Palimpsest

“I'm sorry!” he screams to the river. “Come back!”

But she does not, and he knows, now that his head has cleared itself with small and shameful ritual, that it is because he does not deserve it. He has not made himself worthy, in this place, of this Lyudmila. It was all right that he had kissed her-she was not his sister, not really and even so ghosts had no morality. But he had hurt her, and whatever the red stuff so like blood had been, he should not have spilled it. If one has the power, he thought, to make ghosts bleed, one must be careful with it, so careful.

He hears footsteps behind him, and whirls, expecting the usual city villainy-a knife, a gap-toothed lunatic. But it is just a sorrowful-looking man with glasses, soaked to the bone, his blue sweater leadened by rain. A carriage glides smoothly away above them, and Oleg blinks, baffled.

“Are you Oleg Sadakov?” the man says.

“Yes, why?”

“My name is Ludovico Conti. I came to find you.”

“I don't want to be found,” he snaps. But the man looks familiar, instinctively familiar, like one's own hand.

“Don't you remember?” Ludovico says softly, his voice all but blown into the clouds. “The frog-woman. The ink. The girl with blue hair. I know I'm not memorable, but…”

Oleg blinks again, his mind scrambling to assemble itself into a shape capable of understanding what he is being offered.

“The one with the bee stings sent me. Her name is November. She…she has access. To everything, it seems like. Anyway, I'm meant to tell you how to find us, in the real world, or, rather, the other world. I don't think it's any more real, not really… I don't suppose you enjoy medieval literature?”

Oleg shakes his head dumbly.

“Well, there's a book, like an encyclopedia. It's called the Etymologiae. And it's full of impossible things, really impossible, like griffins and phoenixes, right alongside ants and turtles and cities in Christendom. And I think this is like that. Palimpsest and the real world. An impossible beast sitting next to a possum. Or something like that.”

“Why do I need to find you?”

Ludovico looks up from under his lashes, as though he is afraid to give voice to what he knows.

“It would appear that is how we come here. Permanently. Emigration, you understand? The people we came with, if we can find them in the daylight, we can, somehow, be here for good, for all the time.”

Oleg reels. His heels slip in the beige mud, rendered impossibly silky and rich by the milky river. He sits down heavily in it, neither knowing nor caring.

“No,” he whispers. “I don't want to come here. Permanently. Forever. It's fine for people with access and green carriages. But I work in restaurants and hide under bridges. I hurt her and she'll never come back here. But maybe, in the real world-and it is more real, it has to be, it has to be—she'll come home, and forgive me, and it will be all right again.”

“Who do you mean?”

“My sister. Lyudmila. Only… she's not really my sister here. She's like her, but she isn't. She's a… I think she said she's a Pecia.”

Ludovico laughs, and it is a nervously genuine thing. He is warm, all of the sudden, in familiar territory. His laugh reverberates against the dark, wet stones, and the cockerels scowl on.

“Pe

cia? That means… well, I mean, it was a thing they used to do, when that book I mentioned was written. Instead of copying out enormous volumes they split it into pieces and sent it out to novices for copying. The originals were exemplars, the copied pieces were pecia. So I get it, actually I get what you're trying to say. She's a copy. Someone made a copy for you.”

“Well, I was rude to it. Her. And it left me, it jumped into the river and I don't know how to find it again. I have no interest in this place without her. So you'll have to get on without me.”

Ludovico lays his head on his shoulder and contemplates Oleg. Oleg is defiantly self-conscious, he knows he must look horrid, and his sneer of masked desperation has very likely turned his face into a small gargoyle.

“Shall we find her, then, you and I?” Ludovico says simply, as though offering to take him to dinner. “The river is vast, and if she went into it we may find her. If we are stalwart. And worthy.”

Ludovico holds out his hand, an oversized and graceless thing, and it is a long moment before Oleg takes it.

“I hope you don't have any qualms about stealing boats,” says Ludovico, and they move into the rain, the shallows, the curdling, splashing river. They pull clear the lines of a canopied summer ship with long, upturned ends sporting small wooden lynx-heads on either end. The canopy is probably blue when the sun shines, it is now a sodden, ugly black, its fringe gray instead of spangled. They are quiet; they are unseen. Ludovico gamely oars them onto the high, boisterous current, and Oleg slumps against a long box of frill-skirted children's swimming garments and fishing poles.

The moon shows hesitantly through the clouds and hides again, blushing furiously.

“We're in Rome, Oleg: 50 Via Manin Daniele. Find us. Please come.”

THREE