by Jo Walton
Tolkien converted C. S. Lewis by getting him to agree what a great story it was, and then saying how much more wonderful it would be if it were true. And if one could entertain any notion of its truth, then it’s a remarkable amount of trouble for God to have gone to, and it’s deeply ungrateful of people to spurn his offer. When standing in front of Renaissance religious art, particularly Botticelli and Fra Angelico, Sylvia often feels a nostalgia for belief along these lines. She was brought up with it, and she would often like to sink back into that belief. But you can’t believe by wanting to believe, and in any case she can always cure herself by reading the patent absurdities of the Bible. You only have to read the Gospels with attention to see that Christ clearly wasn’t what Fra Angelico and the whole of Western Christianity said he was. The house of cards is built on very shaky sand indeed. Reading the Bible makes Sylvia think that the pre-Reformation church was right to keep it from people, if they wanted them to carry on being Christians. It also amazes her that anyone could have started from this, from these four utterly contradictory accounts of a man’s life and sayings, and come up with the concept of biblical inerrancy. A religion of ambiguity and positively Lacanian textual exegesis would seem more plausible, where there had to be four contradictory accounts of everything in order for it to have spiritual validity.
In another room in the Uffizi, further back, there is a lovely 1342 painting by Lorenzetti depicting the Purification of the Virgin, which happened in Jerusalem on the fortieth day after Jesus’s birth, an incident described in the Gospel of John, where Simeon, the Jewish priest given the baby to hold recognises him as the Messiah and says now he can depart in peace. Nunc Dimittis. This, the Redemption of the Firstborn, is a genuine Jewish ceremony which is still practiced by Jews when a firstborn child is a son, though they don’t use doves anymore. But elsewhere in the Uffizi you’ll find pictures of the Flight Into Egypt, the contradictory story in the Gospel of Matthew where King Herod persecutes the Holy Family and massacres the innocents and so they escape to Egypt. Herod was still in Jerusalem forty days later, and not likely to have forgotten about the baby he missed in Bethlehem. It took Moses and the Israelites forty years to get from Egypt to Jerusalem in the opposite direction. But it isn’t that far. The Orbis “Mapping the Roman World” website thinks it would take fourteen days in optimum conditions and with plenty of money to go between Jerusalem and Alexandria, which is their most likely destination in Egypt—it had a large thriving Jewish population in the period. So perhaps they could have just barely made it there and back, walking with one donkey, if they only stayed ten days or so in Egypt. But if they needed to go, then it wasn’t safe to come back.…
But really it doesn’t matter, except to nitpicking writers who want stories to be internally consistent. These pictures were painted by people with no need for that and immense faith in the power of the stories. They didn’t read the Bible, and the pictures and the stories they created remain powerful. But if it’s a question of being true, of being real, of what Tolkien said to Lewis, that’s another thing. Sylvia loves the art but can’t suspend disbelief when she steps away from it.
But did you notice what Drusilla said? In Elam, they don’t paint or sculpt pictures of beings, of people or animals, because if they do, on the Day of Judgement, the creatures will come to their creators and ask them for a soul. In a world where that was real, Botticelli and Fra Angelico won’t know where to look.
“Is that what you’re doing?” Sylvia asks me, as we stand before the troubled beautiful face of Michael the Archangel. “Are you asking me for a soul?”
If I know what a soul is, I think I have one. I don’t think that’s what I’m asking her for.
Sylvia looks at Michael, ignoring the Madonna and the other angels and saints. Michael is the angel who fights. He’s always shown with a sword, almost always in armour, and often, though not here, with a demon crushed under his feet. He knows what evil is, he remembers and regrets the rebel angels. Here he’s staring into space, not paying any attention to any of the figures around him and whatever is going on in the painting. He isn’t looking at Christ or the Virgin, but out beyond the viewer. There is no demon, no scales of justice to separate saints from sinners, but his sword is ready. “He’s my guardian angel,” she says to me, inside her head. “He’s you.”
Oh, but I am no angel. I am much trickier than that. Botticelli’s Michael has nothing to be guilty about.
What this Michael reminds me of is the scene she’s supposed to be writing next, Orsino, putting his armour on to go up the tower to talk to his blinded Antean brother. We go out of the Botticelli room and walk around the top floor of the Uffizi. We pop into the newly rearranged Michelangelo and Raphael room. They have moved the two Raphael Doni portraits here from the Pitti Palace, and put them in glass away from the wall, so you can for the first time walk around behind them and make the startling discovery that their backs show cartoons of the story of Deucalion’s flood. It’s strange and delightful to see a picture you have seen a thousand times, and suddenly be able to see the secret hidden behind it. The portraits are a pair, wedding pictures. He has the flood behind him, water bursting from the clouds the gods are sitting on, falling on a gazebo on a hill. Behind her portrait is the same gazebo, but close up, and a man and a woman, Deucalion and Pyrrha, throwing stones over their shoulders to create men and women. Such a surprising thing to sit behind that canny pair, the banker and his wife.
From there we go past the Laocoön to the café, out in the open air, on a level with the top layer of the body of the Palazzo Vecchio and right next to it. The friendly Russian waitress recognises Sylvia, because she comes here frequently—and even more frequently when she didn’t have a chair—and asks how she is doing and whether she’s finished her book yet. “It’s coming along,” Sylvia says. She orders freshly squeezed orange juice, spremuta, and sits facing the Palazzo Vecchio, her head tilted to look up at the tower, and thinking about Geryon. She has been up there, though not this year, up and up the dark stairs to emerge at the platform where the twisting pillars rise, and you are higher than anything else in Firenze, and you can see it all so clearly. The very peak of the tower is still above you, they don’t let people up at the very top, by the twirling gold lion weathercock, but she has been to the battlement below it. Cosimo de’ Medici and, later, Savonarola, were imprisoned in a cell down in the main part of the tower, a little more than halfway up. But she has decided that Geryon is in the layer at the top of the castle proper, just a little higher than where she is sitting in the Uffizi café, which is on top of the Loggia dei Lanzi. She stares over at the space under the crenellations, where there are bars on the arches, where, in Thalia, Geryon, son of Miranda and Caliban, rightful Duke of Thalia, has been bound for three hundred years.
He’s bound out in the open, to rings set in the wall, and if he could see, he could see all of Thalia, the domes and spires of churches and synagogues rising above the rooftops, and Ficino’s tower with the little crystal dome on top catching the light, and the city walls, and the river and the hills. There’s no Brunelleschi’s dome in Thalia, though it is one of the most miraculous sights of the real Firenze, because it’s so big and so unexpected. Thalia’s cathedral is without the huge dome. But Giotto’s belltower is there—it was in Firenze when Manetto left—and the Baptistery, and Orsanmichele, and the Badia, and the tower of the Bargello. Geryon can make out colours now, so he can see the blue of the sky and the gold of the stone and the terra-cotta red of the tiles of the rooftops. And maybe he is starting to see silhouettes, so he could see the skyline below him, or tell hills from sky. But for at least the first hundred years he would have seen none of it, and his world would have been the song of birds, the howling of dogs, church and civil bells marking the hours, the striking of the clock in the tower, drums and trumpets of parades, the occasional clatter of horses’ hooves on stone, and the chatter of human voices in the square far below, where he can make out the murmur but never the words.
Imagine spending a day there, blind, feeling the heat of the sun and knowing it has set only when the chill of night sets in, hearing the city going on with life down below. Then imagine another day, and another, a lifetime, and then a little vision returns, another lifetime, and a little colour. Defeating death opens up terrifying possibilities as well as wonderful ones. But if Geryon had wanted to die at any moment, all it would have taken was the wish. He wanted to live, even if this is what life is, far above the earth that gives him his strength.
29
TWO GRAVES
Before going up to see Geryon, Orsino dresses in his armour, for both physical and psychological protection. His armour is made of steel and enamelled in black and red, with a unicorn and a rose on his chest, for Manetto, the man from another world, as rare as a unicorn, and the Orsini family he married into. (The real Orsini were a Roman family, but Sylvia borrowed them for Illyria.) Drusilla insists that she’s been sneaking up there in her ordinary clothes and doesn’t need to wear anything special. She changes out of the good dress she wore to the funeral and puts on an everyday dress, in dark burgundy over cream. She keeps the gold arm ring, which fits better with these sleeves. She hitches her skirts up to climb the stairs. Orsino is glad they’re not going all the way up the tower. Those stairs always seem endless, and his breastplate is heavy.
The tower on the Palazzo Vecchio was built first and foremost as a watchtower, and that is still its central function. It’s very practical, in a way you can’t really recognise until you go up there. A lookout can see if enemy armies are coming from miles away, in good time to warn the city by ringing the bell at the top of the tower. Once that alarm has rung, it would be taken up by watchtowers and church towers all over the city, letting everyone know not just that an army was on the way, but from which direction. People would close all the gates and get into armour, and rush to defend the walls. The guards and sentries on the walls all the time are a skeleton force, but by the time any enemy came to the walls they would be bristling with everyone who knows how to use a weapon. From the top of the tower, the city would look like a kicked anthill. Orsino keeps three guards on the platform at the top of the tower looking out all the time, and more at times when Thalia is at war, or when war is threatened. They are not posted near Geryon, but they have to pass him on their way up and down. Every four hours, when the watch is changed, one of the newly arrived lookouts takes Geryon food and water, and another throws a bucket of water over him to keep him clean.
The tower also contains a clock, and has since the astonishingly early date of 1353. A great deal of the width of the tower is given up to its mechanism, making the stairs narrow and dark. “Everyone hates winding the clock,” Drusilla says as it strikes. “They try to get out of it.”
Orsino grunts. He doesn’t often wear his armour on other than ceremonial occasions, and climbing stairs in it is making him feel out of condition. “How about lookout duty?” he asks. “Do they hate that?”
“No, they think that’s quite fun,” she says. “Especially when it’s hot, and they’re high up there. But winding the clock is hard work in a small dark space. It’s usually done by whoever messed up recently.”
“Do you go all the way up and talk to the lookouts?” Orsino asks.
“You get the best view from up there,” Drusilla says, evasively.
When Orsino was a boy, he went up to talk to the lookouts too. The sentries had often told grim stories of battles they had fought, and had scars to show for it. The civil war between Miranda and Antonio was vicious. That was one reason why he made his coup against Geryon sudden, brutal, and rapid, with order promptly restored afterwards. But even so, even with everything, he’d never have done it if Geryon had been a good duke. Sitting beside him and watching him incompetently mismanage everything and anger the people for nothing was more than Orsino could bear. If Geryon had been a good duke, then Orsino would have found something else to do with his life. Or even if he’d just mismanaged things, if he hadn’t killed Claudio for not letting him marry Olivia, Orsino would have left him alone. This has been Orsino’s constant justification to himself for the last three hundred years.
They come to the top of the stairs abruptly, and blink in the sudden sunlight. The sun is sinking and everything is casting long shadows. Orsino stops in the doorway, just out of Geryon’s sight, if Geryon can see. His brother is chained to rings set into the wall, facing north over the city. You could mistake him for a man wearing a big hood, a monk stooping forward, if you saw him in other circumstances. Naked, and chained to the rings, the difference is very obvious. He has a dirty beige blanket, and when Orsino sees it he frowns automatically. Somebody has softened towards Geryon, which might mean he still has sympathisers among the people of Thalia. Or, he sighs, it might just as likely be his own wife or daughter who has brought it. In any case, as things are, signs of lenience are probably good.
“Go and say hello,” Orsino whispers to Drusilla. “If I speak to him first he’ll start to roar and rave, and even if he’s faking it, that’s not a good way to begin this.”
Drusilla shrugs, and pushes past her father onto the parapet that runs around the castle behind the bars and crenellations. “Hello Uncle Geryon,” she says.
“You’ll get in trouble if you keep coming up here, Dru,” Geryon says, in his familiar deep bass. “The more often you do it the more likely you are to get caught.”
Drusilla looks towards the archway where Orsino is waiting, then back at Geryon. She shifts from foot to foot. “I told them that you don’t want to be duke anymore,” she says.
Geryon sighs heavily. “That won’t do any good, little one. Now they’ll definitely stop you coming up to brighten my days. And they won’t trust me. They can’t.”
“That’s what they said,” Drusilla says. Then she turns and beckons to Orsino, and he comes out. He doesn’t know whether Geryon can see him or not, if he can make anything of the change of light and colours. Orsino had not, before Ficino’s suggestion of that morning, really thought what three hundred years of blindness would mean.
“Hello brother,” Orsino says, tentatively.
For a moment he thinks Geryon will start to scream at him in the madness that is all he has shown him for centuries. His brother tenses against the chains, and his mouth becomes a grimace. He hisses, then all at once relaxes against the chains and slumps down at the base of the wall, clutching his blanket to his chest with both of his huge hands. “Don’t punish her,” he rumbles. “She’s just a kid, just being a kid. She didn’t mean anything bad coming and talking to me.”
“I know,” Orsino says.
“He gave me an arm ring,” Drusilla interrupts, patting it. “He isn’t angry at me at all.”
“You’re not?” Geryon’s ruined eyes are clearly visible as he turns them towards Orsino in the red light of the declining sun. Orsino can see that they are indeed healing. They were nothing but a mass of scars where the hot irons were laid on, but now the raised criss-cross scars are covered with greyish skin, and there are bulges in there that are something like eyes again.
“I’m really not angry at Drusilla,” Orsino says. “Not at all. I’m grateful to her for making friends with you, for telling me you want to go to Elam.” As always when he sees his brother, Orsino feels profoundly guilty. Usually, after his annual visits to Geryon, he hates himself. He gets drunk and tries to justify himself to Viola, and sometimes to the others, but never to anyone else. He has not spoken about Geryon to anyone outside the family for years. Nor have the Senate inquired after him, or any of the important families, or even the rulers of other states, not for more than a century now. Only Miranda asks how he is, and persistently asks to visit him. But whether they talk about him or not, everyone knows Orsino keeps his deposed brother chained at the top of the castle, and that reputation has served him well for a long time. It means that he has been able to be benevolent in specific cases without anyone thinking him soft.
Geryo
n turns his body towards Orsino, angling his shoulders as much as he can, and Orsino realises he is squinting, trying to see. “It won’t matter if she lets me go when she’s duke, or duchess, rather,” Geryon says. “I won’t take revenge on her.”
Now that he sees him again, after being reminded by Olivia of Claudio’s death, and by his memory of every pinprick of the incompetence that was Geryon as duke, the option of sacrificing himself in Geryon’s place has lost any faintest consideration he might have been giving to it. Orsino has no desire to spend three hundred years, blind, on top of a tower. He would do it for the greater good. But absolutely refuses to do it while Geryon ruins Thalia down below.
So he sees three possible courses lying before him. First, he has brought his sword, and his hand twitches towards it. He could murder Geryon. Bound as he is, he could cut his brother’s throat without very much difficulty. This might or might not help against the threat of Caliban, but it would remove Geryon as a piece on the playing board, and make any attack by Caliban pointless. It would in many ways be practical and expedient. The reasons for not doing it are all human and sentimental—Geryon is still, after everything, his brother, and it would destroy Drusilla’s trust in him as a good person.
Secondly, much worse than killing him, he could bring blacksmiths up here to burn out Geryon’s eyes for a second time. He could do this every century, forever. Blind, Geryon is no threat, but if he could see he would be able to do magic, and perhaps free himself. Orsino knows he will not take this course, that he could not live with himself if he did. Though this is the path Orsino has been walking for three hundred years, he refuses it now, he could not do it knowingly and go on. Worse than losing Drusilla’s good regard would be losing his own regard for himself. Besides, it would probably be useless, indeed, it always was useless if Ficino has the power to restore Geryon’s sight.
