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:
Whether Volterra's defenses were giant-built and god-begun I cannot say; but they were tremendously old and strong, what I was to see of them, walls of rough-cut stone that were said to go back to ancient Etruscan times. The city thus enclosed stood upon a huge olive-clad height, from which the sea was visible, a score of miles distant. Near at hand opened the dark mouths of the alum mines which were so suddenly forbidden to us. In fact, the Volterrans forcibly ejected certain Florentine commissioners who claimed a tribute for Lorenzo.
His Magnificence undoubtedly meant what he had once told me about wishing to avoid war as costly, dangerous, and ignoble. But this was too loud a challenge for even his considerable patience. In the spring of 1472 he called a meeting of the Signoria—the lot-chosen body of citizens who acted as public council—for discussion of the problem. It so happened that Guaracco himself, a Florentine resident by virtue of that house near Verrocchio's bottega was a member of this jury-like group of governors, and present at the meeting.
I, too, would have liked to attend, but it was impossible. Lorenzo had called for a secret session—proof of his concern over the matter. All I knew was that one of the Signoria, a conservative old fellow by the name of Tomasco Soderino, was intending to speak strongly for conciliation and peace. Perhaps he could restore friendship with the Volterrans, make it possible for me to secure my alum.
I wished Lisa were there, to talk serenely and pleasantly to me. But with Guaracco's permission she was visiting a friend, the abbess of a convent near Venice.
The meeting lasted all morning, and all afternoon, and at the end of it Guaracco came to seek me at Verrocchio's.
"It is all settled," he informed me, grinning triumphantly.
"Settled?" I repeated. "Peace, you mean?"
"War," he replied. "We take your needful alum by force."
I felt a little shocked. "But Soderino was going to—"
"Aye, and he did," Guaracco anticipated the end of the sentence. "Bleated about soft answers to turn away Volterran wrath, bleated for hours. I had an answer ready. I told Lorenzo that we could not make your flying machine without alum, and plenty of it."
"Alum is not for the flying machine," I protested, "but for the time reflector."
He gestured idly with a big hand. "Do you not think I know, boy? But we need alum, and what matter under which pretext we get it? Lorenzo is obsessed with desire to see men fly. My word was the final ounce in the balance to make him decide for war."
After that, things moved fast in Florence, because word arrived that the town of Volterra had employed a round thousand tough mercenaries to defend her ancient walls. Lorenzo immediately gathered four times that number of troops, and as their commander engaged Federigo d'Urbino, one of the most noteworthy soldiers of the Italian peninsula.[11]
He did not deign to take command himself, and restrained the younger and more fiery Giuliano from volunteering to lead the mounted lancers. But the brothers did lead the force in procession through the chief streets of the city.
To me that glittering spectacle was somehow ironic. The cavalry was, for the most part, French and Navarrese, the pike-trailing infantry largely Swiss and Swabian, the crossbow companies from Sicily, the artillery and seige train Spanish, and the whole cosmopolitan host sprinkled here and there with Scots, Hungarians, Englishmen, and Moors.
If any element was really missing, it was Florentine.
Yet that was the way the city-states of Italy fought—not with their own blood, but with professional adventurers. Perhaps something can be said for the system. Battles lacked the extreme ferocity of deadly enmity, for opposing generals were often old friends and comrades in arms, who were willing to win or lose, so to speak, on points. At any rate, the Florentine shopkeepers and artisans seemed pleased, and cheered those foreign soldiers as loudly as though a force of native Tuscans was marching away to war.
Guaracco, as leader of the party that advocated strife, went to the palace for permission to accompany the mercenaries. I was with him as he found Lorenzo, writing busily at his desk in the audience chamber.
"Go if you will," the ruler told Guaracco, without raising his eyes from the page. "I trust that this campaign is final."
"You mean, destruction of Volterra?" prompted Guaracco, like a lawyer wrenching an admission from a witness.
Lorenzo seemed to hear him only by half. "That physician is often most cruel," he murmured, as he resumed writing what looked to be a verse, perhaps a sonnet, "who appears most compassionate.'
To this moment I am sure that what he said was being fitted into his poem, and had nothing to do with the campaign. Even if I am wrong, it was a most equivocal answer. But Guaracco bowed as though he had received specific and welcome orders. Then he hurried away.
Perhaps I should have gone with him then, but I had no stomach for battle. I felt some uneasy guilt because with Federigo d'Urbino's train of seige ordnance went my multiple-cannon arrangement for battering down walls, and many of the crossbowmen carried weapons with Guaracco's lever improvement which I had clarified in a sketch.
A day I lingered in the town, which buzzed with excitement about the campaign. A whole night I lay wakeful in the cell-like room I still kept at Verrocchio's bottega. Something indefinable made me woefully nervous. Dawn had barely become bright before I dressed, drew on thigh-boots and leather riding-coat, girded myself with a sword and hurried to where my gray horse was stabled.
It was as if a voice called me to Volterra.
Yet, for all my strangely risen anxiety, I could not ride my poor horse to death. I did no more than thirty-five miles the first day, stopping the night at a peasant's hut. When in the morning I continued, before I had ridden an hour I met another horseman, galloping in the direction of Florence. He was a half-armored French lancer, with the velvet-edged sleeves of an under officer. Also, he was three-quarters drunk, and waved a grubby wine bottle at me.
"Way! Way!" he bawled. "I bear messages to Lorenzo!"
But I spurred forward and managed to seize his bridle.
"Tell me," I said earnestly, "how goes the fighting at Volterra?"
He started to laugh, and finished by hiccoughing. "Fighting?" he echoed scornfully. "Now nay, there was no fighting."
"How's that?" I persisted.
"We marched under the walls of the town, and bade them surrender. And"—he broke off to swig wine—"and they did!" More gulping laughter over something he deemed a joke. "Now, let me ride on with my dispatches, young sir."
"One word more," I begged, but he struck at me with the bottle.
It was of stone, and heavy, but I flung up my forearm to save my head and sustained only a musty drenching. With a prick of the spur, I forced my gray horse close against his mount, shifting my hand from his bridle to his collar, and with the other hand I wrenched the bottle away from him.
"Why is the army not returning?" I demanded, and shook him hard.
He lost his fierceness, but not his joy over what had happened.
"You cannot guess?" he flung back, with a soldier's contempt for one who does not understand military routine. "The lads are plundering. What else? So should I be plundering, if—"
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11
This famous general of mercenaries later commanded an army that fought against Lorenzo. War, to these soldiers of fortune, was a game and a business. There was no more lasting enmity between such mercenaries than there is today between lawyers who may have opposed each other in lawsuits.