Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  There were colors in it, every color that was and some that I’d never conceived of. When they were clearest, my world was calmest. When they went dark, I braced myself for the storm. They were blood-black when Cornelia hanged herself on my tree, knotted and tangled like a witch’s hair.

  Once she was a ghost, she saw the web as well as I. Sometimes she played with it. She could smooth a knot if it was not too tangled, and stroke a gray thread silver. She stopped a lovers’ quarrel so, and they went away arm in arm, though they didn’t set me free.

  We settled in together, the ghost and I, and maybe she was happy—though if she had been, surely she’d have gone where the joyful dead go.

  When the moon was full, the world’s web was bright enough to run a revel by. A few had done it in my glade, but they’d grown tired, or the world was in one of its gray times. Those came, and mercifully went. The bloodred times were worse, and the black ones were worst of all; but gray had its own drab charmlessness. Everyone was stiffly proper then, the philosophers were all Stoics and the women were all chaste, and when they noticed me at all, they disapproved. “Greek luxury,” they muttered. “Eastern corruption.” And I a good Italian Faun, straight out of Etruria.

  This gray time was turning bloody. There was a new cult, and the more of its believers they disposed of, the more there seemed to be. They multiplied like a Hydra’s head, said the scholar who droned to his yawning students under my tree. They were unshakably stubborn. They would not sacrifice peaceably to any gods but theirs, and who was he to keep them all to himself? The Senator who liked to walk through my garden in his mob of friends and hangers-on, could not see why they should be so obstinate. It was a matter of form, no more. Sacrifice to Rome’s gods, give the nod to Rome’s power, go about their business. There was nothing in it about believing in the gods. A man’s mind was his own. After all.

  He’d never seen Triune Hecate in a snit, or spied on chaste Diana while she rested from a hunt—and if that was chastity, then mortals were worse fools than I’d taken them for. She might guard her maidenhead with chains of adamant, but she liked her slim young lads, and her lissome lasses, too.

  Not that he ever asked me. He went his way, and I watched the sun go down, and the moon came up, heavy and full. The world’s web was as dark as wine, and pulsed like a heart. Cornelia shivered under the oak. Even the moon’s light couldn’t lure her as far as the pool.

  They came by ones and twos as the witches used to do, ragged like the witches, too, and by the nick of an ear or the gleam of a collar, more than one of them was a slave. Some started when they saw me, and made signs against evil. The same man always comforted them. He was as ragged as the worst, the top of his head shaved in the slave’s tonsure, and one ear missing. He sat beside my pool where Cornelia liked to sit. He was obviously a city slave, and he had a gladiator’s scars, but he carried a shepherd’s crook. It made me think of Mopsus. Long dead, gods rest him, and he never had forgiven me for getting myself cursed the night before I was supposed to move his sheep to the winter pasture.

  This was a strange shepherd. He said that mortals were his sheep. He was deadly earnest about it. When my glade was full and there were rustlings in the hedge that marked a posting of guards, he stood up.

  Most of what he said was nonsense, and none of it was good philosophy. It dawned on me early that this was the cult the Senator spoke of, and meeting in his favorite garden, too. When the man with the crook had talked for a while, and told them all about the devil—by that he meant me—whom their god had vanquished, and done the maddest thing I’d seen yet, wrapped me in somebody’s sweat-stinking cloak, they set up an altar. I waited to see who would die on it, but no one did. They took bread and called it flesh, and took wine and called it blood, and by grim black Styx they believed it.

  Somewhere in their rite, Cornelia crept out from her shadow. She looked as starkly terrified as she had before she died, but there was hope in her face, too, and a desperate longing. I wanted to shout at her. I couldn’t speak, no more than I could when she died. They ate their magicked bread and drank their magicked wine, and the web was throbbing and knotting, and its colors were mad. I don’t think they even knew what powers they raised. My witches would have been appalled. Pure lack of discipline, and magic that snagged the world-web till it frayed.

  Cornelia drifted like a leaf in a sharp wind, and no more power to stop herself, either. Just before she touched the altar, she hesitated; or the web held her, tangling around her. She reached through it. The priest was just raising the cup to his lips to drain the last of the wine—raw stuff, nothing like my good Faleraian. Her shadow of a hand curved around the cup. He felt it, felt something; and started. A drop of the awful wine spilled on her wrist.

  She went up like a torch. White light so bright even my eyes were dazzled. Her face—it showed no fear at all, no pain. Later I named it, to give my grief a center. Exultation.

  The mortals never saw. She was gone, gone right out of the world, and they were oblivious. Their rite went on. The web was quieter now, as if Cornelia had taken some of its power with her. Its knots and tangles were smoother, and more of its gray was silver.

  They took their altar and their magics, and relieved me of the ridiculous cloak, and went away. I had my glade to myself again. All to myself. No gentle ghost to sit by my pool and smile. No quiet undemanding company with eyes to see what I was.

  The slave-fanatics never came back, either, not as they were that night. Their cult grew into Rome’s cult, and all the old gods died. I felt them go as Cornelia had: like dry grass in a fire.

  I was marble, and I was cursed. Even the name of their Christ had no power over that.

  III

  Roma Dea died, and Roma Mater shrank into a crone. My oak tree took Jupiter’s last bolt and fell. My pool filled with weeds and disappeared. A thicket grew up around me. People stumbled on me now and then. A flock of sparrows had a kingdom in what had been my glade. The queen nested on my head. I’d have minded it more if I’d had any dignity left. As it was, I was only glad that the vine that twisted round my cock a-crowning was a thornless thing.

  Lovers always managed to find me. It was part of my curse. They were particularly lusty along about the time their Latin stopped being Latin, but the curse said nothing about lust. The ones who came after them wore clothes that beggared belief, and stank to high heaven.

  By the time they began to be clean again, some of them cleared away the thicket and evicted the queen sparrow from my head. I’d grown mossy with the years, but all my bits were still in place. They cleaned away the moss—not too gently, either—and put a roof over me, and had what they called salons. Which meant that they drank a great deal of bad wine, ate too much, and talked endlessly of nothing in particular. The women looked at me and giggled. The men eyed me sidelong, often with a glower. No rubbing me for luck in this age.

  They still rutted as eagerly as human animals could, though they made a rite of protesting and calling it a sin. Sin was what the priest of that old cult had gone on about so endlessly. It had made no sense to me then. It made no sense now, however lengthy the explanations. The ones in black with the tiny circle of tonsure were the loudest in condemnation of lust, and the hottest in pursuit of it. I wondered what they would have said if I’d told them the truth about Diana. They disapproved of her divinity, but they made much of her chastity. She was more like them than they would ever want to know.

  There were no true lovers. Or else the Crone had lied, and there was no escape from my curse. That would be like a witch. Small comfort that they were all dead, the lot of them, and Hecate too.

  I was thinking so, one gray dim morning. For some reason I shivered inside.

  The salons were long gone. The roof over me was still there, but it was crumbling. The sparrows had come back to nest in it. A cat or two made forays into their kingdom, but I’d learned a little through the years. I could think at the web that still bound the world, and shift it a little. Enough t
o keep out the cats, and to hold up the roof long after it should have fallen in.

  This was the strangest age that I could remember. It seemed gray, gray as ash, with great clots of blood and corruption. But there was brightness in it, too. I’d never seen the web so complicated, or the colors so varied. Either mortals were swimming in blood or they were reveling in a golden age. The web said it was both. The gray in it was often silver, sometimes tarnished black, sometimes so bright it blinded. It was terrifying. Exhilarating. Men flew like birds. Men lived undersea like fish. Men sailed to the moon. They were like gods.

  They were still men. They still came to my garden, and they still danced the old, old dance. They brought their music with them, trapped by magic in a box. It was a different magic than mine, cold metal magic, and they saw no wonder in it.

  Often of a morning a lady came to sit on the stone bench near me and read her book, or write, or simply sit and think. Once in a while she talked to me, because, she said, I looked like intelligent company. She was writing a book on Old Rome. It was a stubborn thing, and it kept going off in unexpected directions. She liked an adventure, she said, and mostly she was glad to go where it took her, but at this rate she didn’t think she’d ever finish it.

  Every morning as she worked on her book, a gentleman walked briskly by. If she happened to notice him, she’d nod. He’d nod back. And off he’d go, and there she’d stay.

  This was hardly a lonely place, though it was never crowded. My scholar had it to herself, mostly, but people wandered past, peering curiously at me and not seeming to see her at all.

  On the morning that I marked by reflecting that the gods were dead, my scholar came as always. She had her satchel of books, and something new, that she showed me. More magic. A little box full of words, with a page that one wrote on without ever touching it. The world-web shimmered around it, but it always did where my scholar was. Her name was Cornelia. I thought it an interesting coincidence.

  As she settled down with her books and her box, a dreadful cacophony startled her almost into dropping the box. A pair of this age’s young lovers came entwined like a vine about an elm. Her hair was indescribable. His screamed pink so loud it made my eyes burn. Their music came out of a great gleaming thing full of bone-deep thumpings and mating-cat wails.

  Cornelia’s box of words was silent but for the click of the keys that made the words grow. She struggled on, with her neck bent at a stubborn angle and her fingers flying. The young lovers arranged themselves in front of my plinth, did something to their box that made it sound like mountains falling, and went at it as people did in this strange age. A great deal of kissing and groping, a symphony of moans drowned out in the tumult, and nothing like getting down to honest business. That was the Christians’ innovation: tease oneself to insanity, and promise more for later. Later, when it came, was never what they hoped for.

  Cornelia was angry. I could see the web darkening around her. Just before she could have moved, a brisk figure stepped in over the lovers, snapped something on the box, and stepped coolly out again. The silence was thunderous. The lovers unknotted. He had his hackles up. She had her shirt off. Sweet and almost ripe; but I’d seen better.

  Her young man was all righteous indignation. The brisk gentleman looked down a noble nose at him and said, “You were disturbing the lady.”

  The boy swelled his pretty muscles and beetled his handsome brows.

  “There is ample space in this garden for anyone who wishes to come there,” the gentleman said. “I would advise you to find some of it, and not to trouble this lady further.”

  The lady said nothing through all of this. Neither did the girl on the grass. The boy blustered and sneered. It was a game, like the game of Faun and Bacchante.

  He didn’t seem to know it, but the gentleman did. When the boy gave up on words and transparently thought of fists, the gentleman said, “It does amaze me that you would bring your inamorata here. She can look at the Faun, after all, and compare.”

  The boy’s fist went wild. The gentleman’s cane caught his elbow as it flailed past. It seemed a light blow, a tap, no more, but the boy howled and collapsed.

  They limped from the field, the boy clutching his arm and the girl her blouse, dragging their box. I applauded in my head.

  “How heroic,” Cornelia said. Her tone was acid.

  The gentleman tucked his cane under his arm and bowed slightly. I’d seen his face a thousand times in a thousand years, an inescapably Roman face, big nose and thin mouth and uncompromising jaw. My Senator had looked like him, back when Christians were a thorn in the Empire’s side.

  “I really didn’t need a rescue,” said Cornelia. “Or a knight in shining armor.”

  Cornelia, it should be said, was not a Roman. She came from somewhere that Rome had never heard of, on the other side of the world. She believed in independence. She didn’t believe in thanking a man for doing what she could perfectly well have done for herself.

  “Signora,” said the gentleman, “whatever you needed, or thought you needed, I was offended by those barbarians.”

  “They weren’t so bad,” Cornelia said. “You did a terrible thing to that poor boy. She’ll never let him forget that he’s not as fine and upstanding as a Faun.”

  The gentleman looked shocked. Then he laughed. “Ah, but what man is? A man of parts would accept it. A young Goth with all his wits below his belt—he would never stop to think.”

  “I think he was solid Roman,” Cornelia said. “And you, sir?”

  “Giuliano,” he said, bowing. “Giuliano Cavalli.”

  “Signor Cavalli,” said Cornelia. She’d softened a bit. She liked him, I thought. So did I. He talked like a book, as she would have said, but he was old enough to do it gracefully. He was a scholar, too, as it happened. Not of Old Rome but—he looked mildly embarrassed and slightly wicked—but of the new philosophy, the doctrine of signs and shadows.

  “You’re a literary theorist?” Cornelia had cooled again, but not as much as before.

  “Theoretician,” he said, “please. And one does make a game of it. Ecce Eco, vale Vergil…”

  “And sayonara Petrarca! Cornelia shook her head. He was smiling and nodding, looking as close to an amiable fool as a Roman could. She laughed, very much as if she didn’t want to, and said, ”I don’t believe in theory. It gets in the way.“

  “But, Signora, if you use it properly, it sweeps away all obstacles, and there stands Meaning bare.”

  “Do I want to see Meaning naked? She’s not a pretty sight at the best of times.”

  He sat down beside her. He was going to make a convert, I could see, or burst his heart trying. She was going to resist him to the utmost.

  It was the strangest love dance I’d ever seen.

  I listened, I could hardly help it. None of it made a great deal of sense. A Faun took the world as it was, and if he happened to be marble, and me, as it showed itself in the world-web.

  They argued all morning and half the afternoon, and went away still arguing. Cornelia was looking ruffled. Signor Cavalli had lost his elegant aplomb. They were gloriously happy.

  They came back, of course. Often. Cornelia had her book, still, and she insisted that she have an hour at least to glare at it before he came to distract her. Actually she did more than glare. She’d got through a particularly tangled thicket, and the rest, she told me, was looking almost simple. “Scary,” she said. My grin was carved on my face, but she seemed to know I meant it.“

  He scared her too, but it was a wonderful terror. She called herself a fallow field. Now she was growing green. Blooming. And arguing, endlessly, delightedly arguing about everything under the sun.

  Then they stopped coming. It rained for days, and my roof dripped and dribbled abominably. But the sun came back, and they didn’t.

  Mortals did that. Even mortal ghosts. I should have known better than to miss them; but a marble heart is as unreasonable as a living one. I’d actually been starting to understa
nd Signor Cavalli’s philosophy, which is proof that either it becomes comprehensible with enough time and explanation, or I was missing a piece of it.

  The sun came and went more regularly than anything human. The moon swelled and shrank. My days stretched. I wondered if a marble Faun could die, just will himself to crumble away. My kind were all gone. Great Pan was ages dead, and there was nothing of my old world left.

  And then, one morning, she was there. Cornelia with her books and her box of words, sitting on the bench she’d claimed for her own. She looked tired, worn to the bone. There was more gray in her hair than I remembered.

  After a while her fingers slowed on the keys. A while longer and they stopped. She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. I couldn’t read her expression.

  She put her word-box down on the bench and stood up. She stood in front of me. Without my plinth, I’d have been just a little smaller than she was.

  “He died,” she said. She was very, very calm. “I’d just begun to know him, and he died. Do you know how angry that makes me? Do you even begin to imagine how bloody unfair it is?”

  Did I? I’d felt it when they were near me. I’d felt the marble softening, remembering—for a precious instant—the shape and feel of flesh.

  “He was dying when I met him,” she said. “He knew it. He was living on time he’d stolen from the monster in his body. He—we—stole a whole three months of it. Counting every blessed minute.

  “Why couldn’t I have died instead of him?”

  She started to cry. Quiet at first, just the tears spilling over and running down her face. Then harder. Falling forward onto my cold flanks and howling in rage and loss, pounding marble that bruised her poor fists, raking it till her nails broke and bled.