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Jeanne d’Architonnerre

G. Scott Huggins

Even inside the armor of the tartaruga that she was preparing for battle, Gia could hear the bellowing of the Florentine leaders. Them, and the crunching thunder of the siege guns.

“This is your army? You are trusting the fate of the Republic to a blind man and a crippled girl?” shouted Soderini.

“It’s better than trusting the mercy of that son-of-a-whore Borgia and His Profanity Julius II!” hissed back Machiavelli.

Gia inspected the turret. Bearings, greased. Springs and gun-track, polished to a shine. She snapped the slats of the viewports up and down on their hinges. She saw the Florentine militia wavering in their ranks, the dust and smoke where mortar stones had fallen, and finally, the sour, square face of Gonfaloniere Soderini, red jowls flapping.

“You call him profane!” he cried. “But you’re the one dealing with a sorcerer!”

“Well, if he can conjure up a spine for your militia, then he is no wizard, but a worker of miracles and therefore a saint!” growled General Machiavelli. His smooth face was a saturnine mask. Gia was not fooled. The man’s rage was hotter than the copper of the architonnerre. And that shone with heat, steam venting from its valve.

“They’re your militia!” roared Soderini. “You trained them! You led them! You led us all—to this!”

“And you refused to let me train them more,” Machiavelli went on, implacably. “You and the rest, so worried that I might declare myself a prince that they are now—as I warned you!—unable to save us from the devils beating at Prato’s gates!”

Gia snorted. At least she and her fellow tartaruga crews had drilled. They’d had to learn the machines inside-out.

“Have faith,” said a voice with an odd accent. French? A short man in blue uniform under a breastplate stepped into view. “Gaston de Foix comes from victory over Spain at Ravenna, and though wounded, he rides to your aid. But he cannot retake Prato if it has already fallen, and Prato is the key to Firenze. Better to fight now than beg Christ’s mercy from the black hearts of Pope Julius II or Borgia.”

At that name, rage mounted in Gia’s belly, spreading even to the legs she could not otherwise feel. She looked at the Florentines with disgust: they’d wanted to wait like princesses for some dashing French officer to ride to their rescue without having to fight. She’d never had any such illusions. She looked down into the belly of the tartaruga.

“Carlo, are we loaded?”

Si, donna.” The squat man gestured to the long trough of cast-iron balls.

“Gun breech?”

He grinned. “Smooth as a whore’s passage.”

“Don’t talk dirty about my baby, Carlo. Gun barrel?”

“Hotter than Borgia’s soul in Hell.”

Gia listened to the Florentines’ cursing and said, “I think it’s time for a valve test, don’t you?”

Carlo’s smile turned wolfish. “Si, Donna.

Gia looked out, making sure that the gleaming muzzle was turned well away from the arguing lords. The general’s hand was drifting slowly toward the hilt of a large dirk at his belt.

“Lock breech.”

“Locked and empty.”

Gia reached over and slammed the valve shut. The steam hissing through the turret vent cut off. Boiling water rushed through its siphon tube and hit the barrel of the gun, heated by its cage of coals. It flashed instantly into steam.

The copper barrel loosed a jet of vapor with a roar that silenced the shouting Florentines. Slamming the lever back, Gia unhooked a rope and lowered the chair-sized cart on which she sat. It settled to the deck of the war machine on its two wheels next to Carlos’s station. With a yank on the wheels, she propelled herself past the tartaruga’s tiller and off the ramp.

She looked back at it. It still looked a bit like a turtle’s ovoid shell. But the upper third of it, where she sat, could swivel, and the protruding copper barrel along with it. Its hull was sloping, laminated wood backed with thin iron plate, and lined inside with sheets of linothorax armor, tougher than boiled leather. Now there were . . . clay pots, bolted to its sides? What had her master been doing?

Twirling her cart again, she pushed herself around the hull of the war machine until she sat before the pale-faced Florentines.

She glared at them and then looked right and left at the other four tartarughe. Five. Five of the machines were all they had. Without taking her eyes from the two men before her, she called out, “Gunners! Vent your guns!”

Irregularly, the copper barrels snarled and spat steam.

“We are ready, signiore,” said Gia. “Are you?”

“This is madness,” muttered Soderini, looking at her with disgust.

“No, signor Gonfaloniere, madness would be to surrender,” said a new voice. It came from a white-bearded man who steadied himself on the tartaruga’s sloping hull. “You cannot make peace with Borgia,” he said. “And if you hide here, he will grind your walls to dust.”

The men, pale before, went white as milk. But Machiavelli’s voice was steady. “We are counting on you, Captain da Vinci, to lead this charge. Can you?”

Without turning his face away from them, da Vinci said, “Giovanna, the blast you loosed over my head means this old turtle is quite ready?”

“Yes, master,” she said, her guts curdling. He’d been right there?

“My arrangements are also complete. Signor Machiavelli?”

“The men of Firenze stand ready,” said the general, jaw tightening. “And will outfight paid robbers and the conscripts of princes.” He wheeled and shouted at them. “Men of Firenze! If Prato falls, so falls the Republic! Today, you are Horatius before the gates! If we hide, the devil Borgia will loose the fires of Hell upon us and we shall deserve to be consigned to them! Shall we cower, or shall we fight?”

A ragged cheer rose from the Florentine militia. Some men brandished their arquebuses and pikes, while others shuddered at the crunch of falling stones. “Form your ranks!”

The men shuffled past. Some looked down at Gia. In their faces, she saw pity, disgust, and not a few signs of warding from the malocchio, the Evil Eye. She turned her cart and felt her mentor grip the wooden handle at its back. “Let us make ready to lead them, Giovanna,” he said.

Gia threw the brass lever on the side of her cart. The clockwork rattled to life beneath her dead legs and it lurched forward, pulling him along. Adjusting the gears, she guided it into the belly of the tartaruga. Then she pulled it back into place in the turret until the pulley locked. Her master ran his fingers over the tiller and gearing levers below.

“Is everything in place, Captain da Vinci?”

He tilted his face upward. His ruined eye sockets stared through her, and his smile was gentle but grim. “I may be the ‘captain,’ but you must direct us. Oh—light a slow-match.” Her master was fumbling with a network of cords she hadn’t seen before.

“Why?” Their weapons did not need them. Nevertheless, she held a match to the coals of the architonnerre. It lit.

“Because now everything is in place to face Cesare Borgia and his pope. Even old Leonardo da Vinci.”


“It’s very pretty, sir,” she’d said, holding the confection of wood and paper in her callused hands. It looked like cakes she had once seen being carried to the palazzo. The gossamer paper icing hung over its delicate, wooden basket.

The old man smiled down at her. She saw that smile when people bothered to look at her: pity. Sometimes followed by coins. Keep him talking. “What is it?”

“Just a toy,” he chuckled. “For now.” He reached for it, but Gia twitched out of reach. It was risky, but he didn’t look the type to cuff or kick a crippled beggar girl.

“Now? What later?”

He smiled. “What if I told you that if I could make it big enough, a man standing in the basket could spin this screw and it would carry him into the sky like a bird?”

She laughed. But the thing had fluttered gracefully down from his balcony, three floors above the streets of Milano. A kind of flight. “Would not a man whirled about like that be sick?”

He grinned and plucked the model from her hand. “One of many problems to solve: for when the screw is spun, the basket spins the other way.” He laid a grosso coin before her.

“Then use two screws,” Gia said.

He blinked and looked at her. “What?”

“If one screw turns the basket the other way, can’t you add a second screw? Going the other way? Then the basket wouldn’t spin at all, because it would try to spin both ways at once.” She thought a moment. “Of course, you’d need another man to spin the other screw, I suppose.”

Now the man was staring at her. “Who are you, girl?”

She shrugged. “Maledetta.” She eyed him suspiciously. Of all the stares she’d endured, no one had ever looked at her like that. “Giovanna da Mirabello, really. But Father calls me Maledetta.” Accursed. She gestured at her useless legs, thin and twisted beneath her. Wrapped in sackcloth to protect them from cuts as she dragged them home each night, swinging them between her arms.

“Tell me, Giovanna,” he said. “Do you think your father would be interested in an apprenticeship?”

“For my brothers?” Gia said. “Yes, signor.”

“Not your brothers,” said the man. “For you.”

Gia gaped, “But I am just a lame girl! How can I do anything but beg when I cannot even walk?”

“Well,” said the man, handing her back his toy, “it can’t be more difficult than fixing this, can it?”


Footsteps pounded on the ramp, and a man hurtled past da Vinci and squeezed in beside Carlo’s bulk. “Excusez-moi, mes amis,” he said. It was the young French officer.

“What are you doing here?” said Gia. “Get out, we’re about to move!”

Exactement,” said the officer, grinning at her. “And I must be here. Henri Fitzmorton. The Duc de Nemours has charged me to see these wonders in action, and Signor da Vinci says that you, even more than he, are responsible for them, Mademoiselle . . . Jeanne, I believe?”

“My name is Giovanna.” So he was a Scot? Scotland and France had often aided each other against the English.

“But of course, it is just that French is a habit. So this . . . is your work.”

“It is not!” she said, color rising to her face. “Master, what have you told this man?”

“The simple truth,” da Vinci said, blandly. “This armored chariot, this tartaruga is due to Giovanna. Without her, it would not exist.”

“Master, that is not true: they were all your drawings! And you cannot come with us: the tartaruga has but three places. Carlo must load, I must direct, and my master must steer and keep us moving. And you must go.”

Fitzmorton gave her a broad grin. “My duty, Mademoiselle Jeanne, I am not large, and can crouch on the deck out of your way. And—since I see you have built-in firing slits—who knows? I may make myself useful after all.” At this, he produced a pair of pistols, inlaid with ivory and fashioned with a mechanism that drew a gasp from Gia’s lips.

“What is it, my dear?”

“He has your pistols, master. The wheellock.”

“A copy?” her master said. “Or mine? Oh. Gaspard Fitzmorton?”

“I am honored,” said the man, “to carry the pistols you yourself made for my father, Signor da Vinci.”


Gia bent over her workbench, assembling the intricate gunlock that her master had laid out, piece by piece. The metal edges, cut smooth as the purest water.

“Giovanna!” Leonardo called, from the main room of the workshop. “Come here, and bring me the flechette case.”

“Coming, master.” She tripped the lever on her three-wheeled cart. With a steady clicking as the clockwork unwound, she rode it over to the end of the room and took the heavy cylinder from the shelf. Then she reversed the gears and released the brake.

Her back and hands no longer ached from having to drag herself about the streets of Milano. In just a year, so much change! Hand on the tiller, she aimed as best she could for the door. Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed the little wheel off her own workbench—her own workbench!—laying it beside her.

“Master, I...” she began, and then fell silent, eyes wide in shock.

Her master was not alone in the workshop. Five men stood there: four soldiers in red-green-gold livery, and, standing before them, a man of middle height with a long, sallow face and a neat beard. Cesare Borgia, Duke of Milano.

With a shaking hand, Gia steered over to Leonardo. The lord of the city looked at her twisted legs with distaste. “Signior da Vinci, what is this? Surely my patronage is not so stingy that you must rely on crippled beggar girls as assistants?”

The chill she felt at this denunciation was dispelled by her master’s quiet laughter. “Allow me, my lord, to show you what we have devised for your cannon.”

“Cannon?” The man’s eyes lit. Then glared. “We?”

Da Vinci shrugged. “Giovanna had a most interesting suggestion, which I believe has merit.” He indicated a scroll laid out on the table. “This mortar: it will fire solid shot, but it was too difficult to fuse explosive shells so that they would burst among their targets. My lead flechettes also were impractical: their very sharpness made them unsuitable for use in cannon. However, when my apprentice saw them, she suggested...this.” Da Vinci took from her the squat cylinder bound with thin cord. It was made like a puzzle, of wooded wedges. And between the wedges protruded a dozen thick, pointed, iron spikes.

“What is this? Some kind of canister shot?”

“A longer-range canister shot, it is to be hoped.”

“With a wooden shell?”

“It is bound with a simple cord,” said da Vinci, “and flies into splinters as it leaves the gun barrel. But it has served its purpose, throwing the flechettes—for they have fins as an arrow. If you elevate your guns, they should fly at least twice the distance of canister shot, giving you twice as long to defend your cities.”

Borgia took it. “Intriguing.” His voice was calm, but his eyes were greedy. “We shall make trial of it. What is that?” he said, looking over at the next table. Another drawing lay there, in the master’s sure, strong strokes. “A cart...surely those are not cannon around the edge of it?”

Da Vinci sighed. “An idle dream only, my lord. Unfortunately for me, Giovanna discovered that it is impossible.”

“And she is the last word on what is impossible, is she?” asked the duke, a cold look in his eye.

Unable to contain herself, Gia said, “Not impossible, my lord. Only impossible as drawn there. It requires eight men to turn the wheels, and they are too narrow. Besides, the bottom of the cart would catch on the rocks...” She trailed off as her master raised a gentle hand to stop her torrent of words beneath Borgia’s cold stare.

“My lord, do not allow the immobility of Giovanna’s legs to blind you to the quickness of her mind,” said da Vinci, softly. “Consider her cart, which moves without recourse to horses or the strength of men. I designed it; but she, who lives her life on wheels, has brought to light problems—and thus, solutions—that older eyes, with their eyes on loftier goals, miss.”

Borgia sniffed. “You built her wheels?” This is how you spend my patronage? The message was clear.

“And she improved them. As she improved the flechettes. She has an uncanny knack for bringing together disparate elements, Giovanna.”

“So long as she learns when to keep silent.” Borgia sniffed. “These mechanical carts: can they carry food or guns, for an army?”

“Not yet,” said da Vinci. “But we make progress from day to day.”

“Then perhaps less work on toys, and more on useful things. Good day, signor.”

“Master, I am sorry...” she started, when the duke had left.

Her master turned a kind but frustrated smile on her. “I suppose it was partly my fault, to call you out here. The duke does not like being addressed by ‘lesser men.’”

“And I am but half a woman.”

“You are more than enough,” said her master, “but I beg that you will allow me to decide what the duke should know of our labors. Some things I am willing to build for him. Others”—he rolled up the scroll bearing the tartaruga tightly, handing it to her—“should have been put safely away. Let us make sure he does not see your improvements.” Gia nodded. “Now tell me: Are you finished with the wheellock for Monsieur Fitzmorton’s pistols?”

“Not quite, but nearly.”

“Good girl: I will inspect your work after supper.”

“Master...” With a shy smile, Gia brought out the wheel. It was awkwardly put together, with the axle held on either side by a wooden flange. The flanges met in a loop where they joined in an offset pivot.

“What have we here?”

“A wheel: look, if you place it on a surface, then the wheel always trails. It turns from side to side, or forward and back, without having to drag its frame around.”

Her master’s eyes glowed. “Placed correctly...you would create a pivot. A fast pivot for a wheeled cannon. Or...” He looked at the scroll in his hand. “Perhaps more than a cannon.”

Gia grinned, threw her cart in gear and awkwardly steered it around the benches. She was glad to be out of Borgia’s sight. Quite apart from his slurs at her—she got those from everybody except her master—Borgia made her feel cold. Like a dead thing that he had not bothered to bury.

Later, she would remember the feeling as a premonition.


“Carlo,” da Vinci said quietly, but firmly. “Shut the door.” With the pull of a rope, the ramp shut, and they were sealed in the stifling belly of the war machine.

“Locked and loaded,” called Carlo. Outside, Gia heard Machiavelli shouting at his men to form ranks. The shaken men formed into columns behind the tartarughe. Another hammering crunch slammed through the plaza, and a section of wall beside the gate buckled.

“They have to get the gates open now!” snapped Gia. If the thick, iron-bound gates were smashed, the wreckage would make the narrow passage completely impassable.

Monsieur Fitzmorton,” said da Vinci. “Do you see that mouthpiece beside you?”

“What, this one hammered into the side?”

“Sound ‘advance,’ please.”

Gingerly, the man put his lips to the mouthpiece and blew a series of rising notes.

Slowly, far too slowly, the gates were cranked aside. Smoke hung like white thunderclouds over the enemy a mile distant. Now there was nothing to do but meet them. Nothing to trust but the name of da Vinci. “We’re clear! Go!”

Below, her master released the tension on the two huge drive springs beneath the deck. Gears spun, and the tartaruga lurched forward. A new spurt of smoke went up from the clinging bank of fog and Gia clenched her teeth on the scream she felt building in her throat. This was the most dangerous moment. The war machines were in tight column. If Borgia’s mortar hit just right, the heavy stone ball would shatter them like a bocce ball cast among pottery pins.

But much faster than this and they would outrun their infantry. And run their mainsprings out of power before they were halfway across the field.

The stone ball hit with a deafening crunch, leaving a dent like the fist of God twenty feet to the right of the gate. Bricks avalanched to the ground. But they were through the gate, and turning south across the fields. The wide, cylindrical drive-wheels, wrapped in layers of thick, studded leather, drove them sturdily forward, but she had doubts about her four smaller pivot-wheels mounted before and behind. They wobbled, and the car shimmied, but there was nothing to be done now. Gia heard the cries of the infantry as their officers lined them up behind the war-cars. She looked left and right from her cupola.

To the right, two more war cars pulled into place abreast of her, their infantry quick-marching to keep up. To the left . . . 

One of the cars was spinning toward the Fiume River in a long loop. Her heart sank. Jammed tiller, or worse, gear failure. If it was that, they’d never untangle it in time. The other car on the left was hesitating. “Don’t bother about what you can’t fix!” she screamed through the slit. “Form your line!”

The notes of a trumpet cut through the noise. It was Fitzmorton, sounding “rally.” Slowly, the hesitant war-car caught up. But a fifth of their armor was gone, its infantry column unscreened. At least it was on the left, where the Fiume protected them from being flanked.

The papal artillery and infantry stretched out in a thin red line, crawling closer, minute by minute. Mortars belched. Half a mile to go. She picked out the gleam of metal on a barrel. “Sound ‘halt’!”

Fitzmorton obediently blew the trumpet, and the levers rattled to slow the machine.

“Sound ‘aim’!” The other tartaruga-commanders would be picking their targets.

“Five marks starboard!” she called.

“Five marks starboard!” Carlo echoed, shoving with all his might at the cupola’s tiller. Her platform and the architonnerre rotated on their greased rails. Now she heaved at the steam-gun’s elevation. One. Two. Three clicks.

“Firing!” she cried, and slammed the lever home.

The steam cannon roared, and the whole car rocked back as it drove forth a hundred pounds of solid shot. Gia saw puffs of dust as her shot bounded across the fields, heard the roars of the other guns. A ragged cheer went up from the Florentine militia behind them. Had she hit something? At this distance, it was hard to tell.

The architonnerre had not the power of the cannon Borgia commanded, to say nothing of his great mortars that hammered at Prato’s walls. It had two overwhelming advantages as the war-car’s main weapon, though: it required no stores of explosive gunpowder, nor the precious time to measure it out, or to wait for the barrel to cool.

“Load roundshot!” Gia shouted. “Advance!”

Carlo spun the interrupted screw forward of the steam chamber, placed another ball in the breech, and shot it home again. “Locked and loaded!” The car jerked forward again. But suddenly Borgia’s infantry was crawling nearer much faster: they were on the march. Their long line was sweeping around to their right. They’re flanking us. Now, all depended on speed. “Sound ‘charge.’”

“Charge?” said Fitzmorton. “At this distance? Your infantry will be exhausted and shot down like dogs!”

“They only have to charge until we stop to shoot.” She saw his bafflement. “Just trust me, Monsieur. Charge!”

Fitzmorton blew the trumpet. “I hope the springs hold.” Da Vinci’s mutter was almost too soft to hear. The tartaruga accelerated to the speed of a sprinting man.

“Is this possible?” Fitzmorton stared out the window at the terrain flashing by.

Borgia’s cannon fired. “Down!” Gia yelled. She threw herself flat against the cupola deck just as the leaden arrows struck like a hailstorm.

“What was that?” asked Fitzmorton.

Three lead points protruded through the linothorax of her cupola.

“They’re using your flechettes,” she said, grimly.

“But we knew he would,” da Vinci replied, as cool and smooth as polished steel. “Has the armor held?”

“None made it completely through. I think some were deflected. Your sloping armor worked.” Another hail of flechettes struck. Here and there, cries went up from the Florentine infantry that sheltered behind the war-cars, but it was nothing compared to the death that slashed through the unsheltered men on the left. Their screams tore at her ears.

“Sound ‘halt’!”

The trumpet sounded and the war-car slowed. Now they had closed to perhaps a furlong, and she could see the enemy frantically reloading beneath Borgia’s hated banner. Was he there? Was God so good?

“Three marks port!” Carlo grunted, and the architonnere’s sight bracketed the artillery crew. Gia dropped elevation one notch. “Firing!”

Steam roared and this time she saw the ball smash the gun’s carriage. Its bronze barrel leapt up and crashed to the earth. Around her she heard the Florentine infantry shouting. They were deploying into line!

“No, not yet, not yet!” she screamed. What was that idiot Machiavelli doing? They were still in range of the papal canister shot!

Then she scanned the horizon and her stomach curdled.

Machiavelli had no choice. The papal cavalry was charging from the tree line. They overtook the infantry. To her right, the Florentines formed their ranks, refusing the flank. Her war-car’s charge was done.

“Suppress the canister!”

“What?” Fitzmorton’s face was nearly in hers, looking out the viewport beside her.

“Stop watching the battle! You’re in charge of this battery, non? That cavalry is leaving firing lanes for Borgia’s guns. Suppress the canister, or our men die!”

Gia nodded jerkily. The other war-cars had fired, but she wasn’t sure what they’d hit. “Load hot shot!”

Carlo shoved Fitzmorton aside, and the man swore as his arm brushed the barrel. With blacksmith’s gloves, he seized one of the glowing balls that lay caged beside the steam cannon’s boiler and shoved it into the breech.

Gia scanned the enemy artillery line for a target . . . there!

“Seven marks starboard!” She wheeled around, ratcheting the gun. Fitzmorton helped Carlo spin the turret. “Firing!”

The heated shot plunged into the stacked barrels of gunpowder, and touched it off: a toadstool of rotting smoke and fire rose over the papal lines. A cheer went up from the Florentines. “Reload!” screamed Gia. The other tartarughe were doing their work. One fired, ripping a bloody hole in the line of infantry.

“Here come the horsemen!” shouted Fitzmorton.

“Carlo! The organ!”

Si, donna!” The big man fumbled at the fore of the car.

“What, are you going to play them a tune?” Fitzmorton demanded.

“Giovanna!” da Vinci snapped.

Oh, God, I’m falling apart. “Pivot forty-five degrees port!” she replied.

Thank you,” said the old man. He yanked at levers. A glance to the side—the car on her right was turning toward her, as planned. Suddenly, a great fist struck them in the side, and the whole tartaruga rocked. There was the sound of rending wood, but the linothorax shell merely bulged inward. One more hit there, though... They were turning too slowly.

The thunder of horses’ hooves shook the car through the very ground. The matchlocks of the Florentine infantry fired a ragged volley, but it was far too early, and only a few horsemen fell. “Bearing!” shouted da Vinci. Lances snapped downward for the kill.

“Fire!” Carlo yanked his lanyard and eleven wheellocks spun. The front of the war-cars spat a hail of lead. The short-barreled muskets ripple-fired. Their partner tartaruga had done the same, and the papal cavalry went down beneath enfilading point-blank fire. But it wasn’t over. Carlo reached forward and ratcheted the bank of muskets sixty degrees backward . . . revealing a second row of muskets. He fired again. The rending crash of gunfire blended with the screams of men and horses as smoke filled the car. Gia’s eyes stung, and she wept unbidden tears.


“Yes,” da Vinci had said, eyes sparkling as she spun her cart, weaving between the workshop tables. “A great improvement, and one we can adapt.”

“Thank you, master.”

The door crashed open, and Borgia stepped through.

“So, you are leaving us, Master da Vinci? After all of my patronage?”

Gia stifled a shriek. More frightened than she had ever been in her life, she clutched her cart. Through the windows, she saw a score of the duke’s men surrounding the house.

Six more big men entered behind Borgia. At a signal, two of them strode forward and seized da Vinci.

“What is the meaning of this? How have I offended my lord? I am a free man and merely return to Firenze, the city of my heart.”

Her master was frightened, too. And that was the most terrifying thing of all.

An ugly light shone in the duke’s eyes. “Oh, of course. But my dear Leonardo, you have been so useful to me. Your canister-darts. Your mortars. Your maps. I’m really not sure I can do without them.”

“I am sorry, my lord, but my mind is quite made up.”

“Your mind is made up,” repeated Borgia. “Yes, that marvelous mind of yours. That concerns me a great deal. For if it goes elsewhere, then who knows where its deadly fruits might next appear? In the artillery of the king of France perhaps? Among the infantry of Venezia? Or even”—his face darkened—“in the hands of my most gracious lord, His Holiness Julius II?”

Gia’s blood thundered in her ears. It was known throughout Italy that Borgia and the pope hated each other, and that Cesare alone had escaped Julius’s purge of the Church from what he had described as “Borgia filth.”

And Cesare had maintained his place only by dint of the armed might that made him too powerful to dismiss, and too dangerous a rebel. Armed might made possible by the devices of Leonardo da Vinci of Milano. And Gia had helped him.

“My lord,” said her master, with a haughty dignity that almost masked his fear, “I have commissions in Firenze, from the Church, from many noble houses. For paintings. Nothing more.” He gestured to the sketches and half-finished canvasses standing about. “I have done enough in the service of the sword. I wish to dedicate my life from here on to works of beauty. So that God may forgive me for the part I played in war.”

“So that God may forgive you?” shouted Borgia, stepping forward and grabbing her master by the beard so that he cried out. It had been the wrong thing to say. “You will not buy that forgiveness from Julius with paint, old fool! No, the only coin that buys remission of sin for you is blood and iron.”

Da Vinci gasped. “What will you do, my lord? Will you murder me?”

“No,” said Borgia. “Death? For trying to run out on me and sell the secrets of my defeat to the highest bidder?”

“I was not—” But Borgia cuffed him to silence. Gia screamed. At a gesture from Borgia, one of his men stepped forward. He must have kicked her cart, because the next thing she knew, she was on the floor, the world spinning through a star-filled night sky. Her useless legs trailed behind her, and she struggled to her hands. She tasted blood. Her cart spun lazily on its side, wheels turning.

“No, you shall live.” Borgia turned away, and his men held her master up, though he sagged in their arms. When he turned back, he held in his right hand a poniard not more than four inches long, a spike of steel. “You enjoy the company of beggars,” Borgia said, again wrapping his left hand in her master’s beard. “So be one.” And he struck twice. Once in each eye.

Never after that night could Gia remember whose screams had been higher—her master’s, or her own.


Through her tears and the smoke Gia watched the shattered cavalry stagger off the field, or thrash in death upon it. Through the screams of men and horses, she dimly heard a voice crying, “Stand! Stand, for the love of God and of Firenze!”

The arquebusiers had used the time the tartarughe had bought them and managed to reload their weapons. Now the papal infantry was nearing, their lines wavering. They had seen what the war-cars had done. Their officers screamed at them to advance, beating them with the flats of swords. “Advance and starboard turn, master!” Gia called, coughing. “Carlo! Load me a round!” But her loader was cursing and coughing himself in the confines of the war-car, and yanking at the “organ” barrels, wrestling the third and last set into position for a shot.

“I have it!” gasped Fitzmorton. Whipping off his jacket, he wrapped it around his hands and worked the architonnere’s action, slamming a new ball home. The nose of the tartaruga came around and Gia caught sight of an officer.

Basta!” she shouted. The war-car halted. “Firing. Carlo, shoot!”

The ripple-fire of the last set of organ barrels blended with roar of steam and the crackle of Florentine musketry. All outside was thick fog. “Advance!” she coughed. Her master’s breathing was labored, but the tartaruga rattled into blind motion. A dozen feet. A score, and then they emerged from the smoke.

On their right, the papal envelopment was still proceeding. The Florentine infantry was falling back, and as she watched, the enemy fired a single cannon: it looked like they’d been desperate enough to lay one of their mortars flat.

The massive stone ball bounded across the field, and slammed into the leftmost tartaruga, crushing its armor. A cloud of scalding steam went up as its gun ruptured, and agonized screams joined the sound of shattered wood. Gia gasped out a prayer.

But before her, the papal infantry fled, leaving the wreckage of shattered men behind. And behind the rout stood the now-riotous standard of House Borgia: red, gold, green, blue, silver—an amalgamation of all his conquests and alliances. Beneath it, a tiny figure on horseback waved his sword. Borgia recognized his danger, and was frantically sending his personal guard to fill the hole she had created. Sending them to crush her.

She was not afraid. She had been crushed by far worse than this.


“Giovanna!” Her master’s voice was rough with thirst and thick with sleep. “Wine!”

She dragged herself along the short passage, just as she used to when she begged. She would not use her cart for this. It was too loud.

At the door to his bedchamber, she stopped, and blinked away tears. Her master was filthy, hair matted and stained. His face swung from side to side. Where his bright, brown eyes had been, only scar tissue remained. He stank of sour sweat and wine.

She steeled herself. “No.”

“What? What’s that?”

“No. There’s no more wine. You drank it all.”

“All?” He pulled himself upright. “I can’t have. Not all; I sent you just last Saturday—”

“To buy wine. But I didn’t. You’ve had enough wine.”

He flushed red, staggering to his feet. “What are you...? You didn’t? How dare you! Damn you, girl! I’m in pain!”

“Your eyes are as healed as they’re going to be!” she shouted. “There’s no infection, and whether they pain you or not, you’re turning into a drunkard.”

“Then let me be a drunkard!” da Vinci howled. “What else have I to do? I will never paint again. Never read again, draw again!” His voice wavered into madness. “I live in a blank fog, and I might as well die!” He flung out his arms and cursed as his left arm slammed into the shutter of the window. “What is there left to me to do?” he groaned.

When he had subsided enough to hear her, Gia said, as gently as she could, “Come to the workshop and see.”

“The workshop? And see?” he snarled. “Do you mock me now in my own house? Maledetta! After I took you in, gave you everything you are, taught you everything I could? I can hardly find the workshop, much less do anything in it!”

Every word hurt, hearing them from the master she loved. She took a deep breath. “Take three steps forward and stretch out your hand.”

“You direct me like a child now? I should beat you. Who is the master here?”

“I am, as long as you are behaving like a child,” she said. Sudden fury struck her. “Do you think you are the only one to be hurt? To face a life with no future? Stop whining and step forward!”

Her master’s mouth worked, but he stumbled forward and reached out. “What is this?” he asked, fingers wrapping around frayed fibers.

“The end of a rope that leads to your workbench. You still have fingers. Follow it now, or you will never taste wine again. Unless you sit outside and become the beggar I was for it. The floor is clear, but don’t step on me.”

Gia crawled before his faltering steps as he walked to the bench, taking the rope hand over hand. He felt for the stool and sat down. “Now that I am here, what would you have me do?”

“Reach out. There is a shallow box in front of you.”

He did so. The pieces within rattled. “What is it?” he asked.

“Find it out yourself. With your fingers. Gently.”

“Wheels, springs...” His voice rose in frustration. “...This is a hammer.” He paused. “The parts of my wheellock. And?”

“Assemble it,” she said. “Your fingers will remember.”

“And how would you know, eh?” he demanded. “You never needed legs to draw, to design.”

“I did it blindfolded five times last night,” she said. “Keep the pieces in the frame.” She’d invented the frame to keep herself from knocking pieces skittering across the workbench, or off of it. He fumbled and cursed as she climbed onto her cart, and from the cart to the opposite side of the bench. But at last he held up the mechanism. “I think...” he said, fingers working it. “I think it’s together. Properly.” A touch of wonder was in his voice.

“It is,” she said. “Now, try this.” She lifted the larger square frame and placed it before him. “What do you feel?”

Her master reached in and said, “It’s blocky, whatever it is. Wood. The top, why does it turn like this? It lifts off?” He followed its contours with his fingers. “This tube is metal.” He leaned down, sniffed. “Copper. This cage. It’s...” His voice rose. “It’s the architonnerre. Archimedes’s steam cannon. You made a model? Then this is...the new tartaruga. And it comes apart. My God, it’s like a drawing. A drawing I can feel. My drawing. But you’ve done something to the wheels.”

“Yes, master, I—”

“Sssh!” He waved her to silence. “It’s extraordinary. You...two wheels...four of those swivel-wheels you constructed for your cart. Two of the spring drives. I can’t feel the gearing. One drive for each wheel? You carved this. Assembled it. For me?”

She placed her rough hand on his and he grasped it convulsively. “For both of us,” she said. “And this will be for Firenze. Or Venezia.”

“Or anyone else,” he grated, “who will send it against that bastard Cesare Borgia.”


It had taken long years to create the tartaruga. Years for her to carve models, for da Vinci to channel the genius that would have created paintings of holiness and beauty back into weapons of war and revenge. And now the bastard who had forced him to it, who had taken his easy kindness, his laughter from him, was going to pay. The Florentine infantry about her were reforming. Reloading. Their right wing was hidden, nor could she count on Machiavelli to hold it. Borgia was advancing? She would meet him. “Full power!” she shouted. “Thirty degrees starboard! Sound ‘advance.’ And reload!”

Fitzmorton’s ragged bugle and Carlo’s staccato coughing as he slammed a round home and frantically reloaded the organ barrels ran counterpoint to her pounding blood. Borgia was not going to win.

The tartaruga picked up speed, shuddering. “Giovanna—” Her master coughed. “We cannot maintain this speed much further. How goes the battle?”

“We are chasing Borgia. Not much farther!”

Fitzmorton looked out the slit. “You’re sending us into a bloody infantry countercharge! Slow down!” He turned to da Vinci. “Sir, stop us, for the love of Christ!”

“No,” said Gia, “their muskets can’t hurt us!”

Nom d’un chien! They don’t need muskets! They can crawl all over us and pry us out of this barrel oven!”

“Giovanna?” asked da Vinci. She peered out at the swelling mass of soldiery, a scant hundred yards away, and behind them, Borgia’s banner.

“No! We can take him!” Musket balls slammed against their front like deadly hail, but none penetrated.

Fitzmorton lunged for da Vinci’s control levers. Da Vinci fought him. Carlo turned and effortlessly dragged the French officer back by his collar.

“Please, sir,” he said to da Vinci, “this is madness!”

Da Vinci turned empty eye sockets in Fitzmorton’s direction and grinned, a fey rictus. Fitzmorton shuddered and the tartaruga’s designer said, “I’m afraid I trust her madness more than your sanity, my friend. You see, you are sitting in one of its greatest results.”

“We have to punch through,” Gia told Fitzmorton. “Our right is being surrounded. This is our chance to end him!” He wasn’t escaping. Not if it killed her.

Fitzmorton twisted out of Carlo’s grasp. “But you’ve left our own infantry behind! We’ll be overwhelmed! Look!”

Out the left port, Fitzmorton’s grim prophecy was coming to pass. Red-green-gold uniforms piled onto their sister tartaruga, climbing up its slopes. It slowed, and still more men leapt on. They thrust muskets through its viewports and fired. It stopped.

And now the mass of men was upon them.

Gia panicked. “Firing!” she screamed.

“No, Giovanna,” shouted da Vinci. “We must stop to shoot!” But she had already closed the valve.

The architonnerre leapt from its mount like a live thing, under the stresses of its own firing and the rattling of the tartaruga. Braces snapped, and a jet of steam spouted. Carlo screamed as it caught him across the chest. The copper barrel belched, and the steam-driven round splashed men aside like bags of blood. Scalding vapors hit those in the front ranks that had escaped the deadly ball, and they shrieked like the damned. For an instant, Gia’s heart leapt as she saw Borgia’s standard, not fifty yards away, waver and fall.

But the steam-gun was wrecked. Carlo was down, crying out in pain, and the thud of boots echoed on their hull as the tartaruga slowed. Stopped. Just before her vision was completely obscured, she saw Cesare Borgia rise from the ground.

Oh, God. Fitzmorton was right. I’ve doomed us all.

“What do I do?” snapped Fitzmorton. “Donna! Carlo is down! How does this work?” He stood over the organ rack. “I think he loaded it!”

“The lever,” she shouted, pointing. “Turn the rack and pull the lanyard!”

A musket barrel was thrust into the cabin, but Fitzmorton reached up and fired his pistol. There was a shriek, and the barrel vanished. The hull resounded under the blows of feet and rifle butts.

“Giovanna. Giovanna!” Her master. He was holding up a thick, braided fuse tied into his network of cords. More fuses. “The match! Light this. Quickly.”

“What . . . ?”

“Do it!”

She grabbed the slow-match and the fuse caught. With agonizing slowness, it burned down to the others. They caught, and their burning ends crawled toward the edge of the hull.

Fitzmorton yanked the organ-lanyard, but fewer than half the barrels fired. Then light and a blessed breath of cool air as the rear ramp was hauled down. Fitzmorton yelled defiance and lunged backward, loosing his last pistol round. The first papal soldier fell with a hole through his nose.

And then the whole world shuddered with explosions. Gia saw stars.

When her vision returned, the world was quiet, except for the fading screams of men.

She looked down. Fitzmorton staggered up. Her master sat half-stunned on the springs. The car was moving forward again, slowly. “I take it they worked?” he asked, with a bemused smile.

“What were they?” Gia asked, dumbly. “Those jars. The ones you were working with . . . ?”

“We did have extra gunpowder,” her master said. “And all this scrap iron around the place. I always thought you were too critical of my original idea to have guns all around the hull. So I made mines. And I was right.”

She patted his hand. “You were indeed. We have broken Borgia’s . . . ” She peered out the window, at the running figures. There. Cesare Borgia. He was running, too. Limping.

“Master, push us forward. Turn twenty degrees starboard.”

Fitzmorton stared at her. “What are you doing? We have no more weapons!”

“Oh, yes we do,” said Gia, grimly. “All the power you’ve got.” The tottering man swelled in her viewport. He turned just before they hit. The tartaruga shuddered to a halt.

“Giovanna? What have we hit?”

Gia ignored her master. Releasing the rope that bound her cart in place, she lowered it to the deck. With the strength of her arms, she forced the wheels forward. Down the ramp, out and around the blasted, dented hull of her war-car. Around to the front where Cesare Borgia lay pinned beneath its wheels.

He looked up. “Save me,” he muttered. Then he knew her. “You.” His face whitened in horror. “How can you be here? In battle?”

“You put me here,” she whispered to him. “When you blinded Leonardo da Vinci to keep yourself safe from his weapons? You made me. And he and I? We made this.”

She heard steps behind her. It was Fitzmorton. She looked back at him. “Is that my master’s pistol, Monsieur Fitzmorton? Reloaded?”

“It is.”

“May I borrow it?”

“It would be an honor, donna.”

She took it from him and aimed. “A last gift from my master,” she said, “who is a more merciful man than you.”

Her shot cut off Borgia’s scream.

Then she turned back to Fitzmorton. A thunder of hooves approached. “Are we quite lost?”

But he was smiling. “No, donna, I believe we are saved.” Passing through the gunsmoke befogging the plain, riding under a French banner, was Machiavelli, accompanied by a squadron of cavalry.

Madame Jeanne da Vinci,” Fitzmorton said, “please be made known to Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours and commander of the armies of King Louis XII.”

The young man dismounted, and to her astonishment, knelt. “I understand that I have you to thank for preserving the cities of Prato and Florence against the forces of”—he looked over at the corpse—“Borgia.” At her shock, he smiled. “We of France are somewhat used to owing our salvation to unlikely young ladies of your name. One might even believe that our Lord”—he flicked his eyes heavenward—“was making sport of us.”

Machiavelli was helping her master and Carlo out of the wreckage. “Signior da Vinci,” he was saying, “along with Signior de Foix, you have saved Firenze and all of Italy this day. Had you not pressed your attack, we would have been crushed. A bitter victory, but sweeter than defeat.”

Gia exchanged glances with Fitzmorton. “I . . . I nearly killed us all,” she stammered.

“The difference between courage and foolishness is sometimes the breadth of a hair,” he said.

“Indeed it is,” said de Foix, looking over to where Machiavelli was still heaping praises on da Vinci, overriding her master’s attempts to speak. “Don’t worry, Jeanne d’Architonnerre. We will correct him in time. Accompany us back to Prato. Such a victory calls for a feast.”

Gia gestured to her cart. “Sir, my cart will hardly take me all the way back to town.”

“True enough,” said de Foix, and before she knew what was happening, he had swept her up in his arms and was astride his horse with her. “Let me give you a better view, and while we ride, you shall tell me of the part you played.”

As they rode back to Prato, Gia discovered that riding a horse between the arms of a dashing French officer was surprisingly easy to get used to.


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Framed