The Stolen Hearts

  after M.R. James

   It was in September of 1899 that a stagecoach pulled up at the drive of Ashbury Hall, out on the prairie of central Iowa. The only passenger was a little boy, who jumped down as soon as the vehicle stopped, and stood for a moment on the gravel, taking everything in. The house was a tall, dark brooding edifice of an older fashion, with many windows and a classical stone porch tacked on some years later; its several, strangely arranged windows reflected the sunset in hues from orange to blood red. Wings ran off each side, linked by glazed corridors with thin colonnades; the wings kept the stables and the service rooms, and each one had a small cupola crowned with a gilded vane.

   The evening sun made the windowpanes glow like a furnace. Beyond the front lawn the park unrolled flat and oak-studded, with a fringe of firs set against the skyline. A church steeple, half hidden by trees at the park’s edge, had a golden weathercock catching the light; the bell from its tower struck six, the sound rolling in faintly on the prairie wind. Everything about the place—from its ordered, melancholy length of lawn, to the way the road disappeared behind a copse of trees—left the boy feeling the sort of comfortable melancholy that a September evening brings.

   He had come from another county, brought by the coach from a town over toward the river, because six months earlier he had become an orphan. His cousin, an elderly man named Abner Ashbury, had unexpectedly offered to take him in, and the boy, Stephen Elliott, had been sent for; those who knew Mr. Ashbury thought him a withdrawn, austere scholar—hardly the sort of man to take a child into his quiet life. People had odd stories about him: the language professors at the university said Abner had studied the strange cults, the Orphic writings and the rites of old. He had a library full of rare volumes of the ancient world, and in the marble hall stood a costly painting of Mithras slaying the bull, brought home from the Levant. Neighbors said he preferred books to company; so it surprised them when they heard of his orphaned cousin being taken in.

   And yet when the great front door opened, the tall, thin Mr. Abner came briskly out of his study, rubbing his hands, and greeted the boy with obvious pleasure.

   “How are you, my lad? How've you been? I hope your travel here was comfortable, and you're not too tired after your journey to eat your supper, I hope?” he asked, looking at Stephen with a tilt of his head.

   “I’m all right, Sir,” said Stephen. "Not hungry, really." 

   “That’s alright, that’s just fine. Now, how old might you be?”

   “I’ll be twelve next birthday, sir,” Stephen replied.

   “When’s that? Ninth of September?—nearly a year hence. Good. I like to have these things set down in my book.” Mr. Abner chuckled. “Parkes—take him to Mrs. Pincher and let him have his tea.”

   Mrs. Pincher, the housekeeper, was the first person at Ashbury to make Stephen feel at home. In fifteen minutes they were friends; she had been in the neighborhood for half a century, and had kept house at the Hall for twenty years. No corner of the house or its grounds was unknown to her, and she loved to tell stories. She supplied answers to the boy’s immediate questions—such as who built the little temple at the end of the laurel walk; who the old man in the portrait on the stair was; why the servants’ wing smelled faintly of cedar—and she hinted at other things in a voice that fell to a whisper when she reached them.

   On a cold November evening, some weeks later, Stephen sat by Mrs. Pincher’s kitchen fire and asked, bluntly: “Do you think Mr. Ashbury a good man? Will he go to heaven?”

   “Good? Bless you, yes,” said Mrs. Pincher warmly. “He’s as kind as they make ’em. You remember when I told you how he took in that little gypsy girl, some years ago? And the other one—an Italian boy who played an organ he called a hurdy-gurdy? Kind old Mr. Ashbury took both of them orphans in, he did. Shame about the two of them, though—gone, vanished, neither one of ’em with a trace left. Out here in these parts, its no small wonder, what with wild beasts out and about after dark. Master was upset, he was. He had the ponds dragged. But sometimes, Lord knows, you don’t get any answers for such things. Folks come and go, that’s about all I can say.” She shook her head while the memories engulfed her. 

   Stephen begged for more information; Mrs. Pincher obliged, with that mixture of fact and speculation servants accumulate. The girl had been found wandering and brought home; until a few weeks later, when she left one night and was never seen again. The Italian boy—Giovanni, he’d called himself—had turned up one winter with his music, and was taken in on account of being homeless, and then he vanished in the same way. Just wandered off one evening, never to return. The hurdy-gurdy sat on a shelf and had never been played again.

   That night Stephen dreamed vividly. At the far end of the upstairs passage, above his room, was an old disused bathroom—locked, though the top half of its door had a pane of glazed glass embossed with intricate patterns of laurel leaves and satyrs. The muslin curtain that once hung over it had long since gone, and through the frosted glass the lead-lined tub could just be glimpsed, bolted to the wall with its head toward the window.

   In his dream, the moon stood cold in that window, its dim radiance revealing something laying in the tub. It was a body like those Stephen had seen once in photographs of mummies in the vaults of an old cathedral—a skeletal form, covered in a sheet the color of old tarnished metal, wrapped as in a shroud; the lips drawn into the faintest, dreadful smile; the hands clasped together over the breast. As he stared, a low, almost wordless moan escaped the mouth, and the hands moved. The sight frightened him so much that he woke, finding himself standing in the moonlit passage; he'd been sleepwalking. With a courage that surprised him, he crept over to the bathroom door and once again peered through the glass. The tub was empty. He tiptoed back to bed, and told Mrs. Pincher in the morning. She, uneasy, put up another curtain, covering the etched display of leering satyrs and the view to the tub.  After Stephen told Mr. Abner about  it, the old man swiftly took notes in his little book.  

   As spring neared—Mr. Abner was always reminding the boy of the old calendars and how the equinoxes had their dangers—a few things happened that made Stephen uneasy. First was during one early morning, when Mrs. Pincher arrived to Stephen's bedroom door, bringing him his breakfast on a silver tray. She gasped out loud as she noticed claw marks to the left of the door knob, scratched through the paint and gouged into the wood, four parallel slashes about six inches in length.  After showing them to Stephen, he was just as mystified as her. 

   Then, on a dark and windy evening when Mrs. Pincher was darning his nightshirt, she broke off with a small cry. A series of long parallel slashes had been cut through the left side of the garment—long, close together, each about six inches in length, some hardly through the linen. Stephen swore he had not torn them; as far as he knew, the night was uneventful and the shirt had been whole when he last put it away.

   “Why, Master Stephen,” Mrs. Pincher said, staring, “they look like the marks on your bedroom door. Too high for a cat, and too straight for rats—curious things, like somebody’s long nails. You best keep your door locked when you go to bed, my dear, and say your prayers like a good child.”

   He did keep his door locked, and he did say his prayers, every night. But the next incident later that week alarmed both of them even more.

   Parkes, the butler, came in one evening more agitated than was his custom. “There’s muttering in the cellar,” he said. “Either I’m grown old and daft, or there’s something in that wine-bin that don’t belong. I’ve heard things down there—voices. If you put your ear to the far bin, you might hear ’em and know what I mean.”

   “Oh come now,” scoffed Mrs. Pincher. But Parkes only shrugged, uneasy. Stephen listened, and heard nothing; he could not make sense of the old man’s tale, and yet it sat in his mind, bothering him nonetheless. 

   On March 24, 1900, the overcast sky filled with a restless wind that rushed over the park and made the bare branches in the wood creak like mariners’ rigging. Stephen stood at the outer fence and felt, as the wind howled by, a procession of unending figures borne along on that current—ghostly, helpless shapes that could not stop themselves or rejoin the living. Whether a vision or his imagination, it left him visibly shaken. After lunch Mr. Abner asked him quietly:

   “Stephen, my boy, can you come to my study at eleven to-night? I have some business—a matter I've been meaning to let you know about, connecting your past with your future. You must say nothing of it to the others. Go to bed at the usual hour.”

   Stephen’s heart leapt. To be allowed to sit up past bedtime, and in Mr. Abner’s study, was an honor he'd never dreamed of having bestowed upon him.  While in his room awaiting the appointed time to arrive, he heard the wind had died away, and saw the moon hung bright and still, visible outside his bay window.  From across the low marsh and the fringe of higher reeds some strange cries came—half like owls, half like some other, more human lament. The sounds moved nearer and nearer until they seemed to be in the shrubbery close by. Then they stopped.

   Stephen had just caught sight of two figures on the gravel terrace outside the garden—the shapes of a boy and a girl standing side by side looking up at the bay windows. The girl, with her hand clasped over her heart, had a smile that reminded him of his bath-dream. The boy was thin and ragged, with black hair plastered across his pale face; when he raised his arms they looked milky white under the moon. His nails were terribly long and the moonlight seemed to go through them. Then Stephen saw, with a shock that was more vision than sound, a dark, gaping rent on the left side of the boy’s chest. A hollow, despairing cry—the same that had drifted from the reeds—burst in Stephen’s head. In an instant the pair had glided across the gravel and vanished among the laurels.

   He was shaken by the sight, but determined to keep his appointment at eleven. The study door should have been bolted on the outside as was Mr. Abner’s habit; Stephen knocked, and when only silence answered him he pushed, and the door gave. When he entered through the doorway into Mr. Abner's study, the brazier was drawn before the hearth, and there was a little silver-gilt cup on the table filled with dark red wine. A small round silver box burning incense sat upon an ornate, antique end table. 

   He found Mr. Abner in his chair, but not as one would expect. Papers lay across the table, and a long, thin knife was there, clean and bright. Mr. Abner’s head was thrown back; his face carried an expression part fury, part terror—the awful look of a man surprised at the last moment of life. In the left side of his coat was a deep, jagged laceration through which the flesh was opened, revealing a torn open cavity where his heart should have been. There was no blood on his hands and the knife bore no stain. The window was open; the coroner later said a wild animal must have done it, but people who later examined and read the sheets on the table understood otherwise.  

   Among Mr. Abner’s papers Stephen found passages that chilled him, so that in time he began to understand their meaning. They were written in the clipped, neat style of the scholar—but the content was barbaric. Abner wrote, in effect, that the ancients held that by certain cruel rites a man might enhance his spiritual and physical dominion: that consuming or absorbing the hearts of others—especially those of developing children—was reputed to open strange powers, and that Simon Magus and other adepts from olden times were said to have attained flight, invisibility, hypnotic powers and mastery over natural elements by such means. Abner recorded how he had tested the recipe for years.

   He confessed, in cold clinical sentences, to the removal of two young lives: a girl of gypsy blood taken in March of 1888, and an Italian boy—Giovanni—taken in March of 1895. He described, in grotesque technical detail, the method he had employed: while the subject still breathed, to remove the heart, reduce it to ash, and mix the ashes with a pint of red wine—port being preferred—then to incorporate that draught in an arcane ritual. He had hidden the remains in the disused bathroom and in a wine-bin. He had expected, he wrote, that only the least of the spirits—the so-called ghosts—would trouble him afterward, and that a man of real philosophic temperament would not heed their feeble efforts at revenge. He ended by speaking of the emancipation and potential immortality he anticipated—the sense of power that would put him beyond law and death.

   Outside, the night was still and the moon radiated cold. Mr. Abner’s face, Stephen saw, had the color of someone who had lived for some time with a great, terrible excitement—an anticipation capsized at the last. The wound in his side was terrible, as if some animal or something savagely wielding an instrument had torn at the living tissue. Stephen noticed where the body’s hands lay, folded over the throat in a way that gave the face an expression of impossible, grim composure.

   The coroner’s jury—called at the Hall the next morning—found an official answer: the old man had been killed, perhaps by some wild beast, perhaps by misadventure; the window had been left open; the angle and nature of the wound suggested claws. But the papers in the study showed another course of events: the human cruelty, deliberate and studious, which had been the work of a necromantic scholar who had turned to arcane, hideous rites.

   Stephen never had proof of who or what had actually torn the body. He knew only that Mr. Abner had been killed, and that the two children once sheltered in the house had vanished again, as they had vanished before. He had seen their faces under the moon; he was sure of it.  He had seen the rent in the boy’s chest. And he knew, from the cold, pathological lines in the notes, that the appetites of a certain kind of learned man can be as terrible and single minded as those of a wild beast.

   That was the account Stephen later recalled most clearly: how he had found the papers, the silver cup, and the brazier-smell of incense in the study; how he had seen the open window and the gaping wound; and how the coroner’s version left all the horrible detail undocumented. The Hall shut its doors for a time. The hurdy-gurdy remained on its shelf, collecting dust. The turrets of the house continued looking down, blank as ever, reflecting the sunsets across the flat prairie; and in the quietest of evenings, when the wind swept in from the marsh, some said you could hear a faint, desolate cry drift by—as if half-bird, half-human—like some lost thing searching for its heart.

Shattered Ruins

 after an old Japanese fairy tale

   There were two brothers. Armand, the elder, was a hunter of sorts — he spent his life tracking, running, chasing shadows through the Wasatch foothills. He thrived on movement, on the snap of bowstring or the flash of a deer vanishing into scrub oak. His strength was in his legs, his bright eyes, his tireless lungs.

   The younger, Daniel, was different. He was a dreamer. He lingered in coffee shops and library basements, writing in notebooks filled with half-formed poems, maps of stars, and sketches of impossible architecture. His voice was gentle, his thoughts even gentler, and when he sang, it was always of things unseen — gods, fairies, or forgotten rivers beneath the city.

   On a warm summer morning, Armand disappeared into the canyons above Red Butte, bow on his shoulder. Daniel, instead, wandered downtown. He trailed the city creek as it slid beneath bridges, past murals and broken glass, until he reached a block where an abandoned church squatted behind a chain-link fence.

   The building leaned, its once-white stone streaked with rain and soot. A hundred cracked steps climbed to its barred doors, where two gargoyle-like lions hunched, worn by decades of weather.

   Daniel pressed his palm to the fence. “Fairy money,” he whispered, thinking of the yellow mimulus blossoms he had gathered earlier by the stream. “Enough to buy all the joys of another world.” He smiled, slipped through a hole in the chain link, and began climbing the stairs.

   The stone lions creaked and shifted. Their heads turned. Slowly, they rose from their haunches and padded behind him.

   Inside, the air was thick with mildew, candle smoke, and rain dripping through broken rafters. Dust motes swirled like incense. In the dim light, tarnished mirrors reflected fractured images of Daniel’s face — a dozen pairs of eyes, each darker than his own.

   From the shadows came singing. A man stepped forward, taller than any living soul, his skin aglow with a youth that seemed embalmed rather than eternal. He carried a child in his arms, no more than a year old, swaddled and silent.

   “What babe is that?” Daniel asked, his voice trembling.

   The stranger smiled thinly. “No babe, dreamer. A spirit.”

   “And you… who are you?”

   “I am the one who gathers children,” the man murmured. “The abandoned, the stillborn, the ones whose cries echo in the city drains beneath your feet. They wander here, piling stones in the alleys and gutters, making towers that are torn down each night. When they weep, I hush them. When they beg, I hide them in my sleeves. Touch one, dreamer, and feel how light and cold they are.”

   The child’s small hand twitched, pale as smoke. Daniel shuddered.

   The man paced the ruined nave, rocking the spirit-child, humming a lullaby that scraped the edges of sanity.

   And then — a woman appeared, robed in grey, silver sandals glinting on the wet floorboards. Her face was gentle, unbearably so. “I am Mercy,” she said. “I refused eternal rest. My arms are many, my hands full of gifts. When you dream, you will see me drifting in a dugout canoe across the Great Salt Lake, carrying the forgotten.”

   Daniel bowed his head. “Lady… Lady Gwendolyn…”

   The air shifted. Music, like water through stone. A voice sang from the shadows — low, resonant, intimate. A woman in blue stepped forth, her eyes dark as storm clouds. Around her feet coiled serpentine forms, scales glistening, eyes like molten opal.

   “I am Benten,” she said. “Goddess of flood and song. My dragons sleep beneath the valley. Do you not hear them breathing beneath the city streets?”

   Behind her tumbled a crowd of laughing boys, faces cherubic and cruel, arms reaching out. “Come to our cool caverns, dreamer. Come play among the drowned.”

   Figures came and went, each stranger than the last. The God of Roads, attended by apes who covered their eyes, ears, mouths. A gaunt woman wrapped in funeral rags, clutching garments torn from the dead too poor to buy passage across the river. They pressed closer, whispering, their eyes filled with hunger.

   And Daniel stood in the ruined shrine as the storm outside deepened, rain hammering the roof, the city beyond reduced to shadow and thunder. He swayed, transfixed, lips parted in awe.

   Then — a crash. Boots striking wet stone. A lantern’s beam slashed the darkness.

   “Daniel!”

   Armand burst through the door, hair plastered with rain, eyes sharp, frantic. “Brother, where are you?”

   Daniel turned, smiling faintly. “I am here.”

   Armand caught him, gripping his shoulders with both hands. “Half the night I’ve been searching — through alleys, up by the creek. I thought— God, I thought I lost you.”

   “I have been with the gods,” Daniel whispered. His eyes were wide, shining. “They are all around us.”

   Armand lifted the lantern, sweeping its light across the church. The golden glow revealed nothing but rows of toppled statues, their faces eroded, their limbs broken. Stone lions crouched again at the threshold, their eyes blind and empty.

   “I see no gods,” Armand said flatly.

   Daniel tilted his head. “What do you see, then?”

   “Shattered ruins,” Armand murmured. “Only stone. And grey rubble.”

   “They are grey because they are sad,” Daniel insisted. “Sad because they are forgotten.”

   Armand pulled his brother toward the doorway, rain drenching them both.

   Daniel breathed deeply, almost blissful. “Ah… how sweet the city smells after the storm. Like flowers blossoming in a meadow.”

   Armand tightened his grip. “Bind your shoes, Daniel. We’ll race home. Before the night takes hold.”

   Behind them, in the broken shrine, something stirred and smiled, unseen in the shadows.

The Beaver and the Porcupine

  after Franz Boas 

   Back in the 1800s, when the rivers of the Midwest still ran wild and the prairies stretched unbroken, there lived a beaver and a porcupine who were the closest of friends. They made an odd pair.

   The beaver, sleek-furred and broad-tailed, spent his days swimming the river, felling cottonwoods, and patching his fine lodge in midstream. The porcupine, stiff with quills, lived up in the oak woods, shuffling slowly among the roots and climbing trees with his strong claws.

   When they sat together in the evenings, they laughed over how different they were.

   “You’re always wet,” said the porcupine, “and I can’t stand even a rain puddle.”

   “And you,” said the beaver, “bristle like a fence row in a windstorm. Smooth fur’s more to my liking.”

   “Yet here we are, friends,” the porcupine said, and he meant it.

   The beaver often left his river home to visit the porcupine in the hills, but the porcupine never once came down to the lodge.

   “You’ve heard me say it a hundred times,” said the porcupine one morning as they shared acorns and fresh bark. “If I go in that river, I’ll sink. All it would take is one gulp of water, and you’d be dragging my lifeless carcass to shore.”

   “You don’t trust me,” said the beaver quietly.

   The porcupine’s quills rattled as he shifted. “No, I trust you. I don’t trust the water.”

   One bright afternoon, the beaver swam up to the riverbank where the porcupine sat warming himself in the sun.

   “You’re coming to see my home today,” the beaver announced.

   The porcupine’s dark eyes grew wide. “What nonsense is this?”

   “No nonsense at all,” said the beaver. “You’ll ride on my back. I’ll carry you over.”

   “You know what’ll happen. I’ll drown.”

   “You won’t drown,” said the beaver firmly. “I’ll take care of you. Hold fast and trust me.”

   The porcupine hesitated, then muttered, “If I die, it’s on you.” Still, very slowly, he climbed onto the beaver’s back, wrapping his paws around his friend’s neck.

   The beaver chuckled, though his voice came strained. “Easy now. You’ll choke me before the river does.”

   As long as they stayed on the surface, the porcupine endured the crossing, though his grip never slackened. But when the beaver dove once or twice for sport, the porcupine sputtered and coughed, eyes stinging, nose full of water.

   “Stop that!” he cried. “Do you mean to kill me?”

   “It’s just a dip,” the beaver laughed. “You’re safe.”

   The porcupine gritted his teeth and clung harder, whispering to himself, “Just let me live to see land again.”

   When at last they reached the lodge, he tumbled onto the mud roof, gasping.

   Inside, the beaver busied himself. “You must be hungry,” he said, dragging in a bundle of willow sticks. “Tender bark, the finest I’ve saved for winter.”

   The porcupine eyed the pile. “Twigs?”

   “Not twigs—food!” said the beaver proudly.

   The porcupine chewed in silence, every bite bitter as medicine. He kept his face as steady as he could, for he didn’t want to wound his friend’s feelings.

   “Good, isn’t it?” asked the beaver.

   “Mmm,” said the porcupine faintly, though his stomach groaned.

   The next morning, the beaver burst in cheerfully. “Let’s play a game. Ride on my back again, nose down by my neck. I’ll dive to the bottom four times, and four times we’ll rise!”

   The porcupine’s quills rustled in alarm. “That’s no game—it’s torture.”

   “Coward,” the beaver teased, though not unkindly. “Come now. Trust me.”

   Not wanting to insult his friend, the porcupine agreed. The beaver slapped the water with his tail, sending spray into the porcupine’s eyes. He dove long and deep, each time staying under so long the porcupine thought his lungs would burst.

   When at last they came up the fourth time, the porcupine nearly slid off his back from weakness.

   “Now wasn’t that fun?” the beaver said.

   The porcupine could not answer. His heart was pounding too hard.

   Back in his hills, the porcupine summoned his kin. “I nearly drowned,” he told them bitterly. “He called it play, but it was cruel.”

   One of his cousins grinned. “Then invite him here. Let him try your games.”

   The porcupine’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Let him.”

   The beaver came the very next day, trudging up the valley.

   “Come in, come in!” called the porcupine, tossing a spark from the fire that stung the beaver’s eyes.

   “You must be hungry. Sit and eat.” He placed before the beaver a pile of bark and pine needles.

   The beaver tried to chew politely, but the food was dry and tasteless.

   “Eat faster,” urged the porcupine. “I’m eager for our game.”

   The next morning, the porcupine led him to a tall tree on a frozen slope.

   “The game is simple,” he said. “You climb this tree, let go, and fall. Watch me.”

   He scrambled up the trunk with ease, claws gripping deep. At the top, he dropped like a stone, then rolled to his feet. “See? Harmless.”

   The beaver swallowed hard. “I’ve never climbed a tree. My paws aren’t made for it.”

   “Then ride my back. I’ll take you up.”

   The beaver obeyed, trembling as the porcupine bore him high into the branches.

   “Now hold tight to the trunk,” said the porcupine, setting him down.

   The beaver’s smooth paws slipped against the bark. He looked down and saw the ground spinning below.

   “I can’t,” he whispered. “I’ll fall wrong.”

   “Don’t be afraid,” urged the porcupine. “Just let go. Trust me—it’s the only way down.”

   The beaver shut his eyes. He thought of the river, of the lodge he had built stick by stick, of his friend standing below, urging him on. Then, with a shudder, he let go.

   He struck his head on a stone, and the blow killed him.

   The porcupine stood silent for a long time, then turned and walked home alone.

Moral

   And so it was that two friends, each meaning no true harm, brought sorrow on themselves by asking the other to live against his own nature.

   In the old Midwest, folks would shake their heads at such a tale and say: A beaver is made for the water, and a porcupine for the woods. When you demand your neighbor be what he is not, you may lose him forever.

The Monster on the Shield

  after A. Lang 

   In the middle of the 1400s, Florence was alive with art, music, and invention. Great artists didn’t think of themselves as “just painters” or “just sculptors.” They were builders, engineers, dreamers—restless minds who tried everything. Among them, none was greater than Leonardo da Vinci.

   Leonardo was born in 1452 in Vinci, a little town not far from Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero, a respected notary, and a peasant woman named Caterina. Though his beginnings were humble, his gifts showed early.

   As a toddler, Leonardo wasn’t drawn to toys the way other children were. He loved mud puddles. He would squat for hours by the water, shaping the soft earth into animals or tiny figures. If anyone interrupted his work, he would scream in frustration. The only thing that could calm him was his mother’s lute. She would play, and he would sit still, listening. That early love of music never left him.

   By the time he was ten, Leonardo’s father had begun to realize that his son saw the world differently. Where others saw a lizard in the grass, Leonardo saw the elegant shape of its spine, the delicate movement of its legs, the gleam in its eyes. He sketched birds, flowers, insects, and even the patterns of water swirling in a stream. His curiosity seemed endless.

   Recognizing his unusual talent, Ser Piero brought him to Florence, to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city’s most famous artists. Verrocchio taught many young apprentices, but Leonardo soon stood apart.

   One day, Verrocchio was painting a scene of the baptism of Christ. He asked Leonardo to add one of the angels in the corner. When the work was finished, Verrocchio looked at it and shook his head—not in disappointment, but in awe. Leonardo’s angel was so delicate, so full of life, that it outshone the rest of the painting. According to legend, Verrocchio put down his brush after that day, declaring that his student had already surpassed him.

   But the most famous story from Leonardo’s youth did not happen in Florence at all. It happened in the countryside, at his father’s villa, and it involved an old fig tree, a wooden shield, and a monster.

   A farmer who worked Ser Piero’s land had cut down a fig tree. From its wood, he carved a round shield, rough but sturdy. Thinking it might look finer if decorated, he carried it to Ser Piero and asked if something could be painted on it—perhaps a simple design to hang in his home.

   Ser Piero agreed and handed the shield to his son. “See what you can do with this,” he said lightly.

   Leonardo examined it carefully. First, he straightened and smoothed the wood, preparing the surface as if it were an important commission. Then, as he often did, he began to imagine.

   Why paint a coat of arms or a harmless pattern? Why not create something unforgettable?

   He went into the fields and began collecting creatures—lizards, snakes, frogs, bats, grasshoppers. He kept them alive in jars and boxes in his room, studying each one in detail. Then, sketch by sketch, he began to combine them: the claws of one, the eyes of another, the wings of a bat, the coils of a serpent. Slowly, he invented a beast that had never lived in nature, yet looked as if it could leap off the wood and breathe fire.

   When the painting was done, the monster glared from the shield as if from the mouth of a cave, eyes burning, nostrils smoking, jaws open in a terrible roar.

   When Ser Piero came to look, Leonardo placed the shield in a shadowy corner and pulled away a cloth. His father gasped and staggered back, convinced for a moment that some living horror crouched in the room.

   Leonardo only smiled. “It works, then,” he said.

   Ser Piero was proud but also unsettled. He wrapped the shield and carried it away. But he did not give it back to the farmer. Instead, he bought another shield, painted with a simple heart pierced by an arrow, and presented that as if it were the same one. The monstrous shield he quietly sold to a Florentine merchant, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan for a high price.

   For Leonardo, it was never about the money. The shield had been a game, an experiment in seeing how far his imagination—and his brush—could go.

   And yet, it revealed everything about him. He had the discipline to prepare carefully, the curiosity to study nature closely, and the daring to combine what he saw into something the world had never imagined before.

   Even as a boy, Leonardo da Vinci was already what he would always be: not a copyist of nature, but its transformer.

Moral

   A true imagination does not stop at what is, but dares to dream of what might be. In studying the world carefully, Leonardo learned not only to see—but to create.