I pushed the wine bottle back into his fist, and let him go. With whip and spur I sped on my way.
But when I arrived I was too late, even if I had had the power and knowledge to divert that misdeed.
Volterra gushed flame from within her walls. Around the town capered the victorious troops, some of them drunker than the courier I had met, others staggering under burdens of loot. Even from afar I heard yells and laughter. The camp, a great field of tents beneath the hill that supported the town, was almost deserted, and into it I spurred. By chance I came almost at once to the commander's pavilion and there I found Federigo d'Urbino, sitting alone.
He slouched forward on his folding chair, his long, black-tufted chin clutched in a hard hand. His face was as somber as his armor was bright. He glared up as I swung out of the saddle.
"You come with dispatches from Florence, I make no doubt," he growled. "Ride back and tell that blood-drinker, Lorenzo, that I will never draw sword for him again, not if he seek to buy me with all the treasure of Croesus."
"What is this drivel?" I snapped back. "Is not this atrocity your bidding?" In my revulsion, I forgot that I was calling to account the foremost soldier of the peninsula. But he only shook his head.
"Not my bidding. Lorenzo's. I—I have a reputation as a gentleman and a merciful Christian."
"To be sure it was Lorenzo's bidding," said a voice behind me, a voice that often had a way of breaking in on conversations. "You, my dear young Cousin, heard Lorenzo speak to me, give me a message."
I whirled upon Guaracco, thrusting my angry face into his.
"You dared order this pillage and destruction, as though you were Lorenzo's agent?"
"Aye, that," he admitted with the utmost good cheer. "You can bear me witness before Ser Federigo. His Magnificence was plain: 'That physician is often most cruel—' "
"So you interpreted his thoughtless speech, you murdering dog!" I almost choked, and out of my scabbard I swept my blade. "Draw, before I cut you down and rid Earth of your eternal deviltry!"
The red beard rustled in his old smile of mockery. "I have no sword, Leo," he said, as though in chiding reminder. "I bear only—this."
From under the fringe of his mantle his hand stole into view, with his self-invented pistol ready cocked. Even at that, I might have fallen upon him and forced him to shoot, perhaps killing me, but Federigo d'Urbino, who did not recognize that deadly little weapon for what it was, sprang up and caught my arm.
"Do not add one more murder to this massacre, young sir," he begged me. "It is possible that Ser Guaracco truly misunderstood. Yet—" he turned away. "Somehow I must stop these fiends at their hell's work."
Left alone with me, Guaracco stepped warily out of my reach, pistol still leveled. "It is true that I urged Lorenzo's words upon the army, and it was none too loth to sack the town. I have even taken a piece of loot myself. Come and see."
At some time during that speech he had brought his other hand into view. Something gleamed softly and slyly between thumb and finger—his great lustrous pearl, full of spells.
I fought against its power, as against a crushing weight, and indeed I did not lose my wits. But I grew tremulous and vague of thought, and let him coax me to sheathe my sword.
"Come and see," he repeated, and I went with him, slowly and a little drunkenly, to a tent not far from the commander's.
And there he showed me what he had seized from some Volterran shop or warehouse. A great soapy block of alum, reflecting subdued gray and blue lights, lay upon a length of canvas. It was almost exactly cubical, and a good yard along the edge.
"I knew that I must get hold of this piece," Guaracco told me, "and so I passed on Lorenzo's orders. You must not blame me, Leo, if I show scientific zeal."
Some worse motive had really caused him to start the cruelties, but I gazed at the greasy-looking crystal, and its light seemed to drive out some of his spell. In it I saw even a gleam of hope. It would help me to a completion of the time reflector. Then I would be quit of the Renaissance, its frustrations and fantasies. Above all, I would be quit of the abominable Guaracco.
CHAPTER XIV Almost—
Now, if ever, I can offer proof that this is not fiction. If it were, and I were the hero, I would have tried to slaughter Guaracco there in the camp before sacked Volterra, despite his triumphant exhibition of the mammoth alum-crystal, despite his ready explanations, despite the pistol he kept ready in his hand. That would have been the honorable, the courageous, the dramatic course.
But it happens that the story is true, and that I was, and am of human clay. For two years, Guaracco had alternately intimidated and cajoled me, with judicious applications of hypnotic influence. My ultimate emotion was only one of hopeful relief. If this be shameful, make the most of it.
We left the camp together, almost like friends, with some peasant attendants and a two-wheeled cart to carry the piece of alum. We did not go directly to Florence, but sought a rather rough road that took us around and then to Guaracco's house. There we placed the alum, with infinite care and numerous helping hands, in the cellar workshop.
Guaracco assuredly knew more about grinding lenses than I did. Probably it was one more Twentieth-Century science he had developed from his hypnotic interviews with my subconscious self. Too, the alum was a larger and softer piece of raw material than the fragments of glass I had worked with. In one day he roughed it into shape, and in two more, with the help of the swordsmith, he made of it a perfect double-convex lens. This, two feet in diameter, was a gray-gleaming discus that dealt weirdly with light.
At length the time came for the machine to be assembled. We took our place in the same upstairs chamber from which, in that Twentieth Century which would now reclaim me, I had vanished; the same where my friend Astley waited, at my direction, prepared for my return.
I helped to bolt the rods into a framework, and lifted into place Guaracco's battery, a massive but adequate thing inside a bronze case worked over in strange bas-reliefs.
I think that case came from the Orient. It was to do the work I had done with many smaller batteries in my first reflector. Into sockets fitted his electric light globes, most cunningly wrought—again by Guaracco, in secret.
"They are not the best," he said. "I understand," and he smiled wispily, as always when he referred to his findings through hypnosis, "that an element called vanadium is the best for the filaments inside."
"It is more than the best—it is necessary," I pronounced. That much stuck in my mind.
He shook his head. "I have used manganese. That, I have come to believe"—and again his wispy smile— "is almost as good. Obtainable, too, as vanadium is not." He cocked his lustrous eyes upward. "Did you not once predict, my dear adopted Cousin, that a Genoese friend of the Vespucci family—Colombo— would discover a new world in the west?"
"I did."
"And is not vanadium to be mined in those latitudes?… Just so. But not elsewhere. We must make this substance serve."
He studied the camera apparatus, slipped the lens of alum into place and secured it with clamps. Then he set the time gauge.
"May first, nineteen thirty-nine," he said aloud. "And so much allowance for the coming change in calendar which you predict. It was on May first, nineteen thirty-nine that your friend was to bring in a carcass from which your structure would be reap-proximated, eh?" He straightened up from his tinkering. "Now, Leo, do you wish to say good-by to Lisa?"
I had not forgotten her; rather I had fought against thinking too much of this sweet, restrained girl whom I refused as a gift from Guaracco, but to whom my heart turned in spite of all. His speaking her name wakened certain resolutions I had made. I left the room immediately.