Struggling with my close-clamped eyelids, I managed to gaze up. Lisa's face was close above mine, all white except for the dark, worried eyes. She had taken my head in her lap.
"You are not dead, Leo?" she asked.
"Not I," I assured and I sat up. It was difficult, for I was bruised in all my limbs, and the laboriously fashioned wings and rudder were broken to bits. Guaracco descended from his post at the window, and came out into the yard.
"Not Icarus himself plunged so tragically from heaven," he jibed.
I rose to my feet, unstrapping the tangled wreckage.
"For a moment I flew," I defended myself. "The next time—"
"Must there be a next time?" interposed Lisa, who still trembled. "Pray heaven you do not seek to fly again."
"She pleads most prettily," Guaracco observed, stroking his beard. "Are you content to remain on the ground with her, Leo? Will you not leave flight to the birds, its proper masters?"
But I shook my head stubbornly.
"Not I. A bird is no more than an instrument working according to mathematical law. It is within the capacity of man to duplicate that instrument and its working. I shall try again, and I shall succeed."
"Send that I am present to watch," said Guaracco, chuckling.
But he was more helpful when, in the house, I stripped off my doublet and showed bruised ribs and shoulders. His many skills included that of mixing salves and ointments, and the sticky stuff he applied to my hurts helped them swiftly and greatly.
In any case, we had the bombs to offer Lorenzo.
CHAPTER XI Hopes of Escape
Bombs were a curiosity, but ours pleased Lorenzo greatly, when Guaracco and I returned to Florence with them. He gave us an audience, and later entertainment on the terrace of his villa in the pleasant green suburb of Fiesole.
"These things would do us credit in any battle," he was gracious enough to say. "Yet it is my hope to profit by some more peaceable marvel of yours. What, for example, of that flying machine?"
"I make progress."
I attempted to put him off, and Guaracco also labored to change the subject. We discussed the summer heat, and the threatened drying up of wells.
"May it please Your Magnificence," I made bold to say, "an irrigation plan might be drawn up. The waters of the Arno could supply the town in dryest season, and water the fields as well."
"That would benefit the people of my beautiful Florence," and the despot, with one of his softening smiles at play on the arrestingly ugly face.
"Again," I pursued, "does it not seem well to widen the streets of the town? A street should be wide as the houses are high."
"Make haste slowly," he bade me. "Finish the flying machine before you turn Florence into a paradise."
But an early autumn, with real Tuscany frost, enabled me to ask for time and a brighter day. As winter came on, I lived in Florence, working under Verrocchio at paintings, statues, metal work, and my own devices. In the evenings I had plenty of diversion, for the artist Sandro Botticelli showed himself willing to become my friend and sponsor in artistic society.
I was often entertained at great mansions. Once or twice I was present at informal dinners and discussions at Lorenzo's palace, and once at the house of Simonetta Vespucci herself. There I met her kinsman, Amerigo Vespucci, who had won fame as a geographer and map-maker. Visiting him was a tall, roan-haired young man from Genoa, a sailor and adventurer.
"Cristoforo Colombo," Vespucci introduced him to Botticelli and myself, as we stood warming ourselves before an open fire of aromatic wood.
"Colombo?" I repeated. The name did things to my maddeningly distorted recollections. "Colombo? Hark you sir, you intend to follow the sea for all your days?"
The roan-haired visitor nodded and smiled. "Aye, that. I have visited the infidel princes to the east, and Spain, and even England. I hope to go further some day."
"Go further?" I exclaimed excitedly. "I should think you will go further!" In my earnestness I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Ser Cristoforo," I said, "much of the world remains unclaimed, undreamed of. There are whole continents beside these we know—whole oceans and shoals of islands. It is fated for you to sail westward, to find a new world!"
"How, a new world?" he asked me, a little puzzled.
"This earth is round," I informed him weightily. "It is shaped like a ball, with oceans and lands at every quarter of it. In circumference it is nearly twenty-five thousand miles."
He burst into laughter at that, so hearty that Botticelli and some others looked up to see the reason.
"I see it now, Ser Leo!" cried Cristoforo Colombo. "You have been reading that strange book by the Englishman."
"What strange book?" I demanded, puzzled in my turn.
"John Mandeville was the Englishman's name, and he wrote his tale of wondrous travels a good hundred years ago. I bethink me, he even said that the circumference of the earth is something near your measurement, above twenty thousand English miles.[9] But to my mind, it is smaller than that, with India's most eastern spice islands not too many days' sailing out from the Azores."
"You tell us nothing new, young sir," Amerigo Vespucci said to me. "Surely only the simple country folk think that Earth is other than round and without end. The journey of the Sun and stars, the dropping down of a vessel's hull at the line of sky and sea, these prove the roundness of the Earth."
"And so I might have demonstrated by a voyage, had some prince given me ships," rejoined Colombo wistfully.
I could not help but assure him that this gift would come to him in the year 1492, from the ruler of Spain.
"By your leave, my friend, I shall wait until that happy day dawns," he said, with a bow.
And that incident cured me of making prophecies.
Yet I was successful in fashioning many devices, which served to appease Lorenzo, though I was so long in perfecting my flying machine. The most popular, to peasants and porters as well as to my companions in higher social scale, was the wheelbarrow.
As to my studies in art, I was able to contribute many suggestions which Verrocchio accepted gratefully, among them the rather obvious one that a painter or sculptor of the living figure should study anatomy. Such study was most difficult in Florence, for religious law frowned upon the godless cutting up of bodies that should have Christian burial.
However, Lorenzo once again showed himself ready to assist me, and I was enabled to visit the morgue, to study and even dissect bodies of paupers. Some of my sketches Verrocchio posted on the walls of his bottega as ideal studies, and we also assembled on a pedestal the complete skeleton of a horse, to be observed in making equestrian paintings and studies.
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.
9
The Travels of