The Devil's Pawn

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Together they often strolled through Leonardo’s garden, which had the dimensions of a park. A few years ago all this had been swampland, but then it was drained with the creation of canals. Now cheerful brooks bubbled through a shady wood, lambs grazed by their mothers, and there was a vegetable garden, a glass house in which Leonardo cultivated rare plants, an atelier bathed in light thanks to hundreds of small panes of glass, and an herb garden with both kitchen herbs and poisonous and medicinal plants that Leonardo used for experiments.

  Leonardo had invited Johann, Karl, and Greta to stay at Château du Cloux on the very first evening they arrived, and days had turned into weeks. Their walks were often interrupted because the great artist would observe something new in the garden: the cumbersome flight of a bumblebee, water cascading into a pond, the movements of the clouds above, the complex structure of a beehive. On such occasions, Leonardo pulled out the little notebook that always dangled from his belt and wrote a few lines or drafted some sketches. Since he was left-handed, his paralysis didn’t bother him much. There were times when Leonardo seemed perfectly healthy, but then a trembling would overcome him and he’d have to sit down, illness and death written in his face.

  “See the dragonfly over there?” he asked Johann one time when they discussed the possibilities of a water clock consisting of twenty-four individual vessels that filled and emptied every hour. “It flies with four wings. Each time the front pair of wings lifts, the back one drops, like a small apparatus designed by God. Astounding, isn’t it?”

  Johann blinked. “I can’t see much, to be honest. How can you make out individual movements in all that whirring?”

  “I just see them.” Leonardo gave a shrug. “It would seem my eyes pick up more than those of others.” He paused in his tracks. “Hmm. If a dragonfly gains so much uplift with four wings, then accordingly larger wings on a person . . . Oh, just look at that sunlight breaking in the small waterfall over there! The water acts like a filter that separates the individual colors. Highly interesting!” He gathered up his coat and hurried toward the waterfall, like a small boy on the hunt for dragonflies. He whipped out his notebook and immersed himself in a series of sketches with his charcoal stylus.

  Johann looked at his host’s back with wonder. It happened all the time—Leonardo was interested in so many things at once that he struggled to focus on any one thing for more than a few hours. Spending the days with him was like wandering through a forest of ideas without ever stopping. Johann had met many great scholars, the most intelligent of which was probably Agrippa; but even Agrippa was a man of the mind, piecing together the world in his head. Leonardo, on the other hand, studied the life that was directly in front of him, smelling it, tasting it, touching it. He took an interest in everything Johann described to him, be it simple juggling tricks, astrological problems, nifty sleight of hand, the possibilities of alchemy, or the foul-smelling flaming arrows Johann produced for his shows.

  “In Milan, I developed a machine that can loose hundreds of arrows at once,” said Leonardo thoughtfully during a stroll one mild April evening. Karl had joined them, while Greta preferred roaming the streets of town, as she had been doing for days. She seemed quiet, even sullen. She hadn’t mentioned John Reed again—evidently the fling hadn’t been as serious as Johann had feared.

  Leonardo hardly seemed to notice Greta’s absence, but he often inquired about Karl, who was more than happy to join them on their walks. With his ring-studded left hand, Leonardo picked up a stone and threw it into the pond. Little Satan, who walked with the men when he wasn’t with Greta, barked and leaped after the rock.

  “All arrows follow the same elliptical path,” Leonardo went on. “The same goes for cannonballs, which are being used increasingly. The person who figures out how to predict their course exactly has the power to decide a war.”

  “Have you ever offered your knowledge to one of Europe’s leading rulers?” asked Karl. “Especially now, with the advance of the Ottomans, I’d imagine people would pay anything for inventions like the arrow-shooting machine.”

  Leonardo took his time and weighed each word carefully. “I used to think that to preserve the greatest gift of all—freedom—any means were permissible. But I’ve changed my mind. Some thoughts oughtn’t be recorded—yes, not even spoken out loud. They are too dangerous.”

  “But shouldn’t all thinking be free?” asked Johann.

  “It is a dilemma indeed.” Leonardo sighed. “I’m afraid this subject will occupy humanity more and more in the future. Thoughts, inventions, and countless possibilities grow faster all the time on the trees of our imagination.” He gave Johann a long and searching look. “How can we ensure that our ideas don’t turn out to be our undoing? I see a gloomy picture up ahead. Mankind is going to subjugate the earth, and there will be nothing left on land or in the water that we don’t persecute, rout out, and destroy.”

  In those moments Leonardo grew as depressed as Johann had grown in his own darkest hours.

  The days became a blur. Johann saw Greta only at nights or in the morning, and then he and Karl would continue their scientific discussions with Leonardo. He didn’t know what his daughter got up to during the day. It was like in Metz when he and Agrippa were working on the witch trial, or like at Heidelberg when he had built the laterna magica with his friend Valentin. The discussions, the work, and the countless new inspirations gave wings to his spirit. And he forgot everything else around him, even the people he loved.

  But one thing was strange: when Johann mentioned Heinrich Agrippa to Leonardo, the old man said that while he’d heard the name before, he didn’t know of any letters the two of them had supposedly exchanged. Johann suspected Leonardo had simply forgotten his correspondence with Agrippa. Thousands of letters, notes, and scraps of paper were piled up in Leonardo’s library, some of which had even been used twice in order to save paper. Sometimes the great master had an ingenious thought one day just to forget it by the next because he’d had three more since.

  But there was one thing they never discussed during these first weeks: their illness. Whenever Johann broached the subject, the old man avoided the question or gave vague replies.

  “The church says there is a time for everything in life,” said Leonardo once as they sat together over dinner. “A time to grow, a time to die, a time to take, and a time to pay.” The cook, Matturina, silently placed stew on the table and sat down in a corner, where she awaited further instructions. She and the old servant, Battista, always hovered near Leonardo, apparently ready to help him should the old man fall or struggle with his paralysis.

  “Maybe now is the time to pay,” continued Leonardo. He trembled as he spooned up the stew with his left hand; he grew weaker by the day now. A silver chain with a pendant, one of the many chains Leonardo wore around his neck, almost dangled into his food. “What about you, Doctor? Have you got any outstanding scores? An account to settle with someone more powerful than yourself?” Johann felt that the old man was studying him closely once more. In the course of the last few weeks, Johann had become increasingly convinced that Leonardo da Vinci had also made a pact.

  Your extreme giftedness, the intellect, the luck. Where does it all come from, old man? Is it God-given or did the devil make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?

  He was almost ready to mention the matter to Leonardo, but lurking behind them was always the cook, who seemed to listen to their every word.

  “As you know, I studied your Figura Umana,” said Johann instead. “Your sketches suggest to me that the human body is a type of machine, like a complex clockwork. Maybe all we need to do is replace a small spring or screw.”

  “We both have a loose screw?” Leonardo grinned, childlike mischief glinting in his eyes. “I like the image. And I agree with you in general, Doctor Faustus. But maybe there are some diseases that can’t be cured because . . .” He hesitated. “Because the bill can only be paid a certain way.”

  Johann’s hand paused above his
plate. “How do you mean?”

  But instead of giving a reply, Leonardo da Vinci ate his stew in silence.

  Francesco Melzi, the steward, who had looked at Johann with derision in the beginning, occasionally crossed paths with them on the huge estate. Johann knew now that Melzi was a young Italian painter who had been a loyal friend of Leonardo’s for years and who had followed him to France. Leonardo liked to surround himself with handsome men, including another young painter with the nickname Salai, meaning “little devil,” who currently traveled around Italy. Melzi’s main task was to sort through the countless notes Leonardo had made over the last several decades. The steward hadn’t had a chance to paint in a long while.

  Melzi was visibly annoyed that his patron accommodated Johann and his friends as guests—Karl especially was a thorn in his side. Melzi seemed to be jealous of Karl because Leonardo looked at him a certain way. Johann had soon realized that Leonardo, too, was secretly a sodomite. Was that why he’d suddenly left Rome a few years ago?

  From time to time Francesco Melzi allowed people in for an audience, including men of nobility for whom Leonardo had built automatons for their courtly celebrations. But the king never visited. They said he was residing farther north, where he led negotiations about the German election. He sent letters sealed with gold leaf and inquired about Leonardo’s health several times a week.

  In all their time with Leonardo, Johann came no closer to finding answers to his own questions. He was permitted to study Leonardo’s books and notes in the library but found no clues about his disease or about Tonio. But at least his paralysis wasn’t getting worse. He was increasingly using theriac, however, for the worst of the pain. He always kept a bottle under his bed where Karl couldn’t see it.

  One evening, when Leonardo was still painting in his atelier, Johann was sitting in the library next door. Reading and studying here by candlelight was like a journey with an uncertain destination. The books weren’t sorted—not by author nor by subject or title. The tomes piled up on shelves and tables like dusty mountains of knowledge; in between lay scrolls of parchment and crumpled scraps of paper—part of Leonardo’s famous collection of notes. The great master seemed to document everything he saw. With wonder Johann gazed at the sketch for a type of umbrella from which hung a man, evidently gliding to the ground with it. On a different drawing Johann saw a crossbow the size of a ship. There were men with bird wings, cogwheels, war chariots, movable bridges, dozens of cannons in a row, men who looked like monsters and appeared to breathe underwater, but also drawings Johann didn’t understand, like gruesome war scenes full of the dead and injured.

  Johann came upon one especially shocking sketch: it was of a castle that sat enthroned on a mountain of bones and skulls. The longer he stared at the drawing, the more he thought the castle itself was one huge human skull. A single word was written at the top.

  Seguaffit.

  Johann didn’t understand; he’d never heard the word before. But for some reason it seemed just as terrible to him as the castle of skulls.

  Seguaffit. What in God’s name?

  “You shouldn’t be reading this late. You’ll ruin your eyes.”

  Johann gave a start. When he turned around, Leonardo was standing in the door. It seemed to Johann that the old man had been watching him for a while. Leonardo held a brush in his left hand, the drawing hand, while his right hung down limply.

  “The same goes for the painter next door,” said Johann with a smile. He pushed the paper with the strange drawing aside, feeling as though Leonardo had caught him reading something forbidden.

  “You’re right. I was about to finish up, anyhow. Melzi just gave me some bad news.”

  Johann turned serious. “What has happened?”

  “My young stable boy, Silvio, had a riding accident. Apparently, there was a branch he missed in the light of dusk. Sadly, he fell in such a way that he broke his neck.” Leonardo sighed. “I never thought that Silvio would depart this life before me. The funeral is in two days, and until then, his body is over in the shed and . . .” He paused and looked at Faust.

  “You said once that man is like a machine,” he continued eventually. “A rather heretical thought indeed, especially since it could only be proven if we looked inside the human body . . . which is forbidden by the church.”

  “The church forbids many things,” replied Johann cautiously. “But not all of it makes sense in my eyes.”

  “I, too, prefer independent thinking to religion. I guess I will soon find out whether that was a mistake. Ask me again when I’m on the other side.” Leonardo gave a grunt. “I would like to show you something, Doctor.”

  “What is it?” asked Johann.

  “Come to the shed tomorrow night with your assistant, at midnight, when everyone’s asleep,” said Leonardo. “Perhaps then we’ll finally find an answer to the question that has been torturing us for the longest time. Is our illness merely a loose screw or a”—he hesitated—“an incurable curse? I am tired. Let us go to bed.”

  Leonardo waited until Johann had left the library. When Johann wanted to take another look at the drawings the following day, including the terrifying sketch with the mysterious word Seguaffit scrawled on it, he found the library door locked.

  It would remain locked to Johann for many weeks.

  The following morning, Greta, along with many other believers, headed for the small Saint Denis Church above town.

  The church stood a little outside of Amboise on a wide road that led from the Loire up a hill. It was Sunday, and Greta had left Château du Cloux before breakfast to roam the streets of town, like she had done for nearly two weeks. On several occasions she’d had the feeling of being followed, but she thought she was probably mistaken. For safety, she usually brought along Little Satan, who was better than three highly trained bodyguards.

  Greta found it very hard to get over John’s betrayal. She had truly believed the night at Blois had been special for him, too. But she guessed she was just one of many girls he picked up along the Loire each week. A fun adventure, a brief bit of pleasure, nothing more. She had been so embarrassed about the rebuff and her naive longings that she hadn’t even told Karl about it. The two men were always busy with Leonardo; no one cared about Greta at Château du Cloux. It was high time to leave all this behind.

  But where should she go? Greta wasn’t fooling herself. A single young woman in a foreign country was fair game, and her French wasn’t good enough to join a troupe of jugglers. She had given herself a few days to consider her options.

  To take her mind off John and all the other gloomy thoughts, she and Little Satan had been exploring Amboise, the port, the nearby tuff caves, and the castle, even though she never got farther than the upper gates.

  When mist rose from the Loire like a white sheet in the mornings, the castle appeared to hover above the town. A paved lane led up the inside of a tower in serpentines, wide enough to fit carts and carriages. Courtiers and officials came and went, but the king hadn’t returned. He was still somewhere north, trying to sway the election of the German king in his favor.

  In one of the caves at the foot of the hill, Greta had discovered a small chapel. She liked to pray in it, and it soon became her favorite spot, her refuge. Since she had helped her father twice with the power of prayer, her belief had grown strong again. Memories returned from church visits with Valentin back in Nuremberg. The prayers gave Greta strength and dispelled her fears and doubts. That was also the reason she was going to church today. She had left the dog at Cloux; he wasn’t an appropriate churchgoer.

  When the bells rang, Greta followed the other believers into the cool building and sat in a pew at the back. No one paid her any special attention. The smell of incense wafting through the vaulted room soothed her instantly. The citizens of Amboise started to sing a simple hymn that sounded like a children’s song. Greta hummed along softly.

  “Mon Dieu, protégez nos enfants.”

  Lord, protect our ch
ildren.

  Just as in Blois, farther upstream, here in Amboise people told stories of a child-eating monster. Several times Greta had heard the word ogre in taverns, and people had seemed anxious and downcast. And there was another word she’d heard repeatedly in connection with this ogre.

  Tiffauges.

  Greta didn’t know what it meant—was it another monster, or the name of a place or a person? She had considered asking Karl, but he was so preoccupied with Leonardo that she’d dropped the thought.

  The chanting of the believers rose, and Greta joined in.

  “Je crois, je crois, je crois.”

  She was kneeling down to pray with the others when she sensed that someone was watching her. It was the same vague feeling she’d had a few times lately, like an itchy spot on the back that you couldn’t scratch. Carefully, she looked around. She was kneeling in the pews of the women, all wearing scarves around their heads and some even veils. Greta looked to the rows of men to her right. They, too, were kneeling with their heads bowed, but one of those heads, so Greta thought, had only just turned away. The man was sitting on the far side of the church; she couldn’t make out more than a shadow in the dim light.

  Greta’s heart beat faster until the end of the service. Here inside the church she felt safe, untouchable. Evil couldn’t harm her here. When the priest spoke the final blessing with his arms wide open, she stood up and followed the other women outside. But unlike the others, she turned right and hid around the corner of the building. The chiming bells and the murmuring of the crowd gave her courage. If anything happened to her here, she could call out for help.

  After a while she heard footsteps; someone was approaching her hiding place. Greta gathered all her courage and stepped forward.

  She almost collided with the man.

  When Greta recognized him, she was lost for words at first.