City of Stars

by Mary Hoffman

  ‘Something is not right in the city,’ said Aurelio. ‘It is beyond the normal dealing and conniving of the race. If someone has taken the zhou volou from the Ram, then that someone is trying to steal the luck. And the goddess is angry.’

  ‘What will she do?’ asked Raffaella.

  Aurelio turned his dark and sightless eyes to her. ‘We shall see,’ he said. ‘But it will turn out very ill for the luck stealer.’

  *

  It was nearing the time for Falco’s experiment. He had informed the servants that his two friends would be staying the night. Rooms were prepared next to his and the three of them ate dinner in the family dining room. It was not a great hall like the one where Gaetano’s birthday celebrations had been held, but it was enough to overawe Georgia. What would Falco, used to palaces of endless rooms, make of her house?

  She and Luciano had tried to explain twenty-first-century life to him but had given it up as a bad job. Falco simply could not grasp the concept of cars without horses. ‘If they do not pull from in front, then do they push from behind?’ he asked incredulously. In the end, it seemed better, on this dry run, just to show him.

  Georgia ate little and all three of them were anxious to get on with the business in hand. Once it got dark in Talia they would have only a few hours to make the journey. Falco dismissed the servants and Georgia and Luciano went with him into his bedroom where Georgia took the silver ring out of her eyebrow. She handed it to the boy, who turned it wonderingly before slipping it on to his little finger.

  He went to get changed behind a screen and returned looking absurdly young and small in a white nightshirt. He sat on the end of his huge bed.

  ‘What shall I do?’ he asked.

  Georgia went and sat beside him. ‘It’s simple but hard too. You must go to sleep, thinking about my home in England, where the ring came from. I shall tell you about it so you can imagine it. Here, get into bed and I’ll lie down beside you.’

  The boy climbed with some difficulty into the high bed and Georgia lay beside him on top of the brocade cover.

  ‘It’ll be like a bedtime story,’ she said. ‘I’ll describe my house and bedroom to you. Only remember what I told you about when you wake up in my world. If everything works out properly, I’ll be there. If I still seem asleep, just wake me.’

  She took her own talisman out of her pocket.

  ‘Luciano,’ said Falco. ‘Don’t leave us.’

  ‘No,’ said Luciano, settling himself into a chair beside the bed. ‘I won’t.’ He knew he was in for a long night.

  The sun streamed into Georgia’s room and on to her face. She was lying on her bed, in her top and pants, spooned round the bony back of the young di Chimici. For a moment, she couldn’t believe it had worked. Then, ‘Falco,’ she whispered. ‘Are you all right?’

  He turned to her, his huge eyes darting round the unfamiliar room.

  ‘We have done it!’ he said. Carefully, he took the ring off his finger and Georgia fixed it back in her eyebrow.

  Then she leapt off the bed, anxious to get him dressed in his English clothes. She showed him everything, including the underwear, which puzzled him very much. Then she gave him the sticks.

  ‘I’ll go and get dressed in the bathroom,’ she said, ‘and while I’m away, you put these things on and hide your nightshirt in my bed. I’ll lock the door after me.’

  Falco just nodded and she caught up her clothes and crept out of the room.

  It was early on Saturday and no one else was awake yet. Quickly she showered and dressed and went back to her room. She couldn’t risk knocking so she just unlocked the door and went in, hoping that Falco was decent.

  To her astonishment, she saw an ordinary boy sitting on her bed. True, he looked bemused and he had put the T-shirt on back to front. And he was unusually pretty for a modern boy. But he didn’t look as if he came from another dimension.

  ‘You look great, Falco,’ she whispered.

  He tried to smile.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I must relieve myself.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Georgia. ‘The bathroom’s the first door on the right. But you must be very quiet.’

  The thought of Russell bumping into Falco on the landing didn’t bear thinking of. She handed Falco the sticks and he stood up, but hesitated.

  ‘It is not a bath that I need,’ he said.

  Georgia cursed herself for not having explained something so basic to him the night before. Carefully and trying not to embarrass him or herself, she gave him a quick description of modern plumbing. His eyes widened.

  She accompanied him to the door and kept watch while he manoeuvred himself to the bathroom and inside. She had explained the lock, but the whole time he was in there, her body was tense with fear. The enterprise was beginning to seem enormous, and this was just the trial run.

  She heard the loo flush and a little while later, Falco came out and limped back to Georgia’s room. They had passed the first hurdle.

  Much to his surprise, Luciano managed to doze a bit in the chair. He woke to see moonlight flooding the room and he had a crick in his neck. He got up and stretched, then peered at the bed. Falco appeared to be asleep, his dark curls on the pillow. Of Georgia there was no sign.

  Luciano stared at the sleeping boy. He looked perfectly normal but the Stravagante knew that he was looking at someone who was no longer there. It made him feel terribly homesick.

  ‘What are you going to do today, Georgia?’ asked Maura. ‘I was wondering if you needed to do any shopping for your trip away?’

  ‘No thanks, Mum,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got everything I need. In fact I’m practically packed. I wanted to go to the British Museum today.’

  There was a snorting noise from Russell.

  ‘What was that, Russell?’ asked Ralph.

  ‘Nothing; cereal went down the wrong way,’ Russell explained.

  ‘Is it schoolwork?’ asked Maura.

  ‘Yes,’ lied Georgia. ‘It’s for my Classical Civilisations coursework. I wanted to get some notes done before I go away.’

  ‘Geek,’ whispered Russell under cover of the noise of breakfast being cleared away.

  At least he won’t offer to go with me, thought Georgia, even to torment me. There was no way that Russell would go into a museum. Still, she needed to know what he and their parents would be doing. Getting Falco out of the house was going to be the hardest thing.

  But she was in luck. Russell and Ralph were both in their sports gear and were going to the gym. Maura said she would shut herself up in the little room that she and Ralph used as an office and sort through all the bills.

  ‘I’ve been putting it off for ages,’ she said guiltily.

  Georgia waited till the men had left, then made her mother a cup of coffee and took it to the office. Maura’s hair was sticking up and she was biting the end of her pen as she fiddled with a calculator.

  ‘I’m just off, Mum,’ said Georgia. ‘I won’t be back till after lunch.’

  Maura smiled gratefully. ‘Thanks for the coffee, Georgia. And let me give you some money.’ She took a twenty-pound note from her purse. ‘This should buy you some lunch as well as your fare,’ she said.

  Georgia knew that Maura wouldn’t be coming out of the office for a while, so she took her chance to smuggle Falco downstairs. He was surprisingly agile. After the grand sweeping staircases of Santa Fina, he was not likely to be defeated by a couple of flights in an Islington terrace.

  She had told him the plan – they were going to look for an Etruscan horse like her talisman. But the subplot was to give Falco a taste of central London. And he very nearly freaked before they were even out of the front gate. A couple of perfectly ordinary cars passed and he jumped, terrified. All Georgia’s attempts to explain about cars and traffic were nothing compared to the reality; it was more than he could cope with. However, he was not too disturbed by his absence of shadow when Georgia pointed it out to him.

  It took ages to wal
k to Caledonian Road tube. Georgia had checked that it had a lift, so that Falco wouldn’t have to cope with escalators, but she hadn’t reckoned with the slowness of his walking and the many times he had to stop, alarmed by the traffic. In the end, Georgia took him into a café.

  ‘You need some breakfast, anyway,’ she said.

  She bought them tea and fried egg sandwiches. Falco, who had never tasted either before, wolfed it all down. It seemed to do him good. The rest of the journey was easier, though Falco cowered back from the platform when the tube train came rushing in. Georgia realised how much of her ordinary daily life was remarkable now she was seeing it through sixteenth-century eyes.

  The change at Leicester Square did involve an escalator, but not a big one and Falco managed it without problems. But he was already flagging when they got into the lift at Goodge Street, and it was quite a walk from there.

  When they reached the corner of Gower Street and Great Russell Street, Falco heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘We are here – good! I don’t think I could walk much further.’

  Georgia realised that he must think the handsome art book shop on the corner, labelled ‘British Museum’, was their destination. What on earth was he going to think when he saw the real thing?

  ‘Just a tiny bit further,’ she said encouragingly, leading him along Great Russell Street past the black railings. Suddenly they were at the gates and Falco saw the museum in all its colonnaded splendour. He gasped.

  ‘But it is a palace!’ he exclaimed. ‘What mighty Prince or Duke lives there?’

  ‘None,’ said Georgia, ‘but I’m glad you’re impressed.’ She guided Falco across the forecourt, full of tourists and pigeons. He stopped by the massive bronze head at the side and paused for a long time.

  ‘Is it a fragment?’ he asked. ‘The original statue must have been huge. Where is the rest of it?’

  ‘That’s all there is,’ explained Georgia. ‘The sculptor made it that way.’

  There was still a long way for him to go, up the flight of steps to the main entrance. By the time he got to the top, Falco was exhausted. Nevertheless, when Georgia told him that what they were looking for would be on the first floor, he set off gamely for the wide marble staircase.

  ‘Wait,’ said Georgia, concerned by how tired he looked. ‘There must be a lift; there always is nowadays.’

  An attendant heard her and came over to them. ‘The lifts are over there, Miss, just before the Great Court. But wouldn’t you like a wheelchair for your friend? They’re just over here.’

  He led them round a corner where ranks of folded wheelchairs sat just waiting to be taken.

  ‘How much is it?’ whispered Georgia, who was getting seriously alarmed by the cost of taking Falco out and about. Thank goodness Maura had given her some money.

  ‘It’s free, Miss,’ smiled the attendant. ‘Just bring it back when you’ve finished with it.’

  He took out a chair and unfolded it and showed them how to work the brakes. Falco was thrilled. He put the walking sticks carefully between his knees.

  ‘Will it go by itself now?’ he asked.

  Georgia remembered telling him about electric wheelchairs.

  ‘Not this one, son,’ said the attendant. ‘See, you have to push the wheels with your hands or get your friend to push you by the handles.’

  ‘I’ll push,’ said Georgia firmly. ‘Thanks for all your help.’

  As they moved off, she heard him say quietly to another attendant, ‘Poor kid. I wonder why he doesn’t have one of his own? He can scarcely walk.’

  Georgia moved quickly away, pushing Falco to the lift. It was very small, with not much room for anyone else once they had got inside; fortunately no one else joined them. After a couple of journeys up and down, because the ground floor was confusingly called 2 and the first floor 6, they arrived at the upper galleries. Georgia pushed Falco out of the lift and then stopped to peer in his face. He hadn’t said anything while they were going up and down and Georgia had been muttering about the muddly labelling. Now she saw he was white and terrified.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, Falco,’ she said. ‘It’s just another one of our machines. You know, to get you from one place to another. People use them all the time. It’s perfectly safe.’

  What would he make of the transporters on Star Trek, she wondered. To distract him, she moved forward and they came to a window looking out over the internal Great Court.

  ‘The Queen of Sheba’ proclaimed a poster over the door and people were going in.

  ‘Is that her palace?’ whispered Falco, round-eyed.

  ‘No,’ said Georgia. ‘It’s a special exhibition about her. Look, here we are at the galleries. I’ll just ask that attendant which way for the Etruscans.’

  They had to go through a long gallery full of displays about money and Falco stopped several times to exclaim over the big brass scales for weighing coins. ‘I have seen these in Giglia,’ he said. ‘My family’s fortune comes from banking, you know.’

  Then they were in Room 69 and were met by a terrifying marble group of a man stabbing a bull in the neck, his little dog leaping up to lick the marble blood as it streamed from the stab-wound. Falco stared at it for ages.

  ‘Mithras,’ read Georgia. ‘Roman, second century AD.’

  ‘There is one like that in our palace in Santa Fina,’ said Falco in a low voice. ‘It is in a courtyard – I’ll show you next time we are there. We say it is Reman, of course.

  Eventually they reached Room 71, Italy before the Roman Empire, and began their search for a winged horse. Falco was by now wanting to wheel himself, so the two of them went in different directions. Suddenly Falco called out ‘Georgia – come and look at these!’

  She hurried over to see what he had found. There were four bronzes, each about four inches high, showing boys and their horses. The label read:

  ‘Four bronze statuettes of boys dismounting from their horses, from the rim of a Campanian urn. Etrusco-Campanian, about 500–480 BC. Probably made at Capua. The boys appear to be taking part in an ancient Greek race in which the riders dismounted and ran beside their horses in the final stretch.’

  The boys were all naked, with long hair tied back in a very girly style, but they were broad-shouldered and muscular and rode bareback. They were all dismounting from the right.

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ said Falco. ‘You know the Stellata is supposed to have come from a race like that? Our ancestors – the Rassenans we call them – used to race in a straight line and dismount for the last bit. The winners were the team whose horse and rider both crossed the line first.’

  But it was elsewhere in the room that they found the flying horse. Not a model, but a picture on a black bowl. And again in a drawing under a museum notice with the chronology of the Etruscans. It was a representation of two winged terracotta horses standing side by side very close together and found at Tarquinia.

  Georgia and Falco made their way slowly back to Islington after hot dogs and Pepsis from the stand outside the museum. The Talian was completely overwhelmed by all the experiences of the day and was so exhausted that he let Georgia undress him and put his Talian nightshirt back on. By tacit agreement they left Russell’s boxers. Falco had no trouble at all falling asleep on Georgia’s bed once she gave him back the ring. She watched him disappear, turning pale and see-through; she didn’t dare go with him and had to hope he would stravagate safely on his own.

  A sound from the bed woke Luciano, though it was still night. Falco sat straight up in bed staring ahead of him. He looked down at the lace on his nightshirt and began to tremble. Luciano sat beside him and put an arm round him.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘It was ... beyond all describing,’ said the boy. ‘A world of marvels.’

  He twisted the silver ring on his finger.

  ‘And did you feel any better?’ asked Luciano.

  ‘It was as you said,’ said Falco. ‘My leg was not mended. But I fel
t strong most of the time. And I’m sure that a place like that would have the magic I need to make me better.’

  ‘Not magic – science,’ said Luciano in the dark, and remembered how he had once said the same to Rodolfo. Only now he was not so sure.

  Chapter 17

  Translation

  It was hard for Georgia to sit and watch Falco disappear from the room. All her instincts screamed at her to grab her talisman and plunge after him. But she knew that Luciano would be waiting to receive him back in Remora and she didn’t dare disappear herself for the afternoon. In fact, she could hear Maura calling her now. She would have to wait till tonight to find out what had happened at Santa Fina.

  ‘Ah, Georgie,’ said Maura, putting her head round the door. ‘I thought I heard you come back. How was the British Museum?’

  ‘Good,’ said Georgia. ‘I made lots of notes.’ She waved her notebook vaguely in her mother’s direction.

  ‘Why have you got Nana’s old walking sticks up here?’ asked Maura, frowning. Georgia started guiltily. The sticks were still propped against the bed.

  ‘I was using them for this creative extension we have to do for English,’ she said quickly, surprised at how easily the lie came. ‘We have to write something in the holidays from Richard the Third’s point of view as a cripple.’ Thank goodness it was her set Shakespeare play for GCSE.

  ‘Disabled person,’ corrected Maura automatically. ‘That’s all right then, but you should have asked.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Georgia. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Maura. ‘But aren’t you overdoing it a bit? First ClassCiv coursework and now English. It is the first day of the holidays, remember.’

  ‘And tomorrow I’m off to Devon for two weeks,’ said Georgia. ‘I don’t want to spend my time with Alice doing schoolwork, do I?’

  Maura looked at her closely. ‘I suppose not.’ Then, ‘You’re not wearing your eyebrow ring. Have you got tired of it?’

  ‘No,’ said Georgia. ‘It was itching a bit, so I thought I’d leave it off for a while and put some surgical spirit on it.’