I could not recognize the hand as Damiata’s, any more than I could assure myself it was not. Slightly bloated, the fingers swollen most of all, the entire appendage was blotched a ghastly claret and purple. It had been severed cleanly at the wrist.
I had to turn away before Leonardo could begin his measurements. I did not even hear his chalk dreadfully scratching away in one of his notebooks, divining fate with letters and numbers, before he said, “Did you observe this?”
The red string fell from Leonardo’s hand like a trail of blood. Yet the little card attached to it was not stained at all. Leonardo presented it to me as if he were a priest offering the wafer at Mass.
There was no prayer to the Devil on this bollettino; the facing side of the card was entirely blank. My fingers trembled as I turned it over. The script on the other side was in the familiar, polished Tuscan hand and black Chinese ink. But the words were like something heard in a dream.
Il sale più profondo a Cesenatico.
“The deepest salt at Cesenatico,” I mumbled, Cesenatico being Cesena’s seaport, a town about ten miles east, on the Adriatic coast. “It doesn’t even mean anything.”
“There are salt basins at Cesenatico,” Leonardo said. Illuminated from below by the reflecting candle, his face appeared distorted, almost monstrous.
Yet it was his silence that alarmed me. “What is it, Maestro!” I knew I sounded as mad as he looked. “Do you already know? Is it Damiata’s hand!”
Leonardo shook his head as if entirely bewildered. “I cannot determine that with only … this,” he said in a croaking voice. “The hand varies too much from the simmetria of the limbs. I can only say that it was separated from the living body within the previous day. Or two. There are fluids—”
All at once Leonardo’s spidery fingers pounced on the bollettino, plucking it from my slack hand.
He examined the cryptic message, his head shaking in his palsied fashion. Finally the maestro found words. “Perhaps the hand was left for you,” he whispered, clutching the bollettino to his breast. “This is for me.”
It was a measure of the skill with which this unspeakably vile murderer had entered Leonardo’s mind that within moments of reading the butcher’s cryptic missive, Valentino’s engineer general had put aside his urgent pursuit of the duke’s army; with renewed authority in his voice, he instructed his assistants to prepare for a journey to Cesenatico. He then turned to me and said, “I will require several hours to prepare the apparatus necessary to examine the salt basins.” Recalling the great wheel of buckets I had seen in the maestro’s warehouse, I wondered if this “apparatus” would be employed for some sort of excavation or dredging. “You must be prepared to leave here later this day. Wear as much clothing as you have—I can tell you with good assurance there is going to be a storm.”
Before he departed, Leonardo carefully placed the severed hand in a canvas sack. As I closed the door behind him, I could think only: Not two days ago I kissed that warm and tender hand, the hand that burned my flesh and healed my soul, the hand that led me to a new life. Now it is nothing but a butchered piece of meat.
And in Cesenatico would I be condemned to find the rest of her, piece by pale, bloodless piece?
The maestro finally returned for me at midday, alone. He explained that he had already sent his assistants ahead and was now determined to proceed to Cesenatico on foot, as he was certain he could cover the distance more quickly than a mule.
I had no difficulty matching the maestro’s lunging strides; such was my urgency to determine Damiata’s fate, that I could have run the entire way, despite not sleeping at all since I had awakened early the previous morning. After passing through the unguarded city gate, we proceeded east on a road the Romans had certainly not built, as it lacked the perfect line only their surveyors have ever achieved—a symmetry that was otherwise evident in fields bounded by precise borders.
A mile or so past the city walls, we observed that we were not alone. Traveling in companies of five or six to as many as twenty or thirty, they were not local country folk, although in their rough capes they scarcely appeared different, until one observed that many had only scraps of cloth tied about their feet and some were as barefoot as Saint Francis. These desperate mendicants were my fellow pilgrims, who had also followed Valentino’s army from Imola. And while the whores and priests who had journeyed south would always find means to keep from starving, these peasants could only hope to glean from a Cesenate countryside that was quickly being stripped as bare as the Imolese fields they had so recently fled.
“They are looking for farmhouses,” Leonardo said, shaking his head with something like pity. “It is the custom of these ignorant farmers to open their dwellings to the dead between Christmas and Epiphany. The imbeciles provision their tables as if the incorporeal spirits they believe are among them fully possess digestive organs.”
“Tonight the living will either eat for the dead, or soon join them,” I said, observing a group that had already left the road. Like shapeless dark beasts wandering in a little herd, these poor wretches trudged across the snow-shrouded fields, guided by some compass in their empty bellies.
We quickly left behind these plodding foragers. After several more miles, I decided to risk Leonardo’s scorn and offer him my observations regarding the evil maestro who had so cruelly dispatched us on this journey.
“I believe that this man has a peculiar defect of his nature,” I began, “although I do not know precisely how to describe it. The Church would say he is Satan’s creation. But if the Devil truly possessed the art to make this singular being, then why not make a hundred thousand like him and leave all the world beneath a deluge of blood? No. I am more inclined to say that providential Nature, to some purpose we cannot fathom, has throughout history created rare men with this particular defect. They are born without those faculties of intellect and sentiment we would describe as the soul.”
Much to my surprise, Leonardo nodded approvingly. “There are no monsters except those that Nature creates. There are men of divine beauty and men of grotesque deformity, and all the variety that lies between them. Why should there not be a similar variation among the faculties of the sensus communis, wherein the soul is found?”
“Then we lean to the same opinion on this,” I said, scarcely believing our agreement.
Although we were already walking at considerable speed, Leonardo began to pace more quickly. “We agree upon this particular point. But you must understand that human desires, and the events occasioned by these desires, are random in any instance and are further disordered by the whims of Fortune.” His tone suggested he much regretted this state of affairs. “You cannot study the intellects and actions of men, or make assumptions regarding them, as you can the harmonies and proportions that extend throughout Nature and all her elements.”
In this manner Leonardo seemed to disregard my studies entirely—although I was flattered that he regarded them as worthy of reasoned disputation. So I replied, “But as many things as Man disorders, through his willfulness or neglect, so does Nature herself. I might look at Nature and say: What does she offer if not a chronicle of chaos—tempests, floods, hail, earthquakes, drought, and plague? How does this differ from the disorder created by men?”
“You are too ignorant to see that natural events are always guided by the same laws, that air is the same whether it moves in a breeze or the most terrible vortices, that no force in nature is ever lost but only transferred from one form to another. Across her entire domain, Nature achieves perfect unity. Do you know that sound, light, and water all obey the same principles?”
“In what manner?”
“Sound, light, and water are all propagated by means of waves.”
“Waves?” Yet even as I queried Leonardo like a fool, I began to see in these waves a most useful model.
“I am not at liberty to scatter straw upon water and demonstrate the principle,” Leonardo snapped, “nor to show you that the same numeri
c proportions that govern bodies and buildings also extend to the harmonics of sound—”
“Then why cannot wars, revolutions, and the birth and death of states and empires be governed by similar laws and principles? Because these principles have not yet been observed? I have not witnessed these waves that convey sound and light, but you tell me that they are the very fundament of Nature herself. I believe the events recorded in our histories move in similar fashion. Can we not look at an endless chain of examples, from the Assyrians to the Persians to Greece and Rome, and see that every empire is built upon its virtues and decays with its vices? What is this endless rising and falling of states but a cycle as necessary and unrelenting as the rise and fall of these waves that convey all things?”
Leonardo lifted both hands in the air like a priest elevating the Host. “So you would make an organism of the state, yet tell us that you have explained it in its entirety by merely examining its birth and death. By God! Is anything that Nature has created so easy to understand? Look at what we must know before we can hope to explain the mechanisms of the wondrous machine that is the human body—not merely the configuration of each part but also its function, which sensation each nerve conveys and how each muscle moves and where it is attached to bone, and which of these conspire to create a yawn or pout or move the eyes in unison. How does food move through the digestive organs and how do the eyes restore an upright image in the fashion a camera obscura cannot? You can only determine such truths through ceaseless and interminable study! Measurement! You—can your Livy and Herodotus provide you such esperienza? Can you possibly hope to examine all of human history and draw connections among events in such detail that you navigate an unknown sea no man has ever crossed?”
I did not have an answer for the maestro that day. Instead my answer has been the labor of my life, principally my Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy but also my little Prince. Despite what so many say, I did not embark upon this voyage to show men how evil can triumph, but to demonstrate that evil surely will triumph if good men do not strive to learn well its lessons. And now that my usefulness, if not my life itself, has ended, I can say before God and man that I have met the challenge the great maestro of revered memory issued on the road to Cesenatico. For in my life’s work, I crossed the unknown sea and charted a route for all men to follow, should they wish to live in peace and security.
As the afternoon turned toward dusk, we had a perfect illustration of the capricious malice of Nature. First the sky became a heavy gray, as if it might collapse upon us. Then this lowering ceiling became a lighter, ashen hue, whereupon snow began to fall in great sheets. A wind came howling from the sea, as if the hand of God was determined to prevent us going farther.
Nevertheless the curtains of snow parted now and then, until at last I could see the town itself. Hardly a great seaport like Pisa, Cesenatico was composed of a few churches, warehouses, shops, and palazzi, aligned on either side of a canal that entered the sea there. The harbor consisted only of the somewhat broader mouth of the canal and some piers constructed along a spit that jutted into the sea.
“It is the duke’s intention that we build a great port here,” Leonardo said, turning his back to the wind so that his shouted words could be more easily heard. “I have plans to dredge and deepen the canal, greatly expand the harbor, and improve the fortifications so that these new works can be defended! And then we will transform Cesenatico, as we will create anew the entire Romagna!” His words were not directed at me; these cathedral-organ notes were flying straight up to God.
I no longer believed that Valentino would continue to build anything at all. Instead, he would merely leave behind the empire of hope he had constructed in each of our minds. Leonardo’s empire boasted cities more perfect than Plato or Augustine could have imagined. My empire of hope was an Italy defended by citizen soldiers rather than mercenary thugs, free of tyranny and foreign armies, with justice for all regardless of rank or wealth. But I feared I had come to Cesenatico only to wander among its ruins.
“There is the salt.” Leonardo pointed past the left bank of the canal, just behind a row of warehouses. The salt basins had almost certainly been constructed by the Romans, having been arranged in a grid just like the fields, their borders defined by thick earthen berms roughly half my height. The checkerboard thus created was as broad and as long as the town itself; only a taller berm and a narrow beach separated it from the sea. The square pools of water ranged in color from almost black, where they had been newly filled with seawater, to whiter than the snow, where the water had evaporated entirely and the salt was ready to be harvested. A large mound of this dry salt, which had yet to be sacked, rose before one of the warehouses, its outline vague in the blowing snow.
Leonardo turned and studied the sea. “We must proceed with all haste.”
Here I observed the cause of his concern. Great swells were rising with the wind and the gusts continued to drive these waves to the shore; they would soon rise above the berm at the seaward end of the salt basins and begin to inundate them.
We entered the town on the left bank and remained on the road that ran in front of the warehouses, with the salt basins directly to our left. We must have gone almost to the sea—the percussion of the waves was audible above the shrieking wind—when I saw a figure standing on a berm, veiled in snow, long hair and cape flying. I would have imagined this was Lot’s wife, had I not at first believed, just as fancifully, that I had found Damiata.
“Giacomo!” Leonardo shouted as he ran to his assistant; in the moment before I arrived, they had some brief conversation. Climbing up onto the berm, I found it constructed of a dense, clinging clay. I looked out upon a basin that was as dark as Chinese ink. The wind had made small waves on the surface, but they were nothing next to those that rolled at us from the sea, pounding the beach in great explosions of spray.
“Cacasangue cazzo d’iddio!” I shouted, all but jumping out of my skin.
The demon that shot up from the black water at our feet had eyes as big as saucers, the head of a giant locust, and this great, elephant-like snout. If ever in my life I had believed that Satan’s minions dwell beneath our feet, this was the moment. The giant creature, having risen to its full height, began to pull off its own insect head, requiring only several vigorous tugs.
“Tommaso!” Leonardo shouted. “Did you find it?”
Leonardo’s assistant Tommaso stood before us, the glass-eyed leather helmet that had entirely enclosed his head now beneath one arm. “I have it here!” With his free hand Tommaso hefted a large canvas sack.
As Leonardo relieved Tommaso of his burden, Giacomo grabbed the helmet’s elephant snout, which was in fact divided into two tubes, and pulled on it like a fisherman drawing in his net. This brought to dry land a bobbing, bell-like wooden float to which the hoses were attached. I had little time to observe this aquatic device, however, because Leonardo stalked off, leaving his assistants to transport the apparatus.
Leonardo led us to one of the warehouses that stood beside the salt basins. It was an old building with a red tile roof, with several big doors on each side. In less harsh times, one would expect it to be filled with salt in hemp sacks, but only a few wooden kegs were scattered about. Evidently Leonardo’s assistants had placed some planks across two of these kegs to make a small table. Tommaso stood there stripped to his trousers and shirt, drenched, his skin almost white and his lips nearly purple.
“What is this machine?” I inquired as Giacomo carelessly deposited the helmet, float, and tubes on the floor. I assumed it was some sort of invenzione that conveyed air so that a man could remain underwater like a fish.
“You must say nothing of this diving apparatus,” Leonardo admonished. “If this device became known, we would place the capacity for great evil in the hands of menial intellects. A single fool could sink an entire fleet.” As the maestro spoke, he began disgorging the contents of Tommaso’s canvas sack onto the tossed-together table.
; A great deal of clay still adhered to these bones, which appeared to be arms, legs, and ribs—and a large portion of a skull. That cannot be all that is left of her, I told myself, too numb to imagine otherwise.
Sleeves up to his elbows, Leonardo examined the bones one after another, scraping away the mud and studying each from several vantages. Finally he shook his head like a physician who has put his ear to a chest and hears the death rattle. “These bones are of great antiquity. This was all?”
“I was down there a quarter hour,” Tommaso said. His teeth were chattering like a Spanish dancer’s hand cymbals.
“Then we must go down again.” Leonardo looked at me. “There is a sink in that basin, where mud has been excavated, as it is valued for its salutary effects. We discovered it when we were surveying the harbor.”
So this sink was the deepest salt—or salt basin—in Cesenatico. Yet I wondered if Leonardo truly understood what he was saying. “Then whoever sent you here not only knew that you had surveyed this area—a fact, I presume, that was known by many at court, in addition to those in this town. But this man also knew the peculiarities you discovered.”
Leonardo stared at me mournfully. “They all knew. My survey was performed this August. At that time buckets of the salubrious mud were delivered to the duke and his people. As well as to Vitellozzo Vitelli, Paolo Orsini, and Oliverotto da Fermo.” He allowed himself a sigh more like a dying man’s last breath. “Any one of them might have …”
We had come ten miles to Cesenatico and were still a thousand miles from the truth.
As we stood there in silence, an immense roar issued from outside, the wind and waves having created some terrifying new instrument. Water flooded into the warehouse, soaking our feet in an icy bath.
Leonardo’s eyes seemed fixed on a far greater catastrophe. When the water had subsided he strode to the open door. Following him, I observed that the very sea had come to us. It was ebbing away, so that the top of the berm that separated the salt basins from the sea was again exposed, but the smaller berms that divided the basins were under water.
The Malice of Fortune Page 28
