by Eric Flint
Nasi knew the quote himself, from the French revolutionary Danton. Mike Stearns had more or less adopted the slogan for his own. De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace. The words could be translated various ways into English. "Audacity, more audacity, always audacity" was perhaps the most common.
Francisco tried to imagine the best way to translate it, with the Marcolis and the Stone boys in mind.
"Eek," was all he could think of.
"Don't chicken out on me now, Francisco," Mike said sternly.
"Eek."
Of a sudden came the sea
Unlike Sharon, Ruy Sanchez was an early riser. So, when she came into his room—or her room, depending on which way you looked at it—she wasn't surprised to see that he was nowhere in sight. She glanced at the door that led into what passed for a bathroom in even the fanciest palaces in Italy. Ruy might be in there. He was able to move around now, if not very far, and the very first thing he'd insisted upon as soon as he could do so was taking care of his own toilet necessities.
Sharon hadn't objected, needless to say. Any experienced nurse could handle such things with aplomb, but it was hardly something they looked forward to.
The thought made her smile. The irony involved, not the subject matter itself. Except for sex, Sharon and Ruy had experienced a level of physical intimacy over these past weeks that very few couples ever did, even those married for half a century. Ruy made jokes about it.
Of course, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz made jokes about everything. On his last visit before he'd left for the Netherlands, Cardinal Bedmar had warned Sharon that he would. If Sanchez found himself replacing Brutus in the maw of Satan on Alighieri's ninth level of hell, he would claim it was because even the stupid Devil had finally realized Catalan food tastes better than Italian.
The warning had been pointless. Sharon had figured that much out for herself some time before. It was one of the things about Sanchez she cherished.
She decided he wasn't in the toilet. She couldn't hear anything, and Ruy had a habit of singing in there. That was one of the things about the man she didn't cherish at all. Partly because he was a lousy singer; mostly, because of his selection of tunes. One of the few good things Sharon had gotten out of her relationship with that bum Leroy Hancock was an exposure to flamenco music. The real stuff, not the touristy junk. Only good blues in the world 'cept our own, he'd insisted, an opinion Sharon had come to share. If anything, she preferred it to American-style blues.
Alas. Flamenco as such hadn't really evolved yet, in this universe. But the Gypsy groundroots that would produce it were well in place, and well known to Ruy Sanchez. He claimed to be part Gypsy himself—a claim Sharon found a lot more plausible than the business about Casador and Ortiz—and thought he grasped the soul of the music.
Alas. The blues and Ruy Sanchez were terms that went together about as well as the Calvinists and His Holiness, the Pope. Ruy was the only man Sharon had ever known who could somehow manage to sing a song of lament as if it had been composed by John Philip Sousa.
Since Sanchez wasn't in the toilet, that left only one other possibility. Not even the Catalan would risk Sharon's displeasure to the extent of wandering away from his living quarters entirely. Yes, he was healing better than almost any other man of his age could have been expected to do from that type of injury; on the other hand—whether he liked to admit it or not, and he didn't—Ruy Sanchez was: a) human; b) no longer young; c) in fact—you always had to add this, dealing with Ruy—very far from young.
The balcony, then. Which was what she'd expected, anyway. Sharon headed for the door which led out onto it.
* * *
She paused for a moment, as she came out on the balcony, catching sight of the sea. Probing, as she did every morning when she first saw that once-hated body of water.
Hated, not because of anything about the Venetian lagoon's portion of the Adriatic Sea in particular, but simply because—names were human inventions; the sea itself was indifferent—it was the same body of water that, more than nine months before and half a thousand miles away, had swallowed Hans Richter. His body had never been found, devoured by the leviathan. Sharon had been denied even that comfort.
It . . . ached, still. A bit less than yesterday, perhaps. It was hard to tell, one day to the next day.
Not hard, though, half a year to the next. When they'd passed by Lake Constance on their winter's journey to Venice, Sharon had had to avert her eyes. Fresh water or not; frozen over or not—technically guiltless—the lake had earned her damnation. In those days, she'd barely been able to forgive creeks and streams.
She'd never used the balcony herself, after they'd arrived in Venice. Had barred the door leading to it; insisted that the drapes on the windows facing it never be opened. The servants had thought that odd, since the reason the room was considered one of the best in the palazzo was its magnificent view of the waters.
But, they'd obeyed. People usually did, when Sharon Nichols chose to be nurse firm about something.
Ruy Sanchez had been the one to break the command. The first day he'd been able to walk, he'd immediately gone to the door, unbarred and opened it. Sharon had begun to protest, half-angrily, but the Catalan had simply continued his work.
"I will respect your grief, woman," he'd said. That had cut Sharon's protest off in mid-sentence. How had he known? She'd never told anyone how she felt about the sea.
When he'd turned to look at her over his shoulder, she'd seen the understanding in his eyes. And remembered something her father had once told her: A witty man may not be a wise one, but he'll sure as shooting be a smart one.
"I will respect your grief," Sanchez repeated. "Even be glad for it, in the end. For you, because you need it; for me, because it tells me something I need to know as well. But I will not feed the monster."
That said, he'd finished his work, slipped through the door and vanished for an hour.
Sharon had not joined him that day. Not for a week, had she ventured onto the balcony herself. By then, she discovered, Sanchez had set himself up a table to hold his precious morning coffee—Turkish-style, of course; Ruy disdained anything weak—as well as a stool on which to prop his feet.
He'd also set two chairs. She was quite sure he'd had that done on the second day. Strange, how a man as impulsive as Sanchez could also at times be so patient. His was not a broad vein of patience, to be sure; but it ran very deep.
Perhaps that was the Andalusian side of his heritage. Sanchez was only part-Catalan, he'd finally admitted to her, although he considered himself such. But then, he'd immediately insisted, all true Catalans were only part-Catalan. How could it be otherwise, with such a mongrel nation? Any man tells you he's a pureblood Catalan, he's a Castilian trying to give himself airs.
His mother had come from Andalusia. That region of Spain which, if it had none of Catalonia's cosmopolitan flair and panache, had virtues of its own. Tenacity, above all. Over the centuries, the peasants of that harsh land had seen conquerors come and go—Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, Berbers—the Castilians being only the latest. Andalusia endured and outlasted them all; wailing sorrow, only in its music.
It had taken her another week before she could bring herself to use that second chair; another week, to sit it in for longer than a few minutes; yet another, to remain for the entire hour that Ruy did, enjoying her own style of coffee; and still another, before she could finally gaze upon the sea.
Gaze upon it, now, like a human being. Not stare at it, dully hating and dumbfounded and despairing, like a mouse before a snake.
* * *
She did not know, and never would, the day when she finally forgave the sea. It simply happened, as of its own volition. She did not even realize it, until one morning she understood that she had.
She did not know, and never would, the day when her grief for Hans finally closed over. Became a healing scar, not a bleeding wound. It simply happened, as of its own volition. One morning, ga
zing from the balcony upon the sea, she realized that Hans had become a memory instead of a haunting ghost.
Treasured memory, to be sure; and still one that often brought a pang of sorrow. But that would never change, she knew, for the rest of her life. Ruy had told her that there were still times when he would stop in his tracks, remembering that first young wife who had died so many decades ago, paralyzed for just that moment. The same, for his second and third.
He found that a comfort, he'd told her. Proof, in the end, that there was such a thing as a soul.
Sharon thought he was right, even if she didn't share Ruy's eccentric theology. Her own religious beliefs, insofar as she retained them from her mother's adherence to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, tended to run along conventional lines. Ruy, on the other hand, was the closest thing Sharon could imagine to a Sufi mystic's version of Catholicism.
She knew a fair amount about Sufism, as it happened. Leroy Hancock had claimed to adhere to that variant of Islamic faith. But if the man had had much of Ruy's wit and bravura, he'd possessed not an ounce of the Catalan's integrity. Living proof that a smart man need not be wise. Mysticism, to such as Leroy Hancock, was a way to evade all responsibility. To such as Ruy Sanchez, a guide to it.
* * *
"Sit," he said to her, smiling. "Your coffee—if I may so misuse the word—will be suitably tepid for you by now."
As she sat, Sharon smiled back. It had become a running joke between them. The fiery Catalan; the cool American. Ruy claimed to like everything hot: his climate, his food, his coffee—above all, his women. A claim which was immediately followed by sour grumbling that in his old age he'd clearly gotten senile. Abandoning a lifelong devotion to passion because he'd become besotted by an American! He was a disgrace to Catalonia.
But even Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz had a hard time maintaining the grumble. When the time came, he'd have no complaint when it came to Sharon Nichols' passion. None at all. He knew it, and . . .
So did she.
* * *
Sharon did not know, and never would, the day when she found her answer to Ruy's question. She would not speak the answer until October 8, still some months away, for she had come to believe in the power of ritual. But the decision had already been made.
Had made itself, somehow. One morning, not long before, she'd gazed from the balcony onto the sea and realized that it had become settled in her mind. In that mysterious back of the mind, which was so much more reliable in such matters than the treacherous frontal lobes.
Set and firm. As firmly set as her loving memories of Hans, which could now become a support for her life instead of a barrier to it.
"It will be a good day," Ruy predicted.
"Yes," Sharon replied.
Afterword
1634: The Galileo Affair is the fourth volume to appear in the 1632 series, following 1632 and 1633 and the anthology of stories entitled Ring of Fire. There are a lot more books coming down the road. David Weber and I will be writing four more novels, the next of which—1634: The Baltic War—will conclude many of the story elements which were left unsettled at the end of 1633. Not all of them, though: the adventures of the diplomatic mission trapped in the Tower of London will be continued in a novel I will write called 1634: Escape from the Tower. And some of the political issues which emerge in The Baltic War won't be fully resolved until a novel I'm now working on with Virginia DeMarce comes out soon thereafter. That novel will most likely be titled 1634: The Austrian Princess, and it develops some lines of the overall story which Virginia began in her novelette "Biting Time," contained in Ring of Fire.
Nor will that be all the novels set in the year 1634. I'm also working on a novel which follows up the storyline I began in my short novel The Wallenstein Gambit, which is also contained in the Ring of Fire anthology. Mike Spehar, who wrote most of the flying sequences in 1633, is my co-author on that novel. (We don't have a title for it yet. Right now, Mike and I are just calling it "1634: Bohemia.")
All that, in one year?
Well . . . Yes. In terms of its narrative structure—as well as the way it's written—the 1632 series could just as easily be considered a shared universe as a series in the traditional sense of that term. A shared multi-verse, in fact, as I'll explain in a moment.
The basic premises of the setting and the story as a whole are established in 1632 and then expanded and elaborated in 1633. From there, the story branches in many directions. Branches—and constantly reconnects. Characters who play a major role in one novel will not necessarily appear onstage in another, although their actions will often have an indirect effect. Minor or secondary characters in one story will become major characters in their own right in another. Throughout, as the series continues, some characters will tend to remain constantly at the center of things, in one way or another—as Mike Stearns does in this book. And most of the characters, whether major or minor in any given novel or story, will tend to keep appearing and reappearing.
That initial "story explosion" will all happen more-or-less in the year 1634, which is the reason so many of the novels in the series have that date as part of the title. (Okay, one of the reasons. The other one is that it's a nifty marketing device.) Thereafter, the complexities will continue.
People have asked me many times now if I have any final end goal in mind with this series, and the answer is no. I try to let this story tell itself in the sense that I more-or-less approach each book as it comes up. I say "more-or-less" because, for obvious narrative reasons, any author has to give some thought to what's going to happen down the road. So, for instance, what'll happen in the book Virginia and I are working on is connected to what will happen in the books I'll be doing with Mike Spehar and Dave Weber.
But I try to keep that sort of predestination to a minimum, and I make no attempt to develop some overarching general plot outline for the series as a whole. As much as possible, I want to try to capture the often purely contingent aspect of real history—not to mention that this method (I think, anyway) tends to produce better stories because in the final analysis the key ingredient in making a decision is usually purely dramatic. I'd far rather adjust later developments to incorporate a really nice dramatic development in a novel I'm working on, than to truncate the drama for the sake of making the novel fit into a preconceived schema.
That's also the reason I like to work with so many co-authors in the series, either in the form of collaborative novels or by surrounding the novels with shorter stories in anthologies or the new online 1632 magazine I've created called the Grantville Gazette. (See below.) I find that keeps the series loosened up, because different writers will constantly bring in different ideas and angles than I would have thought up on my own. To give an example, except for Sharon Nichols and Lennox, none of the major characters in 1634: The Galileo Affair are ones who played any real role in 1632, except, to a very limited degree, Father Mazzare and Rev. Jones. Most of them, in fact, don't appear at all in that book—and few of them in 1633, and then in cameo roles.
The characters of Stoner and his sons and Stoner's wife, Madga, were first introduced into the series by Mercedes Lackey, in her story "To Dye For" in Ring of Fire. True, they first appeared in print in the novel 1633, simply because of the publication order of the books. But Dave Weber and I based the characters on Misty's portrait in her short story, which had already been written. Likewise, Billy Trumble and Conrad Ursinus were introduced into the series by Deann Allen and Mike Turner in "American Past Time," one of the many other stories in Ring of Fire. Mazarini and Heinzerling, by Andrew Dennis—and it was really Andrew's story "Between the Armies" which lays the basis for the important roles played by Father Mazzare and Monsignor Mazarini in this story.
Sharon Nichols is mine, so to speak. From the moment I decided to turn 1632 into a series, I planned on developing her into one of the central and major characters of the series, on a par with characters like Jeff Higgins and Gretchen Richter. But all the specific ways in whi
ch that eventually happened in this novel were shaped by the input of many other writers.
I like it that way. Partly, because I enjoy collaborative writing. But, mostly, because I think it helps keep the story lively and helps prevent the (always ever-present) danger of the series sliding into a formulaic rut. When I wrote 1632, over four years ago now, I did not intend for it to be the first book in a series. I planned and wrote it as a purely stand-alone novel. I hesitated for some time before changing my mind, after many people urged me to turn it into a series. The main reason I hesitated was because I've seen far too many good single novels turned into tedious series which simply recycle endlessly and pointlessly the ingredients of the founding novel. Eventually, I decided I could avoid that—and a large part of the reason was because of the narrative structure I decided to adopt. The great advantage to a shared universe, as is true with human interaction in general, is that it's very different from having a conversation with a mirror.
Earlier in this afterword, I mentioned the multi-verse aspect of the 1632 series, and I should take a little time to explain what I meant. My publisher, Jim Baen, pointed out to me some time ago that there was no inherent reason that only one Assiti Shard might have struck the Earth. From that initial observation, he and I began thinking through some other ways to expand the setting—both to the side and outward, so to speak. What has come out of that concretely, so far, are two other books which I will be writing:
One of them will be 1781, which posits the effect of a far larger and more complex Assiti Shard transposing both George Washington and Frederick the Great (along with their armies) into the chaotic and turbulent period of the Roman Empire usually known as the "third-century crisis."