A Brightness Long Ago, page 42
“Not tonight,” I said.
His smile faded, then returned. Mercati was such a handsome man, all his life. He died a few years ago, in Rhodias, doing work for the newest Patriarch. All of Batiara mourned him—except, perhaps, some of the other artists. There is more room for them now, I suppose.
“You are judging me,” he said that night. “I can hear it, see it. That’s all right. I still would like to paint you. Where will I find you?”
“You know where. I’m in Seressa, I serve the council and the duke.”
“Perhaps there, then, if you survive. It’s a dangerous place, Seressa. I’ve always found it so. And damp. You do pay, however. There’s that. Thank you for the wine.”
He set it down and turned to leave, reclaiming the lamp he’d placed on a table.
“Wait,” I said. “Why? Why do you want to paint me?”
He was prompt to reply. “You came into the room showing fear, trying not to, dealing with it. I would do your face this morning as that of Lekandros, when he went out to fight Malthias.”
Old, old story. Shepherd boy and giant. Our emerging city-states were using it on murals, in statues, to depict themselves resisting tyranny. They were the young Lekandros at the beginning of his own rise to power.
“Someone wants one?” I asked.
“Clever you. Yes, Mylasia has asked, and met my price. They did overthrow their tyrant, after all.”
He went out, leaving me with—again—an image of Mylasia where so much of my life began; Adria, the two of us, so young, going down together, out into the world, and apart.
* * *
• • •
HE NEVER PAINTED ME. Someone else posed for the famous sculpture he made for Mylasia. He did work on a celebrated tomb, but not Monticola’s. It was also Mercati who painted Adria on horseback for the Ripoli Chapel in the great sanctuary in Macera.
I’ve been there, as an envoy on behalf of the Council of Twelve, and more recently as a member of it, after my second marriage gave me stature enough for the duke to arrange for me to be voted to the council. I saw what Mercati did in his rendering of Adria Ripoli. It is a magnificent painting. It looks nothing like her at all.
Both things can be true.
I cannot clearly say why those years when I met her and loved her (and will do so forever, it seems), when I met Folco and Teobaldo and Ginevra, and my own duke, why those years are so intensely within me always, not just tonight in our council chamber.
Perhaps it is true of every life, that times from our youth remain with us, even when the people are gone, even if many, many events have played out between where we are and what we are remembering.
I am so full of memories tonight from that time—when I was being changed, made and remade by those I met.
Folco died the same year Mercati did. His son rules in Acorsi, as Teobaldo’s does in Remigio. There is no rancour between the families now. There is even talk that Teobaldo’s son will marry Folco’s granddaughter. Seressa has no strong views on this, either way; we discussed it and have decided.
Duke Ricci—he had been fully voted to office years before, when Lucino Conti died, after surviving longer than anyone could have expected—represented us at Folco’s funeral, when he was interred in the chapel built in the sanctuary in Acorsi. The duke invited me to accompany him, although I was only an emerging merchant and adviser then. I hadn’t yet remarried. He knew—he seems to always know so much—how important Folco d’Acorsi had been once in my life, however brief the time had been.
I saw Antenami Sardi there, leader of Firenta since his father’s death and his brother’s assassination. I remembered him as a fool met on the road to Bischio, then outside Adria’s door at an inn. He wasn’t a fool any more. Some men can change greatly. I don’t think I have; I think I was just unformed, and took shape under guidance, given opportunity.
Sardi is my age, greyer than I am, heavier. We spoke briefly at the funeral, mostly about horses. He actually remembered me from that time in Bischio, which was its own surprise. I told him that I still recalled his magnificent horse and even its name: Fillaro. I have no idea why I remember that. He grew misty-eyed, hearing it.
Sardi had, I learned from the duke on the ride home, travelled with a merchant party to Asharias (which is what Sarantium is called now). There was a confusing story, about the man halting his journey at a sanctuary along the route, staying several days at a hamlet nearby.
It was possible, said the duke, as we rode through a windless autumn day, that the man had matured but remained an eccentric. Still, Firenta was flourishing under his guidance, you needed to give Antenami Sardi credit for that, he said.
As for me, there is no mistaking it, I have done well in our dangerous world and city. Well enough to have those who seek my favour and support, and others who hate me. My second wife dislikes me, but it is mutual and we are good at appearing cordial in public when it is necessary—as it often is here, given my office.
My first wife I came to love a great deal. She gave us a daughter before dying two years later along with our second child. I honour her memory and my love for my daughter is extravagant, and I know it is returned. I have that joy. Not everyone does. That first marriage was also arranged for me, but those can sometimes ripen into caring, and ours did. There was laughter in our house, our bedchamber, a sense that the world was a place worth exploring together. We were young, that makes a difference.
I am judged a too reflective, overly serious man by many. My wives and friends have known otherwise. My first wife enjoyed it, shared a manner with me in private. I was lucky in that. My second, so much better born than I, finds me undignified when I am whimsical or frivolous. Probably she is correct, given my age.
My second marriage is a consequence of the duke wanting me on the council to support him. My second wife’s prominent father owed him a great deal of money. My marriage was the price of forgiving the debt. She has never forgiven her father, or me. I can understand that. I am a tradesman’s son. My being voted to the Council of Twelve did please her, however, and I have made a great deal of money, and have helped her father, too.
We have no children together. I do not live with love. Not everyone does.
It is strange, how tangled in memory I am tonight. Or perhaps not so strange. The woman who has just walked from this room through the smaller side door, beside the man with whom she will spy for us in Dubrava, reminds me of Adria so much. And I know this woman’s father. And I killed her grandfather.
I’ve only killed two men in my life. Both in Mylasia.
Given this, I suppose it is no wonder that I am sitting at the council table on a spring night and also reliving those years long ago.
What makes one person remind you of another? They didn’t look at all alike. This woman was small, delicately formed, more sorrowful when we met than Adria had ever been. She’d been in a Daughters of Jad retreat inland from us, sent there to hide a family shame by her father—who was Erigio Valeri of Mylasia.
She’d borne a child in the retreat; it was taken away at birth. I’d asked, because it might be useful, but they hadn’t answered—so I had no idea where the child had gone. We had been sent a report by the Eldest Daughter that they’d received someone again with spirit, intelligence. A woman who might be willing to be of use, in exchange for freedom from life in a retreat. And, of course, a donation from Seressa to them.
We had done this before.
I’d been the man sent by Duke Ricci to talk to her, Brunetto with me. The duke, who knew so much, did not know I had killed a Valeri. No one knew that. Riding out to the retreat to meet this woman had begun a circling of time for me, or call it the past cutting into the present like a blade.
She was as she’d been reported to be. Grieving, angry. Unwilling to submit mildly to her family’s choice for her life. Her father’s choice. I told her what we proposed, what we’d want of her, and went away.
We were back two days after. She agreed to be a spy for Seressa. Said it directly, using the word. We rode with her to the city. She rode wonderfully well, appearing to rediscover the idea of joy if not yet the thing itself, riding beside me to Seressa on a good horse.
Perhaps that had been what started me thinking of Adria, who also rejected the choices, the limits the world gave her, who was not allowed to grow up and become what she might have been.
I wanted this woman I didn’t know at all, this Leonora Valeri, to have those chances. I had no idea if she would. We were not offering her much, and there was considerable danger. People died as spies. But it was a better life than those walls, she had decided.
And now she has left the chamber, a vivid presence gone. I can see that the duke, too, recognized something in her. His manner when she was here . . .
Even with eyesight fading he registers more than anyone I know. He will leave us soon. He speaks of an isle in the lagoon, conversations with holy men and philosophers, the rituals of prayer. I have promised to visit him when he does that. I am not ready for him to go. Meanwhile, he has set a number of things in motion tonight, and we will see where they lead. He likes to do that. He did it with me twenty-five years ago, and here I am. Here I am.
There is a young artist yet to appear before us tonight, we are waiting for him, there is some delay. It is another scheme, another spy we want to send out—who may perhaps also become an assassin. We always have schemes here in Seressa. No one trusts us.
The lights the servants have set flicker and dance around this great oak table in the night. The chamber is echoing and vast, running into darkness by the walls. It is meant, by its grandeur, to awe. The portraits of the dukes of Seressa look down. They are hard to see just now, set very high up.
It is brighter in my memories. I am not old. I have places I want to see, dreams I may shape and realize. I might find love before I go to the god.
I knew, once, a woman diamond bright, and two men I will not forget. I played a part in a story in a fierce, wild, windblown time. I do have that. I always will. I am here and it is mine, for as near to always as we are allowed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some books emerge with a clear origin story, others, including this one, have strands that interweave to produce the beginnings of a novel. One such strand here was reading and thinking about the feud between the Montefeltro and Malatesta families in fifteenth-century Italy (and before). I was engaged by the fact that the great military figures at the apex of the clash (Federico and Sigismondo, who inspired my Folco and Teobaldo) were lords of small cities, minor ones. Wealthy enough, due to their large fees as mercenaries, but never truly powerful compared to the city-states they and their armies served.
I began reading into the condottieri warfare of that time. There are useful sections in War in European History, by Sir Michael Howard. I learned most from Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy, by Michael Mallett, a classic in that field. I found Vendetta, by Hugh Bicheno, focusing on the feud between the two families mentioned, to be very useful, offering some correctives to received wisdom, which had largely treated Montefeltro as good and Malatesta as evil. (The great Piero della Francesca painted both, incidentally.)
Working with this setting again led me to reread a book I’d much admired when researching Tigana a long time ago: Lauro Martines’s Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. Martines also has a much more recent work called Furies, which covers a wider period and deals with the terrible collateral damage of European warfare, civilians caught up in the endless fighting: sieges, famines, lawlessness associated with campaigns just about every spring. It is a powerful, compassionate, recommended work.
For the virtually unchecked violence of some of the lords of Italian city-states there is a great deal of evidence. I can say that my “Beast” falls nowhere near the top of the scale, unfortunately. John Addington Symonds, writing stylishly in the nineteenth century, has more than a little of censorious, shocked English attitudes to the Italians, but casts a useful light, nonetheless, in his Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots. It may be worth noting that he is of the pro-Federico, anti-Sigismondo party.
On the brighter side of the period, rereading Kate Simon’s very accessible A Renaissance Tapestry on the Gonzaga of Mantua reminded me of the school there, founded by Vittorino da Feltre, much loved in his time, to which the children of craftsmen were sometimes admitted. History as a scaffold for invention.
At the end of the 1980s, we were living and writing for a time between Florence and Siena and one day in Siena stumbled upon one of the victory parades for the district that had won the previous Palio race. It was memorable, and I’ve been fascinated by that race ever since. Sometimes it takes a long time for an interest to find its way into a novel, but here we are. Several books were useful and allowed me to shape my version of it inspired by elements of the real one. Heywood Williams’s Palio and Ponte was especially helpful, including mention of a female rider.
A number of historians have thoughtfully (and sometimes dramatically) examined the lives of women in the Renaissance, with a focus—in part because there is more material—on some notably independent or courageous aristocrats. Among them, I found much of note in Elizabeth Lev’s The Tigress of Forli. There is also a strong chapter on the wives of Federico and Sigismondo, and on court women in general, in The Eagle and The Elephant, by Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams.
Medieval and Renaissance medicine remains an interest, and obviously plays a role in this book. I’ve mentioned being aided by several texts before, but a new one this time around was Toni Mount’s Medieval Medicine.
Carole Collier Frick’s Dressing Renaissance Florence was very interesting, sometimes in unexpected ways. Chiara Frugoni’s books on daily life are filled with detail: Daily Life in a Medieval City and Book, Banks, Buttons.
As always, we may write our books alone but a great many people must be present, before, during, and after, supporting and sustaining the work. I’m grateful to my publishers and editors, Nicole Winstanley and Lara Hinchberger in Toronto, Claire Zion and Rebecca Brewer in New York, and Oliver Johnson in London. It is difficult to convey how much I value their enthusiasm for this novel. Claire read A Brightness Long Ago while travelling in Tuscany. She wrote me that she thought she saw where Jelena’s cottage in the countryside would be.
My agents, John Silbersack, Jonny Geller, and Jerry Kalajian, have all been friends for a long time, as well as trusted colleagues, and I am deeply appreciative. Catherine Marjoribanks, who has copyedited nine of my books now, offered her usual blend of precision, humour, and quick, incisive replies to last-minute queries. Lisa Campbell once again helped me chase down articles I was having trouble accessing. A librarian is a splendid resource. Martin Springett, a dear friend, added important details to his map for Children of Earth and Sky to clarify the web of towns and cities in the middle parts of Batiara. Deborah Meghnagi and Alec Lynch continue to monitor and coordinate brightweavings.com, the authorized website on my work.
Finally, as always, my enduring love and deepest gratitude belong to Laura, Sam, Matthew, and to Sybil, my mother.
A Brightness Long Ago
Guy Gavriel Kay
Questions for Discussion
Kay sets this novel in Batiara, not Italy. He has dealt with slightly changed settings in this way many times, using a “near Europe” in history, not the actual places and people, even though he cites his inspirations in the acknowledgments. Why do you think Kay approaches historical places and figures in this way?
There are only small elements of the supernatural in this book, primarily passages involving the voices of the recently dead. Do you think this novel is best seen as fantasy? Historical fiction? How much does a label or category matter in your thinking about a book?
Is art meant to reveal truths or to send messages? Is this true for all works of art?
Do you believe that Guidanio betrayed Morani by not defending him from the mob? What should he have done, if so?
Women in Batiara don’t have a lot of options as far as what they can be or do. Jelena and Adria have both chosen to lead lives different from the norm. How similar is this to women of today who try to break the barrier of women’s expected roles?
Is there a character in the story you identify with most? If so, who and why?
Guidanio is offered a prestigious position in Monticola’s court as a tutor for his sons. If you had been in his shoes, would you have accepted the offer?
Before the horse race, Adria thinks, Men—or women—cannot control the world. Do you consider this true?
We eventually learn how the feud between the Acorsi and Remigio families began. Did finding out the truth about the feud change your perspective on or opinions about Folco d’Acorsi and Teobaldo Monticola? If so, how did your views change? Do you think one is a good person and the other bad? Do you think the author is making a point about this and how we make our judgments?
What are your thoughts on this quote? “Even so . . . we do turn the page, and can be lost again. And in that deep engagement we may find ourselves, or be changed, because the stories we are told become so much of what we are, how we understand our own days.” Do the books you love become a part of who you are?
Guidanio’s journey has led him to meet many important leaders and figures. Do you believe that his experiences with men such as Monticola, Folco, and the duke of Seressa were by chance, or have Guidanio’s own choices led him to these moments? Could it be a mixture of the two? Does this apply to everyone’s life?
