Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Signore Cosimo, you must never stop a man from-from talking about art,” Ficino said, with a slight stammer and a smile. He had a ruddy complexion and wavy blond hair that curled high over his forehead. His eyes were effervescent with thought, reminding me of Petrarca’s eyes. Ficino said, “Art reminds the immortal soul of its divine origins by creating resemblances to that world. To talk about art is to talk about God, and our divine origins; it reminds us that we have the power to become all things, that man can create the heavens and what is in them if we can obtain the tools and heavenly material. We claim our own dignity in talking about art!”

  “If we have the power to become all things and to create the heavens, do you think we can build flying machines?” asked Leonardo, peeking out around Cosimo’s chair. I grabbed, but he darted down before my fingers closed on the scruff of his neck. He peeked out from the other side of the chair and stuck out his tongue. I frowned ferociously. He giggled and hid.

  “Young Leonardo, I think that since the immortal soul can fly, it will not be long before man invents a way for the body to follow suit. That is the nature of man,” Ficino answered.

  “There is no discussion with Ficino that does not begin and end with immortality of the soul,” Lorenzo said, approaching us from behind me. “Unless it begins and ends with Plato!”

  “Lorenzo, my best pupil, at such a young age already an accomplished poet, diplomat, and athlete.” Ficino twinkled at the young man, who towered over him. With his rough-hewn face, his bare rolling shoulders covered in blood and sweat, and the blue veins on his arms bulging, Lorenzo looked like some ancient god of war.

  “Whatever I accomplish is a tribute to the excellent teachers Nonno has placed around me, and to Nonno himself,” Lorenzo said warmly. “But now I must bring our heroic Luca to meet my mother, who is most impressed with him.”

  “My mother Lucrezia of the Tornabuoni is a remarkable woman,” Lorenzo said as he led me toward the field. “Everyone except my grandmother adores her, but that’s how it goes in families, the women bicker.” He shrugged. His name was being called, so he waved. Then he lowered his voice so only I could hear him. “I like you, Luca Bastardo. You’re strong, smart, and willing to do what it takes to win. You must be the son of a dangerous man and a woman with a cool, clear head. I can use such a man.”

  “Use me for what?”

  “Delicate missions, errands that require discretion, overseeing embassies, information gathering, a variety of things for which a leader needs a discreet and loyal man, you know,” Lorenzo said, shrugging. “And in return, I could offer such a skillful, loyal man my protection.”

  “What would your protection entail?” I asked softly, wondering how far Lorenzo would go to have me in his service.

  “Obtaining a certain letter that might get a man burned at the stake for having parents who were witches, all of which is proved by the witchcraft he uses to stay young,” he said sotto voce. “Nonna was frustrated in his efforts to secure the letter, but I don’t have the same scruples he does. I’m not afraid to use whatever means necessary to block the Confraternity of the Red Feather, which, as you may have guessed today, may be out of favor, but still lives in secret.”

  I WAS GLOWERING as I limped up the steps to my room at the inn. I was muttering under my breath, too, invectives in the many languages I’d learned during my travels. The Saracens possessed colorful curses, expressed in satisfying, flowery phrases. I was venting vociferously when I heard my name called. Caterina’s curving form was outlined in moonlight below me.

  “Luca, are you hurt? Come down, I’ll tend you,” she said. I didn’t need to be asked twice but descended as rapidly as my aching body would allow. “Look at you, is that a split lip?”

  “We won,” I said in answer.

  “That makes it all right, then,” she said, with mild sarcasm. “Let me see what I can do about the pain that’s making you hobble about like the town cripple.” She led me into the tavern, then lit a few lanterns that shed a soft light around her golden curls like the halo of an angel in one of Giotto’s frescoes. She stoked the embers in the fireplace. Then her soft hands guided me to a bench. I sat and she placed a lantern near me on the table.

  “Leonardo is not with you?” she asked, and gently stripped off the camicia I’d borrowed from Lorenzo.

  “He wanted to stay in Careggi,” I said.

  “My little man always gets what he wants,” she said, mirth sparkling in her large hazel eyes. “I suppose he wangled himself an invitation?”

  “From Lorenzo de’ Medici himself.” I nodded, and we exchanged an amused glance. Then her fingers roaming over my bruised shoulder found a sore spot. “Ow!” I grunted. She patted me so solicitously that I groaned again, louder, eliciting another soft stroking. Naturally I then moaned pitifully. It was nice to have her caring for me.

  “You’re bruised all over,” she murmured in sympathy. “It must have been some calcio game!” She caressed my cheek and then bustled off. She returned with a damp rag and a tub of ointment.

  “This is a liniment made from an old family recipe,” she said. “Herbs in a purified lard. It should do the trick and ease some of your pain.” She wiped my shoulders and chest gently with the rag. I didn’t say that I probably knew more about herbs and liniments and easing pain than she did, because where would be the fun in that?

  “You know, Leonardo is responsible for the worst of the bruises,” I said.

  “Let me guess.” She sighed. “In his clever way, he devised some strategy that had you running directly into the path of most resistance.”

  “You know your son,” I said. I reached out to touch a long blond curl that dangled down between her full bosoms, which strained against the front of her sheer gonna. Her lock of hair was so fine and soft that it felt like silk wrapping around my finger.

  “And it probably won the game for you,” she said, taking some ointment onto her palm. She held it for a moment, warming it, before massaging it into my shoulders. Where she rubbed, warmth seeped into the muscles. I felt myself relax.

  “It was the winning play,” I said, and reached up my other hand to comb it through her luxuriant curls. “But it bruised me horribly!” She flicked an amused glance at me and massaged the other shoulder, then moved down to work the ointment into my chest. The night air was grainy and purple and dappled with the yellow lucency of lanterns. The mellow light glowed along Caterina’s sculpted cheekbone and saturated her poreless skin. I was deeply aroused by this woman’s touch and didn’t bother to try to hide it. When she was finished with the liniment, she pulled away from me to wipe her hands with the rag. I grasped her around her waist. Her pink lips quirked upward in a smile, so I pulled her into my lap. I took her head between my hands and kissed her.

  “Careful, you’ll hurt that fat lip!” She laughed.

  “Worth the pain,” I said, and kissed her again.

  “But, Luca”—she pulled back—“aren’t you waiting for some great love from a vision? That’s what Leonardo said you told him.”

  “Waiting, sure, but I don’t deny myself in the meantime.” I nuzzled her cheek.

  “But don’t you have to stay true to your vision?”

  “I am true to it.” I caught her earlobe gently between my teeth and nibbled.

  “By not giving your heart away?” she asked softly. I lifted my head and met her gaze.

  “My heart is open to you, Caterina,” I said in a somber tone, and believed it to be so, in that moment. She looked so piercingly into my eyes that I shivered, and knew from where Leonardo had inherited his unusual powers of observation. I wondered briefly if Caterina was, indeed, the one I’d chased for so long like a distant star, the woman whose love would complete me and fulfill me in all the hidden ways I’d longed for since I was a hungry orphan child.

  After a few moments she sighed. “Not the deepest places of your heart.”

  “I had a friend a long time ago who talked about the places inside us,” I said, gat
hering her a little closer, but leaving my arms loose in case she chose to leave.

  “The entrance door to the sanctuary is inside us,” she murmured. She leaned close to me and grazed her lips over my bruised mouth. “It’s okay, Luca. It is what it is. Each of us has a secret companion musician to dance to, a song we alone know and hear. Yours is a woman from a vision. I can accept that.” With that she put her arms around me and eased my pain much more fully than any liniment could.

  Chapter 17

  COSIMO DE’ MEDICI DIED a few months later. It was the first of August and Leonardo had me helping him with a project. His father, Ser Piero, having grudgingly accepted me as a tutor for his precocious son and even more grudgingly consented to pay me a pittance, had given Leonardo a small shield, called a buckler, made from a fig tree, and asked him to paint something on it. In his careful, observant way, Leonardo had examined the buckler and found it clumsy and poorly made. He straightened it himself in the fire and then we gave it to a turner who made it smooth and even. Leonardo applied a coat of gesso and prepared it for painting. Then, with boyish enthusiasm, he decided to paint something utterly terrifying on it, something that would instill such fear that it would turn anyone who viewed it to stone, like the Medusa. To that end we wandered all over Monte Albano seeking lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats, and any other strange creature which happened onto our path. We collected the specimens and then took them back to Leonardo’s room at his father’s house.

  Leonardo went freely between his mother’s and father’s homes, but preferred to work at his father’s; with the summer heat, the room at Ser Piero’s soon took on the stench of the rotting, decaying carcasses. The servants and Leonardo’s stepmother complained and Ser Piero spoke to me in strong language about overindulging his son. I just shrugged, as if anyone could deny Leonardo anything. So the animal carcasses stayed and the women wore scarves around their mouths when they passed near his room. Still, Leonardo wasn’t satisfied. He had exacting standards and hadn’t yet found the perfect combination of horrifying features for his chimera. We went out crawling through the ripening grapes in my vineyard in Anchiano, looking for rare worms and beetles. It was a typical day of tutoring, which, from the beginning to the end of my years with him, consisted of me following Leonardo around, assisting him in his projects, and making sure he didn’t hurt himself in his enthusiasm. I knelt down to examine the leaves of my vines for any sign of rot which would shrink the harvest, and Leonardo threw a small rock at me.

  “Professore, you’re supposed to be looking for scary creatures,” he chided me.

  “Rot is a very scary creature to me.”

  “You know what I mean!” He threw another rock. “Professore, have you heard what Ficino says about friendship and the convivium?”

  “Ficino, yes. Plato, Plato, Plato, the soul, music, good manners, more soul, yakety yak.”

  “Professore!” Leonardo laughed. “Ficino is a great philosopher! You must agree with what he says about art and love….”

  “Art, sure, but why love?”

  “Because you’re waiting for a great love you saw in a vision, aren’t you?”

  “I’m doing more than merely waiting,” I said, smiling with a private thought of Caterina, who filled up my evenings in delicious ways, after Leonardo had gone to bed. She wasn’t the woman from my vision, but she was tender and sweet, and my life was richer because of her. I picked off a fuzzy brown spider from a leaf and held it up. Leonardo shook his head no. I said, “Really, I’m looking for her!”

  “If you were really looking,” Leonardo said slyly, “you wouldn’t be here tutoring me.”

  “Maybe…it’s just that everyone has a secret companion musician to dance to, a song that we alone hear, and she’s mine,” I said airily, quoting Caterina’s words to him.

  “Even Ginori makes smaller piles of manure than that!” Leonardo giggled. “I think you want your love to remain a vision.”

  “I’ll find her,” I insisted. “I don’t know when. Whenever it amuses either the good God who brings sweetness or the evil God who showers us with cruelty. I’ll have my great love when the bitter irony of it comes around, and not one moment before.”

  “Professore mio, it’s not irony that has to come around. It’s your heart,” Leonardo said. He picked some grapes and ate them, spitting out their skins. “When the heart is ready, the beloved appears! I think you don’t want to find her because you’ve been hurt, because you’ve had a strange life filled with pain and you aren’t ready to meet your great love. But God doesn’t control that, you do, with free will. You have to choose love over fear.”

  “I have always chosen love over fear,” I said. “In fact, in my vision, I was given the choice of love and death or long life, and I chose love, even though I will die much younger!”

  “You’ve chosen that in the abstract,” Leonardo argued. “In the world, your heart hasn’t chosen it. That’s why you have all those women around you.”

  “We haven’t seen this beetle before,” I said hastily. I shot Leonardo a covert glance, hoping he hadn’t figured out that Caterina was the woman in my life right now. “Have we?”

  “You don’t want to talk about your secrets,” Leonardo said. He took the beetle from me and examined it in the palm of his hand. “I think you are different from other men, Luca. I heard Lorenzo whisper something to his nonno about it.”

  “You eavesdrop on matters that don’t concern you,” I growled. “Go back to your bugs.”

  “Ficino says friendship comes out of the soul,” Leonardo said. “We live in a web of relationships which nourishes the soul.”

  “I have lived in great aloneness most of my life,” I admitted.

  “But you’re not alone anymore, Luca. You have me, Cosimo, and Lorenzo—”

  “Cosimo is dying and I’d say that Lorenzo de’ Medici has me,” I muttered.

  “Lorenzo’s not a bad man, just calculating. He’ll be a great ruler,” Leonardo said, tossing the beetle back into the vines.

  “What is it you mean to say, Leonardo?” I asked, with some impatience.

  “Why do you hold yourself back from people? Why have you split the one God in two and assigned them different tasks? Because of your history? Do you really have no idea at all about your parents, your origins?” Leonardo asked.

  I sighed. I couldn’t distract him. “I have suspicions about my parents. When I was young I heard tales of a foreign couple, nobles attended by Cathars, who lost a son. Cathars are—”

  “I know about the Cathars!” Leonardo exclaimed. “But no one talks about them!”

  “How do you know about Cathars, ragazzo?”

  “My mama’s family descended from a Cathar who escaped the Pope’s crusade.”

  “Caterina is of Cathar stock?” I asked, startled. I may have been keeping the deepest places of my heart from Caterina, but she was withholding a few secrets of her own.

  “Isn’t that what I said? Mama tells me in secret about our beliefs. We don’t really believe that the Crucifixion killed Christ, because Christ was purely of the spirit, and spirit can’t be killed. We believe in experience and not in faith, because every person can experience God for themselves. It’s our purpose on earth to transcend matter and attain union with divine love.”

  “Leonardo, never speak those words around any but me,” I said, placing my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Men have burned for far less! Women, too!”

  “Yes, women.” Leonardo sighed. “Cathars thought better of them than Roma does. Though Mama told me a poetic story about how Satan created a beautiful woman called Lilith to seduce other angels into fighting with him against God. The angels fought fiercely and broke the heavens, but their bodies were overcome. Their souls fell. Then nine long, heavy days and nights dropped down from the heavens, thicker than blades of grass or drops of rain, until God got angry and decided that women would never again pass through the gates of heaven. I like the way time falls down, like a f
abric, creating the world, but the story does seem to contradict the way Cathars treated women, letting them be priests.”

  “Women priests. That would be one reason for the Pope to call for a crusade.”

  “The other reason being the Cathar treasures.” Leonardo shrugged.

  I stared at Leonardo. “What do you know of those treasures?”

  “I don’t know where they are, but I know they’re real. Holy artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, manuscripts from the Temple in Jerusalem, powerful ancient things still held in secret by Cathars. I wonder what secret about your parents the Cathars were protecting?” Leonardo asked. “Maybe something about a treasure, something like the Ark? Or something else from the Old Testament? What kind of spider is that? Do you see it, Luca, the one with the brown stripes?”

  Leonardo crawled off into a tangle of vines, leaving me sitting very still, wondering about the strange coincidences of life that had led me to a uniquely gifted boy descended from Cathar stock. My arms crawled with goose bumps. Then a galloping horse appeared on the crest of a distant hill, distracting me from my reverie.

  “A horse, that’s what I should make,” Leonardo cried, sitting up from under a vine. A cluster of sun-burnished purple grapes had wrapped itself around his ear, and with his golden curls and his hands full of insects and his lucco stripped off because of the heat, he looked for all the world like a Dionysian cherub. “I should make a horse of clay, like Ginori, a small model—”

  “Finish the buckler,” I said. “Let’s please your papa. He’s unhappy enough about having to pay me a salary. If you can call it a salary. I’d make more money begging on the streets of Florence, and Florentines aren’t generous to their beggars, I assure you!”

  “You don’t depend on Papa’s money for your living,” Leonardo said slyly. “You’re rich. You own this vineyard and you have a lot of money in the Medici bank, I overheard Signore Cosimo saying that to Signore Ficino.”