“See the dragonfly over there?” he asked Johann one time when they discussed the possibilities of a water clock consisting of twenty-four individual vessels that filled and emptied every hour. “It flies with four wings. Each time the front pair of wings lifts, the back one drops, like a small apparatus designed by God. Astounding, isn’t it?”
Johann blinked. “I can’t see much, to be honest. How can you make out individual movements in all that whirring?”
“I just see them.” Leonardo gave a shrug. “It would seem my eyes pick up more than those of others.” He paused in his tracks. “Hmm. If a dragonfly gains so much uplift with four wings, then accordingly larger wings on a person . . . Oh, just look at that sunlight breaking in the small waterfall over there! The water acts like a filter that separates the individual colors. Highly interesting!” He gathered up his coat and hurried toward the waterfall, like a small boy on the hunt for dragonflies. He whipped out his notebook and immersed himself in a series of sketches with his charcoal stylus.
Johann looked at his host’s back with wonder. It happened all the time—Leonardo was interested in so many things at once that he struggled to focus on any one thing for more than a few hours. Spending the days with him was like wandering through a forest of ideas without ever stopping. Johann had met many great scholars, the most intelligent of which was probably Agrippa; but even Agrippa was a man of the mind, piecing together the world in his head. Leonardo, on the other hand, studied the life that was directly in front of him, smelling it, tasting it, touching it. He took an interest in everything Johann described to him, be it simple juggling tricks, astrological problems, nifty sleight of hand, the possibilities of alchemy, or the foul-smelling flaming arrows Johann produced for his shows.
“In Milan, I developed a machine that can loose hundreds of arrows at once,” said Leonardo thoughtfully during a stroll one mild April evening. Karl had joined them, while Greta preferred roaming the streets of town, as she had been doing for days. She seemed quiet, even sullen. She hadn’t mentioned John Reed again—evidently the fling hadn’t been as serious as Johann had feared.
Leonardo hardly seemed to notice Greta’s absence, but he often inquired about Karl, who was more than happy to join them on their walks. With his ring-studded left hand, Leonardo picked up a stone and threw it into the pond. Little Satan, who walked with the men when he wasn’t with Greta, barked and leaped after the rock.
“All arrows follow the same elliptical path,” Leonardo went on. “The same goes for cannonballs, which are being used increasingly. The person who figures out how to predict their course exactly has the power to decide a war.”
“Have you ever offered your knowledge to one of Europe’s leading rulers?” asked Karl. “Especially now, with the advance of the Ottomans, I’d imagine people would pay anything for inventions like the arrow-shooting machine.”
Leonardo took his time and weighed each word carefully. “I used to think that to preserve the greatest gift of all—freedom—any means were permissible. But I’ve changed my mind. Some thoughts oughtn’t be recorded—yes, not even spoken out loud. They are too dangerous.”
“But shouldn’t all thinking be free?” asked Johann.
“It is a dilemma indeed.” Leonardo sighed. “I’m afraid this subject will occupy humanity more and more in the future. Thoughts, inventions, and countless possibilities grow faster all the time on the trees of our imagination.” He gave Johann a long and searching look. “How can we ensure that our ideas don’t turn out to be our undoing? I see a gloomy picture up ahead. Mankind is going to subjugate the earth, and there will be nothing left on land or in the water that we don’t persecute, rout out, and destroy.”
In those moments Leonardo grew as depressed as Johann had grown in his own darkest hours.
The days became a blur. Johann saw Greta only at nights or in the morning, and then he and Karl would continue their scientific discussions with Leonardo. He didn’t know what his daughter got up to during the day. It was like in Metz when he and Agrippa were working on the witch trial, or like at Heidelberg when he had built the laterna magica with his friend Valentin. The discussions, the work, and the countless new inspirations gave wings to his spirit. And he forgot everything else around him, even the people he loved.
But one thing was strange: when Johann mentioned Heinrich Agrippa to Leonardo, the old man said that while he’d heard the name before, he didn’t know of any letters the two of them had supposedly exchanged. Johann suspected Leonardo had simply forgotten his correspondence with Agrippa. Thousands of letters, notes, and scraps of paper were piled up in Leonardo’s library, some of which had even been used twice in order to save paper. Sometimes the great master had an ingenious thought one day just to forget it by the next because he’d had three more since.
But there was one thing they never discussed during these first weeks: their illness. Whenever Johann broached the subject, the old man avoided the question or gave vague replies.
“The church says there is a time for everything in life,” said Leonardo once as they sat together over dinner. “A time to grow, a time to die, a time to take, and a time to pay.” The cook, Matturina, silently placed stew on the table and sat down in a corner, where she awaited further instructions. She and the old servant, Battista, always hovered near Leonardo, apparently ready to help him should the old man fall or struggle with his paralysis.
“Maybe now is the time to pay,” continued Leonardo. He trembled as he spooned up the stew with his left hand; he grew weaker by the day now. A silver chain with a pendant, one of
