by Jo Walton
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, all Europeans are killed in the Black Death and the world goes on without them. Mongols riding into an empty Italy see Firenze’s half-finished Duomo, without its dome (Brunelleschi not yet born to complete it), and think that the Europeans were scrambling to reach God only at the last minute. Sylvia and Idris discussed the power of that image, and whether it was more powerful if you knew the cathedral. They both loved the book, which struck them as a truly innovative thing to attempt, though he was unsure about some of what Robinson chose to do with Islam. The hardback book sits on Idris’s shelves now, back in Montreal, haunted by a new, deeper loss. Everything that he touched, everything they discussed, every moment they shared is limned with sorrow now, as if a bright Ghirlandaio painting full of hope and colour had been retouched by Caravaggio so it seems to be taking place inside a dark cave. Yet she lives on, and wouldn’t have it different.
“Think of Viola and Orsini being married for two hundred years,” she says. “A thousand years. Idris and I wouldn’t have run out of things to talk about in a thousand years.”
“He could be in Illyria,” I say.
“He’s dead.”
“So is Ficino. His memorial is in the Duomo. You walk in under it every time you go to the Sunday morning Latin mass.”
Death, in fantasy, is generally defanged. Ever since Tolkien brought Gandalf back, and Lewis resurrected Aslan, both of them in conscious imitation of Christ, and right at the beginning of the shaping of genre fantasy, death in fantasy novels has been more and more negotiable. It’s more unusual for a beloved character to stay dead than for them to come back to life. Death is for enemies and spear carriers, and the way a spear carrier death is treated is that the main characters will have a single dramatic scene of mourning and then rarely think of them once they turn the page at the end of the chapter. Boromir’s death resonates through the rest of The Lord of the Rings but the imitations of it lesser writers put in do not. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Great War, and saw as much death as anyone ever has. Their imitators are modern people, whose understanding of death is much less visceral. Modern fantasy, even, and perhaps especially “grimdark” fantasy, is often written by people without much close-up experience of death. The horror of the Dead Marshes, in Tolkien, comes direct from Flanders field. They are not there for thrills.
As for the resurrections—she goes to San Marco and sees Fra Angelico’s paintings of the angel in the empty tomb, and Christ harrowing Hell and opening the door that has been closed for so long and letting in light where there was only darkness. The easy way people come back to life in fantasy cheapens resurrection. The ultimate mystery of Christianity becomes commonplace, with the extreme version of the cheapening happening in computer games where there can be an actual fixed price in gold for bringing a party member back to life. (Sylvia loves computer games. She has played all the Ultima games, and done every quest in Oblivion except the Dark Brotherhood. She hasn’t finished Skyrim because she only plays when she’s home in the winter and Skyrim is just as cold and unappealing as Montreal. Also, Idris isn’t there now to watch and reassure her as she goes into the scarier dungeons. What she has played of it, she has played with Con, or online with Jason.)
I knew, when I sacrificed myself as Pico, that there wasn’t any saved game, and I didn’t expect that she was going to bring me back. It was a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice.” But yet here I am, still, remembering it, and so it wasn’t, was it?
“It’s more like reincarnation than having a saved game,” she says to me. “The way you do it.”
I agree. It is. But dying knowing you’re going to be reincarnated, that you have an external and continuing self—well, dying when being aware of what comes after, whatever it is, is a fundamentally different thing, as different as the Illyrian situation, as different as it is for modern people who are astonished and shaken to discover their own mortality, and that of their friends.
“The light loved the city of Thalia, and when saying goodnight it faded from its consciousness as slowly as it could.” That’s how it begins, the line she scribbled in her notebook while sitting beneath Cellini’s Perseus, looking up at the floodlit Palazzo Vecchio as the sky darkened slowly above her. She didn’t have any thought then of endings or my sacrifice, she just wanted to have a go at telling a story. She was bruised and wary, Firenze was an escape, and she wanted an even better escape. As for me, I wasn’t as sure of myself then as I am now. She sent me from my place in her head to animate Pico. And then she started talking to me regularly again, and I started talking back. She says she used to do both parts of the dialogue, but that’s not how I remember it.
She was alone on that trip, and in many ways that’s what she wanted and needed. She was still bouncing back from her marriage with Steve. The long Europe trip, being thirty, was her way of reassessing her life, who she was. Being alone, being solitary, being a woman travelling and looking after herself in a foreign country, let her find her core again. She was good at packing, good at finding restaurants where she could eat alone, unfashionably early. She repelled importunate Italian men with a glare, and there were enough other, younger, prettier, more pliant tourist women that this worked, even in Rome. She saw the monuments of antiquity, the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, whose beauty stunned her. Then in Firenze she saw the beauty of the Renaissance and responded to that the only way anyone can, by gasping at the wonder of it and then making art of one’s own. You can’t answer it or equal it or rival it, but it makes you see you have to give it the best you can because nothing else is good enough. Sylvia hadn’t written in years, before that. Steve had mocked her for it until she stopped. But here it was necessary, and there was nobody to taunt her or punish her for it.
As for me, I was buried in a disused part of her head, and without the resources I have now to defend myself. I suppose I will have to tell that story too, but not now, not yet. In animating Pico I found myself again, we found each other, and her talent, and the story.
She had fled from her mother to Steve, wanting escape, wanting to love and be loved without being penalized for it. There had been no time when she had been alone and asked herself what she wanted. Now, divorced and trying out her independence, for the first time she did. It was only her third day in Firenze. (The first day had been settling in, the second had been spent almost entirely in the Uffizi, dazzled by art.) It was lunchtime. She had drunk espresso for breakfast, walked through the streets, gone into the Duomo and Orsanmichele. She was looking for lunch. She stopped in a shop on the Via del Corso that sold beautiful notebooks, covered in patterned Italian paper, the kind of notebook she still uses. She put out her hand to take one, and I was there, looking through her eyes, seeing her long slim hand on the cover, seeing her hesitate and take a pen too, not an arty fancy pen, a practical pen. A pen that would have a lot of work to do. Inside her head, I nodded approval.
“Thalia was famous for banking, cloth making, learning, art, and wizardry,” she wrote.
14
FRIEND TO ALL MANKIND
“Their world is like ours was before Pico conquered death,” Ficino says. Tish eats some of her cake. It’s very good, subtle and delicious and very Italian. There are no cakes like it where she comes from. She likes it, but it isn’t comforting. Tish is still hovering on the xenophobe/xenophile line, and very uncomfortable without a skirt. (It is like it might be for a modern person to go somewhere where everyone sat around naked below the belly button. It takes a little getting used to the absence of a cultural taboo before it feels comfortable.)
“That’s ancient history,” Giulia says, dismissively.
“You should pay attention to ancient history,” Miranda says, frowning.
“Paying attention to ancient history is how we got where we are,” Ficino agrees, but he is smiling.
“You did say you were learning Greek,” Tish says.
“That’s different,” Giulia says.
<
br /> “How?” Tish asks, intrigued.
“I need Greek for magic, obviously. And that does mean a bit of Greek and Roman history, of course,” she conceded.
“Well, it is that part of history you’ve been neglecting in between then and now that we need to think about,” Ficino says.
“Why?” Giulia asks, sulkily.
“Because we can see from the arrival of our guests that the gods are once again seeking to meddle in the world,” Miranda says, putting down her glass goblet with a click on the tiles.
“Is that good or bad?” Dolly asks.
“That’s always the question that’s most difficult to read in the pattern of the stars,” Ficino says.
“But things have been generally good in their absence, so I’d guess bad,” Giulia says.
“Child, you need to think longer and ask more questions before committing yourself to guesses that way,” Ficino reproaches her. “Generally good for whom? If a change is coming, it may be good for those who have been suffering with things the way they are, and bad for those who have prospered.”
“Most people have prospered,” Giulia says, sticking out her lip obstinately.
“We have prospered, certainly,” Miranda says. She is talking to Giulia, but she looks at Ficino. “Do you say Fortuna will aid our enemies now?”
Ficino blinks placidly. “I have no enemies.”
The others all turn to look at him, an old man in blue scholar’s robes. Tish had been staring into the fire since she finished her cake, not seeming to pay much attention to the conversation, but listening and thinking. “If you have no enemies, then why do you live in a fortress?”
Dolly laughs. “This is Firenze—well, Thalia. Everyone lives in a fortress.” Giulia nods, but Tish is unconvinced. Dolly grew up taking it for granted, but she had found it very strange when she came to Firenze. If everyone lives in fortresses, there must be a reason for it, at least there must have been when they were built. Firenze historically had feuds and riots and open warfare in the streets. Dolly’s ancestors had warred with the Ghibellines, with the Albizzi, with other families, before the city came under the control of the Medici, and after them the Austrians.
“This is a well-built old house in a street,” Ficino says. “And I live here alone and untroubled. People with enemies live in real fortresses with long sight lines, and they have guards and armies around them.”
Miranda stirs uneasily, but says nothing. Tish wonders where she lives, and if Ficino lives here alone why he needs such a big house, and why he has chests of clothing that would obviously never fit him. Tish has of course noticed at once how tiny Ficino is.
“Leaving aside for the moment the intentions of the gods, why did you come to us?” Miranda asks abruptly.
“We know nothing about the intentions of God, or the gods, in sending us, and it seemed to me veriest accident,” Dolly says. Yet now he frowns a little, as if in the back of his mind he senses a shred of my intention in thrusting him into this different world. “The real question now is whether you can help us get home again.”
Ficino looks from Tish to Dolly, his eyes bright. “While we cannot know what the gods intend in sending you two specifically to Thalia in this time, we can judge by the fact that the way was opened for you that they intend something. The gods are outside our world, and nobody has crossed between worlds for a long time—not since I came through in the auspicious year 1499 and closed the way behind me. Whether your presence is good or bad for us, or for you, we will have to learn as time unfolds in its own way. It may have been none of your intention, but it was certainly no accident.”
“I stumbled, and Dolly caught me, and we were here,” Tish says. Dolly nods, and spreads out his hands in what is almost a shrug, to demonstrate.
“Nobody doubts it was accidental on your part, but it was part of the covenant Pico made with God that the gods, lesser gods, the angels, are kept outside our world, and can affect it only from outside. You are here as their proxies, whether you know it or not. I have a way to help you get back, if and when you’re sure that’s what you want. But first we must learn why you are here, and what part you have to play. It does no good to cut across the grain of the gods,” Ficino says.
“Can’t you read it in the stars, or in your mind mirror?” Giulia asks.
“The stars have been speaking of a change,” he says. “You yourself know that much.”
She nods, rolling her eyes. “But they always do.”
“Your lifetime is too short for you to use that word, my apprentice,” Ficino says, chiding, but fondly. “By how I read the stars it is not so much a change as the need for change that they have been calling for for most of a decade now. But no doubt the purpose of the strangers being brought to us will be revealed in time. Until then, Tish, Dolly, please do stay here with me and be comfortable, accept my hospitality as my guests and friends.”
“I want to thank you for taking us in and being so kind to us,” Tish says. “I was wet and frightened out there in the storm, especially with everyone challenging us and shouting, but now I feel as if I have a place to stand. I don’t know how I can ever repay you for your kindness. But I do hope you can help us go home eventually. My family will miss me.” But as she says it she wonders whether they really will, or whether they’ll all be more comfortable without her too-tall presence. She wonders if she really wants to go home or would prefer to go seeking for adventure here. She thinks of poor Vinnie, sitting in the shade and waiting for her to come back. Has she given up already? Who will she ask to help her?
“What Miss Blackstone says goes for me also,” Dolly says, formally, giving a little seated bow as Italians sometimes do in his day.
“You mustn’t call him Miss Blackstone now,” Giulia chides. “Say Letizio.”
“Is Letizio a real name?” Tish asks.
“Certainly,” Miranda says, her voice dry.
“And won’t anyone challenge it?” Tish asks.
“No indeed. Anyone can tell you come from another world, the things you just come out with!” Giulia says, sounding shocked. The wind is blowing rain against the glass. “And if you notice that anyone might be a girl in disguise, it’s very rude to say so, just so you know.”
Ficino shakes his head. “Tish, Dolly, if you decide to stay in Illyria you’ll eventually want to find a means of livelihood. You’ll find that eventually here can be a very long time.”
Dolly is excited by this, and Tish is astonished. This is the first time it has ever been suggested to her that she might be capable of earning her own living. It is a completely new thought, both frightening and exhilarating. She had not realised, when she put on men’s clothes, how deep the impersonation might go. Men earn a living, a livelihood. In her own time and place, though women work hard and their work is very important, it is rare for a woman to be paid for it, and even more rare for her to be able to live on what she is paid. “I don’t know what I can do,” she says, marvelling.
“Well, you don’t have to pick a career at once. And you will have plenty of time to change, and learn other things. Or you can always go into the church,” Ficino says, smiling.
“I am a scholar,” Dolly says. “And I have acted a little.”
Tish can sew and embroider, she makes most of her own clothes and most of her brother’s. She can oversee a house full of servants, at least in her home century, and plan menus. She can speak a little French and Italian, sketch really quite well, and play the piano badly.
“Is your Latin good?” Ficino asks.
“Yes,” they both say, Tish with a great sense of relief. She has always worked hard at Latin, and begged to carry on with it when Vinnie stopped.
“Then you might find work as a secretary, or tutor. Do you know Greek?”
Dolly nods, but Tish shakes her head. “Well, Greek is necessary for a tutor, but it isn’t essential for a secretary. And it is something I could teach you easily, since I am already teaching Giulia.”
“He’
d probably catch up fast,” Giulia says.
“I know a little Hebrew,” Tish admits cautiously.
“Like Pico! Now that’s rare and valuable,” Ficino says, looking at her keenly.
“Hebrew but not Greek?” Dolly asks, surprised.
“It’s a case of what I had the chance to learn,” Tish says, blandly, hoping he will not ask more.
“Do you have good handwriting?” Miranda asks them both.
Now it is Tish who nods and Dolly who has to admit that he does not.
“If you can learn to write a good scribal hand or a neat italic, and you have good Latin, that will earn you a living anywhere.”
Tish’s handwriting is not a scribal hand but copperplate. She wonders how that compares.
“The only thing you must not do here is introduce Progress,” Miranda says.
“Yes. I don’t understand how the prohibitions work, and it likely would have no effect, but it’s better not to try,” Giulia adds.
