Time's Mistress (16 page)

Absence of Divinity

Hell, wrote the mad man in his lonely tower, is the absence of God’s love, not brimstone and sulphur and nightmarish visions. The pains of Hell are metaphorical as well as metaphysical. The tortures, the torments, imagined as perpetual flaying of skin and the application of saltpetre to the wounds, are nothing beside the emptiness where once there was God.

He put down his pen and stared at what he had written, a chill creeping into his heart. It was not as though he could claim ignorance. He knew, on a level bone-deep, exactly what he was doing. He could extrapolate—within reason—the consequences his actions would draw.

He, Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of them all, was going to Hell.

There was a timid knock on the workshop door, probably one of Giuliano or Lorenzo Medici’s lackeys come to plague him. He left it unanswered. Tired feet shuffled away and he was alone again.

When he had commissioned the workshop in what had been Cosimo’s tower it had been for its proximity to the heavens. Every day he would rise up and work side by side with the angels in the sky, and now, like the brightest of them all, he was doomed to fall.

All for the sake of science.

The quest for understanding.

One page in one of his notebooks. A single drawing but its implications were legion.

The drawing, amid pages of inventions and ideas and studies of motion, even of God’s masterwork—man. Proportional and perfect in every way, even down to the musculature and anatomy. It was a blueprint for creation. Study after study of skulls, the secret geography of the flesh beneath the skin, where man was reduced to tendon, bone and sinew. He had studied the human form in all of its vagaries, examining a multitude of specimens, fat, tall, thin, short, lean, sinewy, muscled, hirsute, hairless, crippled, deformed, malnourished and bloated. He recorded what he saw. Each variant added something to his knowledge, allowing him to modify his blueprint for creation. Amid the sketches were organ system observations, bone and muscle structures and reproductive systems. How many of Florence’s sycophants would have blanched at and renounced his obsession with anatomy had they but known that the cadavers he stripped of flesh layer by layer had been stolen from the local morgue.

It had been an obsession with him. He locked himself away in Cosimo’s tower, a single window and the sliver of Florence’s rooftops that it revealed his only connection to the mundane act of living that went on beneath him.

A small bird flitted across his vision. Da Vinci watched its flight, the frenetic bursts of energy that helped it dart from one wave of air to the next. There was none of the easy grace of one of the bigger avians. This one seemed to be in a constant fight against the forces of heaven and earth—but it was doing it. It was soaring over the city, tasting the kind of freedom he could only dream of. Now if he could somehow transfer that notion into a mechanism, perhaps a rotating air-screw or a coiled spring. The idea had merit, even if it so closely mimicked the vanities of Babel and mankind’s towering ego. He looked at the sky and knew, just knew, that one day men would fly like the birds and the angels.

Occasional sounds filtered through the stone floor from the workshops and forges below where the apprentices slaved away in the glow of thirteen furnaces, striving to enhance their master’s reputation. They worked on alchemy and more mundane miracles like cannons and construction braces for the city’s mighty fortifications. Many a Florentine dream was haunted by the rhythmic hammer blows emanating from the depths of Cosimo’s tower, iron striking iron, and the hellish hissing as the red metal was plunged into vats of water to cool.

A year ago he might have called this non-life Hell, but now he knew better.

Now he understood that Hell was something of man’s making.

The room was cluttered with evidence of his genius—or madness. It was a fine line, the distinction between scientist and heretic. If a delegation from the Vatican ever found their way into his dominion no doubt they would bind him and carry him out to be burned at the stake for profanities against the Lord with his prototypes of devices meant to elevate man to the realm of the angels so that they might fly through the clouds; designs so that the surgeons might open a man’s chest and understand the intricate map life within; and worst of all, the empty clay vessel he called Lucifer, the most beautiful of all.

Da Vinci returned to his desk.

The greatest gift is life, he wrote, each letter meticulously framed. Man without doubt the greatest of all His creations. We can build. We can shape and yet we cannot create. We are not Him. Or so the Church would have us believe with their scriptures and their simplicities. I believe we can create. I believe that in every one of us there is a small piece of Him that gives us that power. That is my sin. That is my damnation. Science and numbers are our key to Godhead. They ARE God. In science and numbers lie the answers to every question we can imagine. That is the genius of His creation. There are answers waiting to be found and questions waiting to be asked. God is not some intangible deity, some ephemeral religion. God is in the details all around us. We need only look to find the code to decipher His true face. The rest is Church fueled lies and hocus-pocus as they fear their power and influence could wane if ever people knew that they came into contact with the divine every day.

He discarded the pen and went over to the table where Lucifer lay, half-formed in clay waiting for da Vinci to unravel secrets of the threads that bind flesh and soul. The secret, if ever solved, would elevate man from the level of creation to creator. It would—HE would—make men into Gods.

It wasn’t merely ego, he thought, looking at the perfect lines of Lucifer’s face.

It surpassed that. It truly was genius.

Leonardo let his hands gentle over the anatomical perfection of his creation. The clay felt like dead flesh beneath his touch, so exact was the illusion. Lucifer’s body had been constructed around a metal frame that was precisely jointed, just like the countless skeletons he had examined by whickering candlelight come darkness.

The apprentices were downstairs now, laboring over the individual parts that would come together to create the whole, a perfect replica of da Vinci’s own hands, to prepare Lucifer for his last and most precious gift: life.

They hadn’t the slightest comprehension of what it was their insignificant nuts and bolts of alloyed metal would combine to become, but they would, if Lorenzo The Magnificent could not be swayed from his intended public display of da Vinci’s clockwork man. The man was a fool but he was a fool with influence and power and enough sycophants orbiting him to make him believe he truly was magnificent and not merely another tyrant eager to inflict pain and suffering on whosoever threatened to tarnish his pretended magnificence. Leonardo harbored no illusions. If his clockwork man failed to prance and dance like some overblown marionette Lorenzo Medici would exert every ounce of his ‘magnificence’ to ensure that da Vinci’s body would take on the warmth and texture of Lucifer’s pseudo-flesh as it sank, weighted down, to the bottom of the harbor.

“What am I to do?” he asked Lucifer’s empty shell.

The fragrance of vanilla, out of place in the workshop, was the first hint that he was not alone.

“Who you are dictates what you should do.” Da Vinci turned to face the newcomer. “Who are you? Painter; Sculptor; Maker of Men; Architect; Bringer of War; Musician; Engineer; Inventor or Scientist?”

The scent of vanilla flared as though in response to the passion driving the newcomer’s words.

“I am all of those, and none of them.” He reasoned, shielding his eyes as the creature came into full and beautiful view. It hurt to look at. Pure white light blazed off it. Light so fierce it was almost impossible to see behind it to the creature with its wings of fire, each feather a miracle of perfection, so different from the last, in all of its naked glory. It was beautiful but not in the way that the romantic artists imagined. The creature’s beauty was savage. “And either I am truly insane, or you, you are an angel of the Lord.”

“Michael,” the creature said.

He carried no sword, yet all the Church talk of Archangel Michael was as God’s sword.

“Have you come down to kill me?”

“Do you deserve to die?”

“How can I answer that? I have sinned, more than most, truth be told, but do I judge myself as worthy of death? No, I do not.”

“Then I shall not kill you.”

“Why are you here? Are you even here? Is it all my thoughts of divinity that have driven my mind feverish enough to conjure angels out of the ether?”

“I am here because Elohim bade me …” the word seemed to stick in the divine one’s craw. “Beg you to give up your folly with this, this creature.” It looked distastefully at the stillborn sculpture of Lucifer. “And give up all dreams of creation. He would have you work with the miracles He gave mankind, not try to breathe life into your toys. Even if you succeed, if you animate that thing—”

“He is called Lucifer.”

“And you think that is amusing, no doubt? Even if you animate your devil it will not be a man, it will be soulless, a golem. A thing of flesh without a soul. Where God’s love should suffuse it with life there will be only emptiness.”

The angel’s words echoed his own writing from just moments before. Emptiness. The absence of the divine. Hell. What this messenger was telling him was that even if he did breathe life into his creation, Lucifer would be a living Hell, not his masterpiece.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes you do. The artist in you believes me. It knows the beauty of the soul. The painter and the sculptor believe me. They have seen that beauty in every living thing. They have recorded that beauty on canvas and in clay. Even the scientist believes me, despite being desperate not to. It has no empirical evidence of a life existing outside of God’s care. It is conditioned to believe in numbers, in quantifiable results, therefore based on the evidence of its own eyes, even the scientist in you believes me.”

“And if I don’t stop?”

“Then you will have made nothing more than a companion for my lost brethren in Hell. A new Bright One, as far from God’s love as the first.”

Da Vinci realized he was standing over Lucifer’s clay form, a hand placed where its heart would have been had it had one, with almost fatherly propriety.

“Give it up.”

But of course, he couldn’t.

Creation was an addiction. The Archangel fed the hunger in him. The craving for power. To understand. To go beyond understanding.

“If you must create life, follow the cattle down there, procreate. God did give you the power to create life—”

“But it is not good enough! It is on His terms. Find a partner, make the beast with two backs, and if you are lucky, very lucky, you might, just might, conceive. It is not good enough.” His voice had risen almost to the level of a shout, but the angel had already left, its tears solidifying to multi-faceted multi-hued glass, where they struck the floor, each of the tears resonating with an increasingly more desperate note. The chorus of tears was desolate to hear.

Alone, da Vinci stared at his creation lying there lifelessly. All he could think was that he was doing something right. God himself had sent his sword down because he was frightened.

It would take time but he would give Lorenzo Medici his clockwork man.

It was the most amazing feeling, to know that He Who Doth Create, Knower Of All, was afraid—the feeling faded as fleetingly as it had appeared. He knew. God Knew. Whatever da Vinci could do with Lucifer it was because He allowed it.

“What kind of toy am I?” he asked, but it was a rhetorical question.

Over the coming days and weeks Leonardo da Vinci labored, outlining the mechanisms of Lucifer, for every joint and cog for his creation to be capable of independent movement. The process of building was no mean feat of engineering, every tooth on every gear and cog required custom grinding and cutting to ensure they bit and held when turned. For Lucifer’s knees and elbows he adopted a simple ball-in-cup arrangement to give the illusion of fluidity but the crowning glory was the contraption that would act as Lucifer’s heart, the pump that would act as a battery once Lucifer was in motion, capturing kinetic energy generated by the rhythmic metronomes that were the clockwork man’s arms and legs.

Once it started moving it would never need to stop or rest. Da Vinci’s clockwork man would be an untiring giant with the strength of iron and the stamina of a legion of bulls.

During the creation da Vinci seldom slept. Fatigue ate at him but he was determined to see his efforts bear fruit. He drove himself to the limits of human tolerance and way, way beyond. Like God, on the seventh day, he rested. Lucifer was by no means complete but what was lacking was merely the aesthetics, the mechanics were in place.

He had two visitors that day, the first, Lorenzo Medici, and the second, holiest of holies, the divine Archangel Michael come to beg, bully and finally plead.

Lorenzo Medici carried himself like a vulture, his hooked nose sniffing out carrion, his eyes roving, never settling in one place and his hands flexing, clasping, coiling. The sight of the mechanical man appeared to put him genuinely at ease, which was a rare occurrence in Da Vinci’s experience, but then he had anticipated as much when he began to shape Lucifer. Who could be at ease around a thing like that? Lucifer was truly beautiful and more worthy of life than so many of God’s creatures, who, next to the Bright One, were pale, pale shadows.

Still, the effect the cold clay had on Medici was unnerving.

“Will it live?” he asked in hushed, almost reverential tones, as though Cosimo’s tower had been transformed into some temple, a holy place. Given what was going on inside, perhaps it had.

“Oh yes, the Devil will walk among us,” da Vinci answered the tyrant.

“Good … good …” then: “When?” and there was desperation in his voice. Need. The fire of hunger burned in Medici’s poisonous eyes. This promised unimaginable wealth. Forget base metal transmogrification, the clay and clockwork man on the table verged on the territory of miracles. People would pay to witness its birth.