A Bolt From the Blue (18 page)

“It is just as I feared,” he protested in an offended tone as he stretched his legs. “Not only has she taken over our mission, but now the washerwoman is giving us men orders.”

“Would you rather walk to Pontalba?” I reminded him, refraining with an effort from recounting the numerous instances in history when a female had led the troops. “Besides, we are only guessing that my father and the flying machine have been taken to Pontalba. Be patient, and let us see if she learns anything of value from the other women.”

Tito muttered a few uncomplimentary things beneath his breath, but I knew he could not disagree with my words. Despite my advice to him, however, I waited with barely restrained impatience of my own while the washerwoman chatted with her friends. Finally, Rebecca bade them farewell and started back to the wagon. As for Tito, for all his posturing, he quickly resumed his place among the baskets well before she reached us.

“What did they tell you?” came my anxious query as soon as the woman was in earshot.

Rebecca waited until she had climbed back onto the seat and settled heavily beside me before she replied. “We’re in luck, boys. They say a large wagon did pass this way soon after dawn. It carried something large, but it was covered by canvas. And there was at least three men that they saw.”

“I don’t suppose that the wagon was flying the Duke of Pontalba’s standard?” I asked with a sigh, knowing full well that was unlikely. “But could they tell that’s where the wagon was headed?”

“It was that direction, and they was traveling like bandits was after them. So unless the pope has set up housekeeping someplace besides Rome, the Duke of Pontalba is our man.”

“But how can we know that is the right wagon?” Tito protested. “If it is not, then we have lost many days going in the wrong direction.”

Though his concern was a valid one, I clung to my resolve. “There cannot be many large wagons journeying between here and Pontalba,” I pointed out, smoothing the edges of my father’s cloak. “I recall the Master once saying that Il Moro had made a poor choice of allies, because there was nothing to be found in that province save sour bread and sour men. Why, Pontalba doesn’t even have a grand city like Milan, just a crumbling castle on a hillside.”

“Well, they’ve got a cabinetmaker and a flying machine now,” Tito muttered, and then gave me an apologetic nod as he realized the carelessness of his speech.

Rebecca, meanwhile, favored us both with a dark look. “It’s not too late to change your minds, boys,” she told us. “We can still head back to the castle and tell my friend Fritz—he’s the captain of the guard—what happened. He’ll send his men out, if I ask him nice.”

I gave my head a stubborn shake. “We already told you, Rebecca, no one else must know what has happened . . . not unless the Master himself approves it. We’ll go on to Pontalba, with or without you, and find out the fate of my father and the flying machine. Tito and I are not afraid, are we?”

That last was directed at my fellow apprentice. Tito met my questioning gaze with a sharp shake of his head and a telling pat of his chest.

“We’re not afraid,” he boldly echoed. “You can go back to your laundry, washerwoman, if you’re frightened. We don’t need you. No matter what, Dino and I are traveling to Pontalba.”

“Pah, you need me if you don’t want to wear out your shoe leather,” she said with a snort. “Now, hold tight. We’ve got a lot of miles to go before the sun sets on us tonight.”

Taking the reins from me, she gave them a snap. The brown mare rolled an annoyed eye but obediently took off at a smart clip, heading south toward the province of white hills, where I prayed that my father would be found.

12

—Leonardo da Vinci,
Manuscript G

 

 

 

 

 

T
he brown mare kept up a swift pace, hauling the three of us with ease along the road south to Pontalba. The road became progressively rougher, however, as we put distance between us and Milan.

At times, what had been a smooth highway dwindled to nothing but ruts running parallel to one another. Along those primitive stretches, the center strip of dirt and rough grass was seeded with rocks large enough to break an axle, so that Rebecca was forced to slow the mare to a careful walk. Despite the slow pace, we still bounced against the wooden seat with force enough to leave one’s hindquarters bruised. But we were fortunate in clear weather and the beauty of the surrounding countryside that was liberally strewn with delicate new buds and leaves in celebration of spring.

For the most part, we had the road to ourselves. We passed but one other small cart, and only a handful of travelers making their way on foot, all of which had come from the direction of Pontalba. None, when queried, however, recalled seeing a large wagon pass them by.

After hearing that same response each time, it was all I could do not to give way to discouragement. More than once I heard Tito mutter, “I told you we were going the wrong way,” making me wonder if he were right, after all. But Rebecca did not yield her course, the loose edge of her wimple flapping triumphantly as she drove the wagon with skill.

“Doesn’t mean nothing,” she shouted in my ear after one such negative response to my questioning. “They coulda joined the road after the wagon passed by . . . or maybe they was told not to say they saw it.” Her logic comforted me somewhat; still, I said an extra prayer that we had not gambled wrongly in our choice of destinations.

We had covered a respectable distance by the time a pale sun tucked itself behind the darkening hills. Rebecca insisted that we stop before every bit of light had faded, so that she could safely guide the mare and wagon a short distance from the road to a spot among some hillocks.

“Bandits,” the washerwoman explained when we questioned her, that answer drawing grave nods from both Tito and me.

She needed no further justification. While I’d never actually seen a bandit, I’d heard tales of them since childhood, and how they were the plague of honest travelers everywhere. The fact that we carried nothing of value meant little. Many of these lawless men reputedly terrorized and killed simply for enjoyment, with profit but a secondary motive. Such an assault had been my father’s greatest fear for me in journeying by foot from our home village to Milan.

Find a large group of pilgrims and stay closely among them,
he’d instructed. I had been careful to heed his advice and so had managed my journey in safety. But I knew that others were not always so lucky. In fact, it was the regularity of attacks along the byways of Lombardy that explained why no one had questioned the Master’s claim that Constantin had been struck down by such outlaws.

Thus, we took pains to settle the wagon in a low spot a good distance from the main track and tied the mare out of sight. Rebecca allowed us a small fire. We let it smolder long enough to heat several flat rocks that we would later tuck beneath our blankets and so ward off the worst of the night’s chill. While the flames did their work, we ate our simple meal of bread and cheese. I surprised my companions with dried figs that the kitchen maid had added to my sack at the last minute, earning a grin from Tito, who had a fondness for sweets.

Once we finished our repast, I brought up the subject that had been uppermost in my thoughts . . . namely, how to gain access to Castle Pontalba and determine if my father and the flying machine were being held there. Tito’s primary concern, however, was the advantage in time the kidnappers had on us.

“If we
are
going the right way, the duke’s men will have plenty of opportunity to hide the flying machine—and your father, as well—before we get there,” was his doleful prediction. “Even if we can make our way inside the castle, I fear we won’t find them.”

“They can’t be very far ahead of us,” I countered with more confidence than I felt. “And now that they are far from Milan, they won’t have cause to suspect that anyone is in pursuit of them. To my mind, they will have done as we did and made camp at dusk, for surely they would not risk both the wagon and the flying machine on these roads in the dark.”

“Dino’s right,” Rebecca spoke up. She paused to belch and pick a bit of fig from between her teeth.

“Traveling these roads after dark means inviting a broken axle or a lame horse,” she went on with a wise nod. “They’ve found a spot and settled in, just like we did. They’ll be up at first light and reach the castle before midday. If you boys don’t tarry when the cock crows in the morning, we’ll be at Pontalba by midafternoon. That’ll give us time enough to poke around before nightfall.”

“And we will need to gain the trust of the servants there,” I continued. “The arrival of a strange covered wagon will not go unnoticed. Surely a maid or a page will see something and will be glad to gossip.”

My enthusiasm faded a bit, however, as I finished, “But first, we’ll need to figure out how to make our way into the castle itself.”

“We can hide in Rebecca’s laundry baskets and let her drive us inside,” Tito suggested with a snort, pulling his knees to his chest and hunching his shoulders in fair imitation of someone confined to such a space.

I shot him a stern look, but Rebecca merely grinned. I recalled her comment when he’d questioned her about the baskets, and I wondered if she already
had
formulated a plan that involved laundry. For my own part, I’d had some vague idea that Tito and I might find entry by professing to be itinerant artists. The problem with that disguise was that we had no paints or brushes or panels with us to prove such a claim.

After a few moments’ more discussion, we all agreed that it made no sense to speculate further until we saw what we would face at the castle. We banked our small flame, and the three of us settled beneath the wagon, wrapped in cloaks and blankets and with hot stones at our feet. I had feared that I would spend the entire night staring at the wagon bed above us and counting the wooden pegs in every slat while I worried over my father’s fate. But the day’s events had taken their toll on me so that, despite my concerns, I fell into a fast and dreamless sleep.

I woke at dawn with, not Rebecca’s rooster, but a lark trilling in my ear. Unfortunately, that dulcet greeting to the day was drowned out by Tito’s groans as he dragged himself out from beneath the wagon bed.

“Ah, by the saints, I can barely move! All that bouncing about in the wagon has bruised me like a marketplace pear.”

My snicker at his discomfort promptly turned into a matching groan of my own as I crawled out of my blankets to find my own joints stiff. Indeed, my body ached as if the brown mare had spent all night stomping me with her sturdy hooves. Rebecca appeared impervious to the previous day’s abuses . . . doubtless because of her ample natural padding. She had already crawled out from her blankets and was leading the mare back from the tree where she’d been tied overnight.

Furtively rubbing my sore nether regions, I limped my way over to the privacy of a nearby shrub to empty my bladder. For once, I wished my sensible trunk hose were of the foolishly exaggerated style lately favored by many of the nobles. The horsehair filling that gave the trunk hose that rounded shape, as if the wearer had small kegs tied to either hip, would surely have made the previous day’s ride more comfortable.

We quickly broke our fast and climbed atop the wagon. This time, both Tito and I prudently folded our cloaks into seat cushions to make the next leg of our journey less painful. But our precautions proved unnecessary. As the sun rose higher, so did the road begin to improve. While we previously had traversed hilly plains, the byway had dipped into broad forests and stretched into a smooth ribbon of hard-packed dirt.

Thus we were able to travel without jostling the very teeth from our jaws, making greater speed than we had the previous day. Even so, we exchanged but a few words among us, each of us lost in our own thoughts as the morning progressed.

It was not long after the sun had passed its midpoint when I spotted our objective.

“There, between those two trees,” I softly called and pointed. “That must be it . . . the Duke of Pontalba’s castle.”

Through gaps in the just-budding trees, I could see glimpses of gray stone towers thrusting against a cloudless blue sky. Rebecca slowed the wagon, both to give the brown mare a well-deserved rest and to allow us to take in our destination before we were on top of it.

“The trees, they should be clearing soon,” she said in a low tone. And, indeed, we could see not far ahead of us that the forest did end abruptly.

The change in terrain was deliberate, I knew. Just as the dukes before Il Moro’s time had commanded a wide swath of forest to be cut down around Castle Sforza, so would the past dukes of Pontalba have done the same here. A broad field of green encircling the castle would force any advancing army into the open long before they reached the castle wall, making a surprise attack upon the castle difficult. Moreover, the bare terrain allowed the defenders to more easily repulse their aggressors. With no cover to be found in that span between the forest and the castle, the approaching soldiers would be easy targets for Pontalba’s archers.