by Jo Walton
“It’s several years since anyone died, and that was an old couple who were ready to go,” Miranda murmurs to him. “For many people who knew Giulia, this is their first real loss.”
“She will be finding out the Great Secret,” Ficino says, as if he finds this thought some consolation.
“Whatever it is,” says Miranda, fast and automatically, as if that’s the ritual response.
Her grandmother Harrison was Sylvia’s first real loss. Her father’s mother, who shared her name, and taught her so much, who loved her, if not uncritically then at least without demands. Her grandfather had died first, but his loss was more muted, real and painful, but not a choking grief. Her other grandmother, her mother’s mother, the tavernkeeper Kate, lived on cheerfully wiping tables and pouring beer into her eighties and the century’s sixties. Sylvia grieved for her too, but at a much lower pitch. It was during the very bad part of her marriage to Steve, when all her emotions seemed wrapped in plastic film and held away from her, too difficult and raw to unwrap. She came back from the funeral and found herself tiptoeing around, apologizing to him for her grandmother’s death. “Crazy,” she thinks now, remembering that time.
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” I say.
“Maybe that’s why it was so crazy,” she says.
I was there for her grandmother Harrison’s funeral. Setting out doilies on plates for cakes for the gathering when everyone comes back from the church to the house, Sylvia starts to cry and finds she can’t stop. She locks herself in the little downstairs lavatory—it’s not a bathroom, there isn’t even a sink, just a toilet alone in a little room off the back kitchen, with hardly room for the square box of hard toilet paper, useless for mopping up tears. Sylvia’s mother feels her grief is indecorous, excessive, disloyal. Her father and her aunt Cat hover in the back kitchen, ineffectively trying to protect her from her mother while simultaneously trying to deal with their own grief and loss. Sylvia can’t believe that her grandmother, who could protect her, who she loved, really is gone. Sitting on that toilet Sylvia feels her grandmother can’t be any further away than the kitchen, that she’ll turn around and say “Now Sylvia, stop being so silly and come and help. There’s so much to do!” Thinking this makes the crying worse. She is not a little girl any more, but she is at thirteen still a child, still in her mother’s absolute control. And she has lost her grandmother who was her comfort and her protection, and is left with her mother, who is her real genetic blood mother but nevertheless, in terms of story, her wicked stepmother, who loves the other children she considers her own but never Sylvia.
She writes a story years later, a rare venture into science fiction, where every child is given a robot at birth whose job it is to protect their human rights. In the story, when the mother gives raspberries to all the children but one, the robot speaks up and says “Where are Master Timothy’s raspberries?” The robots also see that the children get their vaccinations, are taken to the doctor when they’re sick, and have everything they need for school. The story is about a robot (me) who doesn’t want to stop protecting its child just because he has grown up, but the story seed comes out of Sylvia’s mother’s deep unfairness. She doesn’t write it until after her mother is dead. She doesn’t publish anything until after her mother is dead. Her mother dies thinking Sylvia is a failure.
“She would have anyway, no matter what,” I say. “Do you think the World Fantasy Award would mean anything to her? She’d just have belittled whatever you did, the way she always did. The way Steve did. But Idris was proud of you. And the girls are proud of you. And your grandchildren. And Con. And all your friends and fans.”
Sylvia comes out of the toilet eventually, when her little sister, Maureen, says she’ll burst if she can’t go. She washes her hands and her face at the kitchen sink. Her father pats her shoulder. “Hold up, old thing,” he says, and she does. Then she sees that her mother has stripped all the plates of doilies, crumpled them up and left them in a pile beside her grandmother’s scrubbed metal kitchen bin. She bites her lip, and dashes into the study, her own special place. There are a pile of coats lying on the table, but there’s nobody in there. She flings herself down on the floor beside the little barrister’s bookshelf, leans her head on the glass, and there I am looking out, as always.
“Are you really going to do this?” she interrupts, and here we are again, nowhere, now, together in the bone cave.
“Why not?” I ask. “I need to get us onto the page, you and me, and this is an important part of it.”
“But I don’t know what really happened.” I don’t answer. There’s nothing I can say to that. “Dammit. I’ve never talked to anyone about it. It’s—”
“You always say that you don’t have to describe everything, you have to evoke. You don’t have to mention every course, you just have to say the air is heavy with garlic and rosemary with a faint edge of something burned.”
“I don’t know how you possibly could—well, go on then.”
Sylvia is thirteen years old, and she has just lost her grandmother, and she is half sick from weeping. Her black hair is straggling out of its ponytail untidily, her eyes and nose are red and raw, she has freckles on her nose, and the black dress her mother bought is too long for her and yet too tight under the arms, where it is digging in. I am there in the glass, where I always am, ready to help as much as I can, be who she wants me to be. What are my constants? I am male, always, unquestionably, with the kind of cocky, slightly pompous confidence men often have but women very seldom, because it is the kind of confidence that comes with taking yourself seriously, and it gets punctured too often in girls growing up. I am snarky, and clever. I am no older than she is, and never have been, in fact I’m often younger. I am conscious of myself, my male and separate self. She leans towards the bookshelf, puts her hand on a knot in the pine, and reaches for me, and I am there, with my round hat firm on my head, leaning towards her, and we are together as we always have been in all my memories up to that moment.
Her voice is choked with tears. “It’s all so awful,”
“Can I help?” I ask.
“Oh—” she says, and she says the name I had then, the name which neither of us can remember anymore.
Her mother comes into the room. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Who are you talking to? Sylvia you’re too old for this kind of ridiculous display. Stop trying to make yourself important. Come out of here at once.” She is wearing a calf-length black dress and high-heeled shoes, which clack on the tiles in the hallway and catch on the old worn carpet in the study.
Sylvia tries to move but she can’t, she feels as if she’s in one of those dreams where you can’t run. She has dreamed about this often since it happened, and she isn’t sure anymore what really happened and what she remembers from later dreams. Her mother grabs her shoulder and pulls her away from me. Until this moment, her mother has quite naturally assumed that I was no more than Sylvia’s reflection in the dark glass. But once she has wrenched Sylvia away, she sees that I am still there. “What’s this?” she asks, in quite a different tone. “Sylvia?”
“Nothing,” Sylvia says, and though afterwards she tortures herself with believing that this is a betrayal, I understand immediately that she is trying to protect me. But she can’t. Her mother’s hand is like a claw on her shoulder, pulling the dress even tighter under her arm. She gives Sylvia a little push, so that she half falls against the table. Then, leaving Sylvia there, she bends down herself. She doesn’t lie on the floor, but crouches in front of the bookshelf. She sees me looking out, with sorrow and anger blazing in my eyes, emotions which Sylvia has never yet seen in me except in play.
Her mother bends down, tutting as if she’d seen something no properly kept house would have, a cockroach, a mouse, a doily. She pushes both hands into the glass. Sylvia screams. She distinctly sees her mother’s hands disappear up to the wrist in the thin smoky Bristol glass, but there is no blood, no tinkle or crash. Her hands sink into the gl
ass as if into water. Her mother takes hold of me and pulls me out, twisting me as she pulls. I fight, try to hit her, try to hold on, but she is much stronger. In the real world, out of the glass, I am light, an angle, a perspective, and she is a grown woman, experienced, indignant, and used to getting her own way. She strangles me, squeezes me, suppresses me. Sylvia screams again, and now she strikes out, flailing forward with both arms, trying to stop her mother from destroying me. She gets in one hard blow across her mother’s face. Her mother abruptly changes tactics and pulls her arms apart, stretching me, wrenching me, ripping me to pieces. I scream then, a hollow thin shriek, like the wind through a crack, like an animal in a trap, like a lost soul. Sylvia’s mother smacks her hands together as if wiping me away. Once I am gone, she turns on Sylvia.
“My father came in,” she says. “I was lying on the floor. She must have hit me, pushed me, something. I don’t remember. Grandma was dead and you were dead. She’d killed you.”
“It’s not all that unusual for parents to murder imaginary friends,” I say. I’ve read about it.
“I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “It was more than I could take. I was on the floor, and I could see in the glass but you weren’t there. You weren’t there.”
“I wasn’t really dead,” I say. Revisiting this moment has hurt her more than I expected.
“Yes you were!” she insists. “You were really dead. I couldn’t get you back, no matter what I tried. I spent years looking in mirrors and windows and bookcases, years. You have come alive again since, but you were really dead.”
“I suppose I was,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry! She killed you. That’s not your fault! I couldn’t stop her.”
“Neither of us could stop her, and we both tried. I’m sorry I wasn’t there later, when you needed me.”
“I got you back,” she says. “I got you back and you saved my life when I did, and I suppose you’re going to tell about that too?”
“Perhaps not just yet,” I say, surprised and shaken myself at the storm of emotion this has woken in her.
“If it had been Illyria, I’d have died then,” she says. “If I could have died at will, I’d never have got up off that carpet. My father would have come in and seen that I was dead too. It would have been a double funeral.”
“That does happen in Illyria. Ring death is a more extreme form of that.”
“Why were we doing this? Oh. Yes. Poor Giulia. The funeral that Victorians think is too elaborate. What should we give them, elephants and trumpets? Dyed black peacock feathers?”
“Let’s leave it for now and go to Perché No!… and get gelato.”
19
INTO THE ROSE GARDEN
After the funeral ends, it’s late afternoon. Miranda announces that she’ll take them to her house. “Ficino needs to rest,” she says as they walk through the streets, which remain both familiar and unfamiliar. “We’ll go back to his house for dinner.”
“I expect he will miss Giulia,” Tish says.
“He misses a lot of people,” Miranda says. “Even though death is rare in Illyria, if you live a long time you will see a lot of it, and if you live a long time, you miss people for a long time. And he had already lived for a long time before Pico’s Triumph. Most people talk about Pico as if he’s a god, but Ficino and I remember him as a person. And every grief brings back all the others. Let’s give him a little time alone. Anyway, I want to look at what happened to my rose garden. And you might enjoy seeing my house.”
There aren’t many people on the streets. Most of those who attended Giulia’s funeral have lingered to watch the grave being filled in. Those who are about seem to be hurrying home, though it is a mild autumn afternoon with a pleasant little breeze.
They turn onto a street that leads to a bridge lined with houses and shops, all closed, with their wooden countertops folded up and sealed shut. It takes Dolly a moment to realise that it is not the Ponte Vecchio but clearly the next bridge east on the river, which in Firenze would be the Ponte alle Grazie. There is a bronze statue on the approach, a woman holding high the head of a man. “Judith and Holofernes,” Dolly says, identifying them.
“This is the Bridge of the Three Sisters,” Miranda says. “Judith and Holofernes here, Jael and Sisera in the middle, and Jessica and Felippo on the far side.” The Jael is marble, and the Jessica is a larger than life-size and very heroic bronze, with traces of gilding. “The Judith used to be in front of what’s now the Duke’s palace, when Thalia was a republic. Duke Manetto, my grandfather, moved it here. The Jael is quite new, barely twenty years old. And this is by Assieti, and it’s quite a famous piece.”
They admire the statues. “Is the equestrian statue in the square also by this sculptor? Assieti?” Tish asks.
“Yes. You have a good eye. The equestrian statue is of Manetto. He came from your world,” Miranda says.
“When?” Dolly asks.
“1408, I believe,” Miranda says. “He’s believed to be the first person ever to do so. Then for almost a century there was quite a lot of coming and going.”
“There’s never been any mention of it on our end,” Dolly says.
“Well, the news that somebody has disappeared is less exciting than the news that somebody has arrived, I suppose.”
“And has nobody ever gone the other way?” Tish asks.
Miranda shrugs. “Maybe.”
“What would happen if they did?” Tish asks. She is thinking about stories in which people come back from fairyland and crumble into dust.
“Ficino went to and fro regularly for a while,” Miranda says. “I thought about going there when I gave up the duchy, but it seemed too extreme an exile. And it would only be another form of choosing to die.”
“But how would it work? How old would Ficino be there now?” Tish asks.
“I don’t think anyone knows,” Miranda says.
“How did Manetto come to be Duke?” Dolly asks, as they walk up the narrow curving street towards the city wall, and the gate set in it.
“That’s a long story. Illyria was a republic then, but lots of people both in and outside the city wished it wasn’t. The other city states of the peninsula wished it wasn’t so they could have one consistent voice to deal with, one policy to understand, one person to remember gifts and favours. The rich merchants who ran Thalia also all wished to have sole power for their own family, but there were many of them and they were constantly jostling with the other families in a very difficult balance, where if any one of them seemed to be likely to make themselves tyrants, all the others would band together to stop them. The Orsini family were in a very good position when Manetto wandered through from your world, and they saw his potential immediately, much sooner than he did. The gods sent him, you see, and he didn’t have any ties. He was, my great-grandfather Zenobio Orsini pronounced, like a super-podesta. Do you know what a podesta is?”
Dolly nods, but Tish shakes her head.
“At that time, because Thalia didn’t have any nobility, the city had to hire somebody to command troops, and to make arrests. Only nobles could do those things. So we’d hire a younger son of a noble from somewhere else to be podesta for a year. He’d live in the people’s palace, he’d lead the troops, organize the guards, arrest people who needed to be arrested, all that kind of thing. Then at the end of a year, they’d pay him his year’s salary—and it was a good amount—and exile him from Thalia forever on pain of death. He came in with power but knowing nobody, and he left before he could be too embroiled in the struggles. And everyone knew he’d be gone at the end of the year.”
“But didn’t any of them try to take over?” Tish asked. “If they had all the troops and the guards and nobody else had any?”
“Well, some of the big families had their own guards. But yes, occasionally a podesta wouldn’t be able to resist and they’d try to take over. Every time they got torn to pieces by the mob. Troops are armed, yes, but they’ll go down beneath the
sheer force of every artisan in the city armed with sticks and stones. And the troops were people, too, with their own ties. Some of them turned on the podesta when he tried to lead them against their families and their own best interests.” Miranda smiles. “And after all, no podesta was in a position to make good alliances with the rich merchant families. They were busy keeping peace in the streets and so on, fairly lowly business. And everyone was watching what they did.”
“This was very much the same in Firenze,” Dolly adds.
“Well, that’s where Zenobio Orsini’s plan for Manetto was different. He happened to show up at a time when there were even more problems with consistency in foreign policy than normal. You see, the men in charge were chosen at random, from the lists of those eligible, so policy could change completely every few months when they got a new lot in. This had us teetering on the edge of war at that time, and if it hadn’t been for the foreign princes dealing with Zenobio Orsini and having at least some kind of continuity, we’d probably have been at war with Verona and Mantua already. So Zenobio put it to the people who were in charge that week that the gods had sent Manetto specifically to be podesta for foreign policy for a year. And they either believed it or thought it couldn’t do any harm; after all, they had a podesta every year and that one had troops. But by the end of the year Manetto was married to Sempronia Orsini, and he wasn’t going anywhere, and by the time my father was born Manetto was Duke of Thalia, properly invested by the Pope.”
They come up to the city gate, which is open. Miranda greets the guard. “Good afternoon Agostino.”
“Lady Miranda,” he says. He is a tall young man with black skin and polished armour. His surcoat has the same arms as in Orsino’s palace. Tish is surprised to see an African here, and armed, but Miranda clearly knows him and seems to take him for granted.
