by Jo Walton
She can be ruthless. Ruthless. You’d never think to look at her what a callous killer she can be. See Sylvia, so sweet, so nice, so kind, with her pretty notebook and her circle of pearls and her hard-bitten heart.
“I said we could change it!”
“It’s too late now. Besides, I don’t want to change things casually with this. I want it to be real, and that’s what really happened.” Insofar as anything is real. Revision is more frightening than death in some ways.
“Are you back to thinking I’m Fate?”
She is Fate, Fortuna, God for her characters, and I am one of her characters. We didn’t always get on this well, there were times when we fought, when I tried to get away from her. I thought I could run away from her to a quiet unpopulated part of the world of the story, where she couldn’t find me and make me do terrible things.
“Constantinople is hardly quiet and unpopulated!” she interjects.
“It didn’t have any plot happening in it, that’s what I mean. When I tried to sneak onto that ship I wanted to get away from the plot. Fate can be harsh. It’s difficult to live with sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s ever said that to me. Her voice softens. “I understand how Fate can be harsh. I understand much better now.”
“Do you remember how Ruth stopped believing in God?” I ask.
“Yes, when she lost her baby. What—”
“Ruth’s Jewish. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor. She knew that, and she still believed in God. It had to be her own baby before she couldn’t.”
She is quiet for a moment. “It’s not that it had to be me before I understood that Fate is harsh,” she says, “though I can see how you think so. It’s more that it feels different when it’s in a story.”
“But now it doesn’t?” I press.
She doesn’t hesitate. “It’s still a story. But I don’t want to hurt you this way.”
“And I don’t want to get away from you anymore. I was young and silly and in love, that time, and that always makes me reckless. I tried to run off into the clean margin, to get away from the way plot makes things happen, but I don’t want that anymore. You can use me for whatever you want, you know that. I’ll always do it.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I almost think she’s stopped talking to me again, until she says gently: “This is your story. You really can change it if you want to.”
“You were telling it there. Apart from a few tiny digressions of mine, that whole chapter is you, it’s how you write. You brought him in so you could merge it with your own dead horse story. And anyway, it’s because it’s my story that I can’t just change it because I’m upset. Dammit. Now I’m the one who can’t wimp out on the story.”
“Good is different from nice,” she says, as she has often said before, with the sharp little smile she gives when she says it. “Writers are not nice people. We can’t be. That goes for you too. All right, you agree. Giulia stays dead.”
I am still grieving for Giulia—partly for her in particular, and partly for her as an example of the existence of death, of mortality. People—sentient beings—shouldn’t have to die. It’s just wrong. I still want to cry, to sob, to blow my nose, but I don’t have anyone who can do that right now. Giulia mostly interacted with Tish. Dolly won’t feel anything but a general melancholic regret. He doesn’t even know she found him attractive. And Tish won’t tell him. Why should she?
Sylvia must be aware of a pause while I am choking on my bodiless grief. “We could tell another story about Giulia,” she says, tentatively. “Maybe when she was younger, or in a version of the world where she didn’t die. We can’t put her into another world, because she’s so culturally specific to Illyria—to that Illyria all those years later where they have all those fascinating cultural expectations about death, and she is very much somebody who grew up in that culture.” Characters can’t usually shift worlds easily. I’m special.
“Maybe later,” I say, and by what she does not say, by the texture of the silence in which she doesn’t answer me, I know that I have guessed right and she is dying, that there won’t be any later. Well. I knew that. I need to get her into Illyria, that’s all. I’ve made a good start. But we are all clustered here in the bone cave. We are all inside her head and nowhere else, and of such stuff as she is made of. Once she’s gone where will we be?
“Remember Water’s Edge?” she asks.
For a moment I don’t, skimming mentally through shelves full of stories, and then I do. “In the Fighter’s Guild path in Oblivion,” I say. “Where you killed those goblins that weren’t goblins.”
“Well, the question is who killed them. Me, or my lizard-person character.”
“Well, both of you?”
“Mmm. I did it. I willed it. But it wasn’t real for me, it was only a computer game. But I still feel guilty about it.”
Good, I think, but I don’t say it. I want her to keep on talking to me, keep on giving me consideration, keep on granting reality to me, at least, of subcreations.
“Let’s give her a good send-off,” she says, after a moment.
“Yes, let’s do that, for what it’s worth,” I agree.
But Giulia … she was alive. She wanted to do things. I liked her. I’ve never had a character for such a short time.
16
FULL OF NOISES
Miranda puts her head around the door. “Now he’s gone, you should come to Dolly. He’s hurt.”
Tish’s stomach lurches with fear and shock.
“Are you all right?” Ficino asks.
Miranda nods. “Tired, that’s all.” She rolls her shoulders. “Dolly’s heavy.” Her eyes move to Tish, and then down to what is left of Giulia. “Oh no!” Her voice is full of dismay and horror.
“Yes. Dead. She was caught right under and pulled down. She must have decided there’s no surviving that,” Ficino says, as he comes towards Miranda and the door, Tish trailing behind.
Miranda frowns. “It must have been terrible pain. But she was so young not to try to wait it out. Poor Giulia. I couldn’t carry her too. And I thought it better if he didn’t catch sight of me. It would only have made him angrier. I thought there was a chance you could deal with him on your own, as you evidently did. He hates me now, but he always liked you.”
“Giulia’s death isn’t your fault,” Ficino says. “You did all you could. She was trying to help, as best she could, and she—” He stops, and takes a deep breath. “A Platonist shouldn’t grieve,” he says. “But it’s such a waste. She was so young and she was so promising.”
“Promising. Yes. A broken promise. Gone, just like that.” Miranda shakes her head, staring down at Giulia. Tish feels hot tears in her own eyes. “I do blame myself. I must. Was Caliban sorry, at least?”
“Yes, he’s learned that much.”
“That was Caliban?” Tish blurts. She doesn’t know why she hadn’t realised before who he must be. “You called him Antean.”
“And so he is an Antean, a descendant of Antaeus, an Earth-nymph,” Ficino says, picking his way over the broken ground that had been the sitting room. One of the embers has caught the woven rug and is starting to smoulder. He waves a hand and all the remnants of the fire snuff meekly out, like a birthday candle. He pauses for a moment by what’s left of Giulia but does not touch her. Tish, following him, thinks that the corpse isn’t like something human, not like a corpse in art, more like a pile of rags and butcher’s meat. The lone lamp is still swinging in the wind from the doorway, casting an uncertain greenish light.
The rain is slashing sideways across the courtyard. A flash of lightning shows that the stones out here have subsided a little and are no longer even. Tish follows Miranda and Ficino around the edge under the colonnade and into the big entrance hall where they first came in. Dolly is sitting on one of the carved chairs. One of his arms is dangling uselessly and he looks very pale. Ficino puts his hand on Dolly’s forehead and frowns. Then he starts t
o glow with a clear blue light, and the blue light flows from his hand into Dolly, lighting him up like a stained glass window, concentrating to deep indigo on his right shoulder and arm.
Tish draws breath to ask a question, but Miranda puts a hand on her arm and shakes her head urgently. They quietly take seats beside Dolly. The chairs in here are much less comfortable.
Ficino starts to sing then, a high melodious chant in Greek, and as he does the indigo stain leaves the blue until Dolly and Ficino are both one even celestial shade. The trees in the nearest tapestry, the one of the men parting by moonlight at a crossroads, start to sway, and the clouds begin to move across the sky. A leaf falls from the tapestry oak, and blows across the scene. As Ficino stops singing it is clear at the edge of the tapestry, across the border. On his last note it blows out of the tapestry and skitters onto the mosaic floor, ending by Miranda’s feet. She bends and picks it up carefully. She grins at Tish’s astonished gaze.
“There, how do you feel?” Ficino asks Dolly.
Dolly moves his arm gingerly, and then swings it freely. “Better, sir,” he says. “Thank you! You have cured me completely.”
“I wish all hurts were as easily corrected.”
“Where’s Giulia?” Dolly asks, as if in response. His sadness as they tell him is real, but a pale shadow of mine, or of the grief Ficino is struggling to master.
“We must talk to Duke Orsino, and discuss how to proceed,” Ficino says. “And I must mend my house, which is only holding stable now by magic. Without that it will withstand more harm and might even topple. And I must speak to Giulia’s family, who will take it very hard.”
“We have an oracle from Hekate,” Miranda says.
“The strangers? The Antaean being freed?” Ficino asks, looking mildly puzzled.
“No. This.” She hands him the leaf. “It blew out of one of the trees in the Hekate tapestry.”
Ficino looks up at the tapestry. “Ah. The dog has moved, too, and the clouds.” The little white dog, which Tish hadn’t even noticed at the side of one of the men, has turned its head to stare out of the tapestry. “Then she wants us to know that she is watching. Interesting.”
He mutters for a moment over his amethyst crystal and the floor smooths out and the walls stand straighter. Miranda snaps her fingers, and the fire laid in the grate crackles into life. Dolly and Tish are startled, but move their chairs so that the four of them are seated in the new warmth. The absence of Giulia is palpable.
“What did Caliban want?” Dolly asks. “Why did he come like that?”
“He wanted someone called Geryon, who he called the Duke, and Ficino said he’s at the top of Orsino’s tower,” Tish says. “But I don’t know who any of those people are.”
“This is going to be hard to explain to children from another world,” Miranda says.
“I’m nineteen,” Tish says indignantly, as Dolly is saying in exactly the same tone, “Twenty-three!”
“I’ve stopped counting by years and am counting eras by rings, like a tree,” Miranda says. “And it’s often better to consider new people by category than as specific individuals. Very few people are truly originals. However old you think you are, you fall into the category of children from another world.”
“That’s nonsense,” Ficino says, gently. “Everybody is different, is a specific person, whatever other categories they fit in. You’re missing the most important things if you do that.”
Miranda sighs. “Oh Ficino, you always make me work so hard!”
“I’m relentless,” he agrees, sounding proud of it.
“Well, it’s still going to be hard to explain it all,” Miranda says.
“I think we owe them some kind of explanation, or they will be entirely at sea as events unfold,” Ficino says. “Besides, the gods want them here, they should know all they can.”
“Well then you explain it to them,” Miranda says, standing up. “I’m going home.”
“You don’t think we should go to Orsino tonight?” Ficino asks.
“The morning should be time enough,” she says, impatiently. “I’ll come here and we can go to him together.”
“But Giulia’s family?”
Miranda’s face falls. “You’re right. I should speak to them soon.”
“Then let us explain quickly to Tish and Dolly, and then we can go to them together,” Ficino says.
“You explain. I’ll shore up your tower,” Miranda says, and leaves the room in the direction of the courtyard.
“This is very hard for her,” Ficino says, following her with his eyes.
“You don’t have to tell us anything, though I confess I am longing to know,” Dolly says.
Ficino draws a deep breath and stares into the flickering flames. “We have here a story of two pairs of brothers and two incompetent dukes, like an illustration of why hereditary monarchy is wrong.”
The others look at him in surprise and consternation. Dolly’s Italy is a post-Napoleonic mosaic of kingdoms and duchies. Tish is a subject of Queen Victoria. The French Republic, which ended before either of them were born, was the bogeyman of their childhoods.
“The whole system is wrong. In Xanadu they choose the best of the king’s many sons. In Venice, in our own world, they elected a Doge for life, from the leading men, but sons and grandsons of previous Doges were specifically ineligible. Perhaps Illyria needed a monarch, and perhaps Manetto was the right man at the right time, but neither Prospero nor Geryon were suited to rule Thalia, and they should never have been asked to try. Plato shows us many forms of good government, all with their twisted mirror image of terrible government. Monarchy is the best, but tyranny is its dark side, and when eldest sons inherit, we see that. Prospero, Miranda’s father, is a powerful wizard, an excellent scholar, but he was a terrible duke. He neglected the state for his studies. Geryon was too arbitrary, so afraid of making any decision at all he would decide suddenly and late on a whim. It’s not surprising that neither Antonio nor Orsino could sit by and watch their brothers frittering away power.”
“We know about Antonio,” Dolly says. “That’s in our play.”
“Well, two generations later the same thing repeated. Geryon inherited Thalia when Miranda retired to concentrate on her scholarship. And his half brother Orsino overthrew him. Except instead of putting him in a leaky boat in a storm, he blinded him and imprisoned him at the top of a tower. At first it was this tower, but he moved him to the tower on the ducal palace. There’s still an invisible walkway between here and there. He couldn’t risk Geryon touching the ground, because he’s half Antean, and his power comes from the Earth.”
“So Geryon is the son of Miranda and Caliban?” Tish asks, disgust and horror in her voice.
“Yes. And Orsino is her son by Ferrante, who is now king of Syracuse.”
“People’d else this isle with Calibans,” Dolly quotes. “How horrible. No wonder she doesn’t want to think about it.”
Ficino looks at him, puzzled. “In her desert exile, without ever having met a human man except her father, young Miranda married Caliban, who was a prince of the Anteans.”
“Married him! But he’s a monster!” Dolly protests. It is not so much the attempted rape Shakespeare mentions as the recent memory of the broken floor, the monstrous shape, that horrifies him.
“Anteans grow in the earth, he was not so huge then,” Ficino says. “Marriages between humans and nymphs are uncommon, but far from unprecedented. Miranda married Caliban freely. Then later, after the island was rediscovered, she dissolved that marriage and married Ferrante.”
“It must have been so—”
Miranda has come back and is standing in the doorway and interrupts before Tish can finish. “You’re getting this completely wrong. It was my marriage with Ferrante that was terrible. I betrayed Caliban a hundred years later when I helped Orsino against Geryon.”
“I think that’s all you need to understand what’s going on,” Ficino says hastily. “Let me find you bedrooms
. You can sleep, and tomorrow we will all go to visit Orsino.”
“But has Geryon been blind at the top of a tower for three hundred years?” Tish asks, as they follow Ficino across the wide room towards the stairs.
“There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no change, no good, no crime,
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless,” Dolly quotes.
Miranda, behind them, makes a small choked sound.
“Who’s that?” Ficino asks.
“Lord Byron,” Tish says. “The Prisoner of Chillon.”
“Geryon had air, at least, at the top of the tower,” Ficino says. “But you should know Orsino won’t let anyone see him. He says he’s mad.”
“Anyone would be mad, after three hundred years,” Miranda says. “Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless indeed.”
“And now Caliban wants to free him, and to have him be duke again,” Tish says. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“He was a terrible duke even when he was sane,” Miranda says. “The last thing Illyria needs now is a blind insane duke.”
“You should rule yourself,” Ficino says.
“I can’t. It was killing me.” She shudders.
“Then—”
“We’ll talk to Orsino tomorrow.” Miranda’s face is closed.
Without further argument, Ficino leads Tish and Dolly to comfortably appointed bedrooms and bids them goodnight.
17
AN AUDIENCE
As they walk through the streets of Thalia to Orsino’s palace the next morning, the gentle autumn sunlight illuminates the art that is everywhere, sculptures and decorative doors and windows and many frescoes on the outside of houses. Arches in the lower floors of palazzi give glimpses of workshops and storehouses where a brisk trade is being carried out by men and women in gorgeous brightly coloured and patterned Renaissance clothes. The streets are full of people bustling to and fro about their business, or stopping to chat. A woman dressed as an artisan hails a man in a red cioppa and starts asking him about payment for a necklace; two old men sit waiting on a bench outside a palazzo, a bunch of boys run past them clutching wax writing tablets. “It’s like Firenze but more so,” Tish says, delighted.
