A Bolt from the Blue

No, not pierced it, I amended with a relieved gasp… merely grazed the flesh. Though the bolt had torn through my trunk hose to hold me skewered like a bird on a spit, I found that I could still move my leg. Still, the bloody stain that was rapidly widening along that leg was alarming, as was the searing pain. But I was still in one piece and able to keep flying… That was, assuming that the craft remained intact.

More canvas abruptly rent, and the flying machine dipped and turned back in the direction from which I’d come. I gave the rudder a frantic pull, but the lever broke loose in my hand, the tail drooping like that of a defeated cockerel. I was headed down, and I would crash there amid the soldiers. My best hope was that I manage to take a few of those brutal men with me as I splintered apart.

My vanity made me pray that my corpse survived the impact in one neat piece.

As when I’d taken off, time slowed so that I was privy to every detail. From the distance, I heard the blare of trumpets sounding a charge… odd, because they seemed to echo from the forest and not the castle. Then, in a flash of silver, I saw bursting from the castle gates a magnificent chariot pulled by two black horses and carrying two dark-haired men, while whirling blades around them sang of victory and death. And, most strangely of all, the scores of painted soldiers that we’d set up among the trees the night before came abruptly to life, pouring onto the field on foot and on horses, their numbers far superior to the Duke of Pontalba’s men.

I smiled, the pain of my injured leg forgotten and any fear of death left behind. Certainly, this must be but a final trick of my now-fevered mind, I told myself as I calmly watched the ground rushing up to meet me. Still, I would die happily, knowing that, at least in my imagination, Leonardo had won the day and my father was free.

And afterward, when I moved from darkness back into light, surely Constantin would be waiting to greet me, his smile proud as he stood alongside his father and welcomed me home.

24

*

Science is the captain, practice the soldiers.

– Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript I

Much to my surprise, I did not die, after all.

Instead, I awakened sometime later to find myself lying upon a soft pallet in one of our wagons, wrapped once again in my father’s cloak. His expression anxious, my friend Vittorio hovered over me.

From the canopy of trees above him, I guessed that we were back in the makeshift camp where we apprentices had gathered the night before. No longer did I hear the sounds of shouting men and clashing arms and frightened horses. Now the whisper of breeze was broken by a lark’s cheery song and the occasional call of one apprentice to another as they gathered up pieces of the Master’s stage setting.

“You’re alive,” Vittorio exclaimed in satisfaction, adding with greater relief, “and none too soon for me. I have needed to piss for a good hour, but the Master charged me with keeping watch over you until you woke up, lest you sink away altogether and breathe your last!”

I was not sure if that final observation was meant to spur me to health or simply to warn me that my prospects were dire. Assuming the former, I shot him a wry look and managed to reply, “Fear not; you don’t have to stitch my shroud just yet. And I will do my best to keep breathing, so take yourself off to piss with my blessing.”

While Vittorio rushed off to find an accommodating tree, I gingerly took stock of my physical state. Despite my assertions to the contrary, breathing proved more difficult than I expected, for my ribs ached with every inhalation. I put an experimental hand to my throbbing head to find it bandaged, with the cloth over my forehead sticky with drying blood. But my greatest alarm came when I realized someone had cut away one leg of my trunk hose in order to bind up the gash on my thigh.

By now Vittorio, still adjusting his tunic, had returned to my side. I gestured him nearer and indicated my bandaged leg.

“Who-who did this?” I asked in no little trepidation, all too aware that the required surgery upon my garb might have revealed a certain lack of my supposed anatomy to anyone observing the procedure.

Vittorio snickered. “Don’t worry; no one save your father saw what dangles between your legs, for he insisted on bandaging you himself. Novella gave him some of the same salve that Signor Luigi prescribed for Rebecca, but he made her look away lest you be embarrassed later.”

He snorted at my sigh of relief, unaware that it was the preservation of my disguise and not my modesty that comforted me. Then, at my request, he told me all he knew of what had happened while I lay unconscious after my dramatic landing in the midst of what was briefly to become a battlefield.