Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "I have not heard of them."

  "They follow the teaching of the pope Bogomil, who believed that our entire visible world was created by the Adversary rather than by God. Thus to avoid imbibing the essence of Satan, they forfeit meat. Yet they eat vegetables and fish." Leonardo laughed and pulled a face to indicate they were crazy. "They could at least be consistent."

  Leonardo ate quickly, which was his habit, for he could never seem to enjoy savoring food as others did. He felt that eating, like sleeping, was simply a necessity that took him away from whatever interested him at the moment.

  And there was a whole world pulsing in the sunlight around him; like a child, he wanted to investigate its secrets.

  "Now...watch," he said to Niccolo, who was still eating; and he let loose one of the hawks. As it flew away, Leonardo made notes, scribbling with his left hand, and said, "You see, Nicco, it searches now for a current of the wind." He loosed the other one. "These birds beat their wings only until they reach the wind, which must be blowing at a great elevation, for look how high they soar. Then they are almost motionless."

  Leonardo watched the birds circle overhead, then glide toward the mountains. He felt transported, as if he too were gliding in the Empyrean heights. "They're hardly moving their wings now. They repose in the air as we do on a pallet."

  "Perhaps you should follow their example."

  "What do you mean?" Leonardo asked.

  "Fix your wings on the Great Bird. Instead of beating the air, they would remain stationary."

  "And by what mode would the machine be propelled?" Leonardo asked; but he answered his own question, for immediately the idea of the Archimedian Screw came to mind. He remembered seeing children playing with toy whirlybirds: by pulling a string, a propeller would be made to rise freely into the air. His hand sketched, as if thinking on its own. He drew a series of sketches of leaves gliding back and forth, falling to the ground. He drew various screws and propellers. There might be something useful....

  "Perhaps if you could just catch the current, then you would not have need of human power," Niccolo said. "You could fix your bird to soar...somehow."

  Leonardo patted Niccolo on the shoulder, for, indeed, the child was bright. But it was all wrong; it felt wrong. "No, my young friend," he said doggedly, as if he had come upon a wall that blocked his thought, "the wings must be able to row through the air like a bird's. That is nature's method, the most efficient way."

  Restlessly, Leonardo wandered the hills. Niccolo finally complained of being tired and stayed behind, comfortably situated in a shady copse of mossy-smelling cypresses.

  Leonardo walked on alone.

  Everything was perfect: the air, the warmth, the smells and sounds of the country. He could almost apprehend the pure forms of everything around him, the phantasms reflected in the proton organon: the mirrors of his soul. But not quite....

  Indeed, something was wrong, for instead of the bliss, which Leonardo had so often experienced in the country, he felt thwarted...lost.

  Thinking of the falling leaf, which he had sketched in his notebook, he wrote: If a man has a tent roof of caulked linen twelve ells broad and twelve ells high, he will be able to let himself fall from any great height without danger to himself." He imagined a pyramidal parachute, yet considered it too large and bulky and heavy to carry on the Great Bird. He wrote another hasty note: Use leather bags, so a man falling from a height of six brachia will not injure himself, falling either into water or upon land.

  He continued walking, aimlessly. He sketched constantly, as if without conscious thought: grotesque figures and caricatured faces, animals, impossible mechanisms, studies of various madonnas with children, imaginary landscapes, and all manner of actual flora and fauna. He drew a three-dimensional diagram of a toothed gearing and pulley system and an apparatus for making lead. He made a note to locate Albertus Magnus' On Heaven and Earth—perhaps Toscanelli had a copy. His thoughts seemed to flow like the Arno, from one subject to another, and yet he could not position himself in that psychic place of languor and bliss, which he imagined to be the perfect realm of Platonic forms.

  As birds flew overhead, he studied them and sketched feverishly. Leonardo had an extraordinarily quick eye, and he could discern movements that others could not see. He wrote in tiny letters beside his sketches: Just as we may see a small imperceptible movement of the rudder turn a ship of marvelous size loaded with very heavy cargo— and also amid such weight of water pressing upon its every beam and in the teeth of impetuous winds that envelop its mighty sails—so, too, do birds support themselves above the course of the winds without beating their wings. Just a slight movement of wing or tail, serving them to enter either below or above the wind, suffices to prevent their fall. Then he added, When, without the assistance of the wind and without beating its wings, the bird remains in the air in the position of equilibrium, this shows that the center of gravity is coincident with the center of resistance.

  "Ho, Leonardo," shouted Niccolo, who was running after him. The boy was out of breath; he carried the brown sack, which contained some leftover food, most likely, and Maestro Toscanelli's book. "You've been gone over three hours!"

  "And is that such a long time?" Leonardo asked.

  "It is for me. What are you doing?"

  "Just walking...and thinking." After a beat, Leonardo said, "But you have a book, why didn't you read it?"

  Niccolo smiled and said, " I tried, but then I fell asleep."

  "So now we have the truth," Leonardo said. "Nicco, why don't you return to the bottega? I must remain here...to think. And you are obviously bored."

  "That's all right, Maestro," Niccolo said anxiously. "If I can stay with you, I won't be bored. I promise."

  Leonardo smiled, in spite of himself, and said, "Tell me what you've gleaned from the little yellow book."

  "I can't make it out...yet. It seems to be all about light."

  "So Maestro Toscanelli told me. Its writings are very old and concern memory and the circulation of light." Leonardo could not resist teasing his apprentice. "Do you find your memory much improved after reading it?"

  Niccolo shrugged, as if it was of no interest to him, and Leonardo settled down in a grove of olive trees to read The Secret of the Golden Flower; it took him less than an hour, for the book was short. Niccolo ate some fruit and then fell asleep again, seemingly without any trouble.

  Most of the text seemed to be magical gibberish, yet suddenly these words seemed to open him up:

  There are a thousand spaces, and the

  light-flower of heaven and earth

  fills them all. Just so does the

  light-flower of the individual pass

  through heaven and cover the earth.

  And when the light begins to

  circulate, all of heaven and the

  earth, all the mountains and rivers—

  everything—begins to circulate with

  light. The key is to concentrate your

  own seed-flower in the eyes. But be

  careful, children, for if one day you

  do not practice meditation, this

  light will stream out, to be lost who

  knows where...?

  Perhaps he fell asleep, for he imagined himself staring at the walls of his great and perfect mnemonic construct: the memory cathedral. It was pure white and smooth as dressed stone...it was a church for all his experience and knowledge, whether holy or profane. Maestro Toscanelli had taught him long ago how to construct a church in his imagination, a storage place of images—hundreds of thousands of them—which would represent everything Leonardo wished to remember. Leonardo caught all the evanescent and ephemeral stuff of time and trapped it in this place...all the happenings of his life, everything he had seen and read and heard; all the pain and frustration and love and joy were neatly shelved and ordered inside the colonnaded courts, chapels, vestries, porches, towers, and crossings of his memory cathedral.

  He longed to be insi
de, to return to sweet, comforting memory; he would dismiss the ghosts of fear that haunted its dark catacombs. But now he was seeing the cathedral from a distant height, from the summit of Swan Mountain, and it was as if his cathedral had somehow become a small part of what his memory held and his eyes saw. It was as if his soul could expand to fill Heaven and earth, the past and the future. Leonardo experienced a sudden, vertiginous sensation of freedom; indeed, heaven and earth seemed to be filled with a thousand spaces. It was just as he had read in the ancient book: everything was circulating with pure light...blinding, cleansing light that coruscated down the hills and mountains like rainwater, that floated in the air like mist, that heated the grass and meadows to radiance.

  He felt bliss.

  Everything was preternaturally clear; it was as if he was seeing into the essence of things.

  And then with a shock he felt himself slipping, falling from the mountain.

  This was his recurring dream, his nightmare: to fall without wings and harness into the void. Yet every detail registered: the face of the mountain, the mossy crevasses, the smells of wood and stone and decomposition, the screeing of a hawk, the glint of a stream below, the roofs of farmhouses, the geometrical demarcations of fields, and the spiraling wisps of cloud that seemed to be woven into the sky. But then he tumbled and descended into palpable darkness, into a frightful abyss that showed no feature and no bottom.

  Leonardo screamed to awaken back into daylight, for he knew this blind place, which the immortal Dante had explored and described. But now he felt the horrid bulk of the flying monster Geryon beneath him, supporting him...this, the same beast that had carried Dante into Malebolge: the Eighth Circle of Hell. The monster was slippery with filth and smelled of death and putrefaction; the air itself was foul, and Leonardo could hear behind him the thrashing of the creature's scorpion tail. Yet it also seemed that he could hear Dante's divine voice whispering to him, drawing him through the very walls of Hades into blinding light.

  But now he was held aloft by the Great Bird, his own invention. He soared over the trees and hills and meadows of Fiesole, and then south, to fly over the roofs and balconies and spires of Florence herself.

  Leonardo flew without fear, as if the wings were his own flesh. He moved his arms easily, working the great wings that beat against the calm, spring air that was as warm as his own breath. But rather than resting upon his apparatus, he now hung below it. He operated a windlass with his hands to raise one set of wings and kicked a pedal with his heels to lower the other set of wings. Around his neck was a collar, which controlled a rudder that was effectively the tail of this bird.

  This was certainly not the machine that hung in Verrocchio's bottega. Yet with its double set of wings, it seemed more like a great insect than a bird, and—

  Leonardo awakened with a jolt, to find himself staring at a horsefly feeding upon his hand.

  Could he have been sleeping with his eyes open, or had this been a waking dream? He shivered, for his sweat was cold on his arms and chest.

  He shouted, awakening Niccolo, and immediately began sketching and writing in his notebook. "I have it!" he said to Niccolo. "Double wings like a fly will provide the power I need. You see, it is just as I told you: nature provides. Art and invention are merely imitation." He drew a man hanging beneath an apparatus with hand- operated cranks and pedals to work the wings. Then he studied the fly, which still buzzed around him, and wrote: The lower wings are more slanting than those above, both as to length and as to breadth. The fly when it hovers in the air upon its wings beats its wings with great speed and din, raising them from the horizontal position up as high as the wing is long. And as it raises them, it brings them forward in a slanting position in such a way as almost to strike the air edgewise. Then he drew a design for the rudder assembly. "How could I not have seen that just as a ship needs a rudder, so, too, would my machine?" he said. "It will act as the tail of a bird. And by hanging the operator below the wings, equilibrium will be more easily maintained. There," he said, standing up and pulling Niccolo to his feet. "Perfection!"

  He sang one of Lorenzo de Medici's bawdy inventions and danced around Niccolo, who seemed confused by his master's strange behavior. He grabbed the boy's arms and swung him around in a circle.

  "Perhaps the women watching you free the birds were right," Niccolo said. "Perhaps you are as mad as Ajax."

  "Perhaps I am," Leonardo said, "but I have a lot of work to do, for the Great Bird must be changed if it is to fly for Il Magnificonext week." He placed the book of the Golden Flower in the sack, handed it to Niccolo, and began walking in the direction of the city.

  It was already late afternoon.

  "I'll help you with your machine," Niccolo said.

  "Thank you, I'll need you for many errands."

  That seemed to satisfy the boy. "Why did you shout and then dance as you did, Maestro?" Niccolo asked, concerned. He followed a step behind Leonardo, who seemed to be in a hurry.

  Leonardo laughed and slowed his stride until Niccolo was beside him. "It's difficult to explain. Suffice it to say that solving the riddle of my Great Bird made me happy."

  "But how did you do it? I thought you had fallen asleep."

  "I had a dream," Leonardo said. "It was a gift from the poet Dante Alighieri."

  "He gave you the answer?" Niccolo asked, incredulous.

  "That he did, Nicco."

  "Then you do believe in spirits."

  "No, Nicco, just in dreams."

  Three

  In the streets and markets, people gossiped of a certain hermit—a champion—who had come from Volterra, where he had been ministering to the lepers in a hospital. He had come here to preach and harangue and save the city. He was a young man, and some had claimed to have seen him walking barefoot past the Church of Salvatore. They said he was dressed in the poorest of clothes with only a wallet on his back. His face was bearded and sweet, and his eyes were blue; certainly he was a manifestation of the Christ himself, stepping on the very paving stones that modern Florentines walked. He had declared that the days to follow would bring harrowings, replete with holy signs, for so he had been told by both the Angel Raphael and Saint John, who had appeared to him in their flesh, as men do to other men, and not in a dream.

  It was said that he preached to the Jews in their poor quarter and also to the whores and beggars; and he was also seen standing upon the ringheiera of the Signore demanding an audience with the 'Eight'. But they sent him away. So now there could be no intercession for what was about to break upon Florence.

  The next day, a Thursday, one of the small bells of Santa Maria de Fiore broke loose and fell, breaking the skull of a stonemason passing below. By a miracle, he lived, although a bone had to be removed from his skull.

  But it was seen as a sign, nevertheless.

  And on Friday, a boy of twelve fell from the large bell of the Palagio and landed on the gallery. He died several hours later.

  By week's end, four families in the city and eight in the Borgo di Ricorboli were stricken with fever and buboes, the characteristic swellings of what had come to be called "the honest plague." There were more reports of fever and death every day thereafter, for the Black Reaper was back upon the streets, wending his way through homes and hospitals, cathedrals and taverns, and whorehouses and nunneries alike. It was said that he had a companion, the hag Lachesis, who followed after him while she wove an ever-lengthening tapestry of death; hers was an accounting of 'the debt we must all pay', created from her never-ending skein of black thread.

  One hundred and twenty people had died in the churches and hospitals by nella quidtadecima: the full moon. There were twenty-five deaths alone at Santa Maria Nuova. The 'Eight' of the Signoria duly issued a notice of health procedures to be followed by all Florentines; the price of foodstuffs rose drastically; and although Lorenzo's police combed the streets for the spectral hermit, he was nowhere to be found within the precincts of the city.

  Lorenzo and his reti
nue fled to his villa at Careggi. But rather than follow suit and leave the city for the safety of the country, Verrocchio elected to remain in his bottega. He gave permission to his apprentices to quit the city until the plague abated, if they had the resources; but most, in fact, stayed with him.

  The bottega seemed to be in a fervor.

  One would think that the deadline for every commission was tomorrow. Verrocchio's foreman Francesco kept a tight and sure rein on the apprentices, pressing them into a twelve to fourteen hour schedule; and they worked as they had when they constructed the bronze palla that topped the dome of Santa Maria dell Fiore, as if quick hands and minds were the only weapons against the ennui upon which the Black Fever might feed. Francesco had become invaluable to Leonardo, for he was quicker with things mechanical than Verrocchio himself; and Francesco helped him design an ingenious plan by which the flying machine could be collapsed and dismantled and camouflaged for easy transportation to Vinci. The flying machine, at least, was complete; again, thanks to Francesco who made certain that Leonardo had a constant supply of strong-backed apprentices and material.

  Leonardo's studio was a mess, a labyrinth of footpaths that wound past bolts of cloth, machinery, stacks of wood and leather, jars of paint, sawhorses, and various gearing devices; the actual flying machine took up the center of the great room. Surrounding it were drawings, insects mounted on boards, a table covered with birds and bats in various stages of vivisection, and constructions of the various parts of the redesigned flying machine—artificial wings, rudders, and flap valves.

  The noxious odors of turpentine mixed with the various perfumes of decay; these smells disturbed Leonardo not at all, for they reminded him of his childhood when he kept all manner of dead animals in his room to study and paint. All other work—the paintings and terra-cotta sculptures—were piled in one corner. Leonardo and Niccolo could no longer sleep in the crowded, foul-smelling studio; they had laid their pallets down in the young apprentice Tista's room.