Or What You Will

by Jo Walton

  “Don’t you think it was hot in 1847?” she ripostes.

  “Or 1499?” Ficino adds.

  I can’t argue. There were days then when it was just as hot, and yet people went wound in yards of cloth, and while they did have silk, they used it to make brocades and velvets, not loose lightweight shirts like the one Sylvia is wearing, clasped at her throat with Idris’s pearl circlet. What could they have been thinking? Why did they ever give up togas? It can be chilly in the winter in Italy (though not by Canadian standards), but imagine the first summer day when you had to wear trousers instead of a toga and feel the cloth rubbing between your legs and the sweat prickling. The end of the Roman Empire was a terrible thing in small ways as well as in large. The sponge fishers of the Aegean used to ship menstrual sponges to all the women of the empire—the poor women could afford fewer of them and had to wash theirs more often, but they could buy a new one when the old ones were worn out. Imagine when trade stopped and the sponge ships didn’t come. I imagine those last hoarded sponges getting more and more worn, until at last they had to revert to using rags—for fifteen hundred years. It’s not fashionable to think about decline and fall these days, it’s generally represented as a change. And some things did get better, for some people, and some technologies improved. But all the same, sometimes when the lights go out, it stays dark for a long time.

  “This is Firenze?” Dolly asks, looking around. He sees a priest cycling by in shorts, but the landscape has not changed. The Arno flows in the same curve. The embankment here had already been made by Dolly’s time. The buildings we can see from here are barely changed.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Ficino says. “When you smoke laurel leaves and look through the eyes of the gods you may see strange things. The question is how to interpret them.”

  “Is this yet another world or is it the future?” Tish asks, a sensible question, so I answer it directly.

  “It’s the future,” I say. “It’s 2018.”

  “And why does everyone have bare arms and legs and writing on their clothes?” Tish asks. She’s still finding it shocking.

  “I suppose because they like it.” Writing on clothes was new and rare in the sixties when Sylvia was young—slogans, advertisements—then the volume of it crept up, and now it’s so ubiquitous I’d stopped paying any attention to it.

  “What happened to the bridge?” Dolly asks.

  “It was destroyed in the Second World War, and replaced after,” I say. “But the German officer in charge of the retreat refused to destroy the Ponte Vecchio. They gave him the freedom of the city after the war.” There’s a plaque about it on one of the buildings near the Cellini statue in the middle of the bridge. We can never remember his name and have to look it up every time.

  “Why—” but just then a young Asian couple come towards us eating gelato, and Tish and Dolly both stare at them in wonder. “Are they Chinamen?” Tish asks, tentatively.

  “Japanese, I think,” I say.

  “Why are they here?” Dolly asks.

  “Why shouldn’t they come and see the best of Western art, once they’ve seen the best of Eastern?” I ask, irked because of course they’re racist, they come from 1847, but it hasn’t come up before, and they’d reacted all right to Agostino, the African gate guard, and so it’s uncomfortable for us to have to acknowledge that.

  “What does their art look like?” Dolly asks.

  “You must have seen Chinoiserie,” Tish says. It’s an old-fashioned style for her, the English fad for it ended when she was a little girl, so she associates it with her mother’s sisters and their dusty drawing room.

  “Yes, but he said ‘the best of their art’ as if it were equivalent to the best of Florentine art!” Dolly says, sounding thoroughly taken aback.

  “Don’t squabble with each other, pay attention. Try to observe as much as you can to remember it when we wake,” Ficino says. “Look at what we are being shown, these self-propelled chariots, and the order of the birds and of the strangers. It’s hard to remember these things properly. If you want to see Chinese art you can travel to Xanadu. I’ve been there twice. Their porcelains are wonderful. I can show you some, later. But if you must question the gods, do it about something more significant.”

  “What’s more significant than art?” Dolly asks indignantly.

  Sylvia laughs aloud. The Japanese couple, licking their cones, smile indulgently at her.

  “I’m sure that is very significant,” Ficino says. We all look. A red truck is slowing down ahead, in fact stopping outside the apartment Sylvia has rented.

  “My chair!” Sylvia says, and begins to run, reaching the door just before the driver gets back into the truck, and just as the rain starts up again. It is indeed her chair at last, being delivered hours after they said it was impossible. The driver reluctantly brings the box inside, and Sylvia triumphantly assembles the chair while more summer rain slashes down against the window.

  23

  FULL OF NOISES

  “What happened?” Miranda asks.

  “What did you see?” Ficino asks in return.

  Miranda’s brows draw down. “You all three vanished for an instant, and then came back! You said yesterday that you had neglected spirit magic, but that was a trick of my father’s.”

  “No such thing,” Ficino says. “When you breathe the smoke of laurel leaves, sometimes you find yourself looking through the eyes of the gods. That’s where we were.” He straightens the wreath on his head.

  “But we didn’t smoke anything,” Tish objects.

  “No, we didn’t. And isn’t that curious? We invited the gods to enter here, but instead, they took us to them and gave us an oracle. There must have been some reason for them to move us to their world instead of for them to come into ours. Let me fetch paper and ink from my study, and before we confer, let us all set down where we were and what we saw, so that we have our separate accounts before we discuss them. If we had been smoking laurel leaves, I’d have had the paper ready.”

  “But—” Tish begins.

  “This was an oracle sent direct from the gods,” Ficino continues. “Do not discuss it until you have written it down!”

  This injunction leaves them looking blankly at each other as the little wizard bustles out of the room. “He is a wizard and a scholar,” Miranda says placidly, taking a fig from the plate and pulling it apart in her fingers. “He would rather know whether there are three hypostases or seven, or some other such little piece of knowledge, than rule the world. And I too, of course, but there is no impatience in Ficino, and too much in me.” She bites into the fig.

  “How long were we gone?” Dolly asks.

  “I have no sundial or clock here to count the time, but a little while. Long enough for me to be sure you were gone, and rub my eyes, and cast a protective cantrip on myself, and get up and put my hand out to where Ficino was sitting to make sure he was not there but invisible.”

  “Do the gods do this all the time?” Tish asks. She had been just getting used to Illyria, and it was alarming to be wrenched out of it and then thrust back.

  “The gods have remained outside the world and done nothing to affect it for three hundred and fifty-three years,” Miranda says. “And we didn’t miss them at all, or at least I didn’t. Did they—” She hesitates, and when she speaks she looks older and more vulnerable. “Did they say anything touching the matter of my sons?”

  “No. They didn’t mention it,” Dolly says. He puts out a hand towards her. “It must be so difficult for you.”

  “Why didn’t you come too?” Tish asks.

  “I don’t know why you three went, and I don’t know why I remained,” Miranda says. “Perhaps I was too connected to my earthly cares to reach the right spiritual state despite Ficino’s singing and the wine and fruit, for I do feel very bound right now by the cares I would prefer to have set down.” She finishes the fig and licks her fingers before wiping them on her napkin. Dolly drains his wine goblet and looks about
for more, but the decanter is empty.

  Ficino comes back with his arms full. He pushes aside the dishes of fruit, and neatly piles up the silver plates they were using to eat, then hands Dolly and Tish paper and quills. He puts an inkpot down where they can all three reach it. This is the method of writing they still use in the mid-nineteenth century, so Dolly and Tish are both accomplished at it. While they write, Miranda leaves them for a little while. When she comes back she brings more wine, which she warms in a copper pot over the fire, adding spices and honey and apple juice. Ficino finishes first. Miranda pours the steaming wine into their goblets and takes up Ficino’s account. It doesn’t take her long to read. She sniffs, and puts her hand out for Tish’s. Tish hands it to her, and sips her wine, which warms her down to her toes. She wonders if it is magic or just cooking, and whether there’s really a difference. Then she takes up Ficino’s account, and blinks. There is no description, but rather a meticulous list.

  MAGIC CHARIOTS

  1) East to West

  A) Small

  White 5

  Black 8

  Grey 16

  Red 3

  Green 1

  “Taxi” 17

  B) Two-wheel

  loud 69

  silent 23

  C) Large

  White 1

  Red 2

  White, open back 1

  Grey 1

  “C3 Piazza Beccaria” 2

  2) West to East

  A) Two-wheel

  silent 3

  PEOPLE

  1) East to West

  Men 17

  Women 12

  Children 4

  2) West to East

  Men 13

  Women 15

  Children 2

  DOGS

  1) West to East

  Large white shaggy dog 1

  Small long rotund bay dog 1

  BIRDS

  1) East to West

  Pigeons 2

  Swallows swirling low over the river (many)

  2) West to East

  Pigeons 1

  Crow 1

  Gull 1

  Heron 1

  NOTE

  We were in the head of Hekate, but she did not speak, though Hermes spoke and answered the young people freely. When I drew Hekate’s attention to the significant large vermilion chariot, we were thrust back to our own place.

  “That’s amazing,” Tish says, honestly, for she is amazed.

  “It takes much training to be aware of everything that may augur for us,” Ficino says. “I don’t expect you to be this observant, yet, though you may master the art in time.”

  The word augur stops Tish, because what he has written is just like augury as she has read about it in classical sources, and yet she had recognised the street traffic as notably futuristic but comprehensible. A distance of a hundred and fifty years is very different from five hundred. But Ficino is a wizard, and he knows a lot more than she does. It occurs to her that in her discussion of careers the night before, wizard was never mentioned as a possibility, but Ficino is talking as if she would naturally be spending a lot of time at magic. She swallows her wine. “The silent two-wheeled vehicles are velocipedes,” she says, hesitantly. “And the noisy vehicles seemed to me to be some kind of steam-powered horseless carriages that don’t need rails, like the omnibuses of London and Paris.”

  Ficino shakes his head. “That’s what we were talking about before. Progress. It doesn’t work here. It’s irrelevant to us, except as divination. The ones I marked as ‘C3’ and ‘Taxi’ had those names in glowing letters. You didn’t observe them?”

  “I was mostly looking at the people,” Tish says. She is still a little shocked by the bare arms and legs.

  “But do the names mean anything to you?”

  She shakes her head. Dolly looks up from what he is writing. The names seem to have some distant connection, but he can’t quite remember what it is. He bends over it again.

  “Did you notice the birds?” Ficino asks.

  “Only the great crowd of swallows,” Tish admits.

  “I’m sure the heron was significant. And perhaps the dogs.”

  Dolly stops writing and hands his paper to Miranda. Ficino starts reading Tish’s.

  Miranda glances through Dolly’s account and nods. “It seems you all experienced much the same events, though you have very different ways of describing them. Dolly says that the male voice, who you identify as Hermes, Ficino, said you were in the year 2018, and that the bridge Ponte alle Grazie was destroyed by Germans in the Second World War. If this can be trusted, then there have been two wars either between worlds, or else involving the whole world.”

  “There had been no such wars by our time, unless you count the Napoleonic wars as encompassing the whole world. Certainly they were fought on all the oceans. But I never heard them called a world war,” Tish says. (The words, so familiar to us as to pass unexamined, taste strange on her tongue.)

  “Between different worlds seems more likely,” Miranda says. “A world is very big, and a war that reaches out to encompass all of it seems implausible. But we know there are different worlds and that they touch.”

  “Yes, perhaps, but then why would the Germans destroy a bridge in Firenze?” Ficino asks. “And why would the man who refused to destroy the other bridge be given the freedom of the city?”

  “Ah, the Germans, or the Austrians anyway, who speak German, were ruling Firenze,” Dolly says, hesitantly. “So that bit made sense to me.”

  “In the Divine Comedy, the souls in Hell were always asking Dante how Firenze was, and breaking their poor damned hearts over the answers,” Ficino says. “My mind is set on higher things, but I understand those poor souls a little better now. Please don’t tell me any more details like that unless it becomes relevant.”

  There is a little uncomfortable pause.

  “I had never imagined the threat of invasion from other worlds,” Miranda says. “I never really thought there were more worlds than these two.”

  “If there are more than one, then there must be many of them,” Ficino says. “And you know the few strangers who have come from my world have changed everything here. Manetto made himself Duke and ended the Republic of Thalia. And Pico and I truly changed everything.”

  “But not like a war,” Miranda says. “Imagine troops stepping through anywhere, in the heart of the most defended places.” She looks suspiciously at Dolly, as if she suspects him of being a scout for an invading army.

  “That can’t happen unless it is the will of the gods,” Ficino says. “And the painting is here.”

  “I intend to go to Xanadu,” Dolly announces unexpectedly.

  “Good,” Miranda says, emphatically. “You’ll enjoy that. And perhaps the gods won’t pay much attention to you there.”

  (What? Xanadu? Do I still want to escape from her, despite everything? No, it’s a bit of Dolly’s native character showing through. I made him out of a younger self who did want to get away.

  “That seems to me to be one of the first independent signs of life Dolly has shown,” Sylvia says to me. “You’re keeping too tight a grip on him, you have to loosen up a bit.”

  “What, and let him go to Xanadu?”

  “Why not? They have literally all the time in the world. It’ll be a hundred and fifty years before we could possibly get there, even if we could really do it. Dolly can go to Xanadu and have a lifetime of adventures before he comes back. I’d have let you go to Constantinople that time except that it was a prequel and I’d painted myself into a corner.”

  She has never admitted that before. But Dolly won’t go haring off to Xanadu instantly either.

  Now you may say that we shouldn’t have thrust them into modern Firenze and confused them with all these things, to which I can only answer that we didn’t. The walls between worlds are thin sometimes, at least inside her head, and she hadn’t been able to write and they came bursting out on their own. I, at least, had nothing
to do with it. Blame the Italian chair company, or anyway their terrible delivery company. But even they have fault but no intentionality here. And now she has her chair and is sitting in it typing, and they’re unlikely to do it again, even if Ficino does smoke laurel leaves.

  “Do you always let him into your head if he smokes laurel leaves?” I ask, suddenly curious. “For the last forty years?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia says. “Four hundred years for him. He smoked laurel leaves historically, and claimed to have visions. I always said it worked, in the books, that he reached the gods … and anyway, he never does anything except count cars and birds and treat them as oracularly significant. It’s mostly when I’m at bus stops.”

  (It would be hypocritical in the extreme if I said anything against this.)

  Miranda cuts slices of cake and passes them around. “Before you go to Xanadu, you’ll stay here long enough to help with this matter of Caliban and my sons?” Miranda asks. “If, as seems likely, that was why the gods sent you here now?”

  “Don’t you want to go home?” Tish asks Dolly.

  “Why, if that was the future of Firenze, full of fumes and noise and half-naked people? I don’t want to live to see that. And I wouldn’t, would I? Because he said it was 2018, and if I lived to 1918 I’d be doing well. But here I could live that long, and much longer. It’s much more of a question of why you do want to go home?”

  “I’m not sure that I do,” Tish admits. “There’s so much more for me here.”

  Miranda picks up Tish’s account. “Bare arms. Short skirts. Wars between worlds.”

  “We won’t have those things here,” Ficino says.

  “Did you do something to stop that?” Dolly asks.

  “Yes,” Ficino says. “It was just before Pico’s sacrifice. We did the magic together. It was setting everything up for the triumph over death. If we wanted to keep the Renaissance forever, we needed to make Progress irrelevant to us. So while the Renaissance had to end in the world where you and I were born, here it could go on forever. It’s just the same as the way people have to die there, but here we can live on.”