Immortal by Traci L. Slatton

the first place? Even Giotto commented on it, one day as I walked with him.
    It was a summer morning, enlivened by good weather, and thick with the welter of sights, sounds, and smells of the Florence that I loved in those days: flowers blooming in window boxes and piled high on wooden carts from farms in the contado, the outskirts; pretty women in colorful dresses carrying baskets filled with produce like sweet figs and young beans or goods like swaths of our excellent Florentine wool; odds and ends with which regular people with families—whole people—defined their lives. Close to the front of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, stones were being laid for Giotto’s bell tower. The clanging rose up along with the clatter of horse hooves, the chiming of church bells, the creaks and rumbles of wagons, and the distant sussuration of the flour mills and wool-washing shops along the river. Giotto and I were headed for the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore when the Master stopped, panting from our brisk trotting, and pointed to a stone.
    “Do you know what that is, Luca Cuccolo?” His voice was affectionate as he called me “Luca Little Dog,” but I knew the affection wasn’t for me. It was meant for the flat gray stone in front of us. There were black letters painted on the stone, but I didn’t read, so I just shook my head. “That is a timeless place of reverence, a sacred holy place like an altar,” Giotto said. “I call it
Sasso di Dante,
Dante’s stone. He would sit here for hours, watching the construction, writing his immortal
Commedia,
and thinking.”
    “Dante the great poet, who was your friend.” I nodded. “So this stone is sacred because a great man, a perfect man, sat here often.”
    “My old friend sinned. In his great work
The Inferno
he admits to lust and pride—”
    “Hell must be more crowded than Florence, if everyone who sins with lust and pride confesses it,” I commented. A grin split Giotto’s homely, wonderful face.
    “We’re all human. You’ll be prey to lust, too, when you grow into a man.”
    “It isn’t my lust that will damn me,” I murmured, thinking uneasily of Silvano’s insinuations that I was a sorcerer.
    Giotto laughed, a deep resonant laugh from his belly that only he could produce. Passersby smiled. “Me neither, pup. That’s what the grace of purgatory is for: purification.”
    “If you believe in purification,” I countered dryly. It would take more than purgatory to fit me for heaven.
    “I do,” Giotto said. “It isn’t perfection that makes this stone holy. Dante was a good man, but flawed, as we all are. Dante was even exiled because of corruption, though he wasn’t guilty of what they accused him.”
    “It’s about his genius,” I reflected, running my hand over the rough surface of the stone. “His mastery as a poet. That’s what makes the stone holy, even if he wasn’t a perfect man.”
    “Exactly.” Giotto clapped me on the shoulder. “There are no perfect men. Just men with sublime parts. You have good understanding, Luca.”
    “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I thought only things the Church anoints were sacred and holy. Like the bread and wine of communion.”
    “That’s an instance of holiness,” Giotto acknowledged. “The deeper mystery of the sacrament, that moment of heaven entering earth, makes it so.”
    “I don’t think heaven ever enters earth, the earth is too full of cruelty and ugliness. If heaven comes here, it must take on the taint of evil, like fabric dipped in dye. But then I haven’t had any catechism. I don’t even know that I’ve been baptized,” I confessed, with a short laugh.
    “Surely your parents had you baptized!” Giotto responded.
    I shrugged. “I don’t remember them or the life I might have lived before the streets.”
    “Luca, you must have some idea about your origins!”
    I glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “I heard a tale about foreigners, traveling