by Jo Walton
The third option is the much more precarious path of letting his brother go. Orsino has all the power here. He is the duke, the leader. Nothing constrains him. He has to listen to public opinion to a certain extent, or he can be overthrown by a conspiracy within the city. He is nominally subject to his grandfather Alfonso of Syracuse, who in practice has stopped trying to interfere with him as long as Orsino acknowledges his theoretical fealty. Most binding, if he does anything that upsets his family he will be unable to have a peaceful life. But as far as actual constraints on his will go, only Heaven, the gods, and God, are truly above him. Only the action of the gods—my action in sending Dolly, Tish, and the ram, from our world into Illyria—has brought him up here to weigh up his choices. Letting Geryon go is fraught with dangers, and some real loss to Orsino’s reputation, and to his domestic peace with Olivia. But if he could trust what Drusilla says, he could do it. She is only a child, but her assessment of character has always been good. And it would, he suspects, please the gods. But it is such a risk. How can he possibly trust his brother?
“How if I let you go?” Orsino asks, abruptly.
“Don’t mock me!” Geryon bellows. Drusilla leaps back, startled, crashing into the parapet, which is shoulder high to her and above waist height to a tall man.
“I’m not mocking you, not at all,” Orsino says, his tone calm, though his heart jumped at the shout and is pounding. “Your first impulse today was to protect Drusilla. If you really want to go to Elam and make carpets, I really am considering letting you go. I haven’t decided yet, because it really is a risk.”
“He means it,” Drusilla says, and Orsino doesn’t know which of them she is trying to reassure.
Geryon is silent.
“You hated being duke, and you were terrible at it. I had to depose you, and because you are what you are I had to do it the way I did it. It must have been terrible. I don’t know what has kept you alive all this time,” Orsino says.
“You couldn’t have let me know you wanted it and asked me for it?” Geryon says.
“You wouldn’t have given it to me. You knew I wanted it. And if I’d asked, it would have made you wary.”
“I don’t want to be duke anymore,” Geryon says, as quietly as he can.
“If I let you go, you’d have to swear, before you touch the earth again, to give up all your claims on Illyria, and you’d have to swear it to Drusilla, and on her life,” Orsino says. Drusilla stares up at her father, who nods gravely to her.
Geryon is silent for a moment longer, and Orsino waits. “Did you send her up here deliberately to make me care about her, so you could do this?” he asks.
“No he didn’t! I don’t know how you could think that!” Drusilla bursts out.
“Oh, he’s capable of it,” Geryon says. “He may be your father, and you may love him, but he’s very devious. I never guessed he was plotting against me until it was too late. He had everything ready, but he treated me just like a beloved big brother until the very last minute. He might have decided to conceive you just for this.”
“He is very devious. Dukes need to be. But he didn’t do that. And I can always tell when he’s lying,” Drusilla says. “He has a tell. My mother told me what it is.”
“What is it?” Orsino asks, horrified.
“I’m not telling you,” Drusilla says, and laughs. Orsino resolves to ask Viola. If one person can figure out what it is, others could, and that could be dangerous. Viola will tell him, and then he can work on changing that mannerism, whatever it is, so he can again lie with confidence. Meanwhile, he resolves to be careful to be truthful in front of his daughter.
“Touch the earth,” Geryon says, yearningly, and his voice cracks and breaks, and Orsino knows that he would cry if he had eyes. The last sliver of the sun sinks below the horizon. “What has changed? Why are you dangling hope so close in front of me now? What do you have to gain by it?”
Drusilla draws breath to tell him, but Orsino puts his hand on her arm above the arm ring to stop her, and she stops, though she frowns up at him. He wants to consider how much he wants Geryon to know. Is he truly going to let his brother go? He stares at Geryon’s ruined face in the fading light. “You are my brother. I always thought I had to keep you imprisoned because I couldn’t face a civil war and all the deaths that would cause. And a duel between us would be no contest. You’d win. But I am a better duke for Illyria. I was trained for it and I paid attention to my lessons. And now I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’m good at it. But you—somebody you’d angered pointlessly would have killed you sooner or later, and probably sooner. You killed Claudio and that wasn’t just a murder, it angered the Claudiani and all the great families. It was better for me to do it at once, better to have an orderly transition.” These are the justifications he always uses to himself, and they sound hollow, voiced.
“I was wrong to kill Claudio. I lost my temper,” Geryon says. “He wouldn’t even consider letting me marry his sister, he just sneered at me the first time. And when I asked him a second time he said no Claudiana would marry a monster. But even so—I just reached out to grab him, and the next thing he was in two pieces on the ground. Humans are so fragile. I was sorry almost immediately. But you didn’t reproach me for it at the time, you didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything. Nobody even asked me why I did it.”
“Olivia told me why,” Orsino says.
“She wouldn’t marry you either,” Geryon says.
“No. But I’m married to the right woman,” Orsino says.
“Well, it’s long ago now. When you asked to wrestle with me on Ficino’s tower I thought it meant you trusted me.” He sighs heavily. “But instead you hated me and were hiding it.”
“But I don’t hate you. I never hated you. I was in love with Olivia. And I cared about Thalia, about Illyria.”
Geryon sighs heavily. “I don’t want to be duke. I always hated it. Miranda said I had to. I didn’t know you wanted it. I thought you were waiting for Syracuse.”
You can’t read a lie in the eyes of somebody who has no eyes, but Geryon’s voice seems entirely sincere. “If it’s true that you don’t want to be duke, if you’ll go away—then it’s possible to contemplate letting you go.”
Geryon sighs again. “I don’t want to. I’ll swear whatever you like.”
Orsino looks at Drusilla, and out at the city, and back at his brother. “But—Geryon, I don’t know how I could let you go and you could not take revenge, even if it was a revenge that took hundreds of years. I blinded you. I left you up here all this time. You’ve always screamed how much you hated me. How could you not want revenge?”
“Of course I want revenge,” Geryon booms. “For decades I thought about nothing else. But now—those decades were a long time ago, and now revenge seems petty and insignificant compared to the other things I want to do. I want to sink into the earth. I want to find onions and garlic growing under the ground and eat them with the dirt still on them. I want to rise up again to make patterns and colours into art. Did Dru tell you my eyes are growing back? Eventually I’ll be able to see properly again. But I believe that even blind I could start to learn the techniques of carpet weaving.”
“Ficino says he’ll heal your eyes,” Orsino says. He realises that he is crying, and dashes the tears out of his own healthy brown eyes. “And it’s true that I’d always have to worry about revenge. But I think if I could live with that, as long as I knew you weren’t going to hurt Drusilla or Illyria.”
“You’d let me take personal revenge on you? Why?” Geryon asks, suspiciously.
“Oh no! I’d do everything to prevent it, from making you swear you wouldn’t to building special defences against it. What I mean is that it’s a risk I am considering being prepared to take,” Orsino says.
“They called you after a bear, but you’re twisty like a lizard,” Geryon rumbles. “Now tell me. What changed?”
“Caliban is loose,” Drusilla says. “That’s why we started talk
ing about this now, and why I told them that you’re my friend. The gods let Caliban go.”
“The gods? The gods haven’t done anything for me,” Geryon says, rattling his chain.
“Nobody knows what the gods want, unless Ficino does, and if so he hasn’t told me,” Orsino says. He scowls towards the afterglow of the sunset. “The gods have sent strangers from another world. I saw them, two young men, they seemed innocuous enough. But consider what commerce with other worlds has brought us in the past—first our great-grandfather, then Pico and Ficino. But now the gods have freed your father, and Caliban’s first thought was to try to free you,” Orsino says.
“Unlike my mother,” Geryon says.
Orsino nods, then realises Geryon can’t see. “Yes. But for what it’s worth, she has asked to see you often over the years and I have prevented her. I couldn’t quite trust her not to free you, if she saw how pitiful you looked.”
“Gah. She could have flown up here and spoken to me any time she wanted, if she really wanted to,” Geryon says. “She can make herself invisible, and she can fly. She wouldn’t have needed to sneak up like Tyb and Dru did.”
“Did Tybalt come up here too?” Orsino asks, in astonishment.
“Yes, but I haven’t spoken to him for a long time, and Drusilla told me he has gone away,” Geryon says.
“Yes, we haven’t spoken to him for a long time either,” Orsino says.
“It’s just the three of us that matter, really,” Geryon says. “Would you trust me if I swear never to hurt Drusilla, and never to come into the city again? Would you trust that, Dru?”
“Would you renounce your right to the duchy before the people?” Drusilla asks.
“Yes. I certainly don’t want it.”
Orsino stares out over the city. Lamps are burning below Ficino’s tower, where in the banquet room they are having a meal to which they invited the gods. Lamps are being lit in other buildings far below as the sky darkens, and torches are being set in sconces. The bells begin ringing to say that day is over and the hours of night are beginning. Orsino looks back to Geryon. If he is to free him, it would be appropriate to free him on New Year’s Day, in five months’ time. It is a Great Year, the year sixteen, so the Thalian calendar will cycle and reset to one. That would be a significant and felicitous time for a big change like freeing a captive held so long. Or he could wait for a big saint’s day, one of the many saints who watches over Illyria. But Caliban will be back at noon in two days’ time.
“The problem is that what I have done to you is so terrible I can’t believe you’d give up revenge,” Orsino says. “Even if you think now you would, even if you swear it, the thought that I had done this to you and escaped without penalty would gnaw at you.”
“But the longer you leave him here the worse you’re making it,” Drusilla objects.
Geryon laughs, a creaking rumbling hack of a laugh that Orsino remembers from long ago. “Then how about if you give me revenge, so that’s satisfied?”
“What would you accept?” Orsino asks, cautiously.
“How about if you gave up the dukedom you stole from me? That would be fair. Not give it back to me, just renounce it so neither of us had it.”
“I’m too young,” Drusilla says at once. “I’m not ready. And I’m not sure I want to be duke anyway. And we don’t know where Tybalt is, though if he wanted to be duke he’d probably keep in touch.”
“Do you mean restore the Republic?” Orsino asks.
It is not light enough to make out any expression on Geryon’s ruined face. “Our great” grandfather came from another world and made himself duke. The forms of the Republic are still there, aren’t they? The Senate, the Council? You haven’t changed that?”
“No, they’re still there,” Orsino says. He is dazed. “But what would I do?”
“Good works,” Drusilla says. “In recompense.”
Orsino flinches. He has been ruling, or training to rule, for all of his long life. The thought of life without that is dizzying.
“Not yet,” Orsino says. “And I would need to talk to the others. But perhaps I could agree to do that eventually.”
Geryon is silent for a long time. A slim crescent of moon rises, silvering the river. “All right,” he says, at last. “Or even if you can’t bear that, just trust my oath not to harm Illyria or Drusilla and let me go.”
“It’s my fault, I know, that it’s so hard for us to trust each other now,” Orsino says.
Geryon sighs, like a landslide. “Maybe, brother, after all this time, we can find a way to let each other go.”
30
FORGET THE PERFECT OFFERING
The problem with talking about Teatro del Sale is that it’s almost impossible to describe. You have to experience it. Fortunately, if very implausibly, it’s real, so you can. It’s a dining club, and it costs seven euros a year for membership. Duties of membership are telling other people about great food, and clearing your own table. Once you are a member, you can eat lunch there as often as you like for fifteen euros on a weekday or twenty on weekends, and dinner for thirty. Dinner includes entertainment afterwards, usually political comedy in Italian by Maria Cassi, wife of the owner, but sometimes music or dance of various sorts.
The place is owned by Fabio Picchi, a Florentine chef, and owner of a very high-end restaurant called Cibrèo, which has lots of stars, the kind of restaurant where you spend hundreds of euros on a meal. He is a socialist, and as he didn’t just want to make food for rich people he opened Teatro del Sale, which makes delicious food with simple inexpensive ingredients, at what are really ridiculously good prices. Water, wine, and coffee are included, and you can eat as much as you want. There’s a buffet of cold food set out at the start of the meal, which you can help yourself to at any time. Other courses come out ceremoniously, one course at a time. These courses are announced by a yell from the window, and are put on the table at the front, where you can help yourself. There are usually eight or ten courses, sometimes more. Lots of them are vegetarian, and there’s usually one or two fish courses and one or two meat courses, and dessert. The courses are tiny, but if you love something you can usually have seconds. The kitchen helps train up sous chefs for Cibrèo—one lunchtime this summer Sylvia watched a girl making sciacchiata, the amazingly delicious flatbread with olive oil, pork fat, and salt, and could see that she was notably better at stretching it out and getting it even by the end of the meal. It also employs the son of a friend of Fabio’s who has Down syndrome. He rings the bell to announce the courses, and sometimes announces what they are, whereupon everyone claps and cheers and he looks utterly delighted.
It’s in an old monastery near the church of Sant Ambrogio and the Sant Ambrogio market, near the old eastern gate of the city. (Firenze isn’t very big, you can walk across the entire diameter in half an hour if you don’t get lost in the maze of streets.) The main room where you eat is next to the kitchen so you can watch the cooks, but separated from it by a glass wall with a serving hatch in it. It has a stage at one end for the evening performances, and different-sized tables set out for any number of people, from two to about twenty. The room can hold maybe a hundred people, and sometimes it does get full. If you want to go there on a busy evening it’s a good idea to tell them in advance, especially if you’re a big group—and it’s a courtesy to do it anyway, because then they have some idea how much food to make. Sylvia tries to remember to pop in and let them know when she’s going there in the evening with friends. She just shows up at lunchtime.
It’s always cool inside. Most of the people there are locals, but there are always some tourists who have heard one way or another that it exists. There are membership forms in a whole bunch of languages, including Chinese and Polish. You see people in big groups, sometimes three or four generations of a family at Sunday lunch. You see young mothers with napping babies in strollers, here for a meal and a rest. You see couples of all ages and gender mixes, and also groups of friends, coworkers. You see pe
ople on their own, old men reading the newspaper, old women watching the cooks, or reading books on their e-readers. People are friendly to each other, and when Sylvia stays in Firenze for a while she starts to recognise some of the regulars and all of the staff, and they recognise her and say “Ciao” when she comes in. It’s a delightfully friendly atmosphere, with everyone looking comfortable and relaxed.
But the real reason to go is that the food is incredibly, unbelievably, implausibly good, so good superlatives crack under the burden of trying to describe it. You could use a whole thesaurus just saying how good the salads are and still not manage to get it across. There’s a spelt salad; spelt, the grain that usually in history means things are really bad if people have resorted to eating it, but here it’s perfect. All Italian ingredients are better than ingredients anywhere else, and Teatro del Sale is the pinnacle of perfection. Sylvia usually just says that it has the best food she has ever eaten anywhere and lets it go at that. Their gnocchi are astonishing. The carrots deserve to have odes written to them. It’s the sort of place you can’t quite believe exists. It strains probability that there could be something this good. You can’t believe you’re there even when you are there, even when you can go again tomorrow.
You should go if you get the chance. You want to go to Firenze anyway, right? Flights can be cheaper than you think, and off season some of the hotels too. You don’t need a luxurious bedroom, you’re going to spend all your time looking at art and eating great food. If you have allergies there will be some things you can’t have, but that’s all right, you’ll have more room for other things. (You don’t have to go. That door at the end of the passage, the door that leads into the rose garden remains firmly closed. We got in the other way, remember? And Orsino and Olivia didn’t go in at all. This is just a suggestion. Advice. If you should come to exist, dear reader, in your nebulous and unimaginable future, then if you’d like to, and if you can, go to Teatro del Sale, and when you eat the carrots, remember us. They are real, by any measure, whether you and I are or not.)
