Or What You Will Read online

  Astonishingly, Ficino understands her gesture. “Oh, that,” he says. “Well, no. We don’t have it. It doesn’t work here.”

  “That is, it works, but it doesn’t scale up,” Miranda amplifies.

  “How?” Tish asks.

  Miranda glances at Ficino, who pokes the fire and says nothing. “Magic,” Miranda says, after too long a moment.

  “And how long do people live here, please?” Tish asks.

  Miranda and Ficino exchange a look, but it is Giulia who answers. “People live as long as they want to. Is that different in your world?”

  13

  THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

  I still think it was a good deal. I sacrificed myself utterly so that nobody else would ever have to die, and when I did it, I did it wholeheartedly, with no idea that I’d ultimately survive. It was the first time an aspect of myself died in a story and I went on in her head. I’m used to it now, but that first time I believed I was really going to die, perish, cease upon the midnight. Yes, it’s reminiscent of Christ, of course it is, and I knew that when I did it. Christ died to save people’s afterlives, and I did it so that people could stay alive right where they were. If there are afterlives in Illyria, and many people there believe that there are, what I did didn’t change that. People die when they want to, and then they go on to whatever comes after—which I’m not sure about, to be honest. She wavered about Illyrian Heaven, because it would have meant endorsing one system and invalidating all the others. I thought I’d reconciled everything, when I was Pico, but in my nine hundred theses you’ll find both reincarnation and Heaven. So whatever comes after death is still there and still a mystery, but death itself is voluntary, unless you’re killed. And they have youth spells, to make you look and feel younger, and pretty good but not perfect magic healing. For healing you have to get to somebody who knows the spell, even if you know it you can’t do it to yourself. Everyone tends to pick up a few useful spells, but most people aren’t wizards because it takes a lot of time and effort and a certain kind of temperament to want to keep at it. People who would be scholars in our world tend to become wizards there.

  As it turns out, teen angst death is a problem in Illyria now, and so is dying of a broken heart. Dying is easier there, because you only have to will it. If you don’t will it, you keep on living. But there are cases where brokenhearted people in our world wouldn’t actually pick up a knife to slit their wrists but do in Illyria will themselves dead. There’s also the thing they call ring death, where you have a group of people grow up together and know each other all their lives, a whole cohort, and then one of them is killed eventually by one of the things that can still kill people—murder, depression, bandits, a broken heart, being hit by a lightning strike sent by the gods, or being mangled in an accident to such an extent that they decide not to live any longer—and then the rest of the cohort will one by one decide to follow them into death. Some communities consider ring death shameful, especially some of the Jewish communities. But there’s a lot of variation in how Judaism deals with death. In Galitzia there are whole villages where the self-defined elders each year all die on Yom Kippur, and others where they die on Yom Kippur at a hundred and twenty. Christians too have very varied reactions. Some feel you should listen for God calling you, others that you should choose death at seventy (a very unpopular view by now, as most of the people who believed in it aren’t around to defend their choice) or eight hundred (like Methuselah), an age which nobody has yet attained. Islam also favours a “good end” when all obligations are fulfilled and angels come to the house to call you. Zoroastrians believe in continuing to live for as long as you are pure, but choosing to die if you become polluted, to undergo punishment and purification after death and before the day of resurrection. Among pagans generally there are fewer religious arguments in favour of death, other than the possibility that Pico’s sacrifice may need to be renewed at some distant time in the future.

  Most people in Illyria (the world) die when they choose to die, of their own free will, for their own reasons. Others are killed by bandits, or in war, or murdered. The rest keep on living. They call the time when it changed Pico’s Triumph, or Pico’s Victory, and, as we just saw, date things from it.

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was a polymath and genius. He learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and attempted to reconcile Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, the Koran, the Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Kabala. (He was one of the first outside the Jewish communities to even acknowledge the existence of Kabala.) He was a friend of Ficino, and of Lorenzo de’ Medici. He wrote nine hundred theses and wanted to have a great Church Council where everyone would debate them. As he was rich (he was a count), he offered to pay the travelling expenses of any scholars who wanted to come to Rome for the debate. He ran into trouble with the Inquisition, who said thirteen of the theses were heretical. (Meaning the other eight hundred and eighty-seven were either orthodox or too hard for them to understand?) He also ran into trouble with women, running off with somebody else’s wife and having to fight a duel. He was saved from the Inquisition by Lorenzo de’ Medici, on condition that he agree to live quietly in Firenze. He became close friends with the Dominican friar Savonarola.

  He was poisoned by Piero de’ Medici in 1494 at the age of thirty-one—oh, perhaps I should have explained upfront that he was real, a real historical figure in the real Firenze. He’s far too improbable for Sylvia to have made up from scratch. However, she did fall under his spell, as so many have, after reading his Oration on the Dignity of Man. She put him into her book, and into Illyria, and recruited me to be him, whereupon I ran off with a flourish in all directions at once. It was wonderful. Pico was curious and fascinated by everything and everyone, and once I got into him I never wanted to let go. He had a whole new world to explore and new ideas and philosophies to reconcile with the ones he already knew. And I want you to know that the idea of his ultimate sacrifice was my own idea. It had to be a voluntary sacrifice or it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know whether she would have asked me, because she didn’t need to. There are roles where I’ve been drafted (I didn’t especially want to be a dragon, though it turned out to be fun in the end) but that wasn’t one of them. Having reconciled all the philosophies, I went up against Death and defeated it.

  You’ll know all this if you’ve read the Illyria books, but you might not have read them, or it might have been a long time ago. Maybe all you remember of those books is the way the colours faded from the tapestries in the Palazzo della Signoria while the Ten of War debated, or the way the sunrise lit the river Sabrina so that it glowed like a sword when we came in at the watergate, and the way the streets smelled different because of the smell of Morgian food drifting on the smoke from the campfires of the besieging army. Or you might remember the conversations I had with Ficino culminating in the great speech I made before the sacrifice. But you might not remember all the details even if you do. Pico was my first—the first time she used me as a character in a story. I threw myself into him with everything I had. I have done better since, and so has she, but Illyria had an intensity and a sincerity that we’ve never rivalled. I mean, I was Pico della Mirandola! I conquered Death! And even with the cultural complexities of what came of that afterwards, which I’d never imagined, I’m still proud of it. Wouldn’t anyone be?

  Everything changes without death, or where death happens only through human will, your own or another’s. If you expect to live hundreds of years your priorities are different, even when you yourself are still young. Education becomes a lifelong business. Career changes, and starting again from scratch, are much more common. People in Illyria often delay having children for a long time, or space their children widely. For conception too must be a willed act, except where the gods intervene, because the world would otherwise become much too full of people.

  In our real Renaissance, people worried a lot about under-population—unsurprisingly with all those plagues. The Black Death killed between a third an
d a half of the population of Europe—more than half the population of Firenze, at least fifty thousand people, dead in a summer. And in the Renaissance they also believed population figures for the ancient world they found in texts, figures that we now believe to be inflated. But whether or not Imperial Rome truly held a million people at the time of Hadrian, in 1300—even before the Black Death—Rome’s population was twenty thousand. It was easy for people living then to see humanity itself as a shrunken remnant of what it was in antiquity. (In Illyria, Roma itself is utterly deserted, only ruins in a field, and the popes hold court in Nemausus, in Aquitania.) But even from such a small start, with death removed, uncontrolled human population growth can be immense. Even for us, with death still regularly taking people out, Rome presently has a population of 2.8 million. So in Illyria, conception, like death, must be a human choice, and the choice of both parents.

  Of course, there are still some people who want to have ten children. But far more people in our world had ten children in the hope of seeing two grow up, or because for straight people the only alternative to ten children was celibacy. Without infant mortality, without any mortality, with willed conception making sex safe the rest of the time, this changes. People marry and live together for hundreds of years, and have children at long intervals. Miranda had her two children long ago when she was young, before Pico’s Triumph, and has borne no children under the new dispensation. Orsino and Viola had a son a century ago, Tybalt, who left Thalia long ago and has not been heard of since. This is not unusual. They have a daughter, Drusilla, who is nine. Olivia and Sebastian have no children, and may never decide to, or might find the right moment in a few hundred years. Giulia was an only child and so was her father, but her mother is one of six. Her grandmother, as Giulia told Tish, wanted nothing so much as to have her own settled family early. All the same, she had those six children spread over eighty years, and Giulia’s cousin Benvolio, the poet and playwright, is forty years older than she was, though still giovane.

  The thing that is uncommon in Illyria is death. That’s what changes everything most. The death of a person has to be willed, by themselves or by another. People decide to die because they’re ready to go on. War happens, and can be very horrible. But in Illyria itself, by custom it has largely become a matter where the condottieri, mercenary captains, march up to each other on the battlefield, do a headcount, and either decide on that basis who has won, or fight a duel to determine the outcome. One death per battle is the usual rule. In the Battle of Verona, a hundred years ago, Orsino’s cousin Giralda was faced with an army three times the size of her defenders, led by her cousin Rinaldo. She insisted on fighting a duel with Rinaldo and two of his captains, and succeeded in killing Rinaldo and one of his men, and seriously wounding the other. She is still duchess of Verona, and her heroic exploit is a common theme for paintings and epic poetry. But real wars and battles with casualties do happen. People are murdered, or kill each other in duels, and murderers are sometimes caught and executed. Three hundred years ago in Sefarda and Tedesca there was an outbreak of torturing and executing people accused of being witches or Jews, which ended with the assassination of the emperor, Felippo, by a Jewish witch called Jessica—another favourite subject for art. There was a war in Galitzia that went on for more than a hundred years and killed thousands of people. It was brought to an end, not without difficulty, by Rosmerta of Koss and Anne de Nemausus, who perceived that everyone was still fighting because it was easier than finding a way to stop when so many had died and so many of the survivors had been through such traumatic pain and anguish.

  If you are a modern person, in our world now, it’s not unlikely that you might not have known the true grief and loss caused by the death of someone close to you until well into adulthood. Because of modern medicine and life extension, we are on average living longer than we ever have. There are people in their seventies right now taking care of parents in their nineties. There are people who meet bereavement as a stranger when death suddenly strikes, because all they have lost before is a pet, or a distant, rarely seen grandparent. (Close beloved grandparents are as great a loss as any imaginable, but a grandparent on the other side of a continent and met only a few times is not.) And there’s a real difference between somebody who knows bone deep what it is to have somebody suddenly gone from your life, in the middle of a conversation (“I can’t wait to talk to you about it.…”), and somebody who only has an intellectual understanding of that.

  This estrangement from grieving is a change in human nature, and one that has happened over the course of Sylvia’s lifetime. Young people today are not the same as they were when she was young. They are not as unfamiliar with death as the Illyrians, but they are not intimate with it, as every other human generation has been. Death comes to them as a stranger, not an intimate. She notices it first in what she sees as extravagant grieving for animals, and then starts to notice it more when her friends lose parents at older and older ages, and take it harder and harder.

  Then she observes a growing embarrassment in younger people around the mention of real death, where people don’t know what to say or how to react, until talking about it is almost a taboo. Simultaneous with this came the rise of the vampire as attractive, sexual, appealing, rather than a figure of horror. There has always been an edge of eroticism in vampires from Dracula on, but it is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and her imitators Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer who concentrated on this aspect, after the intimate knowledge of death had receded. Other undead have also undergone this process in art, even zombies by the first decade of the new millennium.

  Friends with no religion, who mock Sylvia for her vestigial Catholicism, revert to strained religiosity in the face of death because they have no social patterns for coping. They talk about “losing” someone, and adopt the even uglier term “passing on,” or “passing,” originally a Swedenborgian cult term, which becomes such a common euphemism that it is now used more often than the word “died.” Sylvia hates it. Passed, passed on where, what kind of belief does it reflect? Passed, like gas, ugh. She prefers any other term: expired, kicked the bucket, pushing up the daisies, even being pissed on by Lord Byron.

  Look at it this way: Freud wasn’t necessarily wrong about Thanatos. But he was living in a different world, before antibiotics. His patients were very different people from the people of this century. They would all and every one of them have lost siblings, school friends, parents. Tish’s mother died, and her sister’s baby. Dolly lost two brothers to childhood diseases and his teenage sister to brain fever—meningitis. These were his everyday playmates, and when they were gone he was alone with his survivor guilt. We read Freud now, and wonder how he could have thought of some of these things, but his patients lived crowded together in houses with one bathroom or none, where they shared rooms with their dying siblings and fornicating parents, and where death was a constant and familiar presence. Nor did they feel grief any less for the familiarity of loss. Read Victorian children’s books; read Charlotte M. Yonge (as Sylvia did as a child in her grandmother’s house) and see what a constant presence death is, almost a character—and not necessarily violent death, but death by illness or accident, inevitable death that simply cannot be cured. We mock their wallowing in woe, the crêpe, the widow’s weeds, the jewellery made of jet and hair, the huge mausoleums, the black and purple mourning clothes, until we are faced with our own absences in emptiness, with nothing at all to console us and no signals to send to warn others to tread lightly.

  As for the Renaissance, the Plague, the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, came back regularly to ravage the cities, never as bad as the first time in 1348. The population of Firenze climbed back up to seventy thousand by 1500, but the city never filled the space inside the walls again until after the Reunification, when they took the walls away. And the Black Death was only the worst of many, many plagues that were simply incurable. Many of them were massively alleviated in the nineteenth century by better hygiene. Sewers and running wat
er made a huge difference to cholera and diphtheria and other waterborne pathogens. The house Dolly grew up in didn’t have either, and Dolly is, don’t forget, an aristocrat living in a palazzo his family have inhabited for centuries. Tish’s more modest house did have proper plumbing, and that’s probably why the three Blackstone children grew up, while only one of the Tornabuonis did. Just being able to keep clean helps a lot. Dolly and Tish were both inoculated against smallpox, the first of humanity’s great victories against disease, ever. But in the Renaissance there was nothing. Medicine lost a whole generation of doctors in 1348 and was very slow to recover the practical knowledge that was lost. The theory remained in the books that had lasted from antiquity—Hippocrates, Galen—but almost every doctor who tried to treat the plague died. If it had a general 30 to 60 percent mortality, it had near a 100 percent medical mortality. Doctors trying to help their patients by cutting the buboes inhaled the bacteria and caught the utterly fatal pneumonic form of the disease.

  Petrarch seems to have had a natural immunity, which we all now have—almost everyone of European descent alive today has a genetic immunity to Yersinia pestis, because we are descended from the survivors. The plague is still around. A man who was married to one of Sylvia’s grandmother’s sisters, in a tiny village in Ireland, died of it in 1956. A Chinese-American researcher died of it in 2008. But there are no more epidemics, because there’s not enough of a susceptible population for it to roar through cities in a tide of death the way it used to.

  Living through it changed Petrarch. He grew up in a world where people died easily of a myriad causes. He was already one of death’s intimates. But even so, living through the Black Death changed him, changed the letters of consolation he wrote from “God knows what he’s doing, and surely our dear friend is with God now,” to “Are we really so much wickeder than our parents such that we deserved this?” He had been planning to settle down in a retreat with close friends, where they could work and live together happily, but they all died of plague but two, and those two were attacked and one of them killed by bandits. He was left standing, almost alone. His letter about tending a friend and the friend’s family as they died one by one is heartbreaking. You can see his survivor guilt grow as more and more people die. Boccaccio too lived through the great plague of 1348; it provides the frame story for his short story collection The Decameron. He and Petrarch were friends, and Petrarch writes to tell him about the death of mutual friends. He says “I hope you get this letter. I am afraid the reason I haven’t heard that you too have succumbed to this sickness is that there’s nobody left alive to tell me.” It was an act of hope to take up his pen in those circumstances, where his recipients might be dead and there might be nobody left to travel or to deliver letters, when the whole world seemed to be dying around him.