Or What You Will Read online

  Sylvia herself was named after both of her grandmothers. Her father’s mother, Sylvia, was named after a character in a novel by Mrs Gaskell, and her mother’s mother, Kate O’Reilly, was named after St Catherine, either St Catherine of Alexandria, a very early Christian, portrayed in Renaissance art with a wheel, or St Catherine of Siena, a Dominican nun in the thirteenth century who tried to get the pope away from Avignon. Catherine of Alexandria is more fantastical, with her multiple miraculous escapes from death, but Catherine of Siena has the advantage of having been real. Her head is buried in Siena and the rest of her in Rome. She wrote books that survive, and is a doctor of the church. In art she sometimes has a starry headscarf, but more often just looks like a Dominican nun.

  Sylvia’s grandmother Sylvia was born in Montreal, and her grandfather Walter Harrison was born in Kingston, Ontario. Kate O’Reilly, with her husband, Conal, emigrated from Ireland in the 1880s. They kept a tavern in Sud-Est Montreal for many years, cooking stews and sausages and puddings, and serving beer and whisky to working men. The tavern still exists, but is now a café specialising in chocolate, and the much-gentrified area is now known as the Gay Village.

  Names are important. She agrees that they are, and spends a lot of time on names for characters, working hard to get them just right. Idris used to tease her about this, saying it didn’t matter and she should call them all Fred or Freda—names she gave to a brother and sister in Return to Dragon College just to tease him. But names do matter. Maybe for real people it doesn’t matter as much as for characters, where their name tells you so much about them. I myself have had many names, but there is no one name that means only me. She does not use a name for me as I am in her head, me as distinct from the people I have been in her stories. I have not had a name as such since her childhood. Which I suppose we should address, although not yet, not yet, certainly not my part in it.

  Her parents were Catholic, as Idris’s were Muslim, but she herself, like him, is mostly secular, though they each remained rooted, of course, in the rich soil of their ancestral cultures and religions. She grew up in Griffintown and the Sud-Est, parts of the city then largely populated by Irish Catholics, and learned as soon as she took a step in any direction that she was wrong however she held herself. As an English speaker in Montreal growing up in those years after the war (and the war will always be the Second World War, for Sylvia) she should have been a Protestant, and richer. As a poor Catholic, she should have been French. When she lost most of her ability to believe in God she retained the Anglophone and Catholic identities forged in these oppositions. She lives now in her turreted house in wealthy Westmount, a house that she and Idris picked up for a song when they married, at a time Anglos were fleeing Montreal in fear of the province voting for separation. They were in love with it and each other and decided to stay. The house is too big for her now, really, but she wouldn’t consider moving. She trots down the long block to Rue Sherbrooke and takes the bus to the metro, or runs her local errands. She speaks French well, but she thinks and converses and writes in English.

  She went to McGill (graduated 1967), on scholarships, to her parents restrained pleasure. They had scrimped for college fees for her older brother, Sean, and they had four younger children. Sylvia now rarely sees her siblings, or her numerous nieces and nephews, who are scattered all over the world. Even her youngest sister, Maureen, who works as a taxi despatcher in Montreal, she sees only a couple of times a year. They were never close, and have grown further apart, and every time she sees any of her siblings it becomes clear that they still disapprove of her. Of the huge tribe of descendents of the Harrisons of Griffintown, only her cousin Con is her friend. They are comfortable together, and go out of their way to see each other. She has even been able to talk to Con about missing Idris, a little.

  “The stupidest things make me miss him,” Sylvia says to Con, two years after Idris’s death. They are drinking coffee in Sylvia’s kitchen. Con is off to New York the next day for a week of intensive coding, and has brought around leftover peaches and plums for Sylvia.

  “Like what?” Con challenges. “I don’t expect they’re stupid at all.”

  “Yes, yes they are,” she says.

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  Con goes through an elaborate procedure of licking fingers and crossing them, that Sylvia too did in her childhood, but which she is surprised Con, a generation younger but still thoroughly grown up, knows and is prepared to indulge. “I won’t laugh. Give me an example. Tell me the stupidest thing that makes you miss him?”

  Sylvia thinks, sips her coffee. “Global warming.”

  Con explodes with laughter, chokes with it.

  “You said you wouldn’t laugh,” Sylvia says, though she is smiling despite herself.

  “I didn’t realise how stupid it would be!” Con says, face streaming with tears that are changing from laughter to grief. “But it also isn’t. It makes me miss him too, now I think about it. Because he knew about it so long before, and nobody would listen.”

  They set down their coffee mugs and hug across the coffee table.

  “If you really want to do this, perhaps we should start there,” she says now, to me.

  I don’t say anything.

  “There, when I was talking to Con across the coffee mugs. It would be a more normal kind of beginning for a story.”

  I have a very good reason for wanting to start where I did. I want to show you me first, to have you come to know me before you see her, so you can grow some belief in me before you have the chance to observe her so nearly and clearly and thoroughly. She’s so real, so solid, when you see her set in her own comfortable world, and it is a comfortable world she lives in, even without Idris and with the girls grown. She is well established, famous in a small way in her small field, but not at all in the wider space where she lives. She has many friends who are writers, and artists, and photographers, and teachers, and engineers, and programmers. She has editors in New York, and London, and Paris. She does local signings in the Argo bookstore on Ste Catherine, and more far-flung book signings all over North America. She goes to conventions. She wears her neat unobtrusive suits, and her silk shirts, pinned at the throat with an oval of pearls set in silver Idris gave her for their thirtieth anniversary, in 2008. She liked that it wasn’t a string of pearls but a brooch. She liked that he remembered. She liked that it was appropriate to her age and the kind of thing she would wear. She wears it every day, now, no matter what else she wears.

  She twists her hair into its bun with one hand and pins it with her Japanese comb without even looking, she has worn it like that for so long.

  In Firenze, where it is hot, though not as hot in summer as it is in Montreal, where there is humidity, she leaves the suit jacket off, but still wears the pearls at her throat, hiding her scrawny neck, which reminds her of chicken skin, and which she finds unsightly. She never used to think much about her body, which served her well, and even now she tries not to cosset it. That is her word. She is spending the summer alone to work on the book she calls The Florence Book and I call The Dead Horse Book, the book I am not supposed to be in, the book I am infiltrating for my own purposes. She is supposed to be in remission, but I have my doubts. She writes, and she trots about looking at art and architecture and eating gelato, and there is a way she looks at everything that I do not like, an elegiac way, as if she is saying goodbye. I see through her eyes, as she sees through mine, and sometimes we speak, but if I press her on this, she will not answer me. In the way she looks, in her choice to come here alone, now, I fear she knows, and will not let me know, that time is running out.

  In Firenze, there is a place, a portal, a pivot. If only I could get her to stumble over it, like Tish, and come with me into the world that is waiting. Reality is beside the point. In that world I could save her, I know I could. Brunelleschi’s painting is lost. (I do know exactly where it is, but it’s out of our reach now without help.) They pulled down the w
alls in the 1860s. But there is a hinge, a hasp, a threshold, and there I am waiting, creating, and baiting my trap.

  You see, I know her. I’ve been in all her books. But I’ve been in her head much, much longer than that.

  8

  A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE

  In the walled city of Thalia, heart of the duchy of Illyria, two wizards are sitting beside the fire one late autumn evening, sipping rich red wine from blown glass goblets and nibbling slices of sweet pear cake. The wine is local, the excellent vintage of six harvests ago, though most people in Thalia at this time are drinking last year’s wine to celebrate the sticky and triumphant recent end of this year’s grape harvest. The cake is light and delicate, with moist slivers of pear running through it. It is just barely sweet. Sugar is expensive, imported from the island of Candea (from which we draw our word candy) or the fertile kingdom of Mizar, away to the south and east. This room, comfortably lined with bookshelves, is a wizard’s cosy study. More books and papers are piled on the desk. Half buried in the drifts is a ball of amethyst, and holding down another pile is an elegant jade dragon. The room is warmed by firelight but lit from the even greenish glow of several glass lamps shaped like waterlilies, two hanging from the ceiling and two more standing on the desk. The window is tightly shuttered, closing out the dark and rain of a stormy evening.

  The house has a tower (it is a wizard’s house), but this study is only one floor above ground level, and the house it stands in is on a street to which the window of the study would open. The house has a façade of gracefully bas-reliefed stone busts of philosophers; it abuts its neighbours on either side. It is no larger or smaller than they are, except for the tower, with its clear hemispherical glass dome, an observatory for taking astrological sightings. It is the tallest tower in Thalia, except for the one on the Duke’s palace.

  “It’s good of you to make the time to visit on my birthday, and this is very good cake,” the first wizard says. He is a sweet old man, in a red scholar’s hat with two dents, and has silver hair and a mild, distinctive face, by which we can recognise him immediately in any place and time as Marsilio Ficino, scholar, humanist, translator of Plato, tutor to Lorenzo de’ Medici, but here immensely older than he ever grew in our world—because, of course, after several brief visits to and fro, he left our world for good in 1499 when he was sixty-six. His face is a mass of wrinkles, his age unfathomable, but we can calculate it precisely. He is four hundred and fourteen years old today, October 19th.

  The other wizard smiles, takes a sip of her wine, and then sets down her goblet on the warm terra-cotta tiles of the hearth. “The secret is semolina,” she says. “My father loves this cake.” At first glance she seems young, much younger than Ficino, with long, smooth, dark hair and no wrinkles at all, but closer examination of her eyes reveals that Miranda is simply an adept at the spells of youth that Ficino neglects to apply to himself. Perhaps it is a gender difference. There may be an advantage to a female wizard in appearing to be young and tolerably beautiful, perhaps thirty-five, with firm smooth skin, whereas for a male, an appearance of advanced age offers some of the same benefits. Certainly when Ficino stands to add another log of sweet-scented apple wood to the fire, he shows none of the infirmities one would expect from anyone with those lines in his face, though it also becomes immediately apparent that he is notably short. In some other fantasy world one might suspect Dwarvish blood. But here, where there are various kinds of nymphs but no elves or dwarves, he is just a short man, as he was in his younger days in our world. He is a shrimp of a man, but one whom it would be very unwise to discount. Miranda, who is of only average height, tops him by a hand. And she is indeed two decades his junior. Miranda has not yet quite reached her four-hundredth birthday.

  “I haven’t seen Prospero since he handed over this tower. Some day I must sail to Tempest Island and talk to him.” There is a framed wood-panel painting hanging on the chimney breast with vermilion curtains open on either side of it, framing it like a window. It shows a picture of a ship flying before the wind beneath a clear blue sky, all sails spread.

  “Oh yes. Father doesn’t like many people, but he likes you.” Miranda smiles, leaning back in her worn leather armchair. “We could embark together in my enchanted boat. That would be fun. Let’s do that in the spring.”

  “A new experience. And I’ve thus far neglected elemental lore in my studies,” Ficino says.

  Miranda looks at him. “Do you think we wizards live so long because there is always more to learn?”

  “Yes,” Ficino replies, without hesitation. “Everyone else comes to the end of what they want and is content to die. Kings and dukes weary of their responsibilities, rich men become jaded with gathering wealth, great-grandmothers tire of cooing over new babies, captains become bored with their campaigns and conquests, but we scholars never lose our thirst to learn and understand, and so we live on.” Miranda said wizards, but Ficino says scholars, for to Ficino the two are indistinguishable.

  Miranda winces when he mentions the weariness of dukes. As she leans forward to pick up her glass again, her face is lit on one side by the rosy flames of the fire, and on the other by the cold gold-green glow of a lily lamp, which turns her smile enigmatic. “For most people, yes. But some don’t want to stop living.”

  “We haven’t had long enough to know,” Ficino says. “It’s only been three hundred and fifty years since Pico’s Triumph. After a thousand years, what might we see?”

  “I’m longing to find out,” Miranda says. “Of course, there are unwilled deaths.”

  “It’s rare, and only in battle or in the case of murder—” Ficino begins, frowning, when a great clatter arises outside in the street, cutting off whatever he meant to say. Dogs are barking, geese hissing, people shouting, and a gust of wind dashes rain against the glass of the window. The picture above the fire has changed, and now shows a crossroads in a storm, with clouds scudding across the face of a half moon, drawn by the wind, and bare branches of trees lashing.

  “A change is coming,” Miranda says, glancing at it as she draws herself to her feet. “The gods are stirring out there at last.”

  “The stars have been speaking of a change. Well, we have had a long time of peace to toast our toes and eat cake,” Ficino says. He does not sound sorry at all. Nor does he glance at the picture.

  “What does it mean, if they have chosen to act now?” Miranda asks, standing in the middle of the room and staring at Ficino.

  “It depends what they have done, which we cannot guess until we learn it,” Ficino says, standing. He sets the chunk of amethyst from his desk into the pouch at his belt and gestures to the study door. The latch neatly lifts itself, then the door swings open silently on its hinges.

  “What shall we do?” Miranda asks.

  “We’ll go down and attend to the disturbance.” There is a loud rapping at the door downstairs. “Beyond that, it depends what the gods have done, which we cannot guess until we learn it. It may well mean that it will soon be time to make a new covenant.”

  “You take it so calmly!” Miranda says. “But then, you abetted the last change, what should I expect?” She picks up the lily lamp and follows Ficino down the flight of stairs that bends around an inner courtyard, sheltered from the weather by the balcony of the floor above.

  “You too stood by Pico when he made the change,” Ficino says, as they go in through a door that swings open at their approach. They are in a great panelled hall, hung with tapestries. At another gesture from Ficino, lightning springs from the lamp in Miranda’s hand to light the similar lamps that hang from the ceiling. They are all shaped like waterlilies, and the light they give is an underwater greenish white. All at once the big room is very bright. “I can’t be bothered with servants,” he says, almost apologetically. He opens the small door to the street, inset in a huge door. This time, he uses a key he draws out of the soft leather pouch attached to his belt. Miranda steps back against the wall, where she will not be easil
y seen through the door.

  As the door opens, a narrow street is visible outside, lit by orange-red torchlight from sconces fastened to the walls of nearby houses. The sconces are complex metalwork or stone, in the shape of fanciful beasts or grotesques. Rain is falling fitfully, and the wind gusting. The slice of bright white light falling from Ficino’s open doorway reveals a crowd of people in brightly coloured and decorated Renaissance clothing, most with hoods over their heads against the rain. There are city guards, market women, apprentices, guildsmen, children, and a handful of the curious who gather whenever there is an uproar. In the centre of them are two people whose clothes and astonished faces mark them as strangers.

  “Ah. Salve,” Ficino says.

  “They’re late for Carnival,” one of the guards says. “They’ve no money that speaks of any city anyone has ever heard of, and no explanation of where they’ve come from.”

  “How wise of you to bring them to me instead of arresting them,” Ficino says, and he hands each of the guards a coin, which he apparently materialises out of nothing, but as the guards seem to make the coins disappear with equal facility, perhaps it is not magic. “Yes, I can deal with these strangers, don’t worry. You have done quite right.”