the army, and it was none too loth to sack the town. I have even taken a piece of loot myself. Come and see."

  At some time during that speech he had brought his other hand into view. Something gleamed softly and slyly between thumb and finger—his great lustrous pearl, full of spells. I fought against its power, as against a crushing weight, and indeed I did not lose my wits. But I grew tremulous and vague of thought, and let
him coax me to sheathe my sword.

  "Come and see," he repeated, and I went with him, slowly and a little drunkenly, to a tent not far from the commander's.

  And there he showed me what he had seized from some Volterran shop or warehouse. A great soapy block of alum, reflecting subdued gray and blue lights, lay upon a length of canvas. It was almost exactly cubical, and a good yard along the edge.

  "I knew that I must get hold of this piece," Guaracco told me, "and so I passed on Lorenzo's orders. You must not blame me, Leo, if I show scientific zeal."

  Some worse motive had really caused him to start the cruelties, but I gazed at the greasy-looking crystal, and its light seemed to drive out some of his spell. In it I saw even a gleam of hope. It would help me to a completion of the time reflector. Then I would be quit of the Renaissance, its frustrations and fantasies. Above all, I would be quit of the abominable Guaracco.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Almost—

  NOW. if ever, I can offer proof that this is not fiction. If it were, and I were the hero, I would have tried to slaughter Guaracco there in the camp before sacked Volterra, despite his triumphant exhibition of the mammoth alum-crystal, despite his ready explanations,

  despite the pistol he kept ready in his hand. That would have been the honorable, the courageous, the dramatic course.

  But it happens that the story is true, and that I was, and am of human clay. For two years, Guaracco had alternately intimidated and cajoled me, with judicious applications of hypnotic influence. My ultimate emotion was only one of hopeful relief. If this be shameful, make the most of it.