by Jo Walton
Dolly has longed all his life to live in the Renaissance, Tish only since she came to Firenze. So his impulse is to ask why it couldn’t have been preserved in his world too, whereas hers is to question whether there might not be some things about Progress that are good. While of course she would, like any sensible human being, prefer great art to steam trains, might there not by human ingenuity and the help of friendly deities be some way it could be possible to have both? But before either of them can put their thoughts into words Miranda takes up Ficino’s account again.
“So what do you think these things mean?”
“Herons are messengers of the gods, and a symbol of longevity and solitude,” Ficino says. “Also of finding things that are lost.”
“And related to that, the people of Sariola say herons are associated with forgetting,” Miranda says.
“So could it relate to Geryon,” Tish asks. “As he was almost lost and forgotten up there in solitude, but now he’s found?”
“Very good,” Ficino says. “You’ll make an augur yet. The heron is probably the most important, as it was the last bird I saw. But there was also a gull, a crow, and a pigeon. Gulls mean freedom and selfishness. A crow is often death, or the spirit of the dead, but it can also be a messenger. Pigeons mean the young, gossip, accepting responsibility for your words. Seeing the four of them close together, they’re probably related.”
“So selfishness, somebody who’s dead, and responsibility for your words?”
“It could be telling us that Giulia has gone on to a fortunate rebirth,” Dolly suggests.
“Or it could be saying that my father is dead,” Miranda says.
“What?” Ficino asks, turning to her, his face full of surprise.
“And the birds in the other direction, a great flock of swallows and two more pigeons?” Miranda taps the paper. “That would fit too, and his soul on the wind. As for these chariots, I have no skill at reading such symbols, but the vast preponderance of them is from bad to good, and all the ones going east were silent, and on two wheels only. And Dolly wrote that one of those riders was a priest.”
“Has there been time?” Ficino asks, looking stricken.
“Time for what?” Dolly asks. Tish too is frowning in perplexity.
“Time for Caliban to have gone to Tempest Island and killed Prospero,” Ficino says.
Miranda is counting on her fingers. “If he went there directly when he left here, then he could have reached there by now.”
“But he forgave Prospero,” Tish objects.
“In your play, perhaps,” Miranda says, scornfully. “But never in real life.”
“In our play Prospero gave the island back to Caliban,” Dolly says.
“That would certainly have made it easier for Caliban to forgive him,” Miranda says.
“Sixteen grey. Seventeen ‘taxis,’” Ficino murmurs to himself.
“You disappeared, and it reminded me at once of my father’s magic,” Miranda says.
“I think I see hope in these numbers,” Ficino announces. “I think the gods want us to act for them in some way. I think we need to find out more about what they want us to do. Are you both sure you don’t have any idea?”
“Very sure, I’m sorry,” Tish says.
Dolly frowns. “I feel they are outside Illyria, in our world, in that future, and that they want to be here. And the word taxi, I don’t know it, but every time you say it, it resonates.”
“Perhaps the gods need our aid in entering the world,” Ficino says. “Perhaps we need to set up a greater magic to draw them than this simple dinner invitation.”
“Taxi, taxi, taxi,” says Tish. Dolly shakes his head in frustration.
“I think these things speak of my father’s death,” Miranda says. “Caliban might have been looking for me there, after he found my house was empty.”
Ficino looks at her, and nods. “He had better not find you. You should stay above ground.”
“Will you confirm my father’s fate?” Miranda asks.
“The stars have been saying that a great change is coming,” Ficino says. “Yes. I will look in the picture, both for that and for the way we can aid the gods. Come on.” He gestures to them all. Dolly puts down his untouched wine goblet, and they all rise. Miranda takes up a candle, and Ficino leads them out of the banqueting hall and around the portico, past the stairs going up and down, and then opens the door to his study. There is no fire here tonight, and the room is dark. Ficino waves his hand, and lily lamps around the room spring to life one by one, filling the room with a green-gold radiance. Miranda snuffs the candle, because the room is as bright as day. The vermilion curtains are drawn over the picture on the chimney breast. Ficino takes hold of them, then without opening them turns to the others.
“This picture was once a gateway between worlds. It was painted by Brunelleschi, in our Firenze. I used it to pass between here and there, several times, with Pico, and alone after his triumph. When I left your world for good, in 1499, I brought it with me, thus closing the gate. Since then, it has been attuned to me. When I do not look at it, it reflects simply what is in my mind. When I look at it, it can show me what I bid it, though sometimes it tries to trick me. So first, I will look away, and you three can look into it, then I will turn and see what it shows to me.”
“So it will show us what you’re thinking?” Tish asks.
“The poetic pictured image of it,” Ficino explains. “You open the curtain, Dolly.”
He turns away, and Dolly, with a certain reluctance, takes hold of the red velvet curtain and draws it aside. The panel shows an old man with a long white beard and a starry robe lying on a bier, while strange-shaped people mourn. Miranda cries out when she sees it. Ficino turns and looks, and immediately the picture changes. It doesn’t change in the way we expect pictures to change, like a cut in a film, or like slides changing in PowerPoint, or in the magic lanterns that preceded it and with which Dolly and Tish are familiar. It changes the way illusion pictures change, like a Necker cube when it turns inside out, or the face/vase illusion. The decorous mourning scene turns inside out and becomes a fallen castle. Miranda makes another little sound.
“We were right then,” Ficino says. “But Prospero was not necessarily there, as you were not inside your house. Though the gods would be unlikely to bother to send us auguries of mere physical destruction.”
He touches the four fingers of both hands to his temples under the laurel crown, with his thumbs thrust outward in a curious gesture. The picture changes again. This time it shows Sylvia standing near the Ponte Vecchio, with a taxi passing behind her, and a white Vespa, and a big fluffy samoyed. A waxing crescent moon shines clear in the fading afterglow behind her, and a single star. But Sylvia is not alone, or rather, she shows in triplicate: herself as a child, and as she was when she first came to Firenze, flanking the older self she is now.
“Hekate,” Miranda says. “At the crossroads.”
“Now isn’t that interesting,” Ficino says.
24
BRAVE NEW WORLD
As Sylvia paces and mutters around the room, working on the difficult conversation that is coming up between Orsino and Geryon, I am working on my plan. Having Ficino invite us directly came close to working, or anyway to doing something that thinned the walls between worlds. But we were all still within her finite, bounded, limited head. And to get us into Illyria, both of us, all of us, I need to explain her better, which means telling more of her story. But there’s time. At least in Illyria there is time. I deliberately chose the time for that reason. Here, I’m not sure. She went through all that treatment last time, the operation, the chemo, and when mortality comes that close, you can’t know. But she seems as spry as ever as she paces the room, even occasionally hopping up onto the step in front of the windows to gaze out at the river and the tower and the hills. There is nothing as beautiful in Montreal, or anywhere we can think of in Canada or the US. There is spectacular scenery, Niagara Falls, the Grand
Canyon, the mountains of Northern Arizona and Nevada, but nothing that looks so much like art, and certainly nothing that has any trace of the human in it does. The tower of San Niccoló, part of the vanished walls, is set just where it needs to be to create the perspective. It’s placed where you’d place it if you were making it up. This is the landscape that shaped the art that shaped the way we see all landscape.
“Why did you tell them about the Second World War?” she asks me unexpectedly, as she looks out, her chin cupped in her hands, her elbows on the sill.
I am embarrassed. “It was a mistake. I forgot. I was addressing them the way I’d address the reader, explaining, contextualising, augmenting so they’d understand what they were looking it. I forgot they were real, unlike the reader, who is purely imaginary, external, futuristic. I didn’t think about how they’d take it.”
“Characters do that, they grab on to some tiny thing you didn’t at all intend in that way and go haring off with it in the wrong direction. I don’t mind. It’s better than having to make everything up all the time, which is a real slog. Though the idea of wars between worlds, and that there might have been two of them, is so weird.”
“It’s been done. Feist’s Magician does it. It’s a bit like Middle Earth invaded by Tékumel.”
“Yes. But it hasn’t been done much, there’s plenty more that could be done with it. It’s an interesting thought. There could even have been more than two wars, because there could have been more since. And the way Dolly assumed the Germans then must have been connected with the Austrians who were in Firenze in his day … they imagine they’re living in a universe where Italy was never reunited, or decolonized if you prefer, where there was no First or Second World War but instead wars between worlds happened.” She laughs. “I could do something fun with that. But it’s not really what we want this time.”
“But having characters jump to wrong conclusions from available data is something there isn’t enough of in fantasy.”
“In fiction generally,” she agrees. “But the reader can jump to wrong conclusions too, and that’s usually very bad and puts them out of sympathy with the text. That’s something you need to watch out for if you’re trying to tell your own stories. For instance if you have shapeshifters, saying they rolled their eyes in the usual metaphorical meaning of the term can be a terrible idea. You can’t say somebody’s world exploded and mean it emotionally if Alderaan just blew up.”
“I think we can trust any plausible reader not only to be prepared to follow us into the rose garden but to know what the Second World War was.”
She looks east to the Ponte Vecchio, spared by the German official, Gerhard Wolf, who put art and history ahead of victory, though he probably realised that his war was surely lost already. He also dragged his feet on sending art to Berlin, forged documents for some of Firenze’s Jews, protested the arrest of innocents, and sometimes even managed to get them released. The Ponte Santa Trìnita, the bridge designed by Michelangelo, took three charges to blow up, and in the fifties they pulled the stones out of the Arno and set the bridge up again, reconstructed as closely as they could to what it had been. Two hundred and forty-three of Firenze’s Jews didn’t manage to get forged papers from Gerhard or hide in the house of Marchese Serlupi, the ambassador of San Merino. They were sent to camps. Thirteen survived. Thirteen. And as if two hundred and thirty Florentine deaths wasn’t bad enough, it’s just the drop in the bucket that lets you see how big that bucket really is. Every single death in that holocaust of death was an individual human life, invaluable and precious and special. The numbers hide that because they’re so big. We can imagine and regret two hundred and thirty cruel and wanton murders, but we balk at millions, cannot quite take them in.
And of course the best thing about the Holocaust is that it’s safely over, over so long ago. It ended the year Sylvia was born, and that makes it easier to think about and feel we’re on the right side of history. But there are atrocities going on right now, and we’re standing looking out of a window in Firenze at one of the most beautiful views in the world and doing nothing whatsoever to help. Indeed, instead of helping we’re planning to literally escape into a fantasy world. There’s a banner hanging on the Palazzo Vecchio calling for “Verità per Giulio Regeni,” truth for Giulio Regeni, an Italian postdoc at Cambridge University in England who was researching Egyptian labor history when (probably) the Egyptian police arrested him and tortured him to death, very nastily, over a long time. Certainly it was the Egyptian police who covered it up. Italy, Pope Francis, Cambridge University, academics all over the world who care about freedom of research, and the European Parliament in Strasbourg, have spoken out for him, and for the others like him. The reaction to his death has shone a light into a dark place.
But it is only one of many very dark places, and it’s not clear yet whether that light has made any difference. He died in 2016, and the banner is still there, on one of Firenze’s most beautiful and prominent monuments, crying out for truth. But people are being detained and tortured and murdered even as I set these words down, and more of them as you read them in the imaginary future. War, like death, once commonplace and part of most people’s experience, has become unusual for us in the First World, which for seventy-three years, for Sylvia’s lifetime, could be defined as where war is not. But terrible things are happening, and some of them in our names. Do what you can. Every little bit helps. Speak up for the voiceless, protect the powerless, open up choices for the choiceless. As for us, we’re not going to be here to help for very much longer no matter what. But that’s always true for everyone. We’re all going to die. Finding ways to save other people is one form of immortality. I can’t take everyone into Illyria, at least not for long. Gerhard Wolf saved as many as he could. And thirteen of those he couldn’t save came home again to Firenze. Look up the figures for Sarajevo.
“A war between worlds might have been better,” I say.
She sighs. “But not this time. And—well—we may never have time to tell that story. No, the trouble with their augury is that it makes Caliban much more sinister, and I’ve always liked him. I didn’t want him to be a villain. Or Orsino either. So now I have to write this next scene, and it’s hard. I may need to go back and put in some backstory.” The voices of the swallows are carried to us on the wind as they swoop low over the water, almost on a level with her eyes. “Are you still trying to save me? In the real world?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“It’s not that characters aren’t real, not that you aren’t. I don’t mean that. It’s just that there’s a difference between that kind of real and the kind I am, or the men rowing that boat out there, or Giulio Regeni. Remember that term in Duane’s The Door Into Shadow, real enough to bite?” We look at the men sculling backwards along the Arno, their oars breaking the light on the surface to fall into fractured fractals. They all have lives and homes and stories and complications, and we will never know them.
“I already saved you once,” I venture.
I expect her to dismiss this, or dispute, but she doesn’t. She’s quiet for a long time. The boat disappears under the bridge and into the distance.
“Steve,” she says.
“Steve,” I agree. “You’re going to have to talk about that time.”
“We could leave it out.”
“It’s five years of your life.”
“It’s nothing compared to the Holocaust. To what happened to Giulio Regeni. To so many people. It was all petty and personal and—”
“You matter. It was bad enough, and it happened to you. And you have to talk about it if I want to get us into Illyria. And I really do.”
She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she is indulging me. She goes back to the chair and the computer, and begins a new chapter.
25
KALI YUGA
She went from her mother to Steve like a wolf that has gnawed off a paw to get out of a trap escaping directly into fetters. He looked to her like freedom
, like love. He did get her away from her mother, and he did love her. “If you call that love,” she says, scornfully, now that Idris has taught her what love really is. “It was like being closed into a smaller and smaller space, and diminished and punished whatever I did.”
“For your own good,” I add.
“Oh yes, he always said it was for my own good. Especially when he hit me. And he’d be so sorry afterwards, so abject until I forgave him, and then he’d be nice to me for a little while until I made him do it again. That’s what he said, that I made him do it. If I’d only behave properly he wouldn’t have to do it.” She shakes her head. “I was such a fool. And it feels so long ago, longer ago than my childhood in many ways, further from who I am. That time was terrible.” She pauses, then says. “Thank you for getting me away from him.”
This is a story of a terrible time, but it has a happy ending, an ending you know already, where two years after she got away from him she went to Firenze alone and started to write the Illyria books, and then met Idris and had the girls. The time with Steve happened, and affected her, but then it was over, and she was all right, better than all right, successful, happy.
“That’s true,” she says. “But I wouldn’t go through it again even if it is what it takes for me to be me. I only barely made it out. It took everything and cost me so much.”
She always imagined that after she graduated she’d leave Montreal, leave Canada, go to the Europe she had read about and imagined. Her major, which surprises most people, wasn’t in English or History, but Classics. She wanted to go to graduate school in England, and she could have. It was the expansive sixties, there were grants and enthusiasm, and for the first time women could be scholars who weren’t rare exceptions. It was still harder for women, but she believed in herself and thought she was ready for it. She really wanted it. She went to McGill very much as an extension of going to school, taking the same trams and buses, using the same library, living at home, working on her papers, evading her mother’s restrictions, postponing her escape. Her father was sick, dying, and she felt he needed her. But she was going to go to Cambridge in the fall of 1967, and everything would be different. Instead, she got married, and moved across the city from Griffintown to NDG. Steve, who closed all the doors, started off looking like an open door, a fast escape, and a way to everything she wanted.
