He came up out of black water with his mouth full of sand.
It was cold.
That was the first thing, before he knew where he was or how.
A November cold, brown and heavy, pulling at his coat, and under his feet not stone but something soft that gave.
He stood up.
The water came to his waist.
He was holding the astrolabe against his chest so hard the rim had cut into his palm.
Grey dawn.
A wide, slow river.
On the far bank, a long line of houses with their backs to the water, washing hung from poles, shutters still closed.
Upstream, a bridge on low stone piers with little buildings standing on it, crowded together like teeth.
And behind it all, above the roofs, a great red dome with a white lantern on top, catching the first of the light.
He knew that dome.
He’d had it on a postcard over his bed in Camden Town since he was twelve.
His mother had sent it from her sister’s in Lucca, the summer before the war.
Florence.
Then the fever hit him, and the river came up to meet his face again.
* * *
Later, when he could think again, he worked out what had happened, and he wrote it down so he would not lose it.
The astrolabe had been made in Florence in 1503.
It had been made here, in this city, by a man who had worked on it for weeks with these streets outside his window.
When John held it and pushed, the brass had pulled him back to the place and time it came from, the way a weight on a string swings back to the bottom.
He called that the Step, because it was the plainest word he had.
A thing made in a time and place was an anchor for that time and place.
Without one, he guessed, he would go nowhere, or somewhere he had not chosen.
He had arrived with exactly what he had been wearing and holding.
His clothes, his boots, his wallet, his watch, the astrolabe.
Nothing else.
Not the pencil, not his pocketbook, which had been on the bench, not the sandwiches he had already eaten.
And the Step had cost him, the way the Hold cost him.
Not a nosebleed this time.
A fever.
The woman who pulled him out was called Bice, and her husband was a renaiolo, one of the men who dug sand out of the bed of the Arno with long-handled scoops and sold it to the builders by the boatload.
They had a hut of planks and reeds on the gravel below the walls, by the Porta San Niccolò, and a brazier, and a pot, and four children who stood in a row in the doorway and stared at John for two days while he lay under a sheep’s fleece and shook.
He’d been ill before.
Trench fever, at Armentières, in 1917.
This was like that, but faster, and stranger.
His teeth chattered and his skin burned, and when he shut his eyes he saw the glass city by the sea, and a paper cup with lipstick on its lid, and a wooden pier at Brighton with a straw hat going end over end along the boards.
Clara.
Edmund, get it.
He hadn’t been to Brighton since he was six.
On the second morning, when he could keep his eyes open, he listened.
The children spoke Florentine, quick and swallowed, with the c turned into an h so that casa came out as hasa.
He could follow about one word in three.
His mother’s Italian had been the Italian of Lucca, as she had learned it as a girl in the 1880s, and these people were four hundred years further back.
The bones of the language were the same.
Everything on top was different.
It was like hearing a song he knew played on an instrument he didn’t.
He learned the date from the eldest boy, who was about nine and had decided John was his property.
“The dead man’s woken up,” the boy told the others.
Then to John, slowly and loudly, as if to a foreigner or an idiot: “You fell in the river on the Day of the Dead.
Mamma says the river gave you back because it didn’t want you.”
The Day of the Dead was the second of November.
The year he got from Nencio, who said nothing for two days and then, on the evening of the second day, said one whole sentence to his wife as he took off his boots: “They say the new Pope will have the Valentino’s head before Christmas.”
The new Pope.
Alexander VI had died in August 1503, and Cesare Borgia, the Duke Valentino, his son, had fallen with him.
John had read that in a history at school and forgotten it until now.
It was November 1503.
The astrolabe had brought him to within a few days of the year engraved on its rim.
On the second evening the fever broke, and he sat up, and Bice gave him a bowl of bread soup with black cabbage in it, and he ate three bowls and could have eaten five.
“Ciao,” he said to the smallest child, when he’d finished, because it was what his mother said to children.
The child looked at him blankly.
So did Bice.
“Where are you from?” said Bice.
“You talk like a priest from Lucca who’s been hit on the head.”
“Lucca,” said John, which was half true.
“And then a long way north.”
“Hm,” said Bice.
She looked at his jacket, drying by the brazier.
Good grey worsted, from a tailor in Tottenham Court Road, two years old.
She looked at his boots, which had steel toecaps and laces with metal tips.
“Very far north.”
He paid her with a collar stud.
It was rolled gold and worth about fourpence in 1920, and she bit it and looked at him as if he’d given her a ring.
Her husband, Nencio, who had not said a word in two days, gave him a dead brother’s hose and doublet and a brown wool cloak in exchange for the grey jacket.
John kept the trousers on under the hose.
He kept the boots.
He kept his wristwatch where it was, under his shirt cuff, and the wallet with his brother’s letter in the inside of his doublet, and the astrolabe wrapped in a rag in the bag Bice gave him.
“Where are you going, Lucca?” said Bice, at the door of the hut, on the morning of the fourth of November.
“To find a painter.”
She laughed.
“Throw a stone.”
“Is there one called Leonardo?” said John.
“From Vinci.”
Bice’s face changed.
Not much.
“The one who makes the flying things,” she said.
“Nencio’s cousin carried timber for him once.
He paid.
Late, but he paid.” She looked at John as if she were adding him up again.
“He’s a strange one, that one.
You’ll get on.”
He went up into the city through the Porta San Niccolò with the bag over his shoulder and his steel toecaps ringing on the stones.
He had been to Florence once, in a postcard, and once in his mother’s stories, and neither had smelled like this.
Smoke and dung, and wet wool, and the tanneries along the river, and under it all bread.
The streets were narrower than any street in London, and darker, because the houses leaned towards each other at the top.
Men in short tunics and coloured hose pushed past him without looking.
A woman threw a bucket of something out of an upper window and he jumped back just in time.
He had seen it a second before it happened, a faint grey sheet of water falling through the air ahead of the real one.
It’s still here.
Seeing ahead.
It came with me.
Behind the cathedral, a crowd of boys had gathered at the gate of the works yard, trying to see in.
A workman chased them off.
John caught a glimpse past him of a block of white marble taller than a house, with scaffolding round it and a man on top with a chisel, and the shape of a shoulder coming out of the stone.
That’s the David.
He’s still carving it.
He stood there with his mouth open, like a tourist, until the workman shouted at him too.
He didn’t need to throw a stone.
There was only one painter he was looking for.
He’d read the books.
In October 1503 the Signoria had given Leonardo da Vinci the keys to a great hall at the convent of Santa Maria Novella, the Sala del Papa, so that he could draw a battle on a cartoon the size of a wall.
John had seen the date in a footnote at the British Museum.
He walked there through streets that smelled of woodsmoke and horse dung and the tanneries by the river, past men unloading barrels from carts, past a bakery with its door open and the heat rolling out, past a chapel where a priest was saying mass to six old women and a dog.
Twice he stopped and stood still because the doubled pictures came back: a cart that hadn’t yet turned a corner, a boy who hadn’t yet dropped his basket.
Twice it passed.
His head ached.
The convent was huge and green and white, with a long front of striped marble.
A friar with a broom told him the painter was upstairs, round by the great cloister, and that if he was a creditor he should get in line.
He climbed the stair.
He was halfway up the stone stairs when he heard the crash.
* * *
He stopped on the stair with his hand on the wall.
Above him something had fallen, heavy and wooden, and something else had broken, glass or pottery, and then there was a silence that was worse than the noise.
He could have gone back down.
Nobody would have known.
He had been in Florence for four days, he had the clothes of a sand digger’s dead brother and a fever not long gone, and his left knee was still shaking from the river.
Whatever had fallen up there was none of his business.
Then he heard a man’s voice, low and fast, and he knew the tone if not the words.
He had heard it in a cellar at Wytschaete, from a corporal with a German prisoner.
It was the voice of a man who had already decided to hurt someone and was only talking while he chose where.
John went up the stairs.
The Sala del Papa was a long, high hall with tall windows down one side, and it was full of paper.
Paper on trestles.
Paper pinned to boards.
Paper on the floor in drifts, sketches of horses’ heads and men’s faces with their mouths open, and in the middle of the room a wooden scaffold with ropes and pulleys that held up an enormous sheet, pieced together from dozens of smaller ones, on which a battle was beginning in charcoal: horses rearing, men tangled together around a standard, every face a shout.
A trestle had gone over.
Inkpots on the floor, a bowl of red chalk spilled across the tiles like blood.
By the scaffold stood an old man in a rose-coloured tunic that came only to his knees, with a long grey beard and long grey hair, holding a leather roll of papers against his chest with both arms.
In front of him, a younger man with a knife.
He was about twenty-five and lean, with a broken nose and a soldier’s leather jerkin, and he held the knife low and point up, the way men held them who had used one.
He hadn’t seen John.
He was talking, quietly and quickly, in an accent that wasn’t Florentine.
“…don’t care about your horses, old man.
I care about the roll.
The fortresses.
Imola, Cesena, Faenza.
All of them.
You drew them for him.
Now you’ll give them to me.”
“I drew them for the Duke Valentino,” said the old man.
His voice was light, almost interested.
“Who is, I hear, in Rome and not well.
If he wants his maps he may come and ask for them.
You, my friend, may go and drown.”
“I’ll take them from you dead.”
“Then you’ll get them with a great deal of blood on them, and they’ll be very hard to read.”
The knife came up.
For one moment nobody moved.
The old man held his roll of papers.
The young man held his knife.
And John stood in the doorway at the far end of the hall, twenty paces away, and understood that he was looking at Leonardo da Vinci, and that in about three seconds Leonardo da Vinci was going to be stabbed.