by Tanith Lee
The world outside, the arena of humanity, that fascinated Silvio much more. And charmingly in that world, too, he was also a magician. He might come and go, manifest and vanish at a whim. He might still move objects, and even creatures, as he willed, there as here. Even human things, he had found he could sometimes influence. And he had been able to punish them, which was what he had desired the most.
Until now, Silvio’s dual existence, here, there, had stayed a glorious, complex, and enjoyable one, seemingly limitless, lacking no stimulous, threatening no accident nor mishap.
His earliest memory was of lying in crystalline air, supported by invisible and loving arms, and seeing everywhere beauty.
He remembered how her servants had placed him delicately against his mother. Her hair, the color of lemons, had shone and smelled of carnations. He had not needed to suckle, nor to weep. They had slept, Meralda and he. Within three or four days, he could talk to her.
Childhood, as birth, was for Silvio all benign. He was adored, but it was more than this. No one was ever angry—or had need to be. No one ever chastised—or had cause to, since nothing seemed beyond any of them and there was no unsafety. Therefore, nothing need be denied. Nor did anything ever distress Silvio. If he ran and fell, for example, it did not hurt. He swam in the lagoon simply by one day jumping into it (fearless; fear was unnecessary). He could rise into the air as effortlessly. His youth had been filled with flying, winglessly, over the island and the waters. It was only after he went among mankind that he took up the habit of walking with any regularity.
Maybe in his flights he had been looking for other land. He had seemed to sense other places existed, somewhere. Certainly he did not want to invent them, as God had had to do. Did not want the responsibility of that. It was not that he grew bored with Paradise either, only that he was full of life. Yes, there is no other word. And, full of life, he began to search for whatever symbolic food would best feed his hungers.
Silvio knew all of Meralda’s history. Had done so from before the third or fourth day when he began to speak to her in a child’s small voice, and with the dialogue of a far older person. Generally what he said was always adult, and too, then, it had always the flavor of a feral childishness.
“One day I’ll find them and kill them,” he announced to his mother, when he was probably ten years old, an age he had reached in a few months, or the equivalent of that seeming time.
Meralda had gazed at him, half frightened, her girl’s eyes open wide. “No,” she murmured, “we must forgive our enemies …”
From this peculiar slip into instructed formula, he saw (at ten years or ten months of age) that he should not say such things aloud to her.
Nevertheless, he had believed that, just as she had grasped his complete knowledge of her, and had known precisely whom he had meant when he had spoken of killing, she also knew everything he later did. How could she not? They were two who were yet one.
Now, on the slope above the lagoon frenzied with moonstruck eels, Silvio was no longer utterly sure of this. For he and she were, essentially, not of the same essence. It had nothing to do with gender, or time, or that she was born on the earth and had left it, or that he was born out of the earth, and often went back there. It was to do with that psychic difference which now he could not ignore. That she was spirit—and he, some other form, not spirit, yet spiritlike, and sorcerous. More so than she, perhaps, though he had called her the Sorceress.
Silvio shut his eyes for an instant. Then he looked again, and the lagoon was still in the moonlight, the conjured eels were gone.
So he must seem, appearing, disappearing, in the physical world of the City.
To Beatrixa, he must seem this.
A ghost. A magus. Fearsome.
As he had grown up on the island, Silvio began to lust for the things he would have had, had he been born to Meralda in that physical “real” world. A mixture, they were, of what he might have expected had she borne him to the Lord Ciara, and Silvio become a nobleman—but also of the advantages he might have reckoned to get from the scrambling life with Lorenzo Vai.
So banquets evolved on the island, great dinners full of aristocratic people (apparitions) who fêted Silvio, and musicians who played and sang—and phantom realistic armies, and horses to be ridden that were entirely equinely solid until he was done with them, and hunts and games and various tests. All of this. Then, too, princely books came, and Silvio, looking through their convincing but illusory pages, saw that he could not read a line.
Then he went to Meralda, and said she must teach him. She was no scholar, but she knew a little, and this she rendered unto her son. Who, like some fiery sun birthed by a paler moon, took to the mystery of written language as he had taken to speech, and thereafter taught himself. Even the Latin of these recreated books he fathomed gradually, totally. His mind was not human. It was not spirit. Yet somehow it was able to come at both these conditions, and apparently outstrip them. If Meralda was no scholar, Justore had been. Some unrecognized trace of her father perhaps, informed her uncanny child.
As for the books, how did he get them? He, who had seen nothing at that time of the world of humanity. It was as if everything which Meralda had ever glimpsed, or been told of, was there in Silvio, too. And so he could make use of it. No wonder he had believed so long they were each other’s alter-self. He was the man Meralda might have been, had she been a man. Bold for her timidity, and without nervousness—for how could he know such conditions, being and living as he did? The seed of her possibility, which had never been allowed to flourish, became in Silvio a healthy, towering tree.
In the end, stretching for more knowledge and more of all things, he had come to desire the world that they had left behind. To crave physical books, animals that were of flesh and blood. Humans, likewise. Women.
Women, he had had by then. He was sixteen, mostly. (How much time had that taken? It seemed a year or so. But it might have been less, or longer. Did time, anyway, even exist on the island in the green lagoon?) But the women were dream-women, lovely and enticing, and soon abhorrent to him. And, like the books, they somehow issued from the inner ideas, the meager acumen of Meralda, to which he was then very subject—and, too, they resembled her somewhat. And so they were like sisters—incestuous. To Meralda, incest would have been, of course, unlawful and obscene. And Silvio was not distinct from her in this. He turned in distaste from the visual consanguinity of his invented courtesans.
His desire for the world built in him, like a pressure. He became, not dissatisfied, but restless.
But that was to be expected. At sixteen, as a young man of good family (or a soldier, or an artisan’s boy), he would be on the lookout for new adventures. Of ways to uphold the honor of his house, or burnish his own name. (Were these Meralda’s expectations?)
Silvio would go and sit a while beside the marble obelisk that demonstrated his father’s loss.
In that era, Silvio, too, had been called Lorenzo. Meralda had named her son after his dead father. And Lorenzo-not-yet-Silvio had mused on his restlessness, by the obelisk. Then he would spring off the island, and dive deep down into the supernal lagoon.
The lagoon, here, was endless. In all directions, or downward, there was nothing else.
Silvio-Lorenzo floated, careless, not requiring to have air until he should emerge again, even if that were hours distant.
Light-filled in its bottomless depths, the lagoon stayed an emerald for a great way, and then it changed to a green sapphire. Silvio (Lorenzo) allowed himself to tumble down and down, through the pulsing sapphirine, to a matured violet-purple deep, a kind of blackness that was not black.
He stared around him, disorientated finally by infinitude and beauty. But most of all by the immaterial.
A score of occasions, he must have done all this, and felt in this way.
In the real world (as he later discovered and understood), more than twenty years had passed. Silvio-Lorenzo, who had grown to the age of ten in ten
months, and to sixteen in a couple of years, had also been on Meralda’s island for over two decades.
It happened as everything for him did, easily, at last.
One second, he drifted about in the Heavenly lagoon which was purple-blue and sweetly odoured. And then, a sort of gushing and spinning—the water stank and was full of mud and darkness, and a vast fish—larger than himself, he thought—thrust by him. And at the touch of it, like a raw, blind flash, he and it both recoiled. It was a real fish of the real world. It was physical, corporeally alive.
Silvio, who never had, now felt terror, of a kind. He struggled as if he were drowning, and choked, and then pulled such idiocy out of himself and flung it away. The urge to cry out, almost to weep, convulsed him for another moment. (These were, the fight for breath, the lament, normal components of birth into the world of Man. But Silvio’s birth had not been of that order. He did not know.)
He circled, half lazily, half dazed, in the putrid gloom of the alien water. He saw that by sinking down and down in one world, he must have risen up in the other. And he supposed, since Meralda had drowned herself in the lagoon called Aquila, that this was where he had broken through.
But sending himself upward again, through shoals of pallid fish, through clouds of filth and strange weeds, through shards and shapes, as his head burst the skin of the water, he did not find what he anticipated.
The Laguna Aquila, which Silvio’s key to Meralda’s memory had let him see in his own mind, was not as it had been. For one thing, a heavy mist draped over it in thick folds, and a dead, grey twilight.
When he had swum in the other lagoon by the island, upon leaving the water, he had never been wet. Now he was not, either. And, just as always, he was able to lift up into the air, until he stood on the lagoon’s back. It was, today, very still. He knew such a lagoon was not frequently like this. Nor so empty.
Venus and her waters were always riotous with traffic. Not here. Perhaps then he was far from the land, from the islands of the City and her internal shipping.
Silvio walked through the web of mist. As a rule, he would not have done this, but flown. Yet in the world of Man, already he walked, although he walked on water.
Presently a wall surged from the fog.
It was grey, like the rest, but darker, and not very high. On top of it there sat a thing which Silvio knew from his mother’s trove of recollection: a cat.
The cat was nearly colorful in its monochrome. It was white and brown with a sort of gilded striping and dotting that ran through its fur. And it gazed down at him with nacreous eyes.
Then, Silvio noticed that he no longer trod over the water. He was walking now, and had been a little while, on a sandy raft of shore that ran out of the mist as the wall had. Some hag-like trees, deformed by sea winds, scraped against the stones.
There was another shadow beyond the wall—other walls, those of a small house. Even as he looked at it, the atmosphere shifted like a gauze. He saw a shuttered window.
Silvio now flew up to the wall-top, and the cat hissed, its hair standing on end, and jumped away.
Beyond the barricade was a garden of salads and herbs maintained for a kitchen, and in it a pear tree grew, less haggard than the trees outside, in the shelter of the wall.
“Well, seen a ghost, have you?” said a female voice.
She was addressing the cat.
Silvio stared down and so beheld his first mortal woman.
She was a squat one with crossed eyes and angry hair.
In that moment, Silvio realized that he had made himself invisible, in order to hide from her, when she should glance his way. Which now she did.
And then, as she squinted up at the wall, Silvio saw, too, that, although he was not to be seen, nor did she see him, yet somehow with her unruly eyes she made something out.
He had concealed himself not from any unease. (Already, he guessed himself master and mage in this concrete but absurd place, so dull of color, so lurid with potential.) No, it was a playfulness in him. Nor particularly a tender playfulness.
Then the woman spoke to him. “Who is it?”
Silvio could not resist answering, though he made sure she would not hear. “Not any lover of yours, lady.”
But she frowned. She had not caught the words, not even the voice, he thought. Nevertheless, she knew that something sat on the wall, and it had insulted her.
“Away with you, Sinistralo. This is a Christian house.”
Evidently she suspected, also, that he was male—an unlucky spirit of the left-hand, devilish side. (The word she used had a Latin root.)
Silvio grinned.
Then a boy ran up to her through the mist.
“Strabica—what are you looking at? There’s nothing there.”
“Nor is there,” said the woman. She grunted, as if to emphasize Silvio must now indeed be off at once. Then they turned back to the mist-shadowy house, and vanished themselves in the vapors.
Perversely, Silvio made the cat return to him. He had known he could. He smoothed its rough, real fur, which did not feel as it looked, or should, but seemed of pure otherness, strange, nearly frightful (as later he would find all fleshly things did to him.) The cat, too, felt some obvious horror at his touch, and growled, though it could not bring itself to escape until he let it go.
Silvio did not then realize this, but the boy and woman were perhaps servants. The only servants Silvio had so far come across—were not visible.
What he had learned, and swiftly, was that despite his powers, when he himself was invisible, a few mortals would always detect him anyway, sensing, hearing, or seeing enough of him to know he was there. It was their gift: second sight.
Silvio went from that house, and left it lying out along its isolate spit of sandbar and shingle. He went off to see the City of Venus. He duly saw it.
A revelation. Better than his mother’s limited recollections, and the shades of the recollections of others filtered through her. How it had bloomed, the City, like the whole world-in-little, from the fog … its colossal geography, like cliffs afloat on a sea of glass; the tiny details intricate as the scales of dragons.
Here, in this besmirched earthly Paradise, Silvio was as ever able to do as he pleased.
Coming and going where he would, how he would. And from his initial excursion (which itself lasted days, nights) grew all his avarice for the physical impedimenta of Venus. And, too, his culminating gluttony for revenge.
Meralda’s father, Justore, was already dead. But three others remained, like matured fruits on a tree. The evil Ciara; the jealous bitch, Euniche; and, maybe more unspeakable even than they, since he had had no true reason for what he did, Andrea, the fat man, who had handed Meralda over to her death. Silvio did know almost everything. He knew about the letter Euniche had sent to Barbaron, though how he knew it Silvio did not bother with—Meralda had not known. (In a similar manner, possibly, Silvio grasped he had no jurisdiction over the already-dead.)
Silvio saved Andrea for the last. To this end, Silvio went often to the Palazzo Barbaron, watching the lord and his household, gloating. There were the excellent books in the palazzo library, besides, which Silvio delighted to read, and the sunny gardens and courtyards. Soon he came across a little girl, also. She who was Barbaron’s sole legal daughter.
In the beginning, Silvio paid her no more attention than he gave to any of them. She interested him because she was alive, and he liked to dislike her, since she was the child of his enemy.
Silvio della Scorpia—that was the title Silvio had now put on. He had become partisan with revenge, and took up the name of his house. The name of Silvio he gave himself, however, once he knew the name of the lagoon (Silvia) from which he had first of all emerged. Though later he found himself capable of breaking out through any of them, or any area of water in the City, and eventually any area of anything, wood, stone, earth, that the City held. And he rose from all these elements with the same rapid and simultaneous ease. So that, appeari
ng under water, as in the end he did so eloquently in front of Beatrixa, was only a facet of his scheme to ensnare her.
She had been primarily for his use as a weapon against Andrea. What could be more perfect—to ruin and destroy the enemy’s daughter, as Meralda, daughter of the Scorpia House, had been ruined and destroyed through Andrea’s heedless, thoughtless act—for what had Andrea had to gain, save the most petty of vengeances against the della Scorpias?
Silvio had all to gain. Such exercises fed him, as did the books, the art, the scenes of sun and shadow, the very stones of Venus, the very ground beneath the stones, the waters, the earth.
But, oh, Beatrixa.
Where the eels had leapt in the island lagoon, there was yet a slight disturbance.
Nothing Silvio could see caused it. But it went on and on.
I am causing it.
Silvio sprang forward, up into air, downward, through the opal mirror.
The garden was full of the evening scent of summer flowers, and under that, of the Triumph Canal. Beatrixa was used to both.
She stood among the firmly-shaped trees, watching two children of the house, a boy and girl, who were playing on the turf with some wooden toys.
“Whose are they?”
At the voice, everything in Beatrixa fell and smashed like a mirror. Her eyes dazzled over, cleared. She gave no outward sign of any of this, even her tawny skin, faintly flushed along the cheekbones with westering sun, camouflaged her change of color.
“My cousin’s,” she said.
“Aren’t you,” he said, “going to ask me what I want, and how I am here?”
“Not any longer. I’ve learned, you see, that you want things I could never imagine, and that you may come and go as you wish.”
“Oh, Beatrixa, you could imagine one thing I might want.”
She turned, and looked at him, at Silvio, where he stood against the trees. There was a statue there, too, a classical Apollo, brought from the Silvia Lagoon. Two fishing-boats had dragged it out years back, near the spot where there was said, by divers, to be a drowned Roman amphitheatre.