Or What You Will

by Jo Walton

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  This is for everyone who ever had an imaginary friend.

  I know more than Apollo,

  For oft when he lies sleeping

  I see the stars at bloody wars

  In the wounded welkin weeping.

  —“TOM O’BEDLAM’S SONG”

  ANONYMOUS, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

  —FABIAN, Twelfth Night

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  1

  THE BONE CAVE

  She won’t let me tell all the stories. She says it’ll make them all sound the same. She’s had too much of my tricks and artfulness, she says. I have been inspiration, but now she is done with me. So I am trapped inside this cave of bone, this hollow of skull, this narrow and limited point of view that is all I am allowed, like a single shaft from a dark lantern. She has all the power. But sometimes she needs me. Sometimes I get out.

  “I have been” is a very Celtic way to begin a self introduction. (I have been a Celt.) It’s as if the best way to present yourself is with an interlocking set of riddles, a negotiation of images and history and shared knowledge, creating a relationship between us where instead of information being imparted from me to you, you are instead asked to invoke your own wisdom and cunning and information stores to involve yourself in a guess. “I have been” in those long Celtic poems often gives way to “I am” more riddles, often boasting, phrased as sets of opposite qualities.

  I have been too many things to count. I have been a dragon with a boy on his back. I have been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. I have been dream and dreamer. I have been a god. I have stood by the wind-wracked orchard, near the storm coast. I have been guardian of the good water. I am wise, but sometimes reckless. I am famed for my fast answers, but I would never proclaim that I am witty. You see, I am not modest. The sun my brother will never catch me napping, nor the lazy sunbeam warm my pillow. I am friend to monsters, companion to bees. I have been a stormbringer and a stormtamer. My silver tongue runs up and down, on and back, oh yes, I have been a poet. My prison now is the skull of a poet. I am deathless, but I have spent time on death’s many paths. (Yes, time can be currency, especially now that I have so much of it that I can be profligate.) I have been a boy with a book, burning, burning. I have been a shepherd, and a fierce bearded goat looking down from a high path.

  What am I? What am I? Figment, fakement, fragment, furious fancy-free form. I have been the spark that ignites in a cold winter. I have been the swell of a warm penis in the darkness. I have been laughter at daybreak, and tears before bedtime. I have been a quick backanswer. I have been too clever for my own good.

  Especially that last.

  I have been a character, and I have been a narrator, but now I don’t know what I am.

  She doesn’t want to let me out again, that’s the problem. I think she may be afraid, but she doesn’t say that. She says she’s used me too much and wants a change. When I say I can change, that I can be whatever she wants (I have been the roar of a lion. I have been a weaver, and torn cobweb blowing in the wind, and moonbeams enlightening a chink in a wall, and summer fields full of sprouting mustard seed…) then she says she needs to make up the world first. Imagine that power, to make worlds! I can make and shape and take no worlds. I slide myself into the worlds I am given and find myself, frame myself, tame myself into the space there where I can see to be me. I slither like quicksilver, fast flowing to fill up the form. But now she says she doesn’t want me to. So I don’t know what to do. I’m lonely. I miss you.

  There are other people in here, so I am not quite solitary, but unless she will open for me the door into worlds, I am beating the bounds of a prison of bone, contemplating all I have been.

  I have been a word on the tongue. I have been a word on the page. And I hope I will be again.

  She says she is afraid she is going mad, talking to me. She says she used to do both sides of the conversation, but not anymore. She does, however, still talk to me. I take consolation in that. If she didn’t, if she left me in the dark in the bone cage for long enough without light, then might I in time dissolve back into the grey mist? I have seen it happen to others.

  That mist is one of the oldest things in her head, one of the oldest things she ever thought of, when she was a child. She walks into it when she wants a character, and it swirls around her. “Just make one up, just make me up!” the mist voices plead, and as she listens the tendrils thicken and solidify and take form and colour and follow her out into such solidity as she chooses to set them. I might have come from that mist, long ago, though that is not how either of us remember my origin. Still, I avoid the place where the mist pools, for fear of being lost and forgotten, for fear of drowning, or dissolving into the stuff of subcreation. There were others here with me before, almost as solid as I am, who are now only shadows and murmurs, ones who surged like the sea in spate who are only a whisper of waves on the distant shore. It would take a lot to invoke them now, a full-blooded sacrifice to call back no more than their hollow moth-voices. She has half-forgotten them, and I dare not summon them forth. I husband such power as I have. Though I know enough to be aware it is wrong to be selfish, still I have to protect myself. I must fasten my own oxygen mask before attempting to assist others.

  I have been a runner quivering on the instant. I have been an imaginary friend. And a real friend, that too! I have been bound here, waiting, ready to do service.

  She asks if that’s really how I’m going to describe it, the deepest most numinous part of her head, the wellspring of everything? It isn’t just mist, she says, grumpily. It’s a place, a place swirling with potentiality. It’s huge, and though you can’t ever see far you feel that if the twining tendrils of mist thinned you might find unexpected vistas opening before you. It’s the source, the foundation, the origin. It’s the valley of the shadow, and the dreamcrossed twilight. It’s Ginnungagap, where nothing is and all things start. (I have been a thief of words and so has she, though she might not as readily admit it.) The mist that is the essence of creation is of all colours and densities of grey and silver, from dark stormcloud to blown breath on a bright winter morning. It never stops moving, eddying, surging, and nobody can tell what is mist and what is shadow, not until shadow and mist transform and are shaped to become solid and walk beside you. She has been there many times but it has never become tame, there is always a risk, going in, of becoming lost, losing your way out, losing your very self into those drifts of being and becoming. There are cliffs, she says, huge cliffs, shaping the bounds of the space. When she goes into the mist she is always aware of walking between clif
fs, and that is the way she comes out again, between the cliffs, but now in company. If you go too deep, she says, you might find yourself on the top of those cliffs, and drawing too close to the edge.

  How would I know? I stay as far away from it as possible.

  She says, besides, any normal person talking about the inside of her head would speak of her as “I” and of me as “he.” But no, she’s wrong there. A normal person would not speak of me at all, would grant me neither pronoun nor any least mote of reality. I have stood beside her in a circle of standing stones and at the top of the CN Tower, and yet to any eye she was alone. It is true I have seen with her eyes, but has she not seen with mine? I have been the flicker of fire that brings warmth. I have been a threshold.

  I have been cocky. I have been assured. I have learned from Pythagoras himself, and from the masters of Bluestone Caves. I have knowledge and tools and a unique way of seeing. I have been a dragon in a university. I know more than Apollo. But I am afraid. I no longer want to escape to Constantinople, escape fate, escape her. I want her to make a world for me, for all that I am and could be, for me seen whole, not one where I have to pour as much of myself as will fit into an aspect she has shaped for me. “No,” she says. “No. It would be too meta. Nobody would want that. The poor reader would recoil in horror. Anyway, all of what you are would not fit within the bounds of any page, the shape of any story. Besides,” she says, when I don’t answer, “what would it be about?”

  “I could save you,” I suggest, uncharacteristically tentative. Making up stories has always been her job, not mine. I simply tell them and act in them. She has always dealt with the question of what they are about.

  “Save me? What from?”

  “Some real world thing,” I say, casually, but too fast, and she is wary.

  “Oh, so it’s the real world you want? You want to be real in the real world?”

  “Like Pinocchio,” I say. “Like the Velveteen Rabbit. Like the robot in The Silver Metal Lover.” (Can you believe that there’s a sequel?) But this is all the flick and flash and razzmatazz of distraction, and this time it doesn’t work.

  “That’s not in my power,” she says, and she is not laughing, not at all, she is dead serious.

  For what, after all, could I save her from? Think about that, because we’re going to have to face it now. She is the poet and I am trapped in her head. What I need to save her from has to be death. Because when she dies, where am I then? This bone cave is bounded in more than one way, for it is also bounded in time.

  “Could I save you from mortality?” I offer, putting it out there plainly, still tentative, still careful, grateful she is speaking to me at all, that I am at least that far real, that she is giving me consideration. I don’t want to frighten her away again.

  She hesitates, there is a long pause, here in the darkness where we speak poised in space, two jewel-bright voices set in no setting, with nothing around us, not even the wisps of mist, neither heat nor cold nor scent nor touch nor taste, nothing but the expectation of electrical excitation, like the oldest poetry where simile stands in for senses. And she speaks, her words filling the silence, the blankness: “You don’t understand. You’re not real, you only think you are. And even if I acknowledge you are in any sense real, a real subcreation, you’re still not a real god. Your powers are only in my worlds, in story, not in the real world, the outer world where I live and where I must … die.”

  “And if you die, must I die with you?” I ask.

  “You’ll live on in the stories,” she says, but she doesn’t sound certain.

  “Then make me a new one, for all that I am,” I ask, again.

  “No. I have used you too much. I’m getting stale. Now I want to write this alternate Florence book, and it doesn’t have you in it.”

  “But I love Florence!” I insist, which is the whole and holy truth. She doesn’t answer. There’s nothing I can do when she doesn’t answer.

  I am the egg of aspiration. I am the spaceship in the sunrise. I am hope, lurking amid the evils. At least, I hope I am. I’m getting desperate in here.

  2

  HER DEAD HORSE BOOK

  Orsino, Duke of Illyria, is holding the head of a dying mare. They have both been up all night. The mare has given birth to a spindly chestnut foal, with white mane and tail, just like his mother. Orsino has already named the colt Leander. The foal is in the next stall drinking milk from the udders of the reliable Pyrrha, who has fed most of the foals in the Duke’s stable, whether they were hers or not. Pyrrha, the colt, and the dying mare are the only horses in this particular stable, all the rest have been moved out for the birth, and now the death. The mother mare has twisted something inside, and is dying. Orsino has used all the healing magic he can, but it’s not enough. He has been through this before. The pain of loving animals is even worse for the long lived. He is sitting in dirty straw, leaning against a manger, the mare’s head heavy on his knees, one hand on her neck where the pulse beats. He is exhausted, dirty, cramped, and his back aches, but he stays where he is, occasionally huffing gently to the horses.

  “Why did you call her Hero if you won’t let her be one?” Olivia asks.

  Orsino looks up blearily. Olivia has slept, and is washed, bathed and fragrant in the blast of morning sunlight and cold autumnal air she has let into the stable. She is dressed in a gown of brown-and-gold brocade over creamy muslin, and her platinum hair is artfully arranged around a gold-and-bronze coronet. He can still remember when he loved Olivia, when he felt he would die if she didn’t return his love. But time and change have happened, and though now the taste and smell of Olivia, and her somewhat demanding bed habits, are intimately familiar to Orsino, she never has come to love him. Usually they are comrades, but sometimes he almost hates her. He gentles the nose of the mare, Hero. “She is one,” he says.

  “Why don’t you put her out of her misery?”

  “I’m letting her die with dignity,” he says. From experience he can tell when it gets too bad, the moment when a horse would choose death if she were human. Hero isn’t far off, but she isn’t there yet. She can see her foal and appreciate Orsino’s touch, and she isn’t (thanks to his magic) in pain now. “I’ll be here a little while longer.”

  Olivia sighs, and takes a step into the stable. “Oh, the foal is lovely! Beautiful colouring. Can I have her?”

  Orsino is tired, and beyond courtesy. “No, he’s for Drusilla,” he says.

  “You spoil that child. Drusilla’s too small for a proper horse,” Olivia says.

  “And he’s too small to be ridden. Both these things will right themselves at the same time. You have plenty of horses of your own.”

  “I’m going back to the others.” She turns, leaving the door open so that Orsino and Hero are left in a draft. He wouldn’t mind for himself, but he wants the mare’s last moments to be tranquil, so far as possible. “Are you ready, old girl?” he asks, when he’s sure Olivia has gone. Hero shivers under his hand. He makes a gesture of drawing together with his other hand and the stable door bangs shut. It takes his eyes a little while to readjust to the semidarkness. The little curly white stable dog, named Horse by Drusilla when she was a puppy, comes up and settles herself down, warm against his leg. A bell rings in the high tower, and is answered by another, from a monastery across the city. Then the sounds die away, and Orsino can hear the breathing of the dog and the three horses. His own breathing is steady.

  Half an hour or so later, Orsino’s wife, Viola, comes into the stable. She is dressed as a young man, as always, except when she was too pregnant to fit into men’s clothes. She is carrying a covered earthenware pot of warm gruel and a silver coffeepot. “It’s all for her, but there’s enough for you,” she says. She sets the gruel down and pulls a delicate porcelain cup out of the pouch at her belt. “Here.”

  Orsino drinks the coffee gratefully. It has come all the way from distant Timbuktoo, by camelback across the deserts to Mizar, and by ship from there to Thalia. Ev
ery bean is worth its weight in gold, and at this moment Orsino thoroughly agrees with this valuation. As he sets the little cup down, Viola hands him the gruel and a horn spoon, also from her pouch. “You wouldn’t have put cinnamon in it for her,” he says, as he takes off the lid and the scent reaches him. “Cinnamon and honey,” he adds, as he tastes it.

  Viola grins at him, and moves on to see the new foal. “Isn’t he lovely! And you’re lovely too, Pyrrha, you’re so good to feed him. Their legs look so long when they’ve just been born, all spindly, but you can see he’s going to be a beauty.”

  “I’m calling him Leander,” Orsino says through a mouthful of gruel, which tastes very good. “He’s going to be for Drusilla.”

  Viola comes over and rests her hand on Orsino’s shoulder. There is a lot to be said for having a wife who is a friend, Orsino thinks, as he leans his cheek against it. “Do you think Olivia and Sebastian would like to go off and rule a little outlying city on their own?” he asks, as he does sometimes ask.

  “No, and however provoking Olivia was this morning, you don’t really want them to.”

  “She’s so spoilt!”

  “Yes, but that’s just how she is. And I’d be hopeless at being an ornamental kind of duchess, you know I would, and she and Sebastian are both very good at that end of things, and we’re lucky to have them and much better off as things are.” Viola kisses the top of Orsino’s head.

  Hero gives another shiver, and a kind of cough Orsino recognises. He draws his hand over her eyes, and twists with the other hand, almost the same gesture he made at the door. And with the same suddenness, the mare’s heart stops beating, and she slumps, dead. The dog called Horse gets up and turns around where she had been lying, then barks once.

  Orsino stands up, letting Hero’s head slide to the ground. Pyrrha and the foal Leander don’t react at all, but Horse runs to Viola, who pets her. Orsino sets his hands on the wall and bends, easing his cramped legs and stretching his back. “In an hour or so, after the stablemen have given Hero to the dogs, we can bring Drusilla down and show her Leander,” Orsino says, his voice giving away nothing of what he feels.