I smiled, the pain of my injured leg forgotten and any fear of death left behind. Certainly, this must be but a final trick of my now-fevered mind, I told myself as I calmly watched the ground rushing up to meet me. Still, I would die happily, knowing that, at least in my imagination, Leonardo had won the day and my father was free.

And afterward, when I moved from darkness back into light, surely Constantin would be waiting to greet me, his smile proud as he stood alongside his father and welcomed me home.

24

Much to my surprise, I did not die, after all.

Instead, I awakened sometime later to find myself lying upon a soft pallet in one of our wagons, wrapped once again in my father’s cloak. His expression anxious, my friend Vittorio hovered over me.

From the canopy of trees above him, I guessed that we were back in the makeshift camp where we apprentices had gathered the night before. No longer did I hear the sounds of shouting men and clashing arms and frightened horses. Now the whisper of breeze was broken by a lark’s cheery song and the occasional call of one apprentice to another as they gathered up pieces of the Master’s stage setting.

“You’re alive,” Vittorio exclaimed in satisfaction, adding with greater relief, “and none too soon for me. I have needed to piss for a good hour, but the Master charged me with keeping watch over you until you woke up, lest you sink away altogether and breathe your last!”

I was not sure if that final observation was meant to spur me to health or simply to warn me that my prospects were dire. Assuming the former, I shot him a wry look and managed to reply, “Fear not; you don’t have to stitch my shroud just yet. And I will do my best to keep breathing, so take yourself off to piss with my blessing.”

While Vittorio rushed off to find an accommodating tree, I gingerly took stock of my physical state. Despite my assertions to the contrary, breathing proved more difficult than I expected, for my ribs ached with every inhalation. I put an experimental hand to my throbbing head to find it bandaged, with the cloth over my forehead sticky with drying blood. But my greatest alarm came when I realized someone had cut away one leg of my trunk hose in order to bind up the gash on my thigh.

By now Vittorio, still adjusting his tunic, had returned to my side. I gestured him nearer and indicated my bandaged leg.

“Who-who did this?” I asked in no little trepidation, all too aware that the required surgery upon my garb might have revealed a certain lack of my supposed anatomy to anyone observing the procedure.

Vittorio snickered. “Don’t worry; no one save your father saw what dangles between your legs, for he insisted on bandaging you himself. Novella gave him some of the same salve that Signor Luigi prescribed for Rebecca, but he made her look away lest you be embarrassed later.”

He snorted at my sigh of relief, unaware that it was the preservation of my disguise and not my modesty that comforted me. Then, at my request, he told me all he knew of what had happened while I lay unconscious after my dramatic landing in the midst of what was briefly to become a battlefield.

I had not imagined the glorious sight of Leonardo and his chariot charging out onto the field of fi re, my father at his side. The pair had escaped Nicodemo’s dungeon with relative ease, given that Leonardo had had the foresight to hide in his tunic a ring of keys, each being the master to a different style of lock. As for the painted army come to life, the truth had been equally prosaic if no less a marvel.

For the soldiers I’d seen rushing from the forest in great numbers to clash with the Duke of Pontalba’s men had not sprung from our canvases; rather they had been Ludovico’s own army. Leonardo’s message to the duke had met him but a day out from Milan. How he might have worded his entreaty, no one save he and the duke knew, but apparently the note was sufficient to spur Il Moro into dispatching his troops posthaste. Thus, the army had been almost on our heels as we traveled to Pontalba.

It had been my father, Vittorio explained, who had braved the battle around me to rush to my side and carefully extricate me from the flying machine’s wreckage. With equal valor, he had dodged flailing swords and thrusting spears from both sides to carry me to the safety of the trees, not knowing at that point if I still lived or not.

The fighting, meanwhile, had continued, but not for long. During the initial clash, a group of Ludovico’s men had gained control of the castle’s gate before the unsuspecting guards could lower the portcullis and raise the drawbridge. The remainder of the duke’s army had quickly subdued Nicodemo’s smaller force and commenced an orderly invasion of the castle.

As for the remaining apprentices, they were all safe. They had taken cover beneath the wagons and watched the action on the field with the same enthusiasm as if it had been a feast day pageant. Though my dramatic diversion had ultimately proved unnecessary, Vittorio staunchly reassured me that it would have gained them much crucial time had not the soldiers from Castle Sforza fortuitously arrived.

“You know how Davide is,” he reminded me with a grin. “He worries like an old woman. He saw the flying machine atop the castle and feared the Master’s plan had gone wrong. He had already given the order to mount the horses by the time the gate opened. Had Il Moro’s men not appeared to protect us, we would have ridden off. We would have been far ahead of the duke’s soldiers by the time they finally tired of watching you flap about the skies like an old hen.”

Of course, they had all thought me dead when they saw the flying machine gracelessly tumble to the ground. I was gratified to learn that my presumed demise had quite dampened their earlier enthusiasm for battle, and that spontaneous cheers had arisen once they saw that I remained among the living. Later, after the fighting had ended, the Master had examined his battered craft. He had opined that it had been the leather bladder, intended to facilitate a landing upon the water, which had ultimately cushioned the impact enough for me to survive with but minor injuries.

The gash on my leg, though painful, had already stopped bleeding by the time my father rescued me. More troubling, Vittorio explained, was the blow to my head that I’d suffered. After evaluating the damage to his invention, the Master had checked on the welfare of its luckless pilot. He had taken one look at my unconscious form and instructed that I was to remain unmoving for the remainder of the day and through the night, lest I do further damage to my battered head. Assured that I likely would survive, he and my father had returned to the castle where the captain of Il Moro’s guard was busy interrogating the Duke of Pontalba.

Wisely, Nicodemo had not mounted any further defense once it was apparent that his men were outnumbered. Instead, he had played the role of aggrieved noble, protesting that he had been duped by Leonardo into believing that Milan was prepared to lay siege to Pontalba. With the same vigor, he had claimed that he’d only just learned about the kidnapping of my father and theft of the flying machine. That plan, he assured the true captain of Ludovico’s guard, had been solely the idea of his nephew, who had acted on his own and apparently had fled the castle in all the commotion.

It was not until much later that someone had noticed Tito’s broken body lying at the castle’s foot, hidden in the grass.