The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 13

Cellini could tell from the slant of fading sunlight on the wall of the dungeon that it was almost time for his single meal of the day. He slumped in the corner, watching idly as a pair of tarantulas mated in the straw spilling from his mattress. He had grown used to them, along with the rats and other vermin that inhabited his tiny cell. After months of imprisonment, he might have missed them if they’d gone.

There was a shuffling tread outside, a clanging of keys, and the wooden door creaked open. While the guard stood outside with a drawn sword, the jailer, in clothes almost as soiled as the rags Cellini wore, carefully placed a pewter bowl filled with the usual cold gruel on the floor.

“Eat well,” he said, stopping to admire the rough sketches that Cellini had scrawled on the wall with cinders and chalk. The centerpiece depicted Christ among a host of angels.

While he gazed with amazement, Cellini’s own glance went to the door, and specifically its hinges. He had worked on loosening the real ones and replacing them with facsimiles made out of candle wax and rust since the day he arrived, and he was close to completing his task. When he had been taken to the Castel St. Angelo, he had declared no prison could hold him, and he hoped to prove it soon.

“Oh, and the Duke of Castro asked me to add this, since it’s a feast day today,” the jailer said, pulling a hunk of fresh bread from his pocket and dropping it beside the bowl.

“Tell Signor Luigi-the duke, I mean-that I look forward to thanking him soon, in person.”

“Benvenuto, Benvenuto,” the jailer said, shaking his head. “Why do you make things so hard on yourself? A man who can draw like that,” he said, gesturing at the sketches, “can do anything. Tell the duke what he wants to know, beg forgiveness of the Pope, and you’ll be a free man again.”

“I can’t confess to what I didn’t do. I can’t give back gold and jewels that I never stole.”

The jailer, a simple soul, shrugged his shoulders. “These things are too much for me to understand.”

He turned around and shuffled out, the door slamming closed behind him. The artificial hinges held, and despite himself, Cellini eagerly scuttled toward the food, dipping the bread in the cold slop and shoving it into his mouth with trembling fingers. A rat in the corner watched greedily.

It was only as he scraped up the last of the gruel with his tin spoon that he felt something crunch between his teeth, and he stopped chewing. Studying the bottom of the bowl, he saw an almost invisible shard glistening there, and his heart suddenly sank as the truth of what had just happened dawned on him.

He had been poisoned… and by a common enough method among princes and noblemen.

A powdered gem-a diamond-had been introduced into his food. Unlike other pulverized stones, the diamond kept its sharp edges and, instead of passing harmlessly through the body, its tiny pieces-no matter how fine-clung to the intestines and pierced the linings. The result was not only a slow and agonizing death, but one that could be confused with a host of natural afflictions. The duke, who had no doubt hatched the plan, could never be held accountable by his father that way.

Cellini keeled over, his forehead touching the damp floor, reciting a Miserere under his breath. It was just a matter of time-hours, or maybe a day or two-before he would begin to feel the effects.

But what then?

The shock of the thought actually brought him back up. What would happen to a man such as he, a man who had manufactured La Medusa and gazed into its magical depths? He would not die; he could not die.

But would he, then, be destined to suffer forever?

Suddenly, he had to wonder if his adventures in sorcery were not the making of his own doom. Hadn’t Dr. Strozzi warned him?

But when had he ever listened to warnings?

The bulrushes, they had been one thing. The ones that had clung to his clothes in his escape from the Gorgon’s pool, he had gathered in a bunch-not an easy task, as they continually appeared and vanished and reappeared-before swiftly twining them together and dipping the garland in a bath of molten silver. Settled upon the brow, like the laurel wreath upon the head of Dante, the finished piece granted the wearer the gift of invisibility.

By the standards of his trade, it was a comparatively simple procedure.

But the looking glass was quite another matter. When he had made it, he had been so intent on its creation that he had hardly stopped to think through its myriad implications. He had focused all his skills, all his cunning, on replicating the fearsome visage of the Gorgon he had slain. Countless hours had been spent in his studio, the midnight oil burning in the lamp, as he made models, then casts, for the front of the mirror. And though glassmaking had not been among his many talents, he had apprenticed himself for weeks to a master blower, who had taught him how to make the beveled glass in back.

And when he thought he had acquired the requisite skills, he made one mirror-just as he had told the Pope-as a gift for the Medici duchess, Eleonora de Toledo. (He was forever having to find ways to stay in her good graces.) To add some luster to its burnished niello finish, he had placed two rubies in the Gorgon’s eyes.

And then, satisfied that he could accomplish the work, he had cast another.

This one was for himself, to achieve his lifelong dream.

This one was to award himself the gift of the gods themselves… the gift of everlasting life.

He had consulted Strozzi’s books, he had pored over the grimoires from France and England, Portugal and Spain, and then, with the greatest care he had ever mustered, he had opened the flask containing the pale green water he had salvaged from the infernal pool. The waters of immortality that had returned with him, trapped in his boots.

With the mirror laid facedown on his workbench, he had poured the glistening liquid into the hollow of its back. The droplets swished and hissed in the tiny, lead-lined basin, moving and coagulating like mercury. It was almost as if they were struggling to get out, but Cellini quickly fixed the glass into place and sealed the edges tight. Under his breath, he recited the Latin incantation from Strozzi’s book, the final benediction that would complete his task and forever empower his creation.

“ Aequora of infinitio,

Beatus per radiant luna,

Una subsisto estus of vicis,

Quod tribuo immortalis beneficium.”

And then, for good measure, he recited his own translation, in the vernacular tongue he preferred.

“The waters of eternity,

Blessed by the radiant moon,

Together stop the tide of time

And grant the immortal boon.”

With the talisman made, only one step remained-to see if it would work. If it did, then anyone catching the moonlight in its glass, along with his own reflection, would find himself frozen in time forever, as unchanging as the image trapped in the glass.

Had anyone, Cellini wondered, ever accomplished so much as he? Could any artisan, in his own age or the ages to come, boast of such achievements?

He had sat back on his workbench, the lantern light reflected in the glass of La Medusa and felt… what? Exultation? Yes, but mixed with the bitter rue that came from knowing he could never trumpet it to the skies.

What he had done, no man could ever know.

If the Holy Roman Church were to learn of it, he would be burned at the stake. If kings and princes knew, he would be captured, imprisoned, and the fruits of his labor stolen. A race of immortal men, no doubt as corrupt and venal as their mortal counterparts, would spring up to overtake the world. No, the only sensible course was to keep La Medusa close and secret, its powers bestowed only on its creator, and on whatever worthy soul that creator chose to favor.

The lantern had sputtered, its last drops of oil consumed, and gone out. The workshop had been bathed in the light of the winter moon, full and white and cold as a glacier.

Cellini had slipped the chain onto the amulet, then looped it around his neck. Tiptoeing past Ascanio and the other apprentices, fast asleep downstairs, he stepped into the silent courtyard behind his house. Walls of stone rose on all sides. But high above, like a gleaming coin, the moon hung in a starry sky. His nervous breath fogged in the air.

Was he prepared to put his work to the ultimate test? Was he ready to accept any outcome, whether it be everlasting life… or sudden death? No grimoire guaranteed its results.

A shiver rippled down his spine, inspired by the chilly air, or the anticipation. With numbed fingers, he lifted La Medusa, the snarling face glaring into his own… and deliberately turned it over. The curvature of the glass twinkled in the moonlight.

His own face-with its prominent, hooked nose, coal-dark eyes, and luxuriant moustache-appeared in the mirror, but there was something strange going on, something that it took him a second to realize. It didn’t feel like his reflection he was seeing… it felt as if he were already inside the mirror, and helplessly staring out.

The amulet itself seemed to come alive, as if the liquid inside had been brought to a sudden boil.

A dog howled from the alleyway and ran for the street.

Cellini could not tear his eyes away. He felt as if he were being drawn down into a whirlpool, around and around, down and down. His scalp prickled, and his skin erupted in a welter of goose bumps. La Medusa seemed to twist in his hand like a frightened bird, and before he could even think to let it go, he had felt his mind grow dim and his knees buckle beneath him. The cobblestones of the courtyard rose up like an engulfing wave.

“Are you done with your bowl?” the jailer asked through the iron grate in the door.

Cellini, still mourning over the poison he had just ingested, looked up from the floor, then nodded.

“Then pass it to me,” the jailer said, and Cellini picked it up and carried it to the door.

“Tell me,” he asked, “did Signor Luigi-forgive me, the Duke of Castro-himself prepare my food tonight?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not.”

“Then who did? Anyone unusual?”

The jailer smiled. “Nothing gets by you, Benvenuto. It was prepared by a friend of the duke’s.”

Cellini waited.

“A man named Landi. He wore one of those loupes around his neck.”

Of course, Cellini thought. Landi was the jeweler who’d tried to foist off the bad pearls on Eleonora in Florence; he had subsequently moved here, to Rome. How pleased he must have been to receive this deadly commission from the duke.

“Why do you ask?”

“You will know soon enough,” Cellini replied, taking one last look into the bottom of the bowl, and noticing yet another minute splinter. He wet the tip of his finger, removed the shard, then passed the bowl sideways through the bars.

When the jailer had gone, he went to the window and placed the tiny fragment on the sill. How strange to be looking at something so small and yet so lethal. How many, he wondered, had he consumed?

But then, in the last light of the summer sun, he noticed something that made his heart spring up in his chest.

The shard had the tiniest hint of a greenish cast… as if it might be beryl, or some other semiprecious stone.

He examined it more closely. The sun had almost set over the Roman hills, but there was just enough light to catch that cast again. His mouth suddenly so dry he could barely breathe, he grabbed his spoon and pressed it down on the shard. There was a pleasing crunch, and when he lifted the spoon, a spot of harmless dust lay on the windowsill.

Cellini crumpled to the floor, knowing that he had been delivered

… and by the hand of the unscrupulous jeweler. Landi had, no doubt, been given a diamond to complete the task, but had pocketed it instead, thinking a less-valuable gem would do the job just as well.

In that, he was mistaken.

But if Benvenuto had needed any further impetus to escape, this was it. His usefulness was at an end, and so long as it could be made to appear a natural death, his enemies were prepared to kill him now. He dug under his sodden mattress and removed the long ribbon of cloth strips, laboriously tied together, that he planned to use to lower himself over the walls. He had hoped to make it longer, just as he had hoped to wait for a night with no moon, but now that he knew his chances of a papal reprieve were null, it was time to put his scheme into action. When the midnight bell had tolled, he used his spoon to remove the artificial hinges he had placed in the door, crept past the jailer’s room, where he was snoring soundly, and out onto the parapet of the Castel St. Angelo.

All of Rome spread out below him, swaddled in night, and with the strength still left in his emaciated frame, he lowered the rope-still too short to reach the ground-and began his slow and perilous descent.