[Closed] (Memory )In the Garden of Arcane Delights (Nico)

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

A Garden at Brunnhold
The 60th day of Yaris, 2706, evening

S

he did not address his question, seemed to want to pass by the accident of her surname without comment. Let it pass, it was only a curious happenstance and nothing of consequence. Well, not unless he wanted to ask about the rumored increase in airship freight costs. Getting that intelligence would put him in good standing with Mother and Uncle Gian. It seemed to gauche to ask. There was every chance Niccolette had no more idea of the going rate for cargo than he had. Possibly less. And in this place, in the fading light, with its scruffy, overgrown hedges, business seemed a wholly uncongenial topic.

“I have been to Gior. Years ago. With my father. He was collecting glowworms that live upon the roofs of caverns in the south of country. I spend a lot of my time in dark caves, laying upon my back, watching the movement of the larvae above me. Like seeing ten-thousand years of the night sky changing overhead in the course of a single day. The unfixed stars.” ] He had been what, eleven or twelve then? Dragged off on an adventure during the holidays. The immensity of the place, the height of those sheer, freezing mountains, the thin chill air, even now he recalled them with unusual clarity. “Gior made me feel small, insignificant, superfluous. I don’t recall ever having felt so free, as though my actions counted for nothing at all. I should like to go back some day, to see if I can ever feel that way again. And to try more of the local cuisine. I had so little of it. All I recall now were these awful freeze dried potatoes, left to be preserved in the dry cold night air. They lasted forever and were filling, but not exactly what I would call pleasant.”

He would go back. Some day, when he was more himself. He had not felt quite himself for ten years. Living here was like trying to play a part that was too close to his own character for him to grasp. He would need time. Time along the canals and in the coffee houses and in the public squares. He might even tolerate the ‘gifts’ of the pigeons again. No. Never that. That could never be tolerated. Still, it might be the price of being home. That, and the stench from off the canals in the heat of summer.

He longed for home, yet this Niccolette would prefer to stay here, in Anaxas, with all its straight-laced, starched collar regimentation. A mystery. Yet her other desires, to be far away, to see strange countries, that he could appreciate with the ease of slipping into a bath of perfect temperature.

“Naulenon.” He let the word roll about on his tongue, tasting in it the strangeness of that distant place, the stories, the legends he never believed but desperately wanted to be true. “Yes, I too would like to see that. But in my heart and head, what I wish to see is Roannah. I want to see its desolation,stand among the cinders, and listed for the ancient words on the breeze.” He picked up one of his books, A Theory of Monic Semiotics and tapped the cover. “There is so much that has been lost, so much that we are barely piecing together. Uttering the prayers of decipherment and returning only more questions. That is another form of mystery I enjoy, though on a rather different level.” Those mysteries he had loved since as a small boy he sat upon what was supposed to be a reproduction of a sorcerer’s bronze tripod seat, still hundreds of years old, and pretended to be some ancient scholar-magistrate among the antiques that were his family’s stock in trade.

He took another drink of the wine, rather a large one, truth be told, felt the golden liquid flow into his veins. It loosened his tongue, gave fire to his thoughts. “I sometimes think we are too respectful of the trappings of the past. They deserve respect, of course, but I fear too much romanticism has been dreamed up, too much of golden aged imagined. Those early sorcerers, did they think they were the end of magic? I doubt it. Perhaps they knew in their bones that it was only the beginning.” He raised his cup to the disheveled girl. “Forgive me, I am rather further gone than I had intended. Still I did come here to think these thoughts, even if I had not expected to share them.” The girl was still drunk, yet it seemed inhospitable, uncivilized, not to offer her a drink. Did he have another cup? No, of course not. He had not come here expecting company. He waggled the bottle in what he hoped was a friendly manner. Did he want her to accept or turn it away? There was no way of knowing. That was another mystery.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Evening, 60 Yaris, 2706
The Gardens, Brunnhold

Niccolette kept her gaze fixed over the darkening horizon of the lake as Umberto began to speak. It was well dark now, the last of the fading light gone from the horizon. She sat stiffly upright at first, but as he went on, she shifted, pulling her legs back and tucking them sideways beneath her, hands resting on her lap. Something like a tension eased out of her; the little flex in her field had faded, utterly and completely. She turned to Umberto in time, curiously, studying him as he spoke about Gior, about glowworm larvae, about preserved potatoes.

Niccolette sighed a little, and looked back out at the lake. She was not so sure she liked the idea of looking at glowworm larvae for hours on end or eating disgusting food, but she felt an odd, aching jealousy all the same. At least one could be bored seeing something different, Niccolette thought, staring at the water.

Niccolette glanced at Umberto again when he brought the subject around to Roannah. “Yes,” she agreed. “I should like that, I think.” Niccolette shivered. “It is hard to imagine, is it not? A place like this once, and now – nothing. It has all gone.” She did not sound afraid or upset – only curious.

Niccolette watched Umberto again as he spoke. He raised his cup to her, and she raised her eyebrows back at him. He offered her the bottle; Niccolette’s eyes dropped to it. She shrugged, took it from him, and tipped her head back for a swallow of wine. She lowered the bottle, returning it to him, and grinned, a flush rising in her cheeks.

“I quite agree,” Niccolette said, firmly. “Why should we have let them make our rules?” She lifted her chin, squarely, looking at Umberto. “Not only these early sorcerers, but everyone who has come before. They made a lifetime of choices, and those choices have become, for us, rules. We are asked to respect them only because they are old and dead! They should have to work for it, like anyone else.” Niccolette's eyes flashed, her small jaw set. “Some old scholar – he says – ah, you must cast the spell this way. And here we are, thousands of years later, and we cast the spell this way. He says, you must not do this, you must not do that – perhaps we do not know why, anymore, but we follow.”

Niccolette huffed out a little sigh. She flopped back, legs uncurling, utterly unheeding of any potential damage she might do to the supplies of the other student's picnic. She lay on her back on Umberto’s blanket, gazing up at the sky, hair spread about her head like a small, dark cloud. “The world is full of rules,” Niccolette said, staring up at the distant spread of stars, pinprick lights in the sky. “I despise them all.”

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

A Garden at Brunnhold
The 60th day of Yaris, 2706, evening

T

“here are,” he said, pouring more of the wine, “two kinds of rules, well probably a good many more, but for this evening, in this place, there are two kinds.” He gave the glass a thoughtful swirl. The color was hard to make out now in the gloaming. Just as well. Just one more obscurity to tack upon all the rest. “Those laid out for us by the thoughtless hoary-headed elders of bygone ages who wield tradition like a shield, that the rules we discover, which exist because the must. The universality of gravity, the motions of the heavens, the deep structures of language. If it has any deep structures at all, as the coming theory has it. I abhor the first and delight in the latter.”

To describe the world, to make it into something the mind could comprehend, it had to be partitioned in some way, made sense of. That did not make the models right, merely useful. Useful was a great deal better than right. He wasn’t sure he believed in ‘right’. Was not sure, but as the Nicco flopped about, now less, now more like a cat, and sent olives scattering like boules in the grass, he considered some customs, some decorum, might be useful after all. If it was at least described in terms of common courtesy.

He rescued a careering olive, flicked it upward, and completely failed to catch it. It rolled away, following the inexorable rules of gravity, friction, and whatever else governed the course of olives on their mysterious errands. Not the most elegant of actions, but a curse on elegance. This was not an evening for such things.

“Have you ever been abroad? I mean really abroad. Brunnhold hardly counts.” The red-stone island of scholarly retirement and meaningless custom was, he supposed, almost foreign to everywhere, and yet it too commonplace, too safe, too controlled to really qualify. It was like visiting a well-appointed fishbowl. “I can recommend some very nice towns in further Mugroba. Or rather I could, if they had bothered to have names. There was one is a little valley on the south coast with vineyards creeping up the hillsides that made an excellent, and rather nutty, local wine. We were there for the annual butterfly migration. Now there was a sight. The clear blue sky suddenly blotted out by swarms of equally blue-winged butterflies. When they came down to cover the trees on the more remote hills, it was like the sky itself had descended to sleep among the cypresses.”

He reached out for his books, flipped idly through one of them, never even bothering with the title. “It grows rather dark for reading. I will have to make my way home, if I am to get anything read by tomorrow.” With slow but deliberate motions be packed his now rather scattered dinner back into the small satchel he had brought. His formal picnic basket had gone missing and along with it another pointless gesture towards civility. “I should be off in the next half-hour, or there abouts. Can you make your way home on your own, or do you require a guide through this labyrinth?”

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Evening, 60 Yaris, 2706
The Gardens, Brunnhold

Niccolette huffed, still laying on her back against the other student’s blanket. “You are making an argument of semantics,” she told Umberto, faintly disdainful. Niccolette shifted; she settled her hands behind her head, one small ankle crossing over the other. She stared up at the stars above.

“Perhaps they are not so different,” Niccolette conceded a moment later. She looked away, because the stars had blurred, suddenly. She did not turn her face towards the dark-haired student sitting on the other corner of the picnic blanket; she stared off into the dark woods instead. “We must obey them all, in the end.” She swallowed a little. “Whether they are writ in the universe or in the minds of those who think they know best.”

Niccolette sighed; she closed her eyes for a long moment, and opened them again.

When Umberto spoke once more, Niccolette sat up again; she settled her feet flat on his blanket, this time, and curled her cheek against her knees, watching him. “No,” she said, quietly, in response to his question.

She listened; for once, she listened. Niccolette was quiet, a little frown on her face, trying to imagine. The south coast of Mugroba, she thought, shivering. It sounded like a dream. She watched Umberto, and she listened a little more. When he took out the book – when he said he would have to go – Niccolette made a startled little noise of disapproval.

“Oh,” she said, quietly. “Of course,” The Bastian looked down at her knees; long dark hair tumbled between them like a curtain. She sniffled; she pushed a heavy handful of it back off her forehead. “I shall find my own way,” Niccolette said, coolly. She rose, then, wobbling; she was no more cautious of the bits of Umberto’s picnic than she had been when sitting, or lying down. She stepped off the blanket, small bare feet wriggling into the grass. She looked about herself, and frowned, surveying the trees, and all the rest. She tilted her head up to look at the sky, as if it might tell her the way.

Niccolette looked back down at Umberto, sitting on the picnic blanket beneath her. The next half hour, he had said. Well, Niccolette decided, she would not wait; she would not let him dictate the time of her leaving. She had come on her own terms; she would go on them as well. It felt as if he had offered her a gift, with that description, only to snatch it back. It irritated; it itched, beneath her skin, and left her feeling aching and bitter. She lifted her small chin, peering down at the dark-haired Bastian sitting on his blanket.

“Farewell,” Niccolette pronounced. She turned, and marched off along the grass; all unknowing, she went entirely the wrong direction. If she had known, she would not have minded. It was her direction, at least, right or wrong; that, to her, was what mattered most of all.