Titan
“Leonardo, we will be burned,” I said. “If anyone finds out, the church’s tribunal will have us burned.”
He looked back at me and didn’t say anything, but his lip curled up in a sneer that looked like the expression his grandfather, Ser Antonio, made when someone made a mistake in household accounts.
At ten, Leonardo was a handsome boy – I knew this for a fact because Ser Antonio would put his age-gnarled hand on Leonardo’s head and say, “Such a handsome boy. Such a pity.”
I didn’t understand the pity part but I understood handsome. He was larger than most of us, the children of Vinci, at his age, and he had gold-red hair, like newly polished copper, in a frill of curls around his head, and bright green eyes, like spring leaves. Those eyes glinted now by the light of the oil lamp I carried. It was covered almost entirely in a metal shade, to avoid showing the path of our walk through the fields. But I’d left the bottom just a little open so we could see the stones on the way and not fall on our faces.
“Fool,” Leonardo hissed at me, between clenched teeth. “Cover that lantern.”
“But it is dark,” I said
“It is darker where we’re going,” Leonardo said, his small voice acquiring a tone of great weight and thought.
“Leonardo,” I said, my voice trembling just a little at the thought of what we meant to do. “You know the priest says the old gods are truly demons and that–”
Leonardo shook his head, impatient. “He would say that, would he not? Come on, Antonio. Tonight we do magic.”
I trembled from head to foot, but I followed. I always followed Leonardo. It wasn’t just that he was the grandson of the wealthy Ser Antonio or the son of Ser Piero – a notary with a big business in Pisa – while I was just the son of a local farmer with mud between his toes. No, it was much more than that. Leonardo had life in him, a vitality, a hunger, a need I couldn’t either understand or resist. I followed him where he went. I did what he told me. His need was stronger than any of my smaller wants or thoughts. He needed to be noticed. He needed to be someone important.
***
I had realized why he had this need just a few months before. I was the same age as Leonardo and his playmate since we were both about five, when my father, hired to help with the harvest at the great house of Vinci, had taken me along. I’d never given Leonardo’s birth or his position much thought.
I’d known that Leonardo’s family was wealthier than mine, because his grandfather’s kitchen had piped in water and he had servants and fields that other people tended. But I hadn’t thought much about it, or about their allowing their grandson to play with me, till my parents talked about it.
It was at the dinner table, as we sipped soup from our coarse clay bowls, and ate bread mother had bought from the baker in Vinci. I’d come in disheveled and sweaty from running in the fields with Leonardo. Leonard was ever like that, active, restless, climbing walls and running through the fields, exploring caves, riding horses – his grandfather’s and anyone else’s he could get on.
My father had grunted – not exactly reproaching me – as I pulled a wooden stool to the table, and sat down.
My mother, setting the steaming bowl of soup in front of me, gave my father a sharp glance. “It’s Ser Piero’s boy,” she said. “He’s wild and Antonio will follow him.”
Father grunted again. He ate a spoonful of soup, then tore at the bread with his broad, calloused hands. “I suppose,” he said at last. “He’ll be going to live with his father in Pisa soon? And be apprenticed into his father’s trade?”
Mother clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, as if Father spoke great foolishness. She shook her head slightly and threw me a sharp glance.
“What?” Father said. He sounded somewhat annoyed.
Mother sighed. It was clear to me she didn’t wish to talk about it and hoped he would understand her expression. But Father was never good at subtle signals. Instead, he got annoyed when she spoke in a way that he didn’t fully understand. “What, woman? What’s this foolishness? Mean you to say the boy won’t be apprenticed to his father’s trade?”
Mother sighed again. “He is not...,” she said, "The son of his wife.” And then, as Father looked at her, she added, “The notaries will never accept him, his not being...,” she threw me a glance, "legitimate.”
Father looked as struck as I felt. Clearly the idea that Leonardo’s birth might have something to do with his future had never occurred to him. “What will they do with the boy, then?” he asked.
“None of the better guilds will take him,” my mother said. “He will have to learn some lower trade.”
“What?” Father asked. “Work the land? A boy raised as the son of his grandfather’s house as he has been?”
“A pity,” mother said. “And a great shame. He’s been taught to want more than he can have.”
And that was when I understood what drove Leonardo – why he talked of commanding armies, or of conquering cities, of creating great buildings, of changing the world and everything around him. So that his being born outside marriage wouldn’t matter and he could have the great destiny he’d been taught to expect.
***
In our explorations of the region, some time back, we’d found a cave where the gods lived.
Listen, I know what the priests say, and what has been written by great learned men: that the ancient gods never existed, that they were people’s ways of explaining the wind and the sun and those other things for which they lacked a cause. I knew that back then, too. Like any other good Catholic boy I’d been taught there was only one God and he ruled all and the others were demons and monsters, ready to deceive and take one’s soul.
But Caterina, Leonardo’s mother, had a reputation in the villages around for being able to see the future. She had a bag of bones that she’d inherited from her mother, and which she could cast this way and that and tell you what lay in store for you in days not yet dawned.
Everyone knew it, in all the area. Probably even the priest knew it. But, by tacit consent, no one spoke of it. The girls would go to Caterina, now and then, when they were crossed in love. And sometimes wives went when they suspected their husbands played them false. Or old people would go to find out to which of their sons they should leave their fields and house. No one talked about it, but everyone knew there were supernatural powers beyond those of which the priest spoke in Mass.
Besides no boy, growing up in Tuscany, could doubt the existence of gods. Amid the steep hills, the precipitous crags, the low fields planted with sweet-fruited vines, who could doubt that some elemental power had thrown the rocks this way and that, and that some creature or other gave soul and heart to the twisted oak trees that projected the only shadow onto the soft, warm earth of the summer fields?
Leonardo and I walked along the beaten path around one of those fields – his grandfather’s – in the dark of a fall night, headed back to the cave we’d found.
“Do you really think there are gods in there, Leonardo?” I asked, half knowing what his answer would be, but needing his rebuke and certainty nonetheless.
He’d forced me to cover the lantern completely, and above the sky was dark, with only the merest pinpoints of stars showing, too distant and dim to give any light. Underfoot, my bare soles felt the pebbles and rocks smoothed by thousands of feet over the generations. A breeze blowing from the south brought with it the tang of ripening wine. To the North, the ground fell away in crags and chasms, from the terraced field to the depths of a ravine, from which it climbed again, to someone else’s terraced field.
“Of course they were gods,” Leonardo said. “What else would they be?”
I could hear the sneer in his voice and, indeed, how could I think those figures, carved and drawn in the rock were anything else? There were powerful men painted on the dark granite of Tuscany, their faces suddenly emerging from the living rock as if they slumbered beneath it and could push forward, at any moment, like a man tossing off his covers and wakening.
We’d found them one drowsy summer afternoon, when Leonardo had fallen through an opening to the cave below. I’d thought him lost, or hurt, but he’d emerged laughing and called me below, to see his discovery. We’d walked down long corridors seemingly carved by a giant’s hand into the rock. Down and down and down.
“As if we’re going to the womb of the Earth,” Leonardo had muttered, at a point, down the corridor.
I’d followed in hushed silence, till we emerged into a vast cavern, echoing, with a domed ceiling like I imagined a Cathedral would look – having only heard one discussed and never having seen a larger church than Vinci’s tiny chapel. And like a Cathedral, it was peopled by statues and paintings, but such paintings had never been seen in the Christian churches.
A single ray of light coming in through a narrow shaft in the ceiling lit the interior and revealed ... art.
At first I got an impression of men, muscular men – mostly naked or near naked, painted in poses of movement. They were so realistic-looking that I jumped back, shocked…before I realized that they were not alive, and were not in fact human – not as such – but creatures that resembled humans as a rock or a tree grown in the right shape might resemble a human. Humans with the vitality and the feel of immutable Earth. And the scene painted on the wall was a dance.
Leonardo walked around the wall, fascinated, his fingers touching the paint which looked as fresh as if it had just been painted. “The gods, Antonio. It is the gods. They lived here.” He turned to me. “La Caterina said the ancient gods were worshiped in a cave, by initiates who found their way in and passed tests. And those who got to the cave could get anything they wanted. Anything, Antonio.”
His eyes glimmered with that nameless need of his, that need for more than his life could give him.
He walked around the cave, looking, beseeching. His mouth formed words I could not decipher from their movement. His fingers traced the figures. He seemed to be begging, asking for something.
When nothing happened, he looked back at me. He looked like a blind man trying to discern someone’s face.
At the time I didn’t know what to tell him. But I knew he’d asked for something. And that it had not come true.
Our entire friendship, I’d been the follower and he the leader, but now he looked exactly like a small child who asks his mother for a treat and is refused.
I said the first thing I could think of. “You probably have to do something,” I said. “Some sort of ritual. To…wake them up?”
Like that Leonardo’s eyes lit up. He punched his open palm with the closed fist of his other hand. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll need to wake the gods. They’ve been sleeping too long.”
***
Two weeks after we’d found the cave, we had managed to slip away from Vinci and walk through the fields to see Leonardo’s mother in Campo Zeppi.
Leonardo never called Caterina "Mother.” He called her la Caterina. When he was just a year old, she’d given him to his grandparents to raise. Then she’d got married and had a brood of brats.
When we got to her home – a small farmhouse amid verdant fields – she was sitting in the yard, in the sun, mending clothes while her three younger children, a toddling boy and two crawling girls, played around her.
She looked up as we approached and smiled at us. She looked much like Leonardo – same high cheekbones, same straight nose, same leaf-green eyes and brassy red hair. But in Caterina the endless energy and ambition of her son had become a placid certainty and self-contentment.
She smiled and returned to her sewing without a word.
Leonardo moved to sit at her feet. The toddlers neared to play around him, never quite touching him, but staying close by. They were never fully at home near Leonardo, and yet he fascinated them.
Caterina sewed with uneven, broad stitches, and Leonardo sat at her feet. I sat on a low wall nearby that protected a flowerbed filled with late-blooming roses.
One of the spiny branches worried at my back, and I wondered how long it would take Caterina and Leonardo to talk. But their protocols moved in their own way, and in their own way were as prickly as the rites of any court.
After a long while, without seeming to take any more notice of us, Caterina reached over and laid her broad hand on Leonardo’s head.
He looked towards her and smiled. “Caterina, the gods,” he said at last. “The old gods you talked to me about…how were they worshiped? If they were asleep...how would you wake them?”
Caterina didn’t seem to hear. She removed her hand from his hair, and returned to her sewing. At length, she spoke, her voice slow and filled with the lilting accent my own mother’s voice had. “Well,” she said. “They’ve been sleeping a long time.” She sewed some more. “There are dates when it’s easier to wake them, but midsummer’s night is past. So you’d have to go in late autumn, when the time turns around to winter. The last day of October. You should go late at night, in reverence, expecting to be challenged, expecting to hear from them. You should fast beforehand.”
She went on, her voice even, as she gave him the instructions for waking the old ones.
It seemed to me as though it were all a lot of nonsense, and my mind fell into a drowsy half-dreaming. There was a twist to Caterina’s mouth, just at the corner, a placid smile that made me suspect that she was playing one of her practical jokes.
And I hoped I was wrong. Because I did not want to see the lost and confused look in Leonardo’s face ever again.
***
And thus we were on our way, through the darkened fields to the cave, once again.
As we neared it, the way got rougher. We left the fields behind altogether and went across an area of low scrub. Nimble-footed shepherds herded goats in this place, the goats climbing and jumping across the uneven ground. Past that, we started getting into deeper and deeper forest, the trees growing increasingly thick all around.
Pasture I’d crossed unthinking hundreds of times in the day, forests where I played, now seemed a land of danger and fear.
A wolf howled in the distance, and I thought I heard a growl nearby. Was it a bear?
“You can uncover the lantern now, Antonio,” Leonardo said. “We’re far enough no one from my grandfather’s house will see us.”
Grateful, I pulled the tin cover up to allow the light to shine fully on the path underfoot. But the light only seemed to make the shadows more threatening, and the trees leaning towards us looked like the outstretched arms of some monster come to collect us.
Was this a test? Were the trees the guardians that Leonardo’s mother had talked of, who protected the approach to the sacred cave? “Are you quite sure you can find the cave again? In the dark?”
He looked over his shoulder and nodded once, and in that nod I knew he’d been to the cave often since our first visit together, worrying at the ancient portraits like a dog at a bone.
All too soon we got to the cave. Just at the entrance, it seemed to me something uncoiled and snarled. I did not know what it was, or even if there was anything. Leonardo whispered a word I did not understand, and the moonlight shone on an empty patch of ground and the cleft in the rock that led to the cave beyond.
We walked into the cleft and, in the dark, it seemed to me that shadows flitted and that dark beings or ghosts or animals ran just outside our field of vision. Rats, I thought to myself. It would be rats. But the thought was hardly reassuring. After all, one or two people could easily be eaten by a tribe of rats.
“It’s all right, Antonio,” Leonardo said, evenly. “It’s all right. We are protected. Caterina told me what to say.”
She had? I didn’t remember. Somewhere, amid the buzz of Caterina’s words, I’d lost track of what she’d told him.
But I stepped close to Leonardo’s heels, and I told myself I was imagining the movement, the scurrying. That it meant nothing. That I was a fool. My own heartbeat was so loud that it sounded like a drum in my ears.
We stepped into the cave and I stopped, drawing breath sharply. The cave was lit with a big bonfire. A fire, burning brightly. Someone had to have made the fire. How?
“What–” I said.
“I came earlier today,” Leonardo said. He whispered, as if we were at church. “I came at sunset and laid it all in readiness. It only needs a little stoking.” As he spoke, quietly, he added wood to the fire. The wood was laid by, in a neat pile, and my mind spun around this thought because I could neither imagine Leonardo cutting the wood nor making the fire. Leonardo, in the normal way of his life, avoided such tasks as much as he possibly could.
Then Leonardo pulled from his lambskin vest a packet of herbs, which he filtered between his fingers onto the fire. He murmured words, under his breath.
I didn’t understand the words and started to open my mouth to ask him about them, but he only shook his head, silently telling me to be quiet.
So I remained quiet and watched Leonardo throw herbs on the fire and mutter words in an increasing tone of exasperation.
The smoke from the burnt herbs writhed around me like incense at church, but much stronger.
I knew it. Caterina had made a joke. She’d lied to him, and now....
I realized I was sitting cross-legged on the rough ground of the cave, and there was music. I did not remember sitting, and where did the music come from? Who was making it?
Startled, I started to rise. And then I realized that the figures in the wall were dancing – moving round and round with vigorous movements, stomping their feet into the ground with such enthusiasm the entire cave trembled.
I rose--confused, trembling. Was I dreaming? Leonardo stood, without moving, smiling a little with a curious but serene expression much like his mother’s.
“Leonardo,” I said, and grabbed for his sleeve. I wanted to tell him we must be out of here, we must run, we must– But this was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Didn’t he want to wake the gods?
I hadn’t wanted to see him disappointed. I’d never thought....
“What do you wish, pilgrims?” The voice that wasn’t a voice was all around us, demanding, absolute.
And in that voice, my own wishes rose up. I wanted to be like Leonardo. I wanted a life just like he had – to belong to a powerful family with a big house, and be wealthy enough to have piped water in the kitchen. Even if I were nothing but an illegitimate member. I wanted ... to be better than I was.
I heard my own voice say all this, fumblingly, but the god was waiting, was waiting – waiting, I realized for Leonardo. It sensed Leonardo’s greater hunger, his greater need, and it would hear from him.
“I want to be so important that everyone in the world knows me,” Leonardo said. “I want to be remembered long after I’m dead.”
The naked feet of the dancing creatures on the walls made a final stomp, and there was a sound like laughter. Not mocking laughter, but bitter laughter.
And out of the middle of the creatures, one walked who stood head and shoulders above the rest. He had flying white hair and beard, but his side was gashed open, bleeding. He pressed a hand to it, seemingly without any pain, and smiled at us, a smile full of curiosity and of a hunger at least as strong as Leonardo’s.
“Long ago,” he said, and spoke in a voice that seemed wholly human and echoed with the sing-song tone of the peasants of the region. “Long ago we could have granted you all that and more, little one. But we are old ones. Old. We were old when Rome was new. When their Jove shackled us. We are the gods who danced at the dawn of humanity.” He pointed with his free hand at the fire. “I gave humans fire and farming and letters. And for it I must be devoured endlessly by Jove’s eagle. My name is Prometheus and all those others–” he pointed to the wall, and to the other creatures now frozen in the act of dancing. “Those others, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, all of them lie in their own prisons, unable to die, but unable to live. We have just life enough to present ourselves to you. But we are shadows... shadows and nothing more.”
He looked at me, and for a moment I read such nobility and humanity in his gaze, that I felt sorry for him.
And then he spoke. “And I cannot do what you wish... unless... you would allow us to merge with you?”
“Merge?” I asked, trembling.
This earned me a quick smile. “Yes,” he said. He picked a sharp sliver of stone to the ground and handed it to me. “If you prick your finger and let the blood drop into this fire, we’ll be able to come to you, to use your body to make you what you want to be. To make your wish come true.”
My mother had told me, long ago, that everything had a price. And so I asked, “What will it cost me?”
The noble features turned towards me and the mouth opened fully in a smile that revealed sharp, needle-like teeth. “To be devoured,” he said.
I let the sliver of stone drop. I heard it fall to the ground of the cave as if very far away. And I was already running, running, past the scurrying shadows and the darkness, past the narrow corridor to the outside, past the forest and the pasture and the vineyard, till I was snug and still in my pallet in my father’s house, crossing myself and muttering pater nosters to sleep, seeking to interpose the new God before the old.
Before going to sleep, I realized, I knew, that Leonardo had taken the bait and cut his finger. And I wondered what it would mean.
***
What it meant was that I lost my friend. Oh, nothing was changed, not really, not outwardly.
The scab in Leonardo’s finger healed. And instead of spending his days running wild in the fields, he started to draw. He would take pieces of his grandfather’s papers, the scrap left over from household accounts, and, with deft strokes draw a face, to the life. Or a horse so real it might have been running through the pasture outside. Or strange devices, machines that, he said, would one day fly through the skies.
I wondered if that was the gift the gods gave him, and sometimes I felt sorry that I had not done pricked my finger, but not sorry enough to return to the cave. Still, when Leonardo was taken to Florence, to become an apprentice painter, and when his painting and the costumes he designed for the elegant set in town became all the talk in tiny Vinci, I wondered why if I had missed my one chance of getting my wish. And what it meant being devoured. Leonardo seemed whole to me.
But life went on, in the way life does, and I acquired fields and married a woman who brought me a little in her stocking foot, with which I bought yet more fields. I had three sons, all strong men who married and gave me grandsons.
Two years ago my eldest grandson took me to Florence with him. Leonardo was there. He had been away a long while, but came back to finish a fresco under contract.
My grandson left me at the door to Leonardo’s workshop, while he went to talk to some notaries about the purchase of a vineyard.
I went in, hesitant, tapping my cane on the floor, more for reassurance than out of real need. My legs were yet steady enough.
The workshop was a busy place, full of apprentices of all ages, sketching and talking and calling to each other and making bawdy jokes. I asked the nearest one, an impish young man of maybe twenty, where Leonardo was.
He pointed me towards a wall where a man knelt, painting the hem of a cloak in small feathery strokes. Under his hand, the hem had the look of real silk, flowing in an unfelt wind.
“Leonardo,” I said.
He turned to look at me, and a look of recognition sparked in his eyes. “Antonio,” he said, softly. “I remember... long ago. You ran.”
I swallowed. I could not speak. Because the face looking at mine -- flying hair and white beard -- looked like a face in a cave, long ago. Not Leonardo’s.
When we got back to Vinci, I made my grandsons take me back to the cave, and I walked the great length of its corridors, tapping my cane as I went along.
We took lanterns. I was not about to light the old fire once again.
The figures were still there, one and the other arms linked, eternally frozen in their primeval dance.
But the figure with the flying white hair wasn’t there. Prometheus was gone. He had become Leonardo and was making Leonardo’s name immortal.
I walked back out and ordered my grandsons to seal the cave shut with the biggest boulders they could find.
To this day, it remains sealed.