by Jo Walton
“The woman was Crastina,” Ficino says.
“Of course,” Dolly says, immediately feeling stupid for not realising. “Crastina, the Goddess of Tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes. Horace—”
“Was there more?” Ficino asks.
“She was angry. Crastina. Angry with me, as if it was all my fault. What does it mean for Tomorrow to be angry with me? Her eyes met mine, and they were burning bright, like stars, and then they were stars, and then—there was something else. I’ve forgotten. I woke knowing I had to tell you, that it was important.”
Wrapped in the rags and tatters of his dream, and Ficino’s old grey blanket, Dolly doesn’t make an imposing prophet. But Ficino nods gravely. “She has reason enough to be angry with us,” he says. “And the children Saturn was devouring were works of creation?”
“Yes,” Dolly says. “If you count invention as creation.”
“Oh, certainly I do,” Ficino says.
“Then yes,” Dolly says.
“Can you remember the other thing?” Ficino asks.
Dolly is trying, but since the main part of it was the strangeness of being me, of inhabiting a shifting point of view, he can’t hold on to it or describe it. This is partly because he knows he was himself in the dream, which was also true, because I made him out of me. “It’s gone,” he says. “Except a sense of the gods.”
“Ah, yes,” Ficino says. He indicates a star, which is just a bright point to Dolly. “There’s Saturn. And maybe it is so. I think perhaps it is. That would mean the time has come to begin Progress again. To do that—well, it will be a lot of work.” Ficino nods to himself and looks pleased at the prospect.
“If we start Progress does that mean it will stop being the Renaissance?” Dolly asks.
“What an excellent question. No, not if we’re careful,” Ficino says. “There’s nothing bad about technology, what’s bad is turning away from the good to pursue other ends. They may have done that in your world, but we need not. The two things are not bound together, we can have one without the other. We can reach for the stars as a way of pursuing the good.”
“In my world they fought over religion. And after that, ever since then it has been a constant case of chasing after profit, making profit almost into a god,” Dolly says.
“I would have thought Hermes would approve of that,” Ficino says.
“Maybe that’s why he wants to restart progress here,” Dolly says, then shakes his head. “No, I don’t believe that. My dream was about good things being destroyed by stasis. Perhaps what Tish and I know of what happened in our history will help us avoid those perils.”
“That might be why they sent you. But most of all, because they sent you, and sent that dream, we know which gods to call back into the world to make the change. Finding that out can be more trouble than anything else, and we are spared that.”
“Saturn and Crastina?” Dolly asks.
“Well, Crastina will inevitably follow when Progress begins again, but it’s Hekate who has been sending us clear signs. Hekate and Hermes are the gods of change and chance, and they have been shut out. And they have given tokens, the oak leaf and the ram, and the two of you, especially you, Dolly. We must summon them, and it will be a great work, a work after all this time that will challenge me. And what you do will be central. This dream shows that. This must be the work you were called here to do.”
“But can’t the gods just come in? They sent me and Tish here. Can’t they come themselves?”
Ficino chuckles like a schoolboy who sees through a trick. “You’d think so, but no. We call them gods, but really they’re messengers between God and us. It’s better to consider them as angels. Angel means messenger. If God wants to send them here, then they come. Or they can come if we summon them in the right way.”
“Do you know the right way?” Dolly asks.
“I will have to study it, but yes.”
“Shall we do it now?” Dolly asks, eager and ready.
Ficino shakes his head. “You’re not ready. And it will take more than the two of us even so. We will need Miranda, and Prospero, and many others. But we have time. It was 2018 when we were shown Firenze, so it should be that time here when we act. And for the moon to be in the position we saw over the Ponte Vecchio in the painting, it’s possibly June but most likely July of that year. So that gives us a hundred and seventy-one years.”
Dolly had been about to object, but then he relaxes and sits back in his chair. The numbers sounds right. “What will we need?”
“We’ll need the true names of the gods, for the summoning. That will be difficult. And beyond that I’m not sure yet of all we might need. We’ll need a great Elamese carpet. We’ll need my painting, and more paintings of the things in your dream. Can you draw?”
“No, but Tish can, and she said—that is he said that he wanted to apprentice to a painter, and you and Miranda said that would be possible.”
“You’re not in love with her?” Ficino asks, gently.
“Miranda? Oh, Tish? No, neither of them,” Dolly says, confused and embarrassed. “I like Tish a great deal, and I respect Miranda and I sympathise with her.”
“Then perhaps Tish’s part will be producing the paintings, once she is trained. She has seen a steam train, and she shared our vision of 2018. And for you to be able to play your part, you will need to study a great deal of magic. There’s time, but a hundred and seventy-one years is not too much time for that, especially since you want to go to Xanadu, and indeed, you may need to, for we will need the help of many people, far more than can be found in Illyria.” He nods to himself. “Well, we have a lot of work to do,” Ficino says, standing up and rubbing his hands together. Dolly thinks he’s about to be sent back to bed, to begin in the morning. “This will be a great work of magic such as I have not done in centuries. It’s time to teach you the beginnings of spellcraft.”
Dolly leans forward. He feels like Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer, as if new worlds he’d only heard rumours of are spread out for his delight. “Yes!” he says. “How do we start?”
Ficino picks a splinter of wood from one of the logs beside the fire and hands it to Dolly. “Wood wants to burn,” he says. “It only needs a spark to leap into flame. Calm your mind and reach out to the fire and bring the spark.”
Dolly looks at the fire, blazing in the grate, giving out warmth and light. The dancing flames are gold and blue and in the depths orange and vermilion. He looks at the splinter of dry wood in his hands, not much bigger than a paper spill. If he touched it to the fire it would blaze up at once. But how could he bring the spark without moving? He looks at Ficino, who is smiling at him encouragingly. He reaches into the patterns of his mind, and then it is as if he is remembering something he knew once, long ago, perhaps a skill he learned in childhood. It is not so much a reach but a twist. He moves the fingers of his right hand in the inevitable remembered pattern, and the splinter he holds in his left hand bursts into flame.
“Ah,” Ficino says, smiling. “It came back to you. Good. You remembered. Have you felt that before?”
“Yes,” Dolly admits. The fire is real enough to start burning his fingers. He drops the splinter into the fire, where it burns with the rest of the wood, and looks at Ficino. “I have always felt that about some things when I studied them, as if it’s more like remembering than learning. And other things are completely new and fresh. Euripides was like remembering, Shakespeare was all new. But that—”
“Let’s try something,” Ficino interrupts. He leans down to a box on the floor and pulls out a sealed glass jar.
“Quicksilver,” Dolly says, recognising the glint of the silver liquid metal.
Ficino closes the lid of the box, which is smooth polished wood with a raised rim. He pushes it towards Dolly, who straightens it in front of him, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders. Then Ficino opens the jar and pours the metal out onto the top of the box. “Quicksilver speeding and spilling and slowing,” he says, a
nd looks at Dolly expectantly.
“Quicksilver … feeding and filling and flowing,” Dolly responds, half as if he is remembering and half as if he is making it up.
“Quicksilver, beading and billing and blowing,” Ficino says. He touches his finger to it, and without encouragement Dolly leans forward and does the same.
“Mercury,” Ficino says. And again for Dolly it is like a poem he knew once and he is trying to recall. “Mercury myrtle myrrh, mercenary murder demur.”
“Hermes,” Dolly says, slowly, and then all at once he knows it and rattles off the rest of it. “Hermes hurtle her, hereditary, hurter, cohere.” As he says the last word all the balls of mercury flow together and make one smooth, silver, shining sphere, resting on the box top. He laughs aloud, and sits back. He has always felt tentative—even at his most passionate, there has always been an aspect of playacting behind all his sincerity—but now, for once, he feels certain, true, complete. “But what does it mean?”
“I am a doctor of souls, and I should tell you that I recognise your soul. I knew you long ago.” Ficino smiles. The mercury quivers a little on the box lid.
“But who was I?” Dolly asks, excited, leaning forward again.
“You were Pico della Mirandola, of course,” Ficino says. He picks up the ball of quicksilver and holds it on his palm. “Nobody else could have known that. But do not try to force the memory. It will either come back naturally or not.”
Dolly feels as if his blood has been replaced with a fizzing wine. He jumps out of the chair and clasps Ficino to him and dances with him around the observatory. Globes of mercury spill and roll everywhere. Ficino laughs. “I don’t remember, and I’m not sure it can possibly be true, but even just the suggestion makes me very happy,” Dolly says, collapsing back in his chair.
“You’ll still have to work very hard,” Ficino says, pretending to be stern. He resumes his own seat. “Now clean it up.”
“Cohere,” Dolly says again, and the quicksilver balls roll back together from all over the room, to make a single globe at his feet.
“You are, as you always were, an embodiment of Hermes. Even your name points to it. Dolios is his name in trickster form.”
“Then how did I come into the world?” As soon as he asks the question he realises the answer. “Oh. Only a part of me is here. In the dream I was whole.”
“To get this part in, you had to be entirely unknowing, I would guess,” Ficino says. “But you are your own self as well.”
“I am,” Dolly says, though as he sits at the top of the wizard’s tower with the quicksilver orb at his feet, he feels very far from what he has been. “And to bring the gods in, I will have to sacrifice myself again in the end,” Dolly says, recognising it, again, as something half-remembered that he has always known.
Ficino looks at him sadly. “How many times will I have to lose you, old friend?”
“It doesn’t matter how many, does it? As long as you always get me back,” Dolly says.
32
DEUS EX MACHINA
Orsino did not get to bed until much later than Dolly, but he too wakes from a dream at the same hour of moonset. His dream is simpler and more didactic. Hermes, unmistakable in his winged boots (talaria) and winged round hat (petasus) and holding his wand (caduceus) hovers in the air in front of him, and informs him that he has come with a message. “Yes,” Orsino says, as if he receives divine messengers regularly. “What is it?”
“You can trust Geryon to keep his word,” Hermes says, and disappears.
And waking on that note, Orsino embraces sleeping Viola and stares into the darkness.
33
A LOCAL HABITATION AND …
What else needs to go into this, between now and the end? Not much, we must be nearly there. Sylvia takes one of her special notebooks and goes through her lists, crossing things off and making a new list, the way she always does when she’s getting near the end of a book. She’s sitting on her new blue chair at the table, with her old pen in her hand, with tooth marks clear in the end where she’s been biting it. “What’s this?” she asks me, pausing. “Rosary ice skate. What did you mean by that?”
At first I can’t remember, and we stare at the implausible words, which take on the enigmatic significance of any half-understood poetic reference. Then it comes back to me. “The box of things Maureen brought you after your mother died,” I say. “After she cleaned out the house. The things you’d left there, and the things that she thought you’d want. There was one ice skate, remember, and—”
“And tangled around the blade my mother’s coral rosary with the jet cross,” she says. “But why did you want to put that in?”
“It felt significant,” I say. “And we’ve talked about death a lot, but we haven’t talked about your mother’s death, or about the things people leave behind for the survivors to deal with, and I thought that might be a way in to that.”
“No. There’s no need,” she says. “There’s way too much about me in this book already. People will say it’s self indulgence. I’ll have to cut most of it, and put in more adventures in Illyria.”
“Dolly going to Xanadu,” I say.
“Tish becoming a painter. The release of Geryon, and the vow he makes above the city on the invisible walkway. Geryon becoming a weaver in Elam. Dolly learning magic. Orsino talking to Viola. Drusilla growing up. Caliban showing up again. His reunion with Geryon. And I’d like to actually see Sebastian in women’s clothes rather more, instead of just seeing him in them once and saying he wears them more often than Viola. Sebastian and Olivia, both dressed in beautiful Renaissance women’s clothes, pushing the black-and-white Persian cat off that huge bed—”
“Now who’s being self indulgent,” I say, and she laughs.
“But seriously, isn’t there enough of us in already?” she asks.
I think so, but it’s impossible to know for sure until it’s finished and it either works or it does not. Who knows how much is enough, if she does not? They are there, in Illyria, all of them, working hard to get us in, spending that hundred and seventy-one years on getting everything ready. And here we are, in Firenze, with a laptop, a notebook, half a kilo of dark red cherries, and a great deal of apprehension.
“You were very conflicted when your mother died,” I say.
“No I wasn’t. I was more glad than anything. I could finally give up trying to be good enough for her, and be myself. That box of things was upsetting more because it was what Maureen thought I’d want, and that meant she knew me so little. Maureen was the good daughter. And she still thinks I’m a terrible person. It’s too late to do anything about that.”
“You still have the rosary,” I say.
“Somewhere at home,” she says.
It’s in the small top drawer of her writing desk in her house in Montreal, along with a pile of other souvenirs—a tartan fuzzy from a Worldcon in Glasgow, a stub of one of Idris’s yellow pencils, a set of rainbow Post-it Notes, a dragon-shaped USB key with some old book files on, and a crumpled entry ticket for the church of San Clemente in Rome. It’s where she keeps her passport when she’s at home.
“The girls and Con will have to throw it all away,” she says, with a pang. “I should have gone through everything before I left.”
Throwing stuff out after people die, sorting through the things they kept and will never use again is one of the bitterest things in the aftermath of a loss.
“It’s oppressive but it’s boring to write about,” she objects.
She eats another cherry and puts the stone on a pile on a plate that has by now far surpassed any tinkers, tailors, beggarmen, or thieves and gone on into the realms she and Idris made up when the girls were small, “Writer, fighter, engineer, astronaut, cosmonaut, buccaneer…” Idris got so angry when Meg said it was who you’d marry, not what you might become. “You can do all those things. You can become whatever you want.”
“Not a thief,” Lucy said.
“You could be a thief
if you really wanted to,” Meg said.
“If you wanted to, nothing would stop you,” Idris said. “But it’s a good thing you don’t want to!”
She smiles now, remembering, and counts the cherry stones. Farmer, teacher, plumber, vet, librarian, barbarian, space cadet …
“How about you? Is there more of you we should get in?” she asks. “Though it seems I’ve been telling stories about you for my whole career. We had your origin story, and your first death, and how you came back from the dead and rescued me. And we’ve had your second death, your sacrifice as Pico, and the time you wanted to run away to Constantinople, and we’ve decided we don’t need to go into the time you were a dragon or a prince or a skald or any of that.”
“I have flown on the wings of the world. I have stolen fire and words and power. I have been a message and a messenger. I have been a boy with a book and a word on a page.”
“You have been Hermes?”
“Yes. Well, anyway, by Ficino’s Platonic way of looking at things.”
She underlines something in her list. “And you’re going to renew Pico’s sacrifice to get us in?”
“Dolly is, yes. And death shall have no dominion.” I remember the exhilaration of that death to end death, my hand on the knife, my action reaching God above the gods.
She closes the notebook decisively. “Then that’s all these notes. What else do we need?”
“I think we need to go to the rose garden.”
“Aha. Let’s go then!” She slips on her shoes and picks up her bag.