City of Flowers

by Mary Hoffman

  ‘And what about the new Nucci palace?’ suggested Sky. ‘I bet that’s visible from quite high up.’

  ‘Is it safe to land near there?’ asked Aurelio. ‘Is it not from the Nucci that you fear danger?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ said Sulien, ‘they aren’t moving into that palace until the day after the di Chimici weddings. Until then they’ll be living in their home near here. Besides, we have a little farm there. It used to belong to the di Chimici family but Niccolò gave it to the friary recently. Georgia’s Merla could be kept safe there.’

  He fetched paper and pen and unrolled a parchment with a map of Giglia on it. They all contributed ideas, until there was a rough sketch that Sky could memorise and reproduce for Georgia.

  ‘What about, you know, Nicholas?’ he asked Sulien warily, looking at the Manoush. He didn’t know quite what to make of these new people, but the friar seemed to trust them and Luciano obviously knew them.

  ‘Do you know what happened to Prince Falco?’ Luciano asked them.

  ‘We know it was not what was given out,’ said Raffaella. ‘Our friend Grazia, in Remora, told us that she saw him win his own memorial Stellata, on the zhou volou.’

  ‘Many there said it was a ghost who rode in that race,’ said Aurelio. ‘But the Manoush can tell spirits from living people. I would guess he now lives in the other world – the one known to you Stravaganti.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Sulien. ‘But he, like Georgia, will come back here to strengthen our numbers in the troubled times ahead. I myself took him a new talisman to bring him here – one of my own quill pens. He will arrive here, Sky. You can stravagate together.’

  *

  Rodolfo and Paolo faced each other in the mirror. Arianna and Silvia watched in silence.

  ‘So we shall see her again, our little champion?’ said Paolo.

  ‘Not for long,’ said Rodolfo. ‘She will take Merla, if you are willing, and leave you swiftly for Giglia. There will be no time for her to linger in Remora.’

  ‘It will still be a pleasure, if a fleeting one,’ said Paolo. ‘And it will not be a single stravagation, if I understand you.’

  ‘She will need to learn the city, if she is to be of use to us when danger strikes,’ said Rodolfo.

  ‘And she will need clothes?’ asked Paolo.

  ‘A young woman’s costume, as before,’ said Rodolfo. ‘Luciano tells me she has grown up.’

  ‘So,’ said Arianna, when Rodolfo turned away at last from the mirrors. ‘Georgia is coming back.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Not if you need her,’ said Arianna.

  ‘I need them all,’ said Rodolfo. ‘And even with them, with eight Stravaganti in the city, I still don’t know if it will be enough.’

  ‘I wish it were all over,’ said Arianna. ‘And that we were back in Bellezza and out of the Duke’s clutches.’

  ‘As to that,’ said Rodolfo, ‘have you decided what to do about the dress?’

  Rosalind had looked very pleased with herself when she returned from her meeting with Paul. If she remembered that her kitchen had been full of Stravaganti when she left, she said nothing about it.

  ‘How was the club?’ Sky teased.

  ‘It was OK,’ she said. ‘But we didn’t stay there. Paul was supposed to be meeting a work colleague in London, but after we’d had coffee, we went out and ended up having lunch together in Soho.’

  ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ said Sky.

  ‘I do,’ said Rosalind. ‘Does that make it difficult for you and Alice? I’ve noticed you seem to be, well, having problems.’

  ‘It’s not because of you,’ said Sky. ‘Though it is a bit weird when your girlfriend’s dad fancies your mum. We had a misunderstanding in Devon. Alice thought I preferred Georgia.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Rosalind. ‘You do spend an awful lot of time with her. But aren’t she and Nicholas together? I’ve often wondered.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Sky. ‘Sorry. There are things I can’t tell you because they’re not my secrets.’

  Rosalind didn’t press him. But Sky wasn’t happy. The new developments in Talia meant that he was going to be spending even more time with Georgia and Nicholas and their shared secrets were going to grow. How could he explain it to Alice? She was already suspicious and, try as he might, he couldn’t see how he was supposed to have a normal relationship with a girl while he spent every night stravagating to another world.

  The first problem arose the next day. He was round at the Mulhollands, reporting to Nicholas on the progress of plans for getting him to Giglia. Georgia was there too, and the two boys were trying to draw her a map of the city. But Sky was trying to remember Sulien’s sketch and Nicholas kept telling him he was getting things wrong.

  ‘Geography homework in the holidays?’ asked Vicky Mulholland, seeing them all bent over the dining table. ‘You are keen.’

  ‘Vicky,’ said Nicholas, ‘have you got any maps of Italy?’

  ‘Somewhere,’ said Vicky. ‘Let me think. Yes, up in David’s office. Do you want me to get them?’

  ‘I’ll find them,’ said Nicholas. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Georgia.

  ‘Would you like some coffee, Sky?’ offered Vicky and he went with her into the kitchen.

  Now that Sky had met Luciano, he was fascinated by Vicky Mulholland. She had the same black curly hair as her son but she was small and energetic. Nicholas towered over her and so did Sky. As he watched her deft movements about the kitchen, grinding beans, assembling mugs, tipping biscuits on to a plate, he wondered how on earth she had coped with losing one son and gaining another so mysteriously.

  What would Rosalind have done if he had died and, a year later, a Sky lookalike had turned up, in need of a home?

  ‘How’s the fencing going?’ Vicky was asking.

  ‘What? Oh, yes, very well, thanks,’ said Sky. ‘I’m nowhere near as good as Nick, of course, but he’s a good teacher.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Vicky, pouring the coffee into mugs. ‘He’s been a bit, well, restless lately. I’m glad he’s got something to occupy him.’ She hesitated. ‘You know how he came to live with us?’

  Sky felt wrong-footed. He had just been thinking about it and what he knew was very different from the Mulhollands’ view of events. ‘He was abandoned, wasn’t he? By asylum-seekers or something?’

  ‘I don’t think exactly abandoned,’ said Vicky slowly, ‘but it was something like that. He had been badly injured and I think mentally scarred too. He had lost his memory. Only – well, it’s silly really – I don’t like to ask him about it in case it upsets him, but lately I’ve been wondering if he has remembered something – if he’s been thinking about his old life.’

  She looked at Sky with her big dark eyes, so like both Luciano’s and Nicholas’s, and he felt very uncomfortable indeed; she was closer to the truth than she realised.

  ‘Has he said anything to you?’ she asked.

  He was saved from answering by the return of the others, triumphantly waving a handful of maps. They had struck gold and found one of Italy and an old battered one of Florence. They took their coffee into the dining room and spread the maps among their bits of paper. Vicky disappeared with her mug, looking a bit wistful. It was another complication, but Sky had to push it to one side as they pored over the outline of the city that both was and was not Giglia.

  ‘Florence is almost due north of Siena,’ said Georgia. ‘So, if Giglia and Remora are in the same positions as them, I’d need to set my course and fly virtually straight till I reach the city walls.’

  ‘And you’ll see the river running almost across the middle,’ said Nicholas, ‘with Saint-Mary-of-the-Lily on the far shore.’

  ‘The Manoush think you should land before you reach the river, though,’ said Sky. ‘There’s a breach in the southern wall between the fields and where the gardens of the Nucci palace begin. T
hey’ll meet you there if we agree on a day and time.’

  ‘And they’ll look after Merla?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, they offered. They seemed to know all about her,’ said Sky.

  ‘They were there when I won the Stellata,’ said Georgia, remembering. ‘And Cesare flew over the Campo on Merla. I’m sure Aurelio saw her, even though he’s blind. I’d rather trust her to them than anyone else outside Remora.’

  ‘Now, you need to know how to get from there to a place you can meet us,’ said Nicholas. He was flushed and excited, trying to trace the lines of his old home under the sprawl of the modern city. ‘Oh, this is so frustrating! It isn’t Giglia at all!’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Sky. ‘It’s Florence. It’s a different city in a different world over four hundred years later. What did you expect?’

  But Nicholas ploughed on. ‘Just walk past where Sky says this new palace is, towards the river, and you’ll come to a stone bridge – the Ponte Nuovo.’

  ‘Just follow your nose,’ said Sky. ‘It stinks. It’s full of butchers and fishmongers.’

  ‘Then cross the river and turn right and you’ll come to a square on your left,’ said Nicholas, ignoring him and closing his eyes, visualising a walk he had done many times when he was little. ‘That’s where the silversmiths have their workshops, under the Guild offices. Turn left and walk through that square to the next one – it’s huge. That’s the Piazza Ducale with all the statues.’

  ‘That must be where the Piazza della Signoria is today in Florence,’ said Sky, pointing it out to her on the map.

  Gradually they pieced out a route from Georgia’s landing place to the piazza with the great cathedral in it.

  ‘I think we should meet in Giuditta’s bottega,’ said Sky, ‘if she’ll let us.’

  Georgia squirmed. ‘Must we? She probably despises me for making it all so difficult when I could just have stravagated straight there with her model of the ram.’

  ‘It’s central,’ said Sky firmly. ‘And right by the one thing in Giglia you can’t miss. It’s on the north side of the big bit of the cathedral – where the little domes are. And it’s Stravaganti territory – near neither the Nucci nor the di Chimici, so we should be safe.’

  Georgia committed it all to memory. She was getting excited now too. She didn’t expect to love this city the way she had Remora, but it had been Nicholas’s home when he was Falco and it was where Luciano was now.

  Someone came in and they didn’t look up, assuming it was Vicky. But it was Alice. They had been talking so animatedly that they hadn’t heard the doorbell.

  ‘I think it’s time you told me what’s going on,’ she said quietly, and they all looked up, as guiltily as if they’d been caught planning a bank robbery. ‘There’s something that you’re all in on,’ said Alice. ‘And I’m not leaving till you tell me what it is.’

  Chapter 17

  My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend

  ‘So you and Georgia are time travellers and Nicholas is from another dimension?’ said Alice coolly. ‘Like something out of Buffy?’

  ‘More Roswell High, really,’ said Sky. ‘The site of our school was where the first Stravagante had his laboratory in the sixteenth century. That’s why the talismans always end up near it.’

  ‘Well, thanks for clearing that up,’ said Alice. She seemed so calm that it took a while for the others to realise that she was in a white-hot rage. ‘Now would you like to tell me what’s really going on?’

  When she had arrived at the Mulhollands’ and demanded an explanation, it had taken only a few exchanged looks before they decided there was no way out but to tell her the truth. And now she didn’t believe them.

  ‘I don’t blame you for not believing us,’ said Georgia. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. But it’s true. I found my talisman in Mortimer Goldsmith’s antique shop nearly two years ago. I started travelling to Talia then and I met Nicholas there – Falco, he was then.’

  ‘I decided to come here because I couldn’t walk in that world,’ said Nicholas. ‘You remember what I was like before I had my operations? I’d had a terrible accident with a horse and I couldn’t be cured in Talia.’

  ‘And I pretended to find him outside this house,’ continued Georgia.

  ‘And you’re seriously trying to tell me that you kept all this Talia stuff from me all the time we were becoming friends?’ said Alice.

  ‘I didn’t want to,’ said Georgia. ‘But you wouldn’t have believed me – you don’t believe me now. Or any of us!’

  ‘Let me show you the talisman,’ said Nicholas suddenly, taking the quill pen out of his shirt.

  A few moments passed and Georgia took the winged horse out of her pocket. Sky followed suit with the perfume bottle. The three talismans sat on the table among the sketch maps and the coffee mugs. Alice was visibly shaken.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘All these come from the other world, according to you. But Nicholas doesn’t go there, does he? If what you told me is true, he came from there to here. His talisman should be a – I don’t know – a GameBoy or something!’

  They all smiled at that, even Alice herself. She suddenly sat down.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m even trying to bring logic into this,’ she said. ‘It’s too crazy even to discuss.’

  They explained about how Nicholas had used Georgia’s old silver eyebrow ring to stravagate from his old world and had been back to it only once, using a feather from the flying horse. And how the quill was a new talisman, to take him to Giglia.

  ‘You’re saying they came here – two travellers from this other world?’ asked Alice.

  ‘That’s how the talismans always get here,’ said Sky. ‘Stravaganti bring them from Talia so that we can go there. I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true. That’s why I’ve spent so much time with Nick and Georgia. I found out about them while I was there.’

  ‘OK, then,’ said Alice. ‘Prove it. Take me with you the next time you go.’

  ‘You can’t just come with us,’ said Nicholas. ‘We’ve explained that a talisman has to be brought by a Stravagante from Talia before someone from here can travel there.’

  ‘Then how can I believe anything you’ve said,’ said Alice, ‘if I can’t see it for myself?’

  ‘Well, I could ask Sulien, I suppose,’ said Sky. ‘When I go there tonight. We hope that Nicholas and Georgia will be able to go back tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean you’re going there tonight?’ said Alice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sky. ‘I go there nearly every night, for as long as I can.’

  ‘He won’t let you bring another talisman,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ said Alice. ‘How come you and Sky and Georgia are so special but I’m not worthy to have one of your little trinkets? Why shouldn’t I be a Stravagante? Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m even asking this. It can’t be anything more than a crazy story you’ve made up.’

  ‘Why would we make up a story to keep you out?’ said Georgia. ‘Look, the talismans seem to find people who are unhappy, or ill, even. The first person to go from our school was Lucien – the Mulhollands’ son – you know, the boy I told you about. And he was so ill he died.’

  ‘But you’re telling me he’s still alive in this Talia of yours?’ said Alice.

  Georgia looked round nervously. ‘Keep it down,’ she said. ‘You don’t want Vicky to hear. She doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alice bitterly, ‘if you have to be unhappy, then I qualify. How do you think it feels to have a boyfriend who’s always busy seeing your best friend or playing sword games with her . . . whatever Nicholas is? And when you ask for an explanation, all you get is fantasy fiction.’

  Sulien showed Sky the second set of novice’s robes he had ready for Nicholas.

  ‘When he stravagates, you should both arrive here,’ the friar said. ‘I’d like him to walk the maze before you take him out into the city. I think from what I saw of him in y
our world he will be too excited to be careful and I want him to leave here in a calm frame of mind.’

  Sky nodded. He had walked the maze himself a few times now and it always steadied him; it would do Nick good. He wished he could do it himself now, after the row with Alice. But there was too much to organise and he wasn’t quite ready to tell Sulien about her.

  ‘It’s going to get crowded in your cell of a morning,’ he said. ‘Especially if Sandro is hanging around too.’

  Sulien smiled. ‘He certainly spends a lot of time here.’

  ‘What shall we call Nicholas while he’s being a novice?’ asked Sky. ‘He can’t be Brother Falco!’

  ‘No, nor Brother Niccolò, really. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ said Sky. ‘Is everything ready in Remora? And with the Manoush?’

  ‘There is no reason why you should not all make your first trial stravagation tomorrow,’ said Sulien. ‘You can meet at Giuditta’s workshop as planned.’

  ‘It will be so odd to have them both here,’ said Sky. ‘I sort of think of it as my place now.’

  ‘The young prince will help you know it even better,’ said Sulien. ‘But Georgia will need you both to help her find her way around.’

  ‘She needs a Sandro,’ said Sky.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Sandro,’ said Sulien. ‘Do you think he knows about you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sky. ‘He’s never said anything about anyone being a Stravagante.’

  ‘But he knows Prince Falco by sight,’ said Sulien. ‘And it will be difficult to keep the two of them apart. Yet I would rather that Sandro were on our side than working for the di Chimici. He’s very observant.’

  Sky had been putting it off too long. ‘There’s been a bit of a complication in my world,’ he said.

  It was the Warrior’s fiftieth birthday. April the first – April Fool’s Day – and he felt the irony. Loretta was giving him a party to which, bizarrely, she was inviting all his ex-wives, girlfriends (at least the ones she knew about) and his many children and grandchildren.