chapter 12

The group, Rodrigo in the lead with the gun in his hands, emerged from the building.

“How’s the saltpeter?” the duke asked as they passed the steaming cauldrons, stopping by the one that reeked of the foul odor.

“Better.” Tommaso hastened to his side to assure him. “Although still not as pure as the Indian.”

“The problem is the purification,” Rodrigo said. “We can wash it and boil it, but the crystals are still contaminated. It’s the other salts.”

“If you want to get rid of other salts, why don’t you try potash?” Matt asked. “Wood ash,” he added, when they all looked blankly at him. “Like making alizarin crimson from madder root. You boil up the chopped roots with lye and then add potash to precipitate the salts.”

“I take it you’ve had experience with this process,” the duke said.

“I’ve done it a few times,” Matt replied, trying not to flinch at the sight of the duke’s face head-on. The victim of a lance that had found its way through the visor of his helmet during a jousting match as a young man, the duke’s left eye was an empty socket, and his nose, a massive parapet that sprang from a craggy brow and tall cheeks, lined and cavernous, had a huge chunk carved from the bridge. He refused to wear a patch.

“Boil it with potash and then add the urine!” Tommaso said, thinking about Matt’s suggestion.

“I don’t know if that would help,” Matt said. “Urine’s mostly salt.”

“Tommaso, the urine is for making the bricks, not the saltpeter,” Rodrigo said.

“Oh,” Tommaso replied, crestfallen. He leaned over the pot, peering in. “But it works!” he protested. “Can’t you smell?”

They moved on to the field. Rodrigo handed the gun to one of the soldiers, who expertly loaded it, pouring in some powder and then adding a small wad of linen before the bullet, which he rammed home with vigorous hammering of a mallet on an iron rod.

“He’s aiming for that?” Leandro asked Tommaso, pointing to the small white square pinned to a post a hundred yards away. “Impossible. That’s twice as far as any gun can shoot.”

The soldier primed the pan and inserted the thin rope of slow match, already lit, into the serpentine holder above the trigger, and then lifted the gun. He sighted down the barrel, the silence broken only by the hissing and popping of the match. The priest, intoning a prayer, crossed himself. The soldier pulled the trigger and the match fell on the pan, sending a tongue of brilliant red leaping out. Two plumes of white smoke erupted simultaneously, a small one straight up from the base of the barrel and a larger from the bore, as the soldier staggered back from the recoil of the heavy weapon.

A young boy darted out from behind a wooden hoarding and snatched down the target. He scurried back and handed it to Tommaso, who slapped the soldier on the shoulder, making him reel almost as much as the gun had, and then brought the paper over and handed it to the duke. A perfectly round hole the size of a walnut was torn through it.

“Luck,” Leandro said.

“He’s hit the mark nine out of ten times,” Tommaso informed them.

“You know how arrows fly farther and straighter if the feathers are angled?” Rodrigo asked. “It makes the arrow spin in flight. I was watching the gunsmith score the grooves inside the barrel for the burned powder one day and I thought, why not spiral them and make the bullet spin like an arrow? Why it works I have no idea, but it does.”

“It’s the devil,” the priest interrupted. “An arrow has feathers, like an angel—an avenging angel, when employed in the name of the Lord, as any weapon must be. The gun, though, is an agent of the devil. The Holy Father has said so. It spouts fire and brimstone and you can hear the devil’s voice in the screaming of the cursed bullet. But this gun—” he came forward and ran his hand along the barrel—“it has shaken off the devil. You say the bullet spins. The devil can’t ride it! It is on earth as it is in heaven. The stars are pure, for they spin, and the devil can have no purchase; but here on earth, which is stationary, the devil is all around us. We have been witness to a miracle. We have seen the devil dispossessed, cast out. By the grace of the Lord, we shall defeat the enemies of Christ.”

“Glory be to God,” Leandro said. “Is it difficult, cutting these grooves?”

“No, he just spins the barrel while he’s scoring it,” Rodrigo replied. “It takes no time.”

“We have another idea!” Tommaso exclaimed, reaching into his coat and pulling out a sheaf of papers covered in drawings. “Wait until you see this.” The group clustered around him. The soldier, bored, leaned against the gun, staring off in the distance. “It’s to replace the matchlock for firing the gun. We call it the ‘wheel lock,’ ” he said, enunciating the words as though his audience were a bit slow and hard of hearing. “It’s brilliant! A simple idea, really. What you do is wind up this spring with a key. When you pull the trigger here, this arm comes down and pops this one up, which releases this catch holding the spring, and so the wheel here spins, and these teeth strike the iron pyrites here, throwing off sparks here to ignite the powder in the pan!” he finished in a tumble of words. “Simple!”

“Simple?” Leandro asked.

“No more match,” Rodrigo said. “Think of what that means. The soldier won’t have to carry a burning match around. He will no longer be at the mercy of rain, or run the risk of an accidental explosion. And in the dark, no one will know he is there until he fires.”

“How much?” Leandro asked.

Tommaso exchanged glances with Rodrigo. “A bit more than the matchlock. We don’t know, these are just drawings. We have to build one before we know.”

“Are these from Leonardo?” Matt asked, hazarding a guess.

Rodrigo looked at him in surprise. “You know him?” he asked.

“A friend of a friend,” Matt replied. It would have been more accurate to say he knew the drawings, which were copied almost exactly from the ones he had seen in the Codex Atlanticus.

“He’s a good friend of mine,” Rodrigo said.

“Forget it,” Leandro said. “It’s too complicated. Look at that mechanism. It would take a skilled gunsmith weeks to make one of those. And if it broke, which you can be sure it would, then who would fix it? We would have to buy these things at a huge cost for each one and then bring gunsmiths along to fix them. And you know how much they get paid. Go ahead and build one if you want, but there is no future to this.”

“It’s a clever idea,” the duke said.

“The cost is too great,” Leandro replied. “It doesn’t pay. Multiply it by several thousand. So we lose more men with the old way. Men are cheap, and easy to replace. There are better ways to gain an advantage. We’re wasting time. Let’s get on with it.”

Tommaso ran off back to the building as Leandro walked off, talking with the duke.

“That was fascinating,” Matt said to Rodrigo. “But I’m famished. Aren’t we going to be late for lunch?”

“What lunch?” Rodrigo asked.

“Back at the villa,” Matt said.

“The villa?” Rodrigo asked. “Why are you so concerned with the villa?”

“I don’t want to appear rude. Aren’t they expecting us?”

“No. We brought food with us, remember?”

A team of horses appeared, dragging a heavy wheeled carriage with a long brass cannon barrel mounted on it. The party walked up to the gun as the driver unhooked the team and drove them away. The barrel, cast bronze, was about eight feet long. Squat and thick, among the floral carvings at the end could be seen the crest of Louis XI, the king of France.

“Where did you get this?” the duke asked.

“It wasn’t easy,” Leandro replied. “And it cost. They’re being made by the wagonload for Louis.”

“This thing’s too small to even dent a wall,” the duke said, unimpressed. “The balls would just bounce off.”

“It’s a field cannon. And you can see how maneuverable it is—light enough that we can use horses instead of oxen, so it can travel with the army. And look at this.…” He pointed to the rear of the barrel, which rested on a wedge. “Knock it in or out, you can raise or lower it. Fire it anywhere you want, close or far.”

Two men brought up the sealed box that Rodrigo had so jealously guarded.

“Aha!” exclaimed Tommaso. He pried the lid off and tossed it aside. As he threw out handfuls of straw, the rounded domes of six bronze balls came into view. He lifted one out gently, a look of reverence on his face as though he were holding a golden chalice. “The seal is perfect,” he said, tracing the iron band that bisected the polished orb. “And this is the fuse,” he added, touching the cord that extended like a tiny vestigial tail out of a small iron pipe on one side. “Gracias, deo gracias!” he exclaimed, and set the ball carefully back into the box.

Matt, at the sound of mooing, glanced up to see the calf being led, armor clanking, to the far end of the field, where she was left to stand amidst the flock of goats. Tommaso loaded the powder and wadding into the barrel, following with the ball, which he carefully rammed home with a special rod that had a cup-shaped end. He ran to the back of the gun and began hammering the wedge with hard swings of a large mallet, stopping now and then to sight down the barrel. He whacked it hard a few more times and then threw the mallet aside. “All ready,” he announced, and took the slow match from an assistant, the long rope sputtering and hissing in his hand like one of Medusa’s locks.

Matt followed Rodrigo and the others as they retired to a safe distance. They looked down the field, where the goats peacefully cropped the grass, one chasing another around the armored calf which stood rooted, legs splayed.

Tommaso touched the match to the breech of the gun. It leapt back with a loud report, sending out a jet of white smoke that looked oddly peaceful, like a cloud from a child’s dream. Matt followed the round ball as it sailed up in a lazy trajectory across the field to land short of the grazing livestock. Like an errant soccer ball it bounced, skipped, and rolled up to the animals, finally coming to rest. The cow ducked its head, giving an uncertain moo. Silence returned, as the geyser of smoke from the cannon drifted sideways in the slight breeze, stretching and pulling apart.

“Well—” the duke began to say, when he was suddenly cut off by a bang and a brilliant flash of red and yellow. The animals all fell over as if on cue, leaving only a single goat on its feet, staggering in circles and bleating pitifully as it stumbled over a dead companion.

“Exultate, jubilate!” Tommaso shouted, jumping up and down.

“Behold the granata,” Rodrigo said to the duke. “A hollow shell filled with gunpowder and bullets. Like a pomegranate.”

“And armor is no defense,” Leandro said. “What kind of a range can we get with this?” he asked.

“I’ll show you,” replied Tommaso, who had joined them. He ran back to the gun and, opening a different box, began to measure out powder.

“Just think of twenty of these lined up on the battlefield,” Leandro was saying to the duke. “Like having an extra five thousand men. And the effect on the enemy—they’ll run like scared rabbits.”

“That would cost a fortune,” the duke replied.

“In this case we can’t afford not to. If Louis has them and we don’t, we’re finished.”

Matt watched Rodrigo, who had gone off to help Tommaso load the gun. They seemed to be having some disagreement, for Tommaso’s yellow coat was even more agitated.

“He’s in France,” the duke said.

“You think he’ll stay there?” Leandro asked.

Rodrigo rejoined them. “He’s ready. Over here,” he said, hurrying them behind the stone wall of a small shed.

“We can’t see,” the duke protested, and tried to move back past Rodrigo.

“We’ll see well enough,” Rodrigo replied, standing his ground.

“Ready!” Tommaso shouted from a distance.

There was a pause, followed by the bang of the gun discharging, and then a huge report like a thunderclap in the empty sky. The group exchanged startled glances as another volley of explosions sounded in rapid-fire succession, like a string of firecrackers going off.

“Damnation,” Rodrigo said, peering around the side of the shed.

“What happened?” the duke asked.

“I told him not to use corned powder,” Rodrigo replied. The rest followed him around the edge of the shed, pausing when they had a clear view of what was left of the cannon—a few chunks of blackened bronze and the smoldering remains of the wooden carriage. The box of shells was gone. Tommaso was nowhere in sight. “It’s too powerful, but he wouldn’t listen,” Rodrigo added.

“Rodrigo!” Leandro yelled, the hard angles of his face sharpened with anger. “Do you have any idea what that thing cost?”

“What could I do? He’s the armorer, not me,” Rodrigo replied. “Was, I mean.”

The priest crossed himself repeatedly as the assistants, who had run from the shed at the explosion, began combing the area, littered with smoking debris.

“We should rejoin the hunt,” Leandro said to the duke, ignoring the wreckage of the gun as they walked past it. One of the soldiers sat on the grass, glassy-eyed, as his head was being bandaged, blood drying in a thick gout down his neck. Rodrigo stopped and picked up an arm, still in a yellow sleeve, and wrapped it in his cloak.

“We’re back in Florentine territory,” Rodrigo announced as their horses forded the narrow stream and clambered up the other bank.

“I didn’t know we had left,” Matt replied, close behind.

“We were in the duke’s territory, the Duchy of Urbino. His powder mill is right on the border. It’s one reason he likes to visit his old friend the count. That’s also why Leandro is so interested in the contessa; her lands would give the Montefeltro a foothold in Florentine territory. The money doesn’t hurt, either. With the count’s bank he could buy more cannon than he could ever use.”

“That’s pretty cold and calculating. You think she knows that?”

“What makes you think she doesn’t have aims of her own?” Rodrigo asked. “Being the Duchess of Urbino would mark a huge advancement for her family. And I doubt Leandro will stop there. He’s nothing if not ambitious. Do you know what he sleeps with as a pillow?” Rodrigo asked.

“The Iliad,” Matt replied as a wild guess. It was a part of the myth of Alexander the Great that he had slept on his copy of Homer.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I was just joking. Are you serious?”

“Alexander is his idol. The young warrior who swept out of the black hills and conquered the world. I am always suspicious of the obvious parallel. More often than not it’s an attempt to make anything new fit in the Procrustean bed of experience. A philosopher’s stone in reverse, you might say, transmuting the gold of the strange and new into the dross of the familiar. But Leandro makes me think of Alexander, and Constantinople.”

“Constantinople?” Matt asked. “I wasn’t aware that Alexander had ever been there.”

“How could he have been?” Rodrigo asked, giving Matt a strange look. “There was no Constantinople in those days.”

“I know,” Matt said, relieved that history, at least in the main, was as he remembered it.

“I was thinking of the fall of the city.”

“How so?” Matt asked. Holiest of holies, center of the empire since time immemorial, he remembered that the city had fallen to the Turks only decades before.

“The city was thought to be impregnable, but the sultan’s cannon reduced it in only a month. The days of the fortified city ended right there. Wars are won on the battlefield. Taking the city is now just forcing open the strongbox to get the treasure. Everybody knows it. Federico does—he was thirty-one that year. But Leandro was born a year after the city fell. And that’s the difference. For him, it’s the way it’s always been. Did you hear them today? The duke saw the cannon and immediately thought about whether it would be effective against fortifications. You see, he can’t help thinking that way. But it didn’t even occur to Leandro. He saw the cannon and thought of how it would affect a battle. How did Alexander succeed? Mobility. It was on the field at Issus and Gaugamela that he defeated Darius, long before he reached the walls of Susa and Persepolis. Leandro understands this innately. It’s not something he’s had to learn, it’s the way his world is.”

“There’s another similarity that I can see. Alexander had a worldview that extended far beyond the confines of Greece. It was interesting to me that Leandro sees Louis as the primary threat. Not Milan, or Venice.”

“That’s true,” Rodrigo said. “What is it?” he asked after a few moments of silence.

“Nothing,” Matt replied.

“Something’s on your mind.”

“Alexander conquered the world, but at what price?” Matt asked. “Great cities leveled, civilizations destroyed, and nothing left in their place. And if I remember correctly, the first thing Mohammed did after overrunning Constantinople was to drown his younger brother and marry his mother to a slave. He’s still sultan, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Rodrigo replied. The two men halted for a brief rest as the villa came back into view far below. Rodrigo drank from a leather bag and then passed it over. The wine, greatly diluted and mixed with honey, had a sweetly pungent tang that Matt found refreshing in spite of its warmth. The sun was directly overhead, washing all color from the deserted buildings and fields, blanketing them in a white haze of dry heat.

“It was always rumored that Federico had a hand in the death of his brother,” Matt remarked.

Rodrigo glanced back at their escort, but the soldiers were well out of earshot. “His brother was an animal,” he replied. “Raping and stealing from his own people. The citizens of Urbino killed him after six months. Federico had nothing to do with it. They wouldn’t open the gates of the city when he arrived until he promised that no one involved would come to any harm.”

“The count’s estate devolves on Orlando, doesn’t it?”

“That is indeed correct. The count has no family or other children.”

“But if something were to happen to Orlando, the fortune would go to Anna.”

“It would take papal intervention, but that could be had at a price.”

“And then to Anna’s children. And Leandro’s. Not a stepson.”

“What are you saying?”

“Like father like son? Do you have that expression in these parts?”

“Careful, my friend,” Rodrigo said. “Speculation such as this will lead you nowhere but trouble.”

Matt leaned forward, his attention suddenly diverted by a bright flash of color below. “That was the contessa,” he exclaimed.

“Where?”

“Down there.”

“I don’t see anything,” Rodrigo said.

“She’s gone now. You didn’t see them? Francesca was with her.” Blue and green—the dresses he had seen them in this morning. Where could they be going? It was siesta, no one would be about. That was just the point, he thought, his heart filling with a sudden unreasoning rush of jealousy as he remembered Leandro, in such a hurry to rejoin the hunt.

“They didn’t have an escort,” Matt said. “What about bandits?”

“No one would even contemplate interfering with them on the count’s own lands,” Rodrigo said.

“It’s not safe,” Matt protested. “Where are they going at this hour?”

“Are you a complete fool?” Rodrigo snapped. “Leave it alone!” With a slap of his reins he spurred his horse on.