The Amazing Adventures of Young Leonardo - Da Vinci's Cases, Vol #1-4

Chapter 1: The Mysterious Stranger

Lightning flashed from the gray clouds. It was raining cats and dogs and the dirty road the small town of Vinci was situated on, quickly turned into a swamp. Wind came up and shook shrubs and trees.

"Why don’t you close the shutters, Leonardo?"

"Because I want to watch."

"But it will rain into the room, if it gets worse!"

"Come to the window and look out, Carlo."

"I don’t know ..."

"If we're lucky, we will see how a tree is cut. Just like last summer, do you remember? "

Ten-year-old Carlo remembered very well.

His friend Leonardo, of the same age, was sitting at the open window and looking outside with fascination.

Actually, he had been occupied with trying to dissect a dead bird, which he had found in the woods yesterday. But the storm was more interesting than looking inside a bird. Leonardo had a good view of the surroundings from the room in which he lived in his grandfather’s house. It was upstairs and when sitting on the window-sill he could overlook the village to the nearby hills. In the last year a storm occurred which was extremely worse. At that time, Carlo was visiting his friend Leonardo, too, when suddenly it began to rain and to storm heavily. They had been sitting at the window and looking how the lightning was attracted by an ancient tree on one of the hills outside the village. Since then, the tree was split and Leonardo had been captured by a fascination for lightning and thunderstorms that thrilled him again and again whenever it began to rumble in the sky.

Carlo remembered well how Leonardo had wanted to examine the splitted tree the day after the storm. The boys had discovered traces of fire, but that was about all they had found.

Leonardo’s words of that time still sounded in Carlo’s ears. "The flash has a much greater force than a man with an ax – just imagine how long a person would have to use an ax to split a tree! It must be a giant, otherwise he could never split the tree like this: from top to bottom! Therefore, I think that the flash has the power of a giant!"

Carlo sighed and joined Leonardo at the window. Meanwhile, he got used to the fact that his friend was full of crazy ideas and always wanted to know all about everything. Even if Carlo thought that sometimes, he didn’t need to know anything. What was the sense, for example, of learning everything about the inside of a dead bird?

The fresh air that blew in now made Carlo breathe easier. In Leonardo’s room, it always smelled rather sharp, because he liked to dissect dead animals in order to find out how they were structured inside.

Mostly, however, he forgot to remove the leftovers, so that always some putrid odor of decay hung in the air.

"What could you achieve if you had the power of lightning," Leonardo said. "Imagine that you could capture this power somehow or invent a machine that produces lightning itself! Whereas a gang of woodcutters would need a whole month, by the help of such a machine you could finish the work in one day! And during war, you would not have to besiege fortified towns for several months, but this force could crush the fortresses!"

Again and again, Leonardo was imagining the strangest inventions and he could talk about any fantastic machines so vividly, that you could believe in the realization of these inventions.

"But how could you capture a lightning?" asked Carlo, who asked himself once again from where all these ideas came to Leonardo.

"That's the problem! If such a method had occurred to me, I would have tried to realize it for ages."

"Leonardo! You cannot catch a lightning. How should that work? You might as well try to catch the sunlight!"

"You can capture the sunlight," Leonardo said.

"So, how?"

"With mirrors. You can do it yourself from a mirror towards the other."

"But sunlight also has the advantage that it cannot kill you," Carlo said. Three years ago, a farmer in the neighbor village was struck by lightning, because he stayed too long in his field during a thunderstorm. He was killed instantly. Leonardo did not answer.

Once, he cannot say anything against my arguments! thought Carlo, but he was not sure if his friend was maybe just thinking very intensively about something else. This, namely, happened somewhat often. He then sat there and just looked completely absent because he was thinking about something or just had one of his strange ideas. Then he did not even notice when somebody spoke to him. In any case, it was never boring with Leonardo and therefore Carlo liked to spend his time with him - though his friend was by far the weirdest boy in Vinci. In the roar of the storm, the more dense consecutive thunder and the patter of rain a different sound was now mixing that called Carlo’s attention. Hooves!

A little later, a horseman galloped the muddy road between Pisa and Florence along to the village of Vinci. The rider was wearing a cape, which to some extent protected him from the rain. The head was covered by a plate-shaped leather cap from which the water was dripping down. From the face of the man you could only see his eyes, because he had turned up his collar.

"Who's that over there?" asked Carlo. He nudged Leonardo. "That guy there! I have never seen him before!"

The rider reined in his horse and stopped. He looked around at the houses of Vinci.

"He has already been here," Leonardo said. "It's been about four weeks. But since it was night with full moon, I remember exactly, because I was trying to draw the dark spots which you see on the moon surface. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to draw them very well …"

"A strange man ..."

"Anyway, he's armed. Under his cape a sword tip is looking out! "

Leonardo shrugged. "Maybe a mercenary who wants to become a part of the city guard of Florence."

"Then he would not be here!" said Carlo.

"He might have been rejected because of no vacancy", Leonardo pointed out. "And now he wants to try it again. But perhaps he is also the ambassador of a distant court, who should bring an important message to Florence! But it’s obvious that he must be a lord because of his clothes, his equipment, the saddle ..." Leonardo said nothing more. Suddenly, an idea seemed to distract him.

"Did you notice where he was riding to that night while you were watching him?" asked Carlo.

"No. I heard grandfather coming up the stairs and I went to bed quickly. Actually, I should have been asleep. Apparently I had made too much noise so he could hear me. "

The rider now turned his horse to the side and then disappeared behind the church.

"I bet he is now riding to our single guesthouse and wants to stay there," supposed Leonardo. "If he wants to reach Florence today, he would not arrive there before the gates are closing."

Leonardo looked up at the sky. The flashes become more seldom. The thunder only was a distant rumble. The rain, however, even got harder.

"What a pity," Leonardo said. "The storm is dying down. I do not think that today a tree is splitted." He turned away from the window. "Will you help me cutting the dead bird in pieces?”

"That's terrible!" Carlo muttered in disgust.

"I also have a lizard. If you wish, we can also dissect it."

"You make me feel sick," Carlo said. "Just imagine, you would be cut in pieces when you're dead!"

"If I were dead, I would not feel that even more," said Leonardo. "So it would mean nothing to me. On the contrary! If a real doctor will examine my body, he can learn about how the human body works, so that better, more effective methods of healing could be developed! Therefore, after death, I might be useful."

Carlo frowned. "Perhaps my father is right," he said.

"With what?"

“That you are not quite right up top.”

"Carlo, dead animals are dead animals - nothing else! Have you never slaughtered?"

Carlo sighed and looked out of the window again. He now had the choice: Either he walked through the rain home or he had to watch how Leonardo cut two dead animals apart.

There was a knock on the door of the only inn in Vinci. The landlord looked at his wife questioningly. It knocked a second time. Gianna, the ten-year-old daughter of the host, sat in a corner and played with her little sister. They used wooden dolls that their father had carved for them. The third knock sounded and now Gianna looked up and brushed back the long falling hair.

Hesitantly the host went to the door and opened. A dark figure stood there in the rain - wrapped in a cape and with a face almost entirely covered by the turned up collar. The water dripped from the leather cap. The host’s eyes slipped to the good leather boots and the point of the sword.

"Come in, sir," the landlord said very submissively. The stranger stepped forward two steps. The water was dripping from his cloak. The look out of his blue eyes glided across the room, as if searching for something. Above the left eyebrow was a scar.

"Where is he?" His voice came muffled from under the collar.

The host turned to his daughter. "Gianna! Tell the Portuguese the news! Tell him that his visitor has arrived ..."

Gianna swallowed. The Portuguese - that was a very strange man, who had been quartered in the guest house of her father for several weeks. He almost never left his room, was wearing a dark beard that grew up under his eyes and bushy eyebrows that were very oblique giving him such a look that Gianna recalled descriptions of the devil....