John didn’t think.
He was across the hall before he’d decided to be, and as the young man turned at the sound of his boots on the tiles, John pushed.
The hall slowed.
He saw everything.
He saw the knife turning towards him, the light running along its edge.
He saw the young man’s weight going onto his front foot, his shoulder dropping, the line the blade would take: low, under the ribs, the way they’d taught it with bayonets at Étaples.
He saw it clearly enough to draw it on a blackboard.
He had all the time in the world to see it.
He did not have all the time in the world to move.
His body was a twenty-four-year-old physicist’s body that had been sitting in a laboratory for three years, and it moved the way it always had, which was not very fast.
He got his left arm across.
Not far enough.
The blade went into his forearm above the wrist, through the wool, through the skin, and opened it, and he felt it as a line of white cold and then as heat.
The world came back at full speed.
The young man was very close, surprised, his face a foot from John’s.
John did what he’d learned in a trench at Messines from a sergeant from Glasgow who’d never read a book: he grabbed the knife wrist with his right hand and held it, and drove his forehead into the bridge of that broken nose, and as the man reeled back brought his knee up between his legs as hard as he could.
The man made a sound like a kicked dog and went down on one knee.
The knife clattered on the tiles.
John put his boot on it.
The man was on one knee in front of him, both hands between his legs, his face a mess of blood.
His neck was bare.
The knife was under John’s boot.
It would have taken one movement to pick it up and finish it, and a sergeant at Messines would have told him to.
John thought it through in the time it took the man to breathe twice.
He was a foreigner with no name and no papers, standing in a convent that belonged to the Dominicans, in a city where he did not know who the judges were.
A dead man on these tiles would be the end of him before he had properly begun.
And this man had been sent.
Somebody had told him what to ask for and where to find it.
Alive, he would go back to whoever that was and tell them the painter had a friend now.
Dead, he would tell nobody anything, and the next one would come without warning.
Let him run.
Then we’ll know who comes next.
They looked at each other.
The young man was bleeding from the nose.
So was John.
Then the young man was on his feet and gone, through a side door, his steps rattling away down a back stair, and the door banged, and somewhere below a friar shouted.
John stood in the spilled red chalk with his arm running blood onto the floor, and shook.
* * *
“Sit,” said Leonardo da Vinci.
“No, not there, there’s a wet cartoon.
Here.
On the bench.
Hold your arm up.
Higher.
Above your heart, the blood is lazy, it doesn’t like to climb.
Good.”
He bound it himself, with strips torn from a linen sheet, quickly and tightly and very well.
His hands were large and spotted and absolutely steady.
He smelled of linseed oil and charcoal and something sweet, like aniseed.
He didn’t speak while he worked.
When he’d tied the last knot he sat back on his heels and looked up at John, and his eyes were pale grey and very bright and missed nothing.
“You moved,” he said, “before he did.”
John said nothing.
“Not quickly.
You’re not quick.
I’ve seen quick men.
Cesare’s Spaniards are quick, they’d have had your liver out.” Leonardo tilted his head.
“But you knew.
You turned your arm into the blade before the blade had decided where to go.
As if you’d seen it already.
And your nose began to bleed.
Before he hit you.
I watched it.” He held up one finger, smudged black.
“And your hands.
Give me your hand.”
John gave it to him.
Leonardo held it between both of his.
“Cold,” he said.
“Cold as a dead man’s.
In a room with a brazier.” He let go.
“Who are you?”
It would be easy.
It would take a moment.
He could feel where the last few minutes sat in the old man’s head, the knife, the boots on the tiles, the nosebleed.
He could find the joins and take the strip away and leave Leonardo blinking by the scaffold with a bloody bandage he didn’t remember tying.
And something would come with it.
Some piece of Leonardo da Vinci, the way Clara Hartley had come with the pencil and the sandwiches.
He’d carry it for the rest of his life, and Leonardo would wake at night from a dream of a stranger in a brown cloak, and never know why.
Not again.
Not this soon.
“My name is John,” he said.
“Giovanni, here.
I’ve come a very long way.”
“From where?”
“London.”
“I’ve met Englishmen.
They don’t fight with their heads.” Leonardo was watching him.
“How long a way?”
John looked at the battle on the wall.
The horses.
The men with their mouths open.
“About four hundred and seventeen years,” he said.
He waited for the laugh, or the friar’s shout, or the sign of the cross.
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t laugh.
He looked at John for a long moment, and then he got up and went to a trestle and came back with a notebook, small, bound in red leather, and a stick of chalk, and sat down on the floor at John’s feet like a boy.
“Good,” he said.
“Start at the beginning.
Speak slowly.
And if you’re lying, lie well.
I hate a dull liar.”
* * *
It was dark when Salai came in, a beautiful sulky young man with curls, carrying a basket of bread and a dead hare, and found his master on the floor in the chalk with half a notebook filled and a bloodstained stranger on the bench.
“What happened?” said Salai.
“A thief,” said Leonardo, without looking up.
“This gentleman saw him off.
He’s staying.” He turned a page.
“Salai, what did the thief drop?”
Salai bent and picked something up from under the scaffold.
A small leather purse on a broken thong.
He weighed it in his hand, and his face showed, for a moment, a deep professional interest, before he handed it over.
Leonardo opened it.
A few silver coins.
A twist of paper with salt in it.
And a little disc of red sealing wax, of the kind a man carried to prove who had sent him.
He held it to the candle.
Pressed into the wax was a bull.
A small, stocky, charging bull.
Leonardo went very still.
“Then it isn’t my horses he wanted,” he said quietly.
“Or my maps.” He closed his hand on the wax.
“It’s Cesare’s.
And whoever’s left of Cesare’s men in Florence knows where I sleep.”
* * *
Leonardo did not go home that night.
He sent Salai down to the porter’s lodge with a coin to have the street door of the cloister barred, and then he dragged a trestle across the door at the top of the stair himself, with John holding the other end one-handed.
“He won’t come back tonight,” said John.
“No.
Tonight he’s lying in a cellar with his nose spread over his face, telling himself what he’ll do to you.” Leonardo sat down on the trestle.
“Tomorrow, or next week, someone else comes.
Someone who’s been told about the stranger with the cold hands.”
He lit a second candle from the first and set it on the floor between them, and for a while he only looked at John in the light of it, the way he had looked at the horses on the wall.
“Four hundred and seventeen years,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“And in four hundred and seventeen years, do they still remember me?”
John thought about lying.
He thought about the Mona Lisa behind its glass in the Louvre, which he had never seen except in a photograph, and the crowd of schoolboys in front of the Codex at the British Museum, of whom he had been one.
“Yes,” he said.
“Very much.”
“For the horses?”
“Some of it.”
Leonardo nodded slowly.
He did not ask which part.
John saw him decide not to, the way a man decides not to open a letter until the morning.
“Then you’ll stay,” he said.
“Here, with me.
You’ll sleep behind that screen and eat what Salai doesn’t steal and you’ll help me grind colours, which is a job for a boy of twelve and you’ll do it badly.
In exchange you’ll let me watch you.” He tapped the red notebook.
“Every day.
What you do with the world when you push it, how long, what it costs.
I’ll measure it like I measure the flight of a bird.
And nobody will know, because nobody listens to an old man talking about birds.”
“And the Borgia men?”
“The Borgia men want my maps.
You broke one of their noses.
That makes you mine, whether I like it or not.” He smiled for the first time, a short, crooked smile in the grey beard.
“Fortunately, I like it.”
“You haven’t asked me what I did,” said John.
“In the fight.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to be ready to say it plainly.
Say it plainly.”
John tried.
“I can make the world slow down around me.
Not stop.
Slow.
For about four of my own counts, the world moves about as far as it would in a fifth of a second.
During that time I can think as much as I like.
I can see where his knife will go and how his weight is moving.
I saw all of that today.”
“And yet he cut you.”
“Because only my mind goes fast.
My body doesn’t.
My arm moves at the same speed it always does.
So I see everything, and then I can only do a very little about it.
I got my arm across.
That’s all.”
Leonardo turned that over.
“A man who can read the whole page,” he said, “but only turn it at the speed of everyone else.”
“Yes.”
“And the cold?
The blood from the nose?”
“That’s the price.
Every time.
More, the longer I do it.”
“Then the first thing we’ll learn is how much a count costs.” Leonardo wrote it down, right to left.
“And the second is how to make your body as quick as your head.
That, I can’t teach you.
I’m an old painter.
But perhaps somewhere in the world there is a man who can.”
John lay down that night on a pallet that smelled of straw and linseed, behind a screen of drawings of men’s open mouths.
His arm throbbed under the linen.
Across the hall, Salai snored, and Leonardo sat by the candle with the bull seal in his palm, turning it over and over, and did not sleep at all.