by Jo Walton
“Why is that?” Dolly asks.
Miranda looks challengingly at Ficino. “It is part of the covenant Pico made,” she says. “Progress doesn’t work, the gods don’t meddle, and people only die by will.”
Ficino just smiles.
“I know a lot of poetry,” Tish says, hesitantly. “Do you think if I copied it out in good handwriting people would want to buy it?”
“Princes would become your patrons and bestow purses of gold on you,” Miranda says, seriously. Giulia gets up and refills their wineglasses. “People would want it whether you pretended it was your own work or announced that you were transcribing the writing of great poets from Pico’s world. That’s a much better idea than any I had.”
Tish glows at Miranda’s approval.
“But isn’t that Progress?” Dolly protests, leaning forward.
“Poetry?” Giulia asks, doubtfully. “How could that be Progress?”
“But some poems are modern.”
“Like what?” Ficino asks.
It is 1847. We compress and forget so easily, the nineteenth century seems to us at the beginning of the twenty-first as if it all took place on one afternoon, Lady Catherine de Burgh and Lady Bracknell both glaring out at us from opposite ends of the same chaise longue. But Victoria was a long-lived queen, and that chaise longue stretches far. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, with its line about “ringing grooves of change,” is still three years away, and Kipling’s odes to the romance of steam almost half a century. The Brownings are freshly come to Firenze. Romantic Poetry is classical, pastoral, deliberately archaising. So what Dolly thinks of as potentially shockingly modern, and just plain shocking, is Byron. He grins, and recites: “Posterity will ne’er survey a nobler grave than this. Here lie the bones of Castlereagh. Stop, traveller, and piss.”
Tish has heard it before, from her fifteen-year-old brother. Giulia and Ficino burst out laughing, and even Miranda smiles.
“That could have been written by Catullus, or Juvenal,” Ficino says, when he can breathe.
“Oh yes, what you know will do very well here,” Miranda adds, still smiling.
“You can have Byron,” Tish says, sticking her tongue out at Dolly exactly as she might have at Larry.
“Then you can have Keats if I can have Shelley,” Dolly says at once.
“All right. And I want Coleridge, so you can have Wordsworth. And I’ll have Ash and you can have Ashbless.”
“People will be so excited,” Giulia says, looking excited herself. “My cousin Benvolio will be jealous. So many new poets! They’ll think you’re the most accomplished pair ever to pick up pens.” The wind howls, and the shutters rattle and bang.
“We can divide up Shakespeare’s plays,” Dolly says.
“Or collaborate, because they’re much harder to learn by heart. And there are other plays. Webster. Do you know The Duchess of Malfi?”
“Giovanna? I’ve met her, but I don’t know her well. She’s a friend of my son Orsino’s,” Miranda says.
Tish laughs. “I meant the play.”
“If your plays are about us, you should make sure people who are still alive won’t be offended to have their doings known. I wouldn’t care for the one about me. And Giovanna might not enjoy a play that revealed her secrets, and she’d be a bad enemy.”
“My goodness yes!” Tish says, thinking of the play. “Poetry might be safer.”
“Most people in Illyria love poetry,” Giulia says.
Dolly frowns for a moment. “I know this sounds ridiculous, but what language are we speaking?”
Ficino smiles at him gently.
“The vernacular,” Giulia says decisively. “Obviously. Don’t worry, lots of people like vernacular poetry, though of course it isn’t as highly thought of by scholars as Latin poetry.”
“So there’s Latin and Greek and the vernacular,” Dolly says, excitedly. “I knew there was something strange going on. There’s just one vernacular, and people speak it everywhere?”
Miranda nods. “Well, there’s also Hebrew.”
“I think I read that they have a classical language in Xanadu, and maybe in Tarshish and Nippon too,” Giulia says.
“Certainly they have their own classical languages. There are twelve altogether,” Ficino says. “Pico is the only person I ever knew to master them all.”
“Maybe they never had the tower of Babel here,” Tish says.
“It’s not that.” Ficino shakes his head. “Classical languages are necessary for thinking about law and philosophy and medicine and magic, but the vernacular will do for most normal things.”
“That’s why people need Latin and Greek for magic,” Giulia elaborates.
“What about music?” Dolly asks. “Do people here like opera?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Giulia says. Ficino and Miranda shake their heads.
“Music has really changed since the Renaissance,” Tish says. “More than poetry.”
“You’re going to love Vivaldi,” Dolly says confidently, and begins to whistle a line of “Summer.”
Tish has been wondering whether to say that she can draw a little, but decides against it. If the Renaissance has been going on for four hundred years, her drawing won’t be useful, and you can’t repeat great paintings by heart the way you can poems. But then as Dolly whistles it occurs to her that perhaps she could apprentice to a painter, to a Renaissance painter, and learn how to fresco and really develop her art. Her heart leaps at the idea. She loves the classical world and the beauty of words, but her talent is for visual art, and the pictures she saw in Firenze delighted her more than anything she had ever seen. She thinks of the Tornabuoni Chapel, Dolly’s family chapel, in Santa Maria Novella, and thinks how many people it must have taken to do that. “I can sketch and paint a bit. How would I go about apprenticing to go into the workshop of an artist?” she asks.
“You’d want to be introduced,” Miranda says.
“Yes,” Ficino agrees. “Probably the easiest thing would be if I took you around the workshops of my friends and you decided which you liked and which master would be best to work for, and then we could have you enrolled. You’re giovane, the right age to be apprenticed. Nothing would be easier, if you want to stay in Thalia.”
The wind bangs at the shutters again, and Giulia looks up. “Hark at the tempest,” she says.
And at that moment, as if summoned by the word, there is a gargantuan rumble, and the floor beneath their feet heaves hugely, and subsides. They all scramble away from it as best they can. The fireplace buckles, and the burning coals of the fire scatter as the flagstones break apart like tearing paper. Tish finds herself beside Ficino, with her back to the wall, as the floor continues to heave like a sea in a storm. Mosaic tiles and stones are scattered over the buckling carpet. Ficino has pulled the amethyst crystal from his pouch. “Hold fast,” he says to it.
Miranda is hovering in the air, attempting to pull Dolly clear, where he has been trapped under a fallen beam that was the chimney breast. Giulia is on the far side of the room, by the window, but then she darts in to help move the beam that is crushing Dolly. The floor heaves once more, knocking her to her knees, and then she is instantly driven under the flagstones as the whole floor cracks, splinters, and falls away. Pushing up from underneath there is a great grey-brown arm, scrabbling for purchase, and then a huge head emerges that almost fills the room. Ficino and Tish are standing on a narrow band of stone with a quivering wall at their backs and chaos in front of them. Miranda is hovering like a dragonfly, holding Dolly up by the ceiling, behind the monster’s huge head, but Giulia has completely disappeared into the churn of rock and earth and glowing embers of fire. Dolly cries out, but the sound can hardly be heard over the rumbling of the settling rock and earth.
The lily lights on the ceiling are swaying wildly, making the shadows jump. One comes crashing down in a shower of glass. It ceases to glow as it hits the crumpling floor.
Tish focuses on the monster, but can�
�t quite make it make sense. She can’t tell which parts of what she sees are bits of the ruined floor and which belong to the form that pushed through it. It seems to be the colour of mud and the earth it has churned up. The arm looks human, except for the immense size, but the head does not. It seems to have a snout or beak, and no hair at all. There is a shoulder, a hunch of a back, with a hint of reptilian scales. The light swings back, reflecting in its huge bulging blue eyes.
Miranda, still weighed down with Dolly, flies slowly behind the monster towards the door that leads to the courtyard. It opens before her, and then falls off its hinges, but the sound is swallowed in the sounds of cracking stone. A gust of wind blows in, fanning the embers of the fire. The monster fixes its gaze on Ficino and Tish, who tries not to tremble.
“Antean,” Ficino says, in a commendably calm tone, nodding.
“I have come to free the rightful duke,” the monster bellows, not only loudly, but in boneshakingly low tones.
“Well he isn’t here,” Ficino says, continuing to sound unruffled. “You’ve disturbed me, damaged my house, and harmed and perhaps seriously injured my apprentice, and all for nothing. Help me find Giulia, right now.”
“Your house?” the monster asks. Tish can’t see any sign of Giulia anywhere. The monster hesitates a moment, then starts churning through the mess with its fingers, breaking more of the flagstones and tiles and shaking the walls and ceiling as it does. Tish realises that its other arm is still under the earth, like a swimmer at the edge of a pool pushing their head above water while staying mostly submerged.
“Yes, this is my house now,” Ficino says.
“I thought it still belonged to my master. I’d have been more careful if I’d known it was your house. Ah!” It has found something, and Tish can’t help a horrified gasp as it deposits a torn and tattered piece of flesh in front of them, bloody and oozing guts and splinters of bone.
“What a mess,” Ficino tuts reproachfully, and then, startled, “She’s dead!”
Tish isn’t surprised at all. She’d have been much more surprised if anything in that condition had been pronounced alive. She’s only surprised that Ficino is surprised. She hasn’t taken in what Pico’s triumph means, that as her injuries were inflicted only as collateral damage in the monster’s arrival and not with intent to kill her, Giulia could be alive, would be, unless she’d chosen to die.
“May the light behind the stars illuminate her. May she be reborn as a philosopher,” Ficino says, sounding shocked and sincere, staring down at the bloody rag that used to be Giulia. “She died a hero’s death, helping another,” he goes on. “But you have robbed her of centuries of life,” he chides the monster. It bows its head a little.
“She must have been very young and tender, to give up so easily,” the monster says, its voice so loud Tish can hear it in her bones
“She was young. It was probably her first time being really hurt,” Ficino says. “And even though she knew I was here and could heal her, the experience must have been so awful that she couldn’t bear the pain and the horror of it, the shock of being suddenly so hurt and driven under the earth.” He has tears in his eyes. “Poor Giulia. A death in darkness, when she had so much light in her. I had looked forward to teaching her and knowing her for centuries.”
“Sorry,” the monster rumbles, lowering its head.
“There will always be people like that, and you know it. Young people, frail people. You can’t come into human cities like this. You know you can’t,” Ficino says.
“What choice did I have? I was suddenly freed, after so long, and I came here to free my son in his turn,” the monster thunders.
“When were you freed?” Ficino asks.
“Not long ago. I tested my bonds constantly, and at last my strength was enough and one gave way.”
Tish wonders what could be strong enough to bind a creature that could burst up through solid stone flagstones with so little trouble.
“Once I was free, I came straight here,” the monster finishes.
Ficino nods. “And you came here thinking Geryon was here?”
“This was where he last touched the earth,” the monster confirms in a bellow.
“Three hundred years ago,” Ficino sighs. Tish looks at the butchered remains of Giulia and feels sick. She hadn’t known her for long, and most of the time she had been telling Tish off for saying the wrong thing, but she had liked her all the same. Giulia had made being in Illyria seem like an adventure, not a disaster. Tish looks at the monster. She could as easily have become nothing but a heap of mangled flesh if she had been brave enough or had the initiative to try to help Dolly. She swallows hard and tries not to cry.
“This is my tower now. Geryon is imprisoned in the palace and Orsino is Duke. But wait,” Ficino says urgently, as the monster sinks a little into the ground. “Think! Also in Orsino’s palace are a lot of innocent people who don’t deserve to have their lives cut off this way, including at least one child. And Geryon’s at the top of the tower, so he has no resources, and perhaps he’d be the first to die if you tried this and he fell. That’s probably why Orsino put him up there.”
“That does sound like Orsino,” the monster agrees mournfully, at the volume of a foghorn. “But I must try.”
“Wait a little more,” Ficino says. “You have been very patient. Be patient a little longer. Meet me at noon, in three days, outside the city, down by the marshes. I’ll find out more and see how we can rescue Geryon.”
“You haven’t done it in three hundred years,” the monster says, reproachfully.
“He was already overthrown when I came back from Xanadu. I thought the gods were opposed,” Ficino says. “You were bound. He was. Everything seemed to be thriving. Now there has been a change in the stars, and I must reassess. It seems the gods want you free, perhaps they want him free too, perhaps this is some plan of theirs to free themselves and come back to the world. And in any case, I can’t have you ploughing a swathe of destruction through the heart of the city and cutting more lives short the way you have just killed my apprentice. Not if there’s any alternative at all. Even if I find I can’t help, after all this time, three days more can be nothing to Geryon.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” the monster protests. “But all right.” The great rumbling comes again as he moves, shaking plaster and stones down from the walls. “Noon, in three days, in the marshes by the delta. But if you can’t satisfy me then, I’ll do as I please.” It begins to sink again beneath the surface, pushing itself down hard. “I’m very sorry about your apprentice,” it bellows, just before its snout disappears once more under the ground.
“I thought you said you didn’t have enemies,” Tish says unsteadily when the rumbling dies away and the floor seems to be lying quietly in mounds and hummocks.
“That was a friend,” Ficino says.
15
NO DOMINION
I have whiplash. Did you see what she did? I’m crying here, and pacing about and kicking the walls of the bone cave. Giulia might not have been much, but I didn’t expect her to be a mayfly! No sooner brought to life with her pert answers and her axiomatic understanding of what Illyria was, than swept away—not even truly dying heroically. She died as a side effect, a stupid accident, a slice of somebody else’s story. He didn’t mean to kill her, or even to hurt her, he just didn’t care enough to notice that she was in the way. And lost, gone, dead, just like that, in an upheaval of the floor.
Now you can say she’s alive in the book. You can turn the pages to back where she’s alive, where she’s brushing Tish’s hair and giving her information. That page is still there, and she’s still on it, and always will be. But what kind of life is that? So brief, so suddenly cut off. Nineteen years, in a world where people can live forever, just a few lines of life on so few pages! Then gone. People don’t die in Thalia, but they can still be killed. And she was. Real for an eyeblink, drawn out of the mist, out of the stuff of story, made solid, then snuffed out like
a candle. She wasn’t real outside the story. She had no least awareness of being in Sylvia’s head, but there she was as real as anyone inside it, and now she’s really dead. You won’t even remember her, will you? An apprentice, a giovane, little more than a servant, killed in the line of duty. She won’t even stick in your mind. Dead, and forgotten, as if she had never been.
“You could undo it,” Sylvia suggests. “Have him bring her out mangled and bleeding, dangling across his great hand, and have Ficino heal her. We could go back and change it now if you like. She’s a useful character to keep around to give the others world information. I liked her too.”
“Then why did you kill her?” I try not to wail. I try not to sound sulky. I try to say it in a tone of cool curiosity, the way Ficino dealt with the monster, like a proper Platonist. But I fail, my voice catches on the “k” and fills with tears. I have never been known for my calmness.
Sylvia sounds mildly remorseful, rather as the monster did, though her voice is fortunately much quieter. “I wanted to increase the stakes. Just having him mess up the room didn’t seem enough. I hadn’t been thinking of it before. When Miranda lifted up Dolly—I didn’t know she could fly, either! Did you?”
I sniff. “I hadn’t thought about it. It fits that she can.”
“Well, then I thought: what about Giulia? It’s a matter of choreography and balance. It’s fine for Tish to freeze. But Giulia— if she rushed to help, and she would, then she’d get sucked down as soon as he came up. And killing her seemed right, for exactly the reasons you’re complaining about. They don’t die unless they want to, true, but she’s very young, and being mangled like that could easily feel like something she couldn’t bear to go on living with. Pain can be very shocking when you’re not used to it, and she wouldn’t have been. They don’t even have disease. And it would be dark and she’d be crushed and mangled and she wouldn’t know what was going on, and one of the things about dying by choosing to die is exactly that kind of escape from pain and fear. Torture would be a lot less use there. Taking your belt or shoelaces wouldn’t help, if you wanted to kill yourself you just could. And so Giulia did. I just thought it would make a better story if she died.”