The faces of a thousand wordless women stared back at him from their papers, murmuring. Leonardo tossed the chalk and watched it hide away in the shadows of a stack of notebooks. Still, he was only an apprentice and the duty of an apprentice was to prep the master’s paper and the pigments until somehow, someday, he earned the right to actually put chalk to paper and draw. Maybe in the past he’d been in a position to indulge, but for the time being that was extravagant. His master had been confined in his study the past few days and was burning through paper the way a rich man would. Salai knew it too, that he’d been drawing again, and shuffled off for more paper. Leonardo raised his hand to the boy and he bobbed out of sight, the door closing behind him. It was another one of them-a torso, a face, but no mouth. Leonardo looked about his study, peering at the chalk still in his hand. The wooden door to his study was perched open, supported by a frail willow of a boy with a comical nest of curls. In that smile, Leonardo saw intelligence, he saw the mingling of equal minds. He spurned them, kicked them aside, and then they lay still as the Muse crept closer and closer, stretching out her milky white fingers towards Leonardo’s face, and her lips spread slowly into an inscrutable smile belying a secret or perhaps a revelation. The unfinished masses amidst her toes seethed at Leonardo’s feet, clutching at his robes. Her silk-slippered feet padded softly like a cat over the crushed limbs littering the floor. Behind her, dust motes wavered in the folds of her gown, illuminated by the shafts of light filtering in from the windows behind her. ![]() She paused for a minute, stepping lightly from the crumpled remains of the uterus, sweeping olive ripples of cloth falling in hypnotic drapes against the small of her back, parting to reveal a swaying backdrop of faded yellow, not unlike the rusted ochre of mud lining Venetian riverbanks in the fall, and yet not a step from austerity. There was no gauzing of salt spray, no winsome clam-shell edged in pink, only bodies and streaming light and the pre-possessing Muse in all her splendor. ![]() These were the abandoned ones, the paintings half-attempting at the beauty of the Muse. A sea of creased and crumpled atrocities spilled out upon the oiled wooden floors of the room, each bearing the torso and limbs of a different woman. Then all at once she broke through, tearing at the crinkling edges as if it were only paper. Veins pumped strange fluids in and out of the multitudinous ducts and passageways that snaked over and beneath the Muse’s feet-even in utero, those were the most beautiful feet he had ever seen.Īnd now the Muse grew faster and faster, bones molding and shifting at astonishing rates, tendons climbing and linking and seeking in the dimness like ivy leaves. First came the sloping curvature of the forehead the butterfly lace of her eyelashes then the diaphanous wisping of hair. Deep inside, the cells beat with life, stretching and glowing translucent with the weight of its contents as the Muse grew within. The veins of her chamber pulsed rhythmically, reaching like vines from a balcony in a Veronian tableau, pulling and pressing against the membranous tissue of her cocoon. She came the way she always did, curving frame outlined against the light of the window overlooking the city.
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