Twice in Time

by Manly Wade Wellman

  Thus I mused, in the blackest of humors, until a faint stirring sound at the window made me lift my eyes. A small, childlike face hung there—the face of the deceptively handsome dwarf of Guaracco.

  He cautioned me to silence with a tiny finger on his lips, then, with the utmost suppleness and skill, thrust his wisp of a body between the iron bars. How even so small a creature could do it, I have no idea; but in two seconds he stood in front of me, smoothing out the wrinkles of his little surcoat.

  "What do you here?" I demanded.

  "It was easy," he chuckled. "By a vine I swung from the street and over the wall. In a tuft of brambles I lurked, until the sentry walked by. I am here with a message from Ser Guaracco, your master and mine."

  "Well?" I prompted, a faint hope wakening in me. Guaracco had claimed some influence. Perhaps he was bestirring himself on my behalf.

  "The message," said the dwarf, "is this: Hanging is an easy death and a swift."

  "Hanging?" I echoed. "I am to be hanged?"

  "Perhaps." The little head wagged wisely. "That is the punishment for brawlers, and killers in hot blood. But there are other punishments." He smiled up impudently. "A witch, a devil's apostle, for instance, may be burned at the stake. By comparison, a sorry end."

  I grew ironic myself. "Your riddles become easy to read, imp," I said. "Ser Guaracco is anxious that I make no claims of coming to him miraculously—that I say nothing of being nourished and ordered to assist him in his intrigues."

  "They breed quick minds where you come from," said the dwarf.

  "Go back," I told him. "Back, and say that I know his selfish reason, but that his advice is good. I will not involve him in my ruin. Better to hang than to burn."

  The little fellow nodded quickly, turned and wriggled out between the bars like a lizard.

  Time wore on, and I felt weary and hungry. Finally, pushing my stool back so that I could lean in the corner, I dozed off. A rough voice awakened me.

  "God's wounds, knave, you do slumber at the very lip of death! Rise and come with me. Lorenzo the Magnificent has sent for you."

  I got to my feet and rubbed my eyes. Night had come, and I walked out of my dark cell toward the light held at the open door. Two men in steel-mounted leather waited, a bristle-bearded captain and a lanky swordsman with a scarred cheek.

  Between them I walked away into a long hall, around a corner, across an open courtyard—it was a clear, starry night overhead—and into a building beyond. A sentry challenged us in the arras-hung vestibule we entered. At an explanatory word from the bearded captain, we waved me through a curtained doorway.

  The room in which we came to a halt was not spacious, but lofty, and lighted by no less than eight lamps on tables and brackets, or hung by chains from the groined ceding. The walls were frescoed with scenes and figures of Grecian mythology, and the floor was richly carpeted.

  At a table of polished ebony with inlaid borders and figures of ivory, sat Lorenzo de Medici, in a magnificent dove-gray houppelande with furred neck and wrists. His ugly face was toward us. Beside him was stationed a scribe or secretary, in the hooded gown of a monk, busy with pen and ink.

  But, standing before the table with back toward us, was a long, spare man with a red pate. He could be none but Guaracco. And he was speaking as we entered, in the gentle, plausible manner he could affect so well.

  "Magnificence," he was saying smoothly, "if to be related to the young man is a crime, I must plead guilty. It is true that I arranged for his education, as Ser Andrea Verrocchio testified before you just now. But concerning this butchery of your poor servant, I must say that I have no reaction save surprise and sorrow."

  He was clearing his skirts of me then.

  Lorenzo leaned back in his chair of state. It was a square-made armchair of massive carved wood.

  "I wonder, I wonder," the ruler of Florence almost crooned. His eyes probed Guaracco like sharp points, and if anything could unsettle the sorcerer-scientist's aplomb, it would be such a regard. "It is possible," continued Lorenzo, "that you assigned him to the task of murdering Gido? But here is the young man himself. His story may be revealing."

  The captain who had brought me now thrust me forward with a push of thick knuckles in my back. Lorenzo's eyes met mine, and I returned him as level a stare as possible.

  "Stand aside, Guarracco," commanded Lorenzo. "Now, young man, your name?"

  "Leo Thrasher," I replied.

  "Leo—what?"

  And Lorenzo shook his head over my surname, which all Italians have found difficult. The clerk, pen in hand, asked me how to spell it.

  "A barbarous cognomen, which bespeaks the barbarous fellow," remarked Lorenzo sententiously. "What defense have you to offer?"

  "Only that I did not murder your guardsman, but killed him in a fair fight," I made respectful reply.

  Guaracco, standing against the wall, gave me a little nod of approval and drew in his lips, as though to council prudence.

  Lorenzo turned and took several sheets of writing from his monkish companion.

  "According to the testimony of others, you were the aggressor," said he. "You interfered, and struck him after he had fallen from his horse."

  "He flogged the beast cruelly," I protested. "I used my bare fist upon him, and he drew his sword. I say, I but defended myself."

  "Do not contradict His Magnificence," the middle-aged clerk cautioned me bleakly.

  "And do not traduce the name of poor dead Gido," added Lorenzo. His eyes still raked me. "I have lost a good servant in him."

  "Perhaps," I said, on sudden inspiration, "I can make good his loss."

  "How?" exclaimed Lorenzo, and his black eyes narrowed. "As a swordsman in my guard? But Gido had conquered hundreds."

  "I conquered Gido," I reminded him, despite the fact that Guaracco was signaling again for prudence. Lorenzo saw those signals, and turned in his chair.

  "Ha, Guaracco, by the bones of the saints! I do begin to understand it. You'll have planned that this creature of yours might rise on the dead shoulders of his victim, and be taken into my service as an invincible blade. Then, being near me, and myself unguarded—"

  "As heaven is my judge, this is not my doing!" exclaimed Guaracco, unstrung at last.

  I spoke again, to save myself and him, too.

  "If I cannot be trusted to guard Your Magnificence, I have other worthy gifts." I thought a moment, marshaling what latter-day science my memory still retained. "I can build bridges. I can make war machines of various kinds. I can show you how to destroy fortresses—"

  "Indeed?" broke in Lorenzo. "How came you by all this knowledge? More of Guaracco's doing, I make no doubt. He is whispered to be a sorcerer." Another of his darted sidelong looks made the tall man shake violently. "You, too, young man? Death is the severe penalty for black magic."

  I recognized defeat, and shrugged my shoulders in exasperation.

  "I shall not weary you with further pleas, Your Magnificence," I said. "Call me wizard as well as murderer. I am neither, but you are determined to destroy me. As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

  The captain at my elbow made a motion as though to drag me away, but Lorenzo lilted one long, white hand, with a many-jeweled ring upon the forefinger.

  "Wait! Tell me—what was that you said?"

  "I said, as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

  "Hanged for a sheep as for a—" A grin came, slowly, as if it did not well know the way to that rugged face. It made Lorenzo strangely handsome. "Neatly said, my Bacchus!" He spoke to the clerk. "Write that down. Here we have one gift that was never won from yonder dull Guaracco."

  I was stunned at the zest with which he repeated the cliché.

  "Why, Your Magnificence!" I said, wonderingly, "it is but a saying, a handful of old words."

  "Yet the thought is new, a new thing under the sun. Say on, Leo the Witty. If you are an assassin set to kill me, your tongue is as tempered as your sword."

  He calle
d the phrase new and, of course, it was. The Fifteenth Century had never heard it before. Every cliche must have been devastating in its time.

  I groped in my mind for another, and the works of William Shakespeare, a good century in the future, came to my rescue.

  "Since I am graciously permitted to plead my case once more," I said, "let me but remind Your Magnificence that the quality of mercy is not strained; it drops as the gentle rain from heaven upon the earth beneath—"

  "Excellent!" applauded Lorenzo. "Clerk, have you written it all?" He smiled upon me the more widely and winningly. "You go free, young sir. Swordsmen I can buy at a ducat a dozen, but men of good wit and ready tongue are scarce in these decayed times. Tomorrow, then, you shall have a further audience with me."

  I bowed myself away, scarce crediting my good fortune. But, as I walked down the palace steps and through the gate, Guaracco fell into step beside me. Under his half-draped black cloak I caught the outline of that pistol he had invented.

  "I have nothing to say to you," I growled. "I have washed my hands of you. And you washed your hands of me yonder, when my life hung by a thread."

  "I never pledged myself to you," he reminded, "nor did I demand a pledge of you—only obedience. Instead of death, you win favor from the Medici. When you go back tomorrow, you go under new orders from me."

  And thus I was deeper than ever in his strong, wicked clutch.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Court of Lorenzo

  Perhaps it is odd, and yet not so odd, that I remember no more of that particular walk, of my warm disgust at Guaracco's confident leer, of his insistence on my aid to him. It is my fixed belief that, during our conversation, he found and took the opportunity to throw upon me his hypnotic spell. He could do that almost as well as the best Twentieth Century psychologists.

  Walking together thus on the way to Verrocchio's bottega, I entranced and somnambulistic, he alert and studied, there must have been strong talking by Guaracco and reception listening by me. He must have planted in my dream-bound mind that I was his friend and debtor, that I must share Lorenzo's favor with him, Guaracco.

  What I do remember is the next afternoon, and an equerry from the palace presenting himself before an impressed Verrocchio, with a message summoning me to his master. I went, clad in my simple best—the decent doublet and hose which Guaracco had given me on my first evening at his house, my red mantle, and a flat velvet cap with a long drooping feather. With a little shock of pleased astonishment, I saw that the equerry had brought me a horse—the same fine gray over which I had fallen out with the late lamented Gido.

  "The beast is a present from the Magnificent," I was informed as I mounted.

  To the palace we rode and there, while my horse was cared for by the equerry, I was conducted through a great courtyard to a rich garden among high hedges of yew, trimmed to a blocky evenness, with nichelike hollows for stone seats or white statues of Grecian style. There were roses, both on bushes and climbing briars, flowering shrubs in clumps and ordered rows, a perfectly round little pool with water lilies—all luxurious and lovely, though perhaps a bit too formally ordered. In the center of this, under a striped awning, lounged Lorenzo and his friends on cushioned seats of gilded wood and leather.

  To the four other guests I was introduced as Ser Leo. His Magnificence still shied at pronouncing my barbarous surname. And I bowed to each as his name was spoken. First there was Lorenzo's younger brother and codespot, Giuliano, the same cavalier who had ridden with Lorenzo upon me at the moment of Gido's death. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, even as Lorenzo was one of the ugliest.

  Almost as highly honored was an elderly churchman with a fine, merry face and plain but rich vestments—Mariotto Arlotta, the aristocratic abbot of the woodland monastery of Camaldoli. His repute, I found, was that his repartee was the sharpest and readiest in all the state of Tuscany, and indeed he jested in a lively, though ecclesiastical, fashion.

  Close beside him stood a plump, courteous young man in his middle twenties, Sandro Botticelli the rising court painter.[*6] Him I found friendly, though moody.

  The last man of the group, and the youngest, was an adolescent poet, Agnolo Poliziano. Uglier even than Lorenzo, he was wry-necked, crooked-mouthed, beak-nosed, and bandy-legged.[*7] Yet, for all this sorry person and ungrown youth, he was eloquent and thoroughly educated. From him I was to learn, in after days, much of what a man must know to shine as cultured in Fifteenth Century Florence.

  "A young sparkle-wit, friends," Lorenzo told the others in presenting me. "He was thrown in my way, I nothing doubt, with the thought that he might assassinate me. Yet am I drawn to him by the lustrant wisdom of his speech. 'As well hang for a sheep as for a lamb,' he defied me yesterday."

  He paused, while the saying went around the delighted group, from mouth to merry mouth.

  "If he is dangerous, yet shall I keep him, as I keep the lions at the Piazza del Signoria. Guard me, all of you, from any weapon save his tongue." Once more he turned to me. "What of that sorcerer cousin of yours, Guaracco?"

  To my own surprise I found myself pleading earnestly and eloquently for Guaracco. It was as if I had been rehearsed in the task, and indeed I probably was, by Guaracco himself. Hypnotists, I say again, can do such things. In the end Lorenzo smiled, and seemed far less ugly.

  "By the mass, I wish my own kinsmen spoke so well on my behalf," he said to the others. "Ser Leo, your eloquence saved you yesterday, and today it recommends Guaracco. He is dull, I have thought, but he knows something of science. I am minded to send for him, for all he is a wizard."

  "Sorcery cannot prevail against pure hearts," contributed the Abbot Mariotto, at which all laughed heartily.

  The equerry who had conducted me was dispatched to search for and bring Guaracco. Meanwhile I was served with wine by a bold-eyed maid servant in tight blue silk, and entreated to join the conversation. It was turning just then on the subject of a new alliance of the Italian powers against possible Turkish invasion.

  "The threat of the infidel comes at an opportune time," Lorenzo pointed out. "Taunted and menaced, we Christians forget our differences and draw together for our common safety. The Sultan dares not attack us, we dare not quarrel among ourselves, and peace reigns."[*8]

  "Your Magnificence does not like war, then?" I ventured.

  He shook his ugly crag of a head. "Not a whit. It is expensive."

  "And vulgar," added Botticelli.

  "Aye, and dangerous," chimed in the poet Poliziano.

  "And in defiance of heaven's will," sighed the abbot, as though to crown the matter.

  "And yet," Lorenzo resumed, "I bethink me that it is well for a state to prepare for war, that others may fear, and be content to keep peace. I have it in mind, Ser Leo, that you spoke yesterday of war engines."

  "I did," was my reply, but even as I spoke I was aware how poorly my scrambled memory might serve me. "For instance, I might design a gun that shoots many times."

  "Ha, some of Guaracco's witchcraft!" exclaimed Lorenzo at once.

  "Not in the least," I made haste to say. "Nothing but honest science and mechanics, may it please Your Magnificence."

  In my mind the form and principle of machine-gunnery became only half clear. I wished that I had mentioned something else.

  But Lorenzo would not be dissuaded from knowing all about my oft-shooting gun. He sent Poliziano for paper and pencils and ordered me to draw plans. I made shift in some fashion to do a picture of a gun-carriage, with wheels, a trail and a mounting of, not one barrel but a whole row, ten or more.

  "It is nothing of particular brilliance," objected the poet. "A rank of arquebusiers would serve as well."

  "Aye, but if we have not overmany ranks of arequebusiers?" countered Lorenzo, and gave me a most generous smile. "A single man, I think, could serve and air and fire this row of guns. Ten such machines could offer a full hundred shot. Well aimed and timely discharged, that hundred shot might decide a great battle."<
br />
  Encouraged, I offered a variation of the idea, a larger and wider gun emplacement with, not small barrels, but regular cannon placed in a row and slightly slanted toward the center. These, I suggested, could be so trained as to center their fire on a single point. The bank of cannon, wheeled into position and the fuses lighted in quick succession, could throw a shower of heavy shot against a single small area upon a rampart or wall, battering it open.

  "Right you are!" applauded Lorenzo. "It would outshine the greatest battering-ram in all Christendom."

  "It may be improved," I continued, "by explosive shot in the cannon."

  "Explosive shot?" Giuliano repeated in sharp protest. "How, Ser Leo? Is not all shot solid? Can lead and iron explode?"

  "Yes, with powder and a fuse inside," I said at once, though none too surely.

  "Now nay," he argued. "What would prevent such a shot from exploding in the very mouth of the cannon, belike splitting its barrel and doing injury to our own soldiers?"

  I had to shake my head, saying that I could not answer definitely just then.

  "Then another time," said Lorenzo kindly. "In the meanwhile"—he picked up my two drawings—"these will go to my armorers, for models to be made. Ser Leo can draw us other things, as well."

  "He draws notably," contributed Botticelli.

  Evening had drawn on, lamps were lighted, and we had supper in the garden, a richer and spicier meal than I care for. There was plenty of wine, and all drank freely of it, not excepting the abbot. Finally some fruits and ice-cooled sherbet were brought, and at this dessert we were joined by five or six ladies.

  Most beautiful and arresting among these was the famous Simonetta Vespucci, the reigning toast of Florence. She was no more than eighteen years old, as I judged, but mature in body and manner, a tall, slenderly elegant lady, a little sloping in the shoulders but otherwise beyond criticism in the perfection of her figure. Her abundant hair gleamed golden, and her proud face was at once warmly and purely handsome.