Samhain Publishing Ltd, Ebooks and Books in Print

The Dreamer closed his eyes and dreamed on in time through Florence, through a hundred years of shouts from a hundred years of drunken artisans in that same tavern… Fading into bells and chanting from the Duomo, Gypsy violins outside every trattoria, sunlight falling like angel feathers across the Arno River…

The young dottore knew that Judge del Giocondo’s wife was more human than human the first time he heard her sing in public.

He’d been hurrying home, hat pulled over his ears, scowling at the ground, arms full of supplies from the apothecary, mind and plate likewise overloaded. He hated crowds, all these thoughtless massa damnata who had been put on Earth to do little more than waste his time.

But when he heard her voice, rising from the usual busker carnival up and around the Ponte Vecchio, his shopping basket clattered to the ground. For a few moments, he was right there then, living in the world around him. The sunlight made everything look like a tapestry. The river haze was so thick that passing forms grew indistinct.

A sunbeam followed her. She was dressed like a Gypsy, wearing a patchwork velvet skirt that swept nearly to her beringed toes in their Roman sandals. Her white peasant blouse, a near mirror of his own work shirt, was unlaced to an improprietous degree. Her bosom made him think of snow on the Alps in springtime.

The dottore’s body felt like a loaf of lead as he tried to move under that twinkling gaze. La signorina’s eyes were almost black, full of stars, each one as wide as the mirror of Narcissus. Her oval, classical face was high with color.

She watched him as She walked and sang. Only the drums of the street buskers kept talking, changing to a soft, thrumming beat behind that Voice. The dottore knew the song. Sort of.

It was from some cantiones profanae written by monks only a few decades before, but very hard to come by. A few actors he knew claimed to have the whole thing by heart. Though he was conversant with the words, he had never actually heard any tune with it. Her voice thrilled his entire being in its shaping.

“O…Fortuna…

Ve-luuut…luuuuu-na…

Staaa-tuuuu vaaariabi-i-lis…”

His eyes blurred in focal seizure. For just a moment, he was in Rome. The city burned down all around them as she sang. Somewhere, he heard the wild wail of an imperial violin. But he was in love and could not quite understand these things.

On the Old Bridge, and for a good quarter-mile round, the noise of every bawling pushcart peddler, every screaming baby in the arms of every female pickpocket, every babbling dandy and cursing drover, broke…and then swelled again when She finished, into spontaneous, tumultuous applause. She beamed, eyes twinkling, face flushed with color, and curtseyed deeply.

“Ti tutti amo!” she cried in vulgare eloquentia, speaking street so that they would mark Her as one of their own. “I love you all!”

The dottore’s eyes could look through any clockwork or machine and find a way to make it work better. Those eyes cut the world into grids and saw the angel of potential within every human form. He had no difficulty quantifying what was right in front of him.

Those eyes saw the way that plants which had long ago given up the earth burst into improbable bloom mere minutes after She touched them. Those eyes saw the sparrows that came and perched on Her finger when She went for Her long, lone walks through the old city, joking with the vendors and the whores and the hurdy-gurdy men.

The dottore’s eyes were known by the Judge, and everywhere it mattered, as eyes that were only for young men. But from the moment Il Justico revealed his blushing bride from parts unknown to Florentine society, dottore Leonardo daVinci could barely sleep a wink.

He kept the true cause of his insomnia hidden, especially after the Judge commissioned him to paint the lady’s portrait. Judge del Giocondo assumed, by DaVinci’s reputation, that the dottore would act as artistic eunuch-in-the-harem and everyone would walk away happy.

DaVinci’s larder was low at the time. His landlord, Signore di Bianchini, had tired of the weeks-long claim of an upcoming Church contract. The old slum king had broken down the door to DaVinci’s garret and kicked apart a delicate kite of wood and parchment standing on a badly-lathed pedestal by the tiny, smeary window.

“When you gonna spin this into gold, old man?” Bianchini rounded on him. “Man, he was meant to fly, Il Dio, He’d—”

“…have given us wings,” DaVinci finished. “Very original. Let me see what I’ve got in the house.”

It would take weeks to rebuild the model hang glider, DaVinci thought then, groaning at the smeared wine stains across the plans for the Volo Instrumentale. Young Raphael bought Leonardo’s groceries for a week after that particular party foul, but groceries wouldn’t teach Man to slip the surly bonds of Earth.

Still, the work needed a lot of fuel. So he swallowed his pride and bade La Gioconda down for a sitting at home. That sitting turned into the Judge hiring the better part of a carnival troupe to clown through the great hall of the del Giocondo villa for three weeks of agonizing false starts. Not even the mountebank juggler, last of the whole lot, could make Her smile, even when the hump on his back switched sides.

La Gioconda’s nickname, She Who Always Smiles, came before She lost the baby boy earlier that year. The midwife said that She was put together wrong for any more tries at an heir. The midwife wouldn’t elaborate. The midwife came from an old family and was truculent about her silence.

The Judge and the Medici bankers of the old city were in each other’s back pockets. If the Medici thugs ever beat the true meaning of the midwife’s words out of her, they never said. The two mooks hired for that job let her live, gave their money back to the treasury and made a beeline for the Cathedral of San Matteo. One became a friar in the new Franciscan order. The other hanged himself the same night.

DaVinci knew all this. But the sadness on La Gioconda’s face drove everything else from his mind on those long, hot afternoons. He thought of Santa Lucia, blinded by her own beauty.

“Gli occhi sui belli.” He muttered the words of the old joke to himself at the easel, not looking away from Her eyes.

Then he felt his right boot sole slide on a few drops of oxblood thickener on the old tile floor. You always feel it right when it’s too late to pull back, he thought ruefully. And it was.

His shaggy head punched through the canvas as he went down, glancing up like an irritated lion with its mane in elf-locks of black and gray and brown. There was a daub of green in one bushy eyebrow. He yanked the frame from around his neck, and froze.

“Madonna. We sit this long, and the work completes itself in its destruction.”

La Gioconda gave out with a mysterious, knowing smile.

Then She began howling with laughter. On the floor, Leonardo was already roughing out that initial smile with the squeezings from his beard.

The Judge eventually pronounced the work done to his standards and gave DaVinci a substantial golden handshake when he dragged him off the easel.

After that painting, Leonardo’s work seemed to spin itself out of thin air. All he had to do was put a quill or a brush in either hand and close his eyes to fully feel Her song still ringing through the marketplace in some distant corner of his mind.

His life became a pale imprint of a ghostly reproduction, with very little noise to distract him from that song that went on and on and on in his head, that voice that wheeled and soared and swung with the pigeons at a level of the Old City in which he’d longed so desperately to travel when he designed the Volo.

All Florence thought Leonardo mad. But no one else could hear the song. Then, one night, it stopped.

Leonardo looked irritably up from his memoirs. His graying eyebrows knitted together.

“Those youth…” he mumbled to himself. “Your students. They are all the Maestros now. They think you…They do not think you mad, they think of you as their…”

“Dottore,” Paola Di Filippo, his young valet, stood panting in the doorway. The boy was bare-headed, out of character for him, and his black curls looked a mess. He was brushing dust from his jacket and twitching.

Paulie was a good lad, a few bricks shy of a hod, but dependable enough to take with him from Florence to Milan these days, between the two houses he now kept. Milan was not the same as it was when Leonardo was a younger man. Though that house served to entertain the nobility, Leonardo had a harder time there now with the work.

He’d bought back his old garret in Florence from Bianchini at a shameless price. After the papers were signed, DaVinci helped the old fool out the door with a boot to the trousers and went in to unpack. It wasn’t much, but he would always call it his first home.

Paulie’s dull eyes were now full of animal terror. He looked like he wanted to leap out the nearest window, hit the cobblestones and keep on running. “You got company. I told the Lady you wasn’t receiving guests, and then he showed up, he—”

Boot heels tocked up the spiral stairs as Leonardo’s gangly young servant was shoved aside. The dusty air became thick with sweet gentleman’s perfume.

“It will be Her birthday-present.” The dry, throaty voice spoke through its nose. Boot heels echoed on the hardwood floor of Leonardo’s studio. “Well met, Signore DaVinci.” A bony hand in a black leather riding glove came up straight with the fingers together, hailing him in the manner of the old Caesars.

Leonardo squinted…and then dropped to his knees. “Prince Giuliano,” he stammered. “Ave.”

“I shall never understand what it is She sees in these scribblings.” The dark figure made every candle flame flicker in the studio as Giuliano de Medici paced around. His motion made his somewhat bobbed black hair swing above his high collar.

Leonardo held his tongue. Giuliano’s brother Giovanni had been made the new Holy Father. At his age, Leonardo knew from which side his own palette had been squeezed. (It would only be a matter of months before the effete tyrant Giuliano was stabbed through the neck as he prayed at Mass. But even DaVinci could not have known that then. So he kept his mouth prudently shut.)

“Rise,” Giuliano barked. Leonardo did so, looking sheepish. “Lady Constanza d’Avalos, my most trusted advisor,” so that is how such a position is titled these days, DaVinci thought, “wishes that her portrait be commissioned to you. I have no idea why. I do not understand your work. But my…uh…gentle…brother thinks very highly of you, so it shall be done. You will be paid half now and half upon completion of the painting.”

Giuliano scowled. Those black assassin’s eyes glittered in the pale skull mask of his nearly-chinless face. His teeth gleamed in the dim light. “And for God’s sake, be traditional.”

The attic door whispered open again.

“Ah.” Giuliano puffed up like a peacock. “Speak of Lady Fortune, and She favors you with Her presence.”

“My noble lord.” Leonardo beamed in a grandfatherly manner. He had been caught off-guard, but by that point in his career, he was used to dealing with this crowd. “I hardly know how to thank you for your mendac—I mean, magnanimity—”

The old dottore looked up. His eyelids wouldn’t function as they’d been designed to. All his praise for Giuliano trailed off to a squeak.

La Gioconda was standing in the doorway. She hadn’t aged a day. When She saw him, She began to smile and spoke.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Signore Da Vinci.”