1 Soul Bound
1.3 Making a Splash
1.3.2 An Allotropic Realignment
1.3.2.15 those moments lost in time, like tears in rain
The widow was animated now, almost brought back life, her eyes young again. Eyes that saw again her husband beaming with pride over the bound pages of his newest book.
Kafana: “Do you still have a copy?”
Manutius: “You’d like to see it? Yes, certainly! We keep the proof copy of every edition we’ve ever published, in our stores.”
She led them past shelves stacked with supplies and formes waiting to be printed. Each forme consisted of a sturdy metal frame containing the woodcuts and galleys of 4, 8 or even 16 pages, carefully spaced out by wooden blocks and held tightly in place with metal quoin clamps. On the same wall as the shelves, a pair of arches led into a large space and she caught a glimpse of presses, surrounded by groups of workers, as she passed. Manutius led them on, to a heavy oak door in the far wall that was firmly closed.
It didn’t have a handle or keyhole, but it did have three brass wheel rims exposed, on which had been engraved letters from many alphabets. A combination lock, back in the 1600s? She saw Kafana’s expression, and responded proudly.
Manutius: “Our Master Cardano is a man of many talents. He also created a device to keep his coffee safe, that he calls a gimbal suspension, and a special gearing that lets our press print copies twice as fast. You won’t see a lock like it elsewhere. It avoids keys being lost, and thieves lack the learning needed to crack the code.”
She pointed to where a picture hung beside the door. A staff was thrusting phallic out of a wind-raked sea, and twin leather strips unwinding from it became amorously entwined serpents that dived into the depths.
[Quest accepted: “Hermeneutic Housebreaking” - Capponi is curious about the storeroom at the Aldine Press. Find the code word, and let her in. Difficulty: F]
Bulgaria recited: “Lir the lucky, second-born son of mighty Mor, did both opportunity and Hermes take, and make, sad poetry of tragic temptation, embodied in the body of his newborn son’s brief mortal span, sweet Rán.”
[Quest update: “Hermeneutic Housebreaking” you have found the code word.]
The widow looked approvingly at Bulgaria, and set the dials to “r”, “á” and n”. With a push the door swung open, causing the dials to smoothly spin back to their neutral position.
Kafana looked worriedly at Bungo: {We’re not really going to tell Capponi are we, even if she did help guard us at the Arsenal?}
Bungo: {Nah, we’ll cash it out now.}
A moment later, as Manutius led them inside a windowless room lit by lanterns, she received a message:
[Quest terminated while incomplete. No items, skills or monetary reward gained.]
*ding* [Your party’s reputation with Poets has increased by 10.]
Poets?
Kafana: {Bulgaria, maybe you should have asked Master Poet Moschus for help? He owes us a favour.}
Bulgaria: {That hack? Have you read his stuff? No, I have taste. If I were going to call in a favour, I’d have asked Signora. A little piece of gossip I picked up is that she writes herself, until the name of “Anaxilla”.}
Bungo: “Hang on. How did Hermes have a child with Lun who is a goddess in one story, and with Lir who is a son in another? Did the Hellenic writers just make this stuff up?”
Manutius was putting a pair of very thin gloves made from the belly hide of young goats, over the fragile skin of her age-worn hands, but she answered Bungo readily enough.
Manutius: “Interesting question. The Sagist theory (favoured by historians) is that, yes, two authors both made up stories about a legendary figure, and then a later author resolved the conflict by adding in the detail that Hermes had the sexual organs of both genders.”
Bungo: “Boring. There’s an alternative?”
Manutius nodded, taking out a book and laying it on a table, then turning the pages slowly so Kafana and Bulgaria could admire them.
Manutius: “The Ránist theory (favoured by poets) is that each time a Legendary figure is reborn, they change a little. The destined trajectory of their lives is altered by the beliefs people held about them at their rebirth, affected by the stories that have spread. So, even if they didn’t start as the children of the prime deities, it became true once people believed it so, resulting in the powers and skills of those reborn legends increasing to match their new role and parentage.”
Tomsk: “I can see why poets would like that. A poem would become true, because of its beauty.”
Bungo: {It might be the correct theory. If the game only fills in backstory when it needs to, then they’d pick whichever version of a Legend made for a better quest for players, based on the information available when the decision needs to be made. In fact, if we turn out to be the first group of players to ask about this, our next words might determine which the game picks.}
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
Kafana had been looking at the pages, her eyes increasingly widening, and only half heard the discussion. The images were beautiful yes, but…
She raised a hand to halt the turning, pointing to a very detailed woodcut of a chariot, no doubt full of hidden meaning. It was no Tarot card, however. The charioteer was stark naked, and the chariot was being pulled by two equally naked figures, a male and a female covadan bound by rope, who the charioteer was birching as they pulled it through the brambles of an uneven forest path. Not even the decorative details on the 8-spoked wheels of the chariot could distract from the tormented expressions on the faces of the figures.
Kafana: “Um, it's a little racy, isn’t it?”
Manutius sounded gleeful in her reply: “More than a little, and a good thing too. Else, when it became popular, guild master Hieronymus Scotus would have published an edition. As it was, he wouldn’t touch it lest he offend his traditionalist customers, who are still influenced by the Age of Priests when those idiots tried arguing that everything should be in its place, and the place of women was in the home, birthing children and raising them, no matter their calling or talents.”
Tomsk looked disgusted.
Tomsk: “Idiots indeed, when women here can fight as well as any man. What happened?”
Manutius: “They started with saying it was immodest for women to allocate stat points into strength, dexterity and constitution as those were virtues for manly warriors. It ended when they used a line from a book of collected sayings by Kukai the Peacemaker, claiming it supported the position that no wife should be of higher level than her husband.”
Bungo: “That’s ridiculous! People have a right to improve themselves.”
Manutius: “They were nearly successful. Many guilds were pressured into not offering apprenticeships to women. Only the Mages Guild was strong enough to refuse outright. And that’s when Petrarca made his discovery.”
Kafana: “The poet?”
Manutius: “Yes. He had the poor taste to fall in love with Laura de Sade, who was young, beautiful, and newly married to Count de Sade of Pentapolis. The love was unrequited. She stayed faithful to the Count, and he spent his life writing more than a hundred sonnets in her praise, culminating in an epic allegorical work which has cruel Love personified as Ishtar, leading a triumphal procession in a chariot, before being defeated in battle by prudent Chastity personified as Laura.”
Kafana: “Thus the chariot in Strife? Later poets referred back to Petrarca’s imagery, making Ishtar out to be crueler yet? Forgive me if I hope that doesn’t affect her next incarnation.”
Manutius handed her a book from her own pocket, a collection of Petrarca’s works.
Manutius: “I wouldn’t worry about it. The point is that Petrarca was tormented by the love he felt that wasn’t returned. He couldn’t bear to be near her, nor long parted from her. So he became a wanderer, travelling to distant cities and devoting himself to scholarship. And it was on one of these travels that he picked up a much older edition of the book about Kukai. He discovered that the line being used by the patriarchal Priests hadn’t been said by Kukai at all. It was a commentary added as a gloss, that some low level scribe had carelessly copied along with the original lines above and below the gloss.”
Bulgaria: “Thus the wisdom of ‘make haste slowly’. Hundreds of years of oppression is a heavy price to pay for not taking the time to have an editor double check the scribe’s accuracy.”
Manutius: “And now you’ve praised the importance of my job, I suppose you’d like me to check over this play you’ve written, hmm?”
She didn’t sound quite so adamantly opposed this time, though it was clear Bulgaria still didn’t have enough reputation with her. Kafana leafed through the small book, as Bulgaria took a different tack.
Bulgaria: “Perhaps on another occasion. But your time is valuable, and we turned up unannounced. Too many still do not value women as they should, even when the woman in question is a high master, runs a successful business and is also a poet in her own right. They dismiss art touching upon matters of the heart as the ‘writings of whores’, and look the other way when female authors are murdered.”
Tomsk: {What do they expect will happen, when they tell women to put their stat points into intelligence and charisma, and then give them little to do except stay at home? When only nobles and courtesans wishing to pass as nobles receive education, of course many of them became poets.}
Tomsk: “Poetry is the language of love, and a man who cannot speak it fluently is but half a man. But you speak of Lady Morra from Castle Valsinni?”
Bulgaria nodded.
Tomsk: “I saw her mentioned in old case files Lelio lent me. Her brothers swore she deliberately drowned herself in a river, and the Watch Captain at the time dismissed it as being outside his jurisdiction. We could investigate, though I’m not sure what evidence would remain after all these years.”
[Quest accepted: “Vale Valsinni” - talk to Siri, the turbid river of an infernal valley surrounded by lonely and dark woods, to find Lady Morra’s missing body: Difficulty C.]
Tomsk, oh Tomsk. So split between stern warrior and laughing lover. Would he ever pick between them?
She read on, her attention increasingly locked upon the page, and was surprised to realise she was reciting the second half of one of Petrarca’s sonnets out loud:
> Love found me all disarmed and found the way
>
> was clear to reach my heart down through the eyes
>
> which have become the halls and doors of tears.
>
> It seems to me it did him little honor
>
> to wound me with his arrow in my state
>
> and to you, armed, not show his bow at all.
She finished the last line looking directly at Tomsk. Tomsk, wearing a sword at his side. Tomsk now also wearing an utterly stunned expression upon his face.
All conversation halted as the others looked at her, then at Tomsk, and then back at her again.
[Skill “Aura of Power” has reached level 15.]
Maledetto! Blast! She swore silently as she realised she hadn’t turned her aura off. It was strong magic - an unfair advantage. She’d never meant to use it against Tomsk.
What had she done?