At the end of winter, Lorenzo entertained Galleazo Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan in lavish manner. Andrea Verrocchio was pageant master during those glittering days, and I helped him to plan processions of horsemen and costumed figures, routs, balls, receptions and miracle plays, and even a warlike afternoon of jousting in one of the public squares.
Here banks of seats were erected all around a cleared space, so that the square resembled a stadium or hippodrome, and various Florentine cavaliers tilted against the followers of the Milanese ruler. Lorenzo offered, in what he must have thought a kindly mood, to provide me with armor, a lance, and a war horse, that I might take part in the activity. When I declined, he thought I was being only modest.
"You are an artist and scientist," he argued, "and therefore, among free Florentines at least, a gentleman and the peer of any. Do not be afraid of these lords with their lances."
But I managed to beg off, though the sport was not as dangerous as I had surmised. For one thing, the opposing cavaliers did not dash foil upon each other. They rode on opposite sides of a paling, endeavoring to strike or push across it with lance point against shield or helmet.
For another thing, professional soldiers were barred, as apt to forget themselves. Giuliano de Medici, handsome and dashing, wore a knot of ribbon tied upon his mail-clad arm by the beautiful Simonetta, and overthrew two opponents. Otherwise, the jousting struck me as rather tame.
Lorenzo took special pride in showing his art treasures to Sforza who, as Poliziano later told me, cried out that mere gold and silver could not approximate such riches of the soul. And when the Milanese departed they were too greatly impressed to hide their admiration—which was what Lorenzo had hoped.
It had been Guaracco's earnest ambition to make a friend of Galleazo Sforza, but after a carefully contrived interview on the final day of the visit, he sought me out at Verrocchio's bottega, shaking his head.
"Sforza is too absolute a tyrant among his Milanese," he complained.
"Is money not something?" I suggested teasingly, for in those days we were on terms of something resembling good fellowship.
He shook his foxy red head. "Money is little, to me. I want power. I want wills to be bowed to mine, cities to rise or fall at my lifted hand, great men to go on missions here and there with my words and wishes upon their lips. I want the oceans to shake with the passage of my ships, the continents to vibrate under the marching feet of my armies. I want to rule!"
"Money rules," I reminded. "Look at Lorenzo. The founder of his house was a druggist, a simple maker of pills. Yet, by the accumulation and the wise use of gold—"
"Gold!" snorted Guaracco. "It buys food, clothes, wine, music—but of what value is it, save to attract thieves? It was powerful with the Medici only through generations of careful planning, and I cannot wait so long. Cold steel is the better metal, if held by a brave man and ruled by a wise one."
I began to appreciate something of the ambition that stirred this charlatan—genius.
"I followed sorcery from boyhood," Guaracco went on, "because, at first, I believed in it. As you yourself once put it, a true sorcerer could travel winds, chain lightnings, know and rule the Universe. Even when I found that supposed enchantments were but a fraud, I remained a student and practitioner of the false art—and I have won some rewards.
"You saw my coven of deluded witch-worshippers; they serve me in many ways, because of fear or awe or fascination that they would never dare if I offered them only gold. Too, a great many nobles and merchants respect and fear me because I seem to foretell events, can cast horoscopes, and apparently summon devils. And one or two are well within my power. I gave a certain man poison, for instance, to serve a certain other man. That certain other man owes me both gratitude for the vengeance, and fear lest I betray him."
"But now you follow true science," I said. "You told me so."
"Science—and sorcery of a kind. "
I shook my head. "There is no such thing as sorcery."
"Is there not? Come with me.
Once again I accompanied him to his house nearby. The front room was changed, in that there was a massive square table with a thick velvet covering extending to the floor on all sides. In its center stood a great bowl of silver-coated glass.
Guaracco drew the heavy curtains, so that it was quite dark in the room, and lighted a candle. Then, at the clap of his hands, the two dwarfs entered with a great ewer of water between them. From this Guaracco filled the bowl to the brim.
"Look into it, Leo," he bade me, as the dwarfs departed.
I did so. "What then?" I challenged him. "Here is a simple basin of water."
"You are sure of that?" he persisted. "Thrust in your hands and convince yourself."
Again I obeyed him. It was water, sure enough, and beneath it the surface of the bowl was smooth and normal.
"I see no wonder," I said to Guaracco.
"What did you expect to find in that bowl? The face of Lisa?" And he laughed. "Favor me, kinsman, by blowing out the candle."
I blew it out. The room fell all dark at once. No, not all, for a faint filtered glow came up from the bowl of water.
"A chemical trick," I pronounced immediately. "You have put phosphorous in there."
"Did you not see the water poured from pitchers?" he asked. "But I make no argument. Look into the bowl again."
As he spoke, he put in his own hand and stirred the liquid into ripples. I saw nothing but a disturbed surface, like a tiny ocean in a gale, with light beneath. Then the ripples grew less, slowed, finally departed. I gazed deep into the radiant water.
From its bottom a face looked up at me.
Lisa!
I think I spoke her name aloud, and put forth a hand to touch her forehead. But my finger only dipped into water, and Guaracco laughed his familiar mocking peal.
"You were deceived, for all your assurance," he taunted me. Quickly he moved to uncurtain the windows, letting in the light. "See, it was simple. I arranged it an hour ago to mystify one of the Milanese. A hole in the table, a glass bottom in the bowl— and, under the velvet, a couch whereon Lisa lay with a light beside her—"
He lifted a corner of the cloth, and Lisa slowly emerged.
"It was as if you looked upon her through a window," Guaracco summed up. He saw that I gazed reproachfully at the girl, and laughed once again.
"Now nay, Leo, she did not deceive you of herself. I put her to sleep, as you know I can do—with this."
He held it up in his fingers—the glowing pearl that more than once before had drawn forth my wits. Staring at it unguardedly, I felt myself ensnared before I could set up my defense. He caught my elbow with his other hand, easing me into a chair as mists closed about me.
When I awoke, Guaracco sat at the velvet-covered table, scribbling hastily upon a tablet of white paper.
"You will rejoice," he said, seeing my eyes open. "I took opportunity to open again that closed memory of yours."
"What this time?"
"Details of the machine you forgot. The time reflector."
At once I lost my resentment of his sly assertion of power over my senses.
"Full details?" I cried.
"Enough, I think, to build the machine itself."
And then I saw Lisa's eyes, turned mournfully upon me, as though already she bade me good-bye.
Notes:
*9 - The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight," existed in manuscript form as early as 1371. The theory of Earth's roundness, common among intelligent geographers in the Fifteenth Century, is set out at length by Mandeville, who describes a reputed voyage nearly around the world in his own time.
CHAPTER XII
The New Reflector
Even if I could, I do not think I would get down exact details of a machine which is so apt to cause trouble as the one which Guaracco had retrieved in theory from the waste places of my mind. The fact is, he kept the plans to himself, and questioned me only now and then, sometimes hypnotizing me
for the questions, sometimes not. And there were bits of science which even he could not digest.
"These exact measurements of the steel frame parts, how can we achieve them?" he would ask. "You tell me, in your sleep, of micrometers, yet how can we design a micrometer? How, even knowing its principle, can we make it without proper tools? How was the first micrometer made?"
Automatic lathes, alloy charts, and welding torches were equally unobtainable. Guaracco did the next best thing. He sought out a master swordsmith and in some adroit way—I think his witch-cult helped him—bound the fellow to his service by terror and awe. This craftsman, with all his tools and materials, he transported to the country estate, and there set him to work painstakingly shaping the metal skeleton of the reflector mechanism.
Electrical engineering Guaracco learned from the ground up. Here, once again, I must needs be hypnotized and my subconscious mind probed. My partner began with sticks of sealing wax and glass rods, rubbing them with fur or silk, and studying the effects of the static charges. From that he progressed to what I was able to remember as a Leyden jar, contrived by his own cunning hands after several unsuccessful trials. Finally came simple batteries, but here he kept back from me the knowledge he had mined from my own inhibited memory. He refused to tell the acids and metals involved.
When I insisted, interruption came—a messenger from Lorenzo, asking how I progressed with the flying machine.
"You reminded him," I accused Guaracco in private.
"How ungrateful you are, Leo!" He snickered unabashedly, fingering his red beard. "Go to Florence and make your report. I shall work here in our laboratory, and promise you that I will have progress to show when you return."
To Florence, perforce, I went. Lorenzo received me with some impatience, in his frescoed audience chamber at the palace.
"Well, young sir, what of the wings you were making?" he demanded. "I gave you and Guaracco money for your experiments, and it is high time you made me some return."
I exhibited my small models, all that I had to show since the breaking of my first wings. He was interested, but not completely satisfied, and I regretted having mentioned aviation to him. Yet, I knew, men could fly. I remembered seeing them, in that age whence I came and which itself was yet to come—men flying singly or in parties with the aid of great spread-pinioned contrivances.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo was giving me orders.
"I shall see this device take shape under my own eyes. At my villa in Fiesole is a great guest house. Go you thither, set up your shop, and have sent to you all that you need. Work where I can watch."
I bowed acceptance, and went to Fiesole. There messengers brought me the remains of my wings and rudder, also more leather, silk and staves, while Lisa came at my urgent plea to help with the sewing. She made a considerable impression on the various guests who thronged Lorenzo's villa. Botticelli wanted to paint her, Poliziano wrote six sonnets about her, Giuliano spoke so courtly to her that Simonetta's eyes took on a green glow, and to a certain captain of mercenaries, a Spaniard named Hernando Villareal, I was forced to voice a warning.
"The young lady is working on my machine," I told him, "at my wish and under my protection. She does not welcome your pressing attentions."
"By God's blood," he sneered. We were walking in a grove of poplars, to which I had drawn him for privacy. "I think, Ser Leo, that it is you who find the situation unwelcome."
"I do not like it either, if that will content you."
He caressed his long moustache of black silk. "Now nay, it does not content me a whit. I shall say to her what I please, whenever I please."
"Few words are best," I made reply. "If you speak to her again, I shall deprive your company of its captain." And I turned and walked away.
He was in a towering rage, and made haste in search of a friend to bear me a formal defiance. The first he met was Giuliano, who had not forgotten the cudgeling I had given him, and the friendship he had sworn. Giuliano informed the Spaniard that I was the most dangerous antagonist in Christendom, in whose hands a wand was worse than a sword, and a sword itself a finger of Fate. Whereat Captain Hernando Villareal left Fiesole the same day, indeed left Florence, and I never heard speak of him again.
When my wings were completely repaired and improved, I made a second attempt, springing from the eaves of the guest house while Lorenzo and his friends watched. Again I failed badly, tumbling aslant through the air, but this time I managed to land upright on my feet, only spraining my ankle. My wings and other harness remained undamaged, and I was not distressed by Guaracco's ironic laughter.
"I count myself lucky," I said, and Giuliano ran out to support my limping steps. "My ankle will mend of itself. But my wings, being broken, would take much more labor and time."
"You have not a complete loss of labor to show," Lorenzo was considerate enough to say. "You came to ground a good ten paces beyond the house, farther than you might have leaped unaided."
"And had you leaped without wings you would have had worse hurt than your ankle," added Giuliano, though he had first disputed my theory of man's ability to fly. "For those two moments you were above ground, methought I saw your fabric hold you aloft. It broke your fall, at least."
This encouragement heartened me. "I shall yet succeed," I made bold to say, while a physician plucked the shoe from my injured foot. "It is not the fault of my theory, nor the weakness of my arms. I must learn, as a fledgling bird learns."
But my sprained ankle kept me for days at Fiesole, where I could practice no art save lute playing and repartee among those silken courtiers. Lisa insisted on remaining with me, most prettily concerned over my injury. After a day or so Guaracco appeared with some of his healing salves, to care for me with the apparent solicitude of a kinsman, to bow and utter compliments to the ladies, to discuss poetry with Poliziano, weapons with Giuliano, science and government with Lorenzo.
"I submit that my young Cousin Leo makes progress with his flying," he told the company. "Who can hold these first failures against him? Can he learn as a science, in a few days, the behavior that has been a born instinct of birds since the Creation?"
With more such talk, Guaracco helped to convince Lorenzo that I should continue my labors in the field of aviation. I came to realize that it was to Guaracco's interest that I do so. He wanted me to stay out of his way. He was carefully arranging that I not re-learn too much of the science I remembered only when in a trance.
The rest of that summer I was able to put off a third experiment with my wings—not that I did not want to fly, but that I dreaded failing and falling again before the eyes of my patron. During the winter I achieved several substitute offerings. These included a plan for draining some nearby swamps, which Lorenzo approved but did not act upon at once; a brief written outline of a new system of sword play for the palace guardsmen, which Lorenzo in high good humor caused me to demonstrate upon two very surprised and glum fencing-masters; and a suggestion, rather vague, about the use and purpose of antiseptics, at which Lorenzo laughed and which I could not demonstrate at all.
I made several attempts at fashioning both a microscope and a telescope, but I did not understand the accurate grinding of lenses, and nobody was skillful enough to show me. Also, even when I secured from Andrea Verrocchio's spectacle maker a pair of indifferent lenses that would serve, I could not bring them into proper relationship in a tube.
One thing I remembered well from my century, or rather the one before it, was Mark Twain's pleasant novel about the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. I was failing signally to duplicate the exploits of that hard-headed and blithe hero. Perhaps the Yankee, being an adroit and impassioned mechanic, knew the principles of all things from the ground up.
My science, first of all, had been sketchy and too derived. Second, I had been too interested in art, so that my less loved studies in chemistry, engineering, and physics had been shoved too far back in that now clouded brain of mine. Without Guaracco's hypnotism, hardly anythin
g of real complex practicality could be evoked. And with Guaracco's hypnotism, I was unable to see or appreciate the very things I was caused to remember.
Poor Andrea Verrocchio, who had hoped for so much from my drawing, dared to shake his untidy head over these scientific gropings of mine.
"His Magnificence will ruin a master painter to make a convenient philosopher," he mourned. And it was true that I had little or no opportunity that winter to paint the picture I had once visioned as my footprint in the sands of Renaissance time.
As for the time reflector, which Guaracco worked on with phenomenal energy and understanding, it took form and power as the cold weather passed us by. Among the things it lacked was a piece of alum large enough to make a lens, but the most notable alum mines of our knowledge were not far away— fifty miles to the southwest in the ancient town of Vofierra.
At that time, however, the Volterrans chose to refuse any trade or tribute to Lorenzo; even to defy him. It began to look as if the only alum we could get must be secured by theft or force.
CHAPTER XIII
The Fate of Volterra
Here was, indeed, what seemed a full stop to our hopes for completing the mechanism. I could think of nowhere to get alum in a large enough portion but in a mine. True, crystals may be built or fed, but I did not know how; and the only available mine was the one at Volterra.
That defiant city was a small one, but plucky and proud, with splendid defenses. As I mused, into my mind drifted a few lines of a poem I had heard very often in my other existence:
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