Or What You Will Read online

  He gestures to the two strangers to come inside.

  “Shall we report that you’re taking care of it?” the guard asks, fingering his little bag.

  “Yes. Tell the Podesta that if I need his help I’ll be in touch, and tell the Duke and the Senate that I’ll make a report if there’s anything to report.” He then points at one of the apprentices in the crowd. “Giulia. Come in and make yourself useful, since you’re here.”

  The teenage girl he pointed at comes in, as her friends giggle and back away. Then Ficino extends his one of his hands to each of the strangers. “Please come in,” he says, and then repeats it in Latin. They have said nothing so far. “You, I think I have known before,” he says to Dolly, and then to Tish, “But you are quite new to me. I’m Marsilio Ficino,” he adds.

  “That’s impossible,” blurts Dolly.

  Ficino doesn’t waste time arguing. “Come in. You’re shivering.” He draws them inside. Tish, who was not dressed for a cold night, is indeed shivering, and quite wet through.

  9

  THIS IS ILLYRIA, LADY

  Illyria is the world she made for her first novel, Castaway in Illyria (1977) and revisited in The Wizards of Illyria (1978) and Return to Illyria (1980).

  It’s a world based on Renaissance Italy, with Thalia/Firenze very solid in the centre and everything thinning out and simplifying as it goes off into the distance from there. She has Not-Europe mostly worked out, from Sariola/Finland up in the far north to Elam/Persia off in the east and Mizar/Egypt in the south. West to east, the silk roads run between Sefarda/Spain and Xanadu/China. Hungary’s called Morgia, Germany is Tedesca, Greece is Yavan. France is (of course) divided into three parts, Aquitania, Tasavalta, and Paesi Bassi. She hasn’t thought much about Xanadu and Nippon and Tarshish, but she knows they’re there, off on the other side of the Elamite empire, which has elaborate magic carpets and sherbet (which fizzes, and is eaten with licorice sticks) and beautiful complex poetry.

  Sylvia winces. She says she was young, and she has built better, more inclusive, less Eurocentric worlds since, which is true. But I have special reasons for wanting Illyria.

  Gunpowder doesn’t work; at least, it doesn’t scale up, you can use it for fireworks and little arm’s-length inaccurate field guns, like they had in 1400. Magic does work, as we have already seen. Religion is real, and there were gods in the world, lots of gods. Christianity is a religion among other religions: Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, various varied and complex paganisms. Christianity is the dominant religion in Illyria, but it’s the muddled Christianity of the Italy of Shakespeare’s comedies, where people swear by both Jove and Our Lady. Or perhaps it is better thought of as the eclectic humanist Christianity of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. For all the monotheisms have adopted variants of the Platonic idea of One God with subordinates, because you can’t deny the gods when they meddle, but you can quite easily say that they’re angels or demons. They haven’t meddled for some time, though.

  Indeed, since 1980 and the end of Return to Illyria, it has been three hundred and fifty years of their time in which the gods have been withdrawn, time for the Illyrians to toast their toes and drink wine, as Ficino said. The ratio of time in Illyria to time in the real world was established quite clearly in The Wizards of Illyria. It is 1847 as Tish and Dolly step into Ficino’s living room, as it was 1847 when they walked around the walls of Firenze. They lost the summer, as everyone loses a season when they cross over. They stumbled into Illyria in 1847, but we last visited Illyria in 1495. Since then the people there have been living. Happily. Ever after. More of them than you’d expect. In Illyria nobody has to die unless they want to, or somebody else kills them. Death happens only by human intent.

  “Oh, so that’s what you were up to,” Sylvia says, a smile in her voice. “Ingenious.”

  She knows she has the power to make what worlds she will, and I do not. I have to work with such scraps as she allows me.

  “But you are dead in Illyria, aren’t you?”

  She’s right. I died in Illyria at the end of the third book. I was Pico, a wizard of our world, and I sacrificed myself to save that world, to save everyone else there from dying, ever. It was a good deal. I’d do it again.

  “So you got back in as Dolly?”

  Evidently.

  “But what good is it going to do?”

  None, unless I can get her in too. In Illyria, she wouldn’t have to die. And this is the first wisp of my plan, enticingly trailed in front of her. Illyria, a much more interesting place than when we last saw it, because benign neglect of the author and the absence of death have over centuries led to many things, complex and labyrinthine and beautiful.

  “But there’s no way I can get into a fictional world. It’s not like you think. You say that I have too much to lose here, or that I don’t want to, but it’s not that. It’s impossible. I make up worlds, yes, but they’re just … made up.”

  “Like me?” I ask, speaking directly to her now.

  “Even if I concede that you’re real, you’re only real inside my head.”

  That’s true enough. I can feel the bone cave clamping down on me again. I cling to Dolly, in his appropriate red hat and anachronistic black suit, dripping on Ficino’s marble floor under the waterlily chandeliers. Miranda is looking at him assessingly as he stares around at the tapestries a little desperately. They are faded, blue-greys and white, but still clearly show the glory that was Greece to a background of pillars and porticos—Plato writing; Socrates disputing; Alcibiades catching a quail, next to a trireme; Pericles orating at a rostrum, the Parthenon behind his left shoulder; and, in long strips on either side of the door, a boy with a lyre beneath a cloven pine, and two young men bidding a fond farewell at a crossroads under a waxing crescent moon. A wood, near Athens.

  “There’s no way for me to get into Illyria,” she says. “It isn’t real. I made it up.”

  She made it up, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean she can’t get into it or that it isn’t real. “You’re a god in Illyria,” I say.

  “I’m a god in all my worlds.”

  “Yes, but because Illyria was the first—the first to have that much attention, the first to be published if not the first you ever thought of, the first to have sequels and other people’s attention, that makes it special.”

  “And because you conquered death there.”

  “Right.”

  “But real people can’t go into made-up worlds. It’s just not possible. I don’t know how I can explain if you don’t understand. There’s a difference, and you’re not seeing it.”

  “Ficino went in. Pico did. Manetto Ammanatini did.” I do not cite Viola and Sebastian, because they were perhaps always a shade less real.

  “They did in my story.” Her voice is gentle, careful. “I can say in words on a page that anything happens, and within the story it does. But if I say I grow wings and fly, or that the sun goes behind a cloud right now, or that the water in the shower will come out properly warm this time, in the real world nothing listens to me and nothing happens. It’s just words, and they don’t have any power. You say you want to be real, but you’re more real than I am, in some ways. Readers remember you. So you’ll live on in the books. It’s the only form of immortality the real world has.”

  In fact the real world has more forms of immortality than that, and as for living on in books, well, I can’t count on it.

  Cattle die, kinsmen die, the gods themselves will someday die. Only wordfame dies not, for those who well achieve it. That’s what Odin says in the Poetic Edda. (I have been a Viking.) But like everything Odin ever says, it’s twisty. What does it mean, to achieve wordfame well? Has anyone ever done that? What does it mean, for a book, or a character in one, to live?

  Books last; well, of course they do. Everyone knows that. Writers die, but their works live on. If you go to Stratford, you will find Shakespeare is dead in the church, but vitally alive in the theatre. But all th
e same, most books are lost and forgotten. The bestseller lists of a century ago are easily googleable, and most names on them mean nothing today. Do you read Dorothy Canfield Fisher? Ernest Jones? Elizabeth Von Arnim? Kathleen Thompson Norris? Do you even vaguely recognise the names? Rebecca West? Mary Cholmondeley? You have read The Hound of the Baskervilles or at least know what it is, and you’ve probably at least heard of Edith Wharton and Upton Sinclair, but the rest? And this is from only one hundred years ago, and only writers who wrote books that were both good and popular. How about the French bestsellers of 1778? You may know Les Liaisons dangereuses but have you read The Nun in a Nightdress? (But don’t you long to, now you know of its existence?) Petrarch revived antiquity, true, but for some of what his humanist followers found, it was at the last possible moment. Lucretius was down to one copy, mouldering in a monastery in Switzerland. The last copy of Quintilian had been propping up a table leg in a different monastery for four hundred years. They discovered and dusted off works nobody had been reading for a very long time. One of the first things published, only twenty years after the invention of the printing press, was Cassiodorus. But who reads Cassiodorus now?

  Beyond that, why did the monks preserve the books? St Benedict wrote in his Rule for monks that each monk should read a new book every year, a book they hadn’t read before. He wrote that in civilization, in the Roman Empire, at a time when there were bookshops and libraries and literacy, and coming upon new books was not hard. He wrote it exactly as somebody might write an injunction like that today. He did not mean, in writing that rule, to prescribe scriptoria, and monasteries as the sole refuge of literacy, and books moving across Europe at a speed that scholars today can track, to see who could have read what. He wrote a practical rule for the world he lived in, not imagining it being interpreted as holy writ in the world that had changed out of all recognition, where books were scarce and finding a new book for a monk who had been professed for forty years meant a real challenge.

  That copy of Quintilian propped up the table in a world St Benedict could never have imagined. He had never seen an illuminated capital, nor for that matter text that distinguished capitals. Would he have seen it as successful beyond his wildest dreams? The monks preserved the works of antiquity as a side effect, manu scripta, copying them by hand and passing them hand to hand, passing them on with no knowledge that anyone would ever really want them. They didn’t know the Renaissance was coming, that eager hands would be waiting to take them up, to print them, with the forms for big letters in the upper cases and the small ones in the lower cases of printers’ chests. Nobody ever knows what’s coming. It’s easy to lose sight of that looking backwards, when it all has the air of inevitability, but the future lying before the people of the past was just as dark and impossible for them to penetrate as your future is to you. Abelard, in 1200, did not think there were only another two hundred and fifty years to go before Gutenberg, any more than you think of the vast blankness that are the events of 2268.

  Books do sometimes last. Once Quintilian was rescued from under the table, it became a Renaissance best seller. (But have you read it? Do you even know the title?) But even when they last, by what measure? You can be a best seller for a thousand years after your death, read by every schoolchild, and then five hundred years after the end of that thousand years be almost forgotten and read only by eccentrics. Precisely that happened to Lucian of Samosata. His works remained popular throughout the ascendency of Byzantium, but as a Syrian citizen of the Roman Empire writing in post-Classical Greek, the Humanists and the Victorians had nowhere to put him and swept him under the carpet. Or your works can survive as esoteric curiosities (as Lucian did for the last five hundred years, and like Cassiodorus, he is in print right now in the excellent Delphi series) read by some, neglected by most, until one day, in translation, in a culture you could never have imagined, they suddenly spring to prominence and you become the single greatest secular authority, read by everyone, a household name even to the illiterate. This happened to Aristotle—this happened to such an extent that even now people are astonished to know that in the thousand years after his death he was not very widely read, nor much revered by those who read him. Even Cicero, beloved by Petrarch, Dolly, and Tish, greatest of the Latinists, suffered an eclipse during the later Roman period, when all educated people read Greek. He swept back into popularity at the fall of Rome. In the fifth century, Boethius, consul under Ostrogothic kings who later executed him, translated Aristotle and Plato, badly, but as best he could, because he correctly foresaw Greek being lost to the West. Five hundred years later, Bede, writing his history of the English church, dates everything by Roman emperors, even after the fall of Rome, using the emperors of Byzantium, because to him it was still all one thing, one empire, wide and real and useful. But Greek was unknown to him, and in his world few but monks could read.

  Sylvia has published thirty books, and I am in them all. In some I am the narrator, in others, the main character. In most I am less important, but there, flitting about in the background helping other characters achieve their arcs of fulfillment, or appearing in a flash of imagery in a poem. Thirty books. What is the chance that any of them will be read in a hundred years, a thousand? What rocking tables will they prop up, in what unimaginable futures? In what electronic wastelands might they founder? It only takes a small change in taste for nobody to want them at all. And she’s good, she’s popular, but she’s not the best, not the most popular. Tolkien will survive, Rowling, perhaps. But will she?

  I have a better prospect. “In my story, you will go into Illyria, the way Manetto and Ficino did,” I say. “Let me tell this one and you’ll see. Wouldn’t you like to be in Illyria?”

  “Yes … look, it’s fun, and I can let you keep telling it, and it’ll actually fit with what I wanted to do, the Twelfth Night story, but that won’t get me inside.”

  “I think it can,” I say, not ready to give too much of my plan away as yet.

  “People will think I’m getting senile, going back to Illyria after all this time,” she complains, but it’s a pro forma complaint, and I know I have won this argument so far. “We’ll work on it together,” she goes on. “I like Tish. She has possibilities. And I’ve always been fond of Ficino. And it’s interesting to think what’s been going on there all this time.”

  “Yes,” I say, trying and failing to keep the triumph I feel out of my voice. This was the hardest obstacle, for if she had cut me off now, it would have been much harder to win through, perhaps impossible if she bound me up in the bone cave in silence and wouldn’t let me speak to the possibility of you. I can fight most things, but not her, she has all the power. I have fought dragons and manticores and Death itself, and overcome them all, but against her I am as helpless as an Antean lifted away from the ground.

  As for her objections, they’re real, but not insurmountable. It’s not me who doesn’t understand.

  10

  THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS

  Ficino sends Tish off with Giulia. “Dry clothes, and then we’ll talk,” he says. He hands Giulia a waterlily lamp, which gives a clear unwavering greenish light brighter and steadier than a gas or oil lamp, and therefore clearer and brighter than any artificial light Tish has ever seen. Tish stares at it, and then at Giulia, who is holding it. The girl looks about fourteen or fifteen, and is dressed in Renaissance clothes—an undyed linen shirt under a densely embroidered moss-green woollen overdress. She clearly knows the house, and leads Tish into a courtyard, up a flight of stairs, down a verandah and into a room panelled in dark wood, with a dark blue coffered ceiling painted with stars. She sets down the lamp on a marble-topped table. She has great difficulty helping Tish out of the soaked pink crinoline, and tuts over it.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. What were they thinking to put the buttons here? It’s fine-woven cloth, and brightly coloured, but so flimsy!”

  As Tish stands shivering, Giulia rummages through a huge painted chest that stands under the
shuttered window. After a moment she gives a pleased grunt and comes out with a huge fluffy, yellow towel. Tish rubs herself dry as best she can. The lamp lights the room, but leaves a lot of shadows in the corners. Giulia can’t answer any of Tish’s most urgent questions—or rather, she keeps repeating that she doesn’t know, or that she’d like to know too, or that Master Ficino might be able to answer, while continuing to rummage in the chest. On the front of the chest is a painting of Psyche holding up a lamp to look at a very naked Cupid, sprawled in sleep on a bed. The painted lamp also looks like a waterlily.

  “Is he really Marsilio Ficino?” Tish asks.

  “Yes. Of course he is. How do you know him?”

  “If he’s the same person, he’s famous where I come from. He translated Plato, and—” Tish isn’t sure what else. She has just seen the smile Florentines get, to this day, when they hear Ficino’s name. “He was a scholar. A humanist.” But he had been dead for centuries.

  “Well, he’s a humanist and a translator here too. And a wizard.”

  “A real wizard, who can do magic?”

  “Of course,” Giulia says.

  “Did he come here from … from the same place I came from?”

  Giulia shrugs and burrows in the chest again. “Either that or he must have visited it, I suppose, if he did work there. He hasn’t been there recently, that’s for sure. He hasn’t been outside the walls of Thalia that I remember.”

  “What year is it?” Tish asks. Everything—the clothes, the architecture, even the towel she is drying herself with, which has purple and gold tassels, looks to her as if this is the Renaissance. And yet …

  “Year sixteen,” Giulia says, her voice echoing in the chest. “So it’ll be year one again in March and a really big New Year celebration, with fireworks and a joust and a play. My cousin Benvolio’s writing the play.” She turns around, her arms full of material. “Are you dry?”