by Jo Walton
We go the same way Miranda took Dolly and Tish, across the Ponte alle Grazie, in this world just a modern bridge, through the narrow twisting Renaissance streets of the Oltrarno, out through the gate, pausing to look at the one unbroken and neglected stretch of wall. It is very hot, but dry. We pass tourists, and bicycles and Vespas and taxis pass us, but they’re part of our normal background so, unlike Ficino, we pay no particular attention to them. We pause only to look at sculpted busts on buildings and menus of unfamiliar restaurants. We have no difficulty finding the gate to the rose garden, as it is not magically hidden in Firenze, and we go in. It’s interesting to see the kind of people who visit a rose garden in Firenze, which has so much else to offer. There are some individual college-age girls, sunbathing. One of them is reading Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître, in French. There is a family of German rose fanatics, exclaiming over the flowers and calling each other to see their discoveries, their enthusiasm clear even through the barrier of language. There is an elderly Japanese couple, very elegant. Sylvia observes everything with the writer’s air of attention and making notes for later. We make our way through the roses, in full bloom now, as they would not be in October, and with a straggling and untended air. There is no shade, and the heat is oppressive, Helios Apollo beats down relentless. We get to the fountain and the pool, choked with waterlilies.
“Here we are. Why did we come?” she asks me.
“We should have come the other way,” I say. “Down the passage.”
“But Caliban knocked down Miranda’s house, and it isn’t here anyway.” She turns around. To the eyes of the teenage German girl looking at a rosebush, Sylvia is alone, an elderly lady in a grey silk shirt pinned at the throat with a pearl circlet, gazing into a pool of waterlilies.
“I need a name,” I say. “They’re going to summon us by name. Ficino and Miranda and wizards from as far away as Xanadu are doing spells to determine which names to call when they call us. Yours they will find easily. But I have never had one.”
“You had one once,” she says. “But that was what my mother killed.”
I have been nameless. I have had more names than the Allfather. Who am I? “I’m asking you to give me a name now,” I say.
She stares down at the waterlilies, tight pink buds, open waxy flowers, choking green pads. “It would be wrong for me to name you. Ask them for one.”
“Them? What them? Who? The reader? I can’t ask the reader. The reader couldn’t come that far in.”
“Ha, if you could! Your name would be different for every reader,” she says, smiling.
No, but I can’t count on you, can I? You who live under the relentless and fickle reign of Crastina. You are uncertain, potential, and as we compose these words you don’t even know I exist. You, who may not even be born yet as we stand in the rose garden on the afternoon of July 16th, 2018? You lingered in the passage looking at the faded spines of the books, remember? You didn’t want to open the door into the rose garden. We made a contract back at the beginning of the book, I’d tell you stories and I promised I wouldn’t make you do anything but read. And besides, you could read this book a hundred times (it’s all right, I don’t expect you to) and give me a hundred different names. What kind of immortality would that be?
“What would we do, leave a blank space where they can write it in? Have them put it in the margin? This is ridiculous. It won’t work. Give me a name. Aren’t I worth that to you, after all?” I’m pleading, but she’s implacable when she wants to be.
“They will know what to call you,” Sylvia says, nodding in that decisive way she has, and smiling her shark’s smile. She heads back down the hill and out of the gate. “We’d better finish this chapter quickly and get on with it,” she says. “I want to go to Perché No!… and have a last gelato before we go. No gelato in Illyria. That’s a good enough reason for restarting Progress.”
I thought I was building a trap for her, but she has trapped me.
34
IBID
Tish has made a new painting, the same size as Ficino’s, or rather Brunelleschi’s, original. It shows the scene as best she can imagine it, in the Firenze of 2018, which she glimpsed so briefly through Sylvia’s eyes. The Baptistery is the same, and St Zenobius’s elm tree pillar, but the people are wearing skimpy clothes with words on them and holding strange bags. They are not all white. There are lots of them. She has not attempted to draw the vehicles, but she has put in a swallow. It’s good she drew no vehicles, because only ambulances and horse-drawn open carriages for rich tourists drive across that piazza in 2018. Tish is standing by the easel. She looks like an adult, and indeed an adult woman, with skirts and an embroidered headscarf. She revealed her gender and married Elia Pardo twenty years ago. He is also a painter, and although he is several inches shorter than she is they are very happy together, happier than she ever imagined. She intends to have a baby any year now, once this project is finally complete. He is standing next to her, carrying her paints, in case Ficino decides on any last minute emergency alterations. She is mostly known by her Hebrew name now, but she has signed this painting neither Rinah Pardo nor Letizio Petranero but simply “Tish.”
Geryon has made a magic carpet, the compelling pattern in a thousand subtle shades of cloud colours, pierced with an echoing symmetrical pattern of precisely shaped tiny holes, like an immense doily. It is huge, and it floats. He has been in Elam all this time, and this is his first return to Thalia. Prospero, Miranda, and Ficino are standing on the carpet, a few feet off the ground, to the side of the cathedral steps. If Ficino is a sweet old wizard, Prospero is a sour one; he looks as if he’s perpetually sucking a lemon. He’s wearing robes of deepest fuligin clasped with a crescent moon. Ficino’s starry robes are midnight blue, and Miranda’s sky blue.
Drusilla stands with Geryon to the right of the carpet. She has become a great traveller and has scoured the world for some of the stranger things they need for this spell. At a hundred and eighty she is still giovane, but looking towards the older end of it, mid-thirties, as if she might settle down soon. She usually dresses as a boy, but for her return to Thalia she has returned to women’s clothing, a brocade dress in dove grey and navy blue. She has also brought news of her brother, Tybalt, who was captured by bandits, became a bandit, got tired of being a bandit, and took up life as a sugar merchant in Persepolis, one of the great cities of Elam. He lives happily with his husband, their camels, and a golden-eyed hunting leopard. Orsino and Viola are very glad to know he is well. He has no desire to return to Thalia, so Drusilla is still heir apparent.
Orsino has not restored the Republic, though he did think seriously about it. He has given the Senate more power and widened the franchise. He has reinstituted the system of electing eight people (women as well as men now) for two months each, but he keeps executive oversight. He is standing on the cathedral steps, wearing his armour. Viola is beside him, with Sebastian and Olivia on her other side. The twins are today as usual in gender-reversed clothing, Sebastian dressed in a ruby-and-silver gown that complements Olivia’s, which is silver shot with ruby.
From the magic carpet, Miranda is desperately trying to keep everything under control, like a demented stage manager on opening night after a disastrous dress rehearsal. She’s urgently directing people into position. Ficino seems unruffled, but even he is muttering and pacing across the rug, causing it to ripple a little beneath his feet. Prospero is sitting cross-legged like Buddha. His presence is causing some social difficulty as nobody except Miranda and Ficino has any idea what to call him. There are some people in the crowd who remember when he was Duke of Thalia.
Of our major characters, Dolly is the most changed. He does not look two hundred years old, but you’d guess he was sixty or seventy—his unruly hair and beard are white, and his face is lined. He’s more substantial too, heavier all over. He’s still wearing his chaperon though, and his eyes are still dancing with delight. He’s standing on the steps holding the stone knife
which Pico used for his sacrifice, which is now a holy relic that Orsino had to browbeat the bishop into releasing for the occasion.
There is a choir, and drummers, and buglers, and music specially composed for the occasion by Prospero. They are standing grouped, ready, though some of them are fumbling with their music and instruments.
Despite the long period of preparation, there is an air of desperate improvisation about everything. Worst from my point of view is the fact that they can’t agree what name they’re going to use to call me. A group of wizards from all over the world, dressed in a wild assortment of garments, are standing by the doors of the Baptistery squabbling about it.
Everyone is packed into the space between the cathedral and the Baptistery. In Firenze, that space was traditionally called the paradiso, and it’s the liminal space of baptism, naming, poised between worlds. The bronze doors Ghiberti made for the Baptistery were named “The Gates of Paradise” by Michelangelo precisely because the space had that name, though people who call them that today mostly have no knowledge of the history of the name or the space they’re made for. Here, exactly where Dolly is standing on the steps of the cathedral, the great trickster Brunelleschi stood and made his perspective painting, which hangs on Ficino’s wall now, showing very different sights. The paradiso would be quite a big space if it wasn’t always absolutely packed with people.
As Sylvia walks to the Duomo from Perché No!… the dome comes into sight. It’s hidden by other buildings until you’re really close to it, and then it always looks improbable, too big, beautiful, red, and always unexpected from whatever angle. It’s as if Brunelleschi, inventor of perspective, cheated on his own rules, which of course he understood better than anyone else, to make the dome as big as this and yet seem to float. Firenze has many iconic buildings and statues and paintings, the dome is just one among them, and yet the most central and defining. Walking between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo (stopping at Perché No!… for a gelato on the way) you are at the very heart of Firenze.
She has finished the book, if you can call it that, and emailed it to her editor in New York. She isn’t talking to me. I’m clamped down in the bone cave, with nothing to see but my connection to Dolly. I’ve tried reasoning with her, pleading, and even threatening. I’ve tried being quiet to trick her into addressing me, but I couldn’t wait long enough. Patience has never been one of my virtues. And anyway, there’s only today. The moon was new three days ago. We saw it framed between the buildings on Via del Corso as we were coming back from Teatro del Sale. They know her name, in Illyria. Ficino divined it. He couldn’t divine mine. Nobody could because I don’t have one, she won’t give me one, and you won’t, and even if you would, how could you? You can’t do it in time. Dolly’s going to kill himself to get her in, but I won’t be in. I won’t even be in the amount I am as Dolly, because he will die to open the gate and thus flow back to me and be outside. The same thing happened before I sacrificed myself to kill Death, but left myself out.
I have been a god and a sacrifice. I have been a goat and a scapegoat. I have been calm, but right now I’m panicking. Everything has gone wrong. Well, not everything. If she gets in, I suppose I’ll get in with her, in the bone cave like always. After all, I’m not coming to ask her for a soul on the day of judgement! I’m only asking for a name! They’ll summon me as Hermes, and Dolios, I suppose, but that’s only part of what I am. All of me, I said. That’s what I was trying to get on the page this time, but the page has gone to New York as fast as a speeding electron, and what you’re reading now, if you even exist, is the book in the mind, the words that never make it to the page, the unwritten, unreadable story that always runs a pulsebeat ahead under everything we do and think and say all the time, the unheard narrative of life. And yet I still address you, still describe, narrate, as if I believe that this still can, somehow, magically, reach you. I know you don’t exist. But I keep on talking to you.
Why won’t she give me a name?
She stands on the stones at the base of the steps, centered. You can’t get up on the steps anymore, they rope them off except when they open the doors for people to stream out after services. The only time they keep them open is on San Giovanni, St John’s Day, June 24th, when there’s a wonderful parade with people in period costume and horses and music and they carry the Codex Fiorentina, or anyway a copy of it, and have a procession in a way that is both smiling and solemn, both real and fun. They bring the finger bone of John the Baptist out in its reliquary and display it, and they have services in the Baptistery and the Duomo, and both the doors are open. That would have been a good day to try this. But we didn’t and we can’t wait for next year because she is starting to get pain now, and if she goes home or goes to a doctor they won’t let her loose again.
She moves a little to the left, centering herself better. In Thalia the choir begins to sing and Dolly gets into position in the clear space everyone has left for him. Tish is checking her picture anxiously. Others of her pictures are set out on easels around the square; among other things, there is a steam train crossing a viaduct, an opera house, and a version of the scene they saw in the original painting, the triple-Sylvia with the crescent moon. There’s even a faithfully executed picture of the ram.
What am I going to do? This was my one chance. I want to be real. I want to survive. I want to be embodied, and free. The bone cave is the same as it ever is, I am floating in no space, no colour. There’s nobody else in here right now, all of her part-formed people are out there in Illyria or dissolved back into the mist. In desperation, I look towards the mist. It’s moving, pulsing, shifting, like always. There are shapes and shadows and shades twisting and turning in the tendrils that reach. I look out of Dolly’s eyes, and see Ficino and Miranda conferring desperately on the carpet, even though they have already started. Prospero is sitting still on the magic carpet. Geryon is looking up at it with a proprietorial air. He has eyes now, big brown eyes. He’s happy making carpets. Fifty years ago he turned down an offer from Malvolio to join him in revenge on Orsino and his family.
Dolly is fingering the stone knife, and looking over at Miranda. They still don’t have a proper name for me, and it’s time.
I walk into the mist. I never have before, in all these years, because I’ve been afraid of what it would do to me. But now there’s nothing else for it. I’ve seen her go in, and come out again. I walk in boldly, but terrified, of course, because this could be real death. She could end up in Illyria without me even being there in her head. But I can’t keep cowering here. The entrance runs between cliffs, as she told me. I can feel them more than see them towering up through the mist, which fills not just my vision but all my senses. It touches me, clammily, and I can smell and taste it, and as for hearing, I’m overwhelmed. The mist is full of noises—music, laughter, swelling voices, bells ringing, and beeping, and chiming, the roar of traffic, and thunder, and planes taking off, but most of all snatches of conversation, heard and gone again. “How could she die, when she was so alive?” “I am small, but sometimes I am a small part of great things,” “If you love books enough, books will love you back,” “She wouldn’t be the person her life had made her if she could have made any other answer,” “There will not be sunsets or poetry, but there will be something like them but even better,” “I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him,” “There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop,” “Time is rent from the worlds,” “I don’t want to be a might-have-been!” “I can’t wait to talk about it with you,” and all of them pressing on me and pushing at me, a jumble of voices and attention and forms looming up to go with them, if I were to look in the right way. “You feel what you feel and I feel what I feel, but that doesn’t mean you have to—”
I ignore them as best I can and keep moving in, keep going. What I want to do is find my own power to create, to make worlds, the power she has, which must be here somewhere. I hadn’t realised that o
nce I stepped into the mist I wouldn’t be able to reach Dolly or keep track of what’s going on in Illyria. I can’t reach out at all, and there’s nothing here but the voices, some of them mocking “I could make a man every bit as good as you out of two rhymes and a handful of moonshine…” and others intensely set on their own affairs and paying no attention to me. “Perfection isn’t static. It’s a dynamic form!” I turn to find my way out, because this is getting me nowhere, literally, because when I turn I realise that all directions are alike, there is nothing but the mist. I run, in the direction I think is back, and find myself running down a long corridor, past fading books and a dying geranium on a windowsill, and come to a halt, panting, by the green-painted back door. I am, somehow, in her house in Montreal. I put out my hand tentatively to the brass doorknob. Then, as I step forward, I am abruptly on the edge of a precipice, the dark looming down before me, as the mist closes in again. “Er’ perrehnne,” a voice says, almost in my ear.
And she is there, out of nowhere, looking about thirty, her hair black as a raven’s wing against the grey-white mist and roses are growing at her feet, all around her, all around me. The pearls at her throat are glowing. All the voices go quiet at once. They are afraid of her, and they are wise to be. “I need a name,” I say.
“Where did you get your soul from?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. It’s a terrible question. Could you answer it? Where did I come from in the first place? I was in the glass bookshelf and she found me. I was licked out of a cloud by a cow. I shaped myself with a magic chisel. God made me out of mud. I don’t know! I don’t remember.
“Did you take it from the baby? Did I trade him for you?” she asks.
It has occurred to me before, so I have a ready answer. “Not consciously. Not knowing. And if I did, it was another sacrifice I made for you. But I really don’t think I did. I can remember before that. Have you been wondering about that all this time?” Through thirty books. Thirty.
