1: The Origins of the Infamous Comedians
Take whatever image you might have of a quaint vinyard-shaded villa, gnarled old olive and fig trees, fountained pools stocked with rust-colored fish. Lift it, gently, from the ground, allowing the concave bowls of uprooted stony soil to molder and erode for a few thousand years, fuzzing over with moss and flowers.
Now, frame everything with the facade of the old manor house, the wall ripped out. In order to get the destruction right, the architectural shearing away of sections like a cubist's foreshortening, you would have to know, or sense, how a villa, with its attached outbuildings, had been constructed with some combination of living and dead apergic, or anti-gravitational wood. The local reversal of gravity is a combination of fungus and algae that doesn't exist in your dimension. It can live symbiotically in trees or unsustainably in the wood after lumbering and carving, the buoyancy period extended through trade secrets trapped in lacquer.
Everything was canted, collapsing, or on fire, the sky striated with skeins of black smoke. Trellised rotundas, gazebos, gondolas, all the networked bridges and gardens lay dead like ships at the bottom of the sea. The main hall itself was expected to touch the earth at any moment, for the first time in centuries. The battle line had swept over the ancient villa, as well as the small village of Torn to which it was attached, finishing off the damage from garrisoning the Papal regiments, their engineers having stripped the vinyards of all the floated flora and fauna that could be fed into their flying engines of war.
The proprietor of the villa, the future Dottore, is standing by a grand piano. The Harlequin has come in and is lurking unnoticed by the bookshelf, still holding the playbook with the lazzi. She is tearing the pages out, one by one. The page that says The Harlequin leaps onto the stage flutters by his ear at the precise moment the bottom-most point of the main villa crunched into nest of dead grape vines and salted soil, sending both of them flying towards the open, broken, wall and window.
Since you won't believe me anyway, I might as well admit that I'm making most of this up, and we can change the story to make it more interesting, or nestle up to the contours of a given genre. For this section you can imagine an adjustable slider bar for understated or over-the-top action. Not, however, violence. For now, this is my novel, and I won't have it to soaked in blood or littered with mangled or dismembered limbs. War and brutality are the backdrop, not the story itself, and almost all combat will be staged, which is to say fake, and performative.
The universe, though (multiverse, actually, as this is one of a series of inter-connected worlds), has antigravity, floating islands of improbable ecology and architecture, so we might as well play up the Harlequin's acrobatic prowess, despite her age and injuries. You're probably getting bored, anyway, with all this backstory, so:
The inverted cone shape of the colonnaded villa, with its attached peristyles, porticoes, and loggias, crunched down into the salted trenches of the dead plum orchard, sending everything sailing towards the broken wall of windows, the draperies and copper foiling and spiky armatures that had lost their grip on stained scenes of glass. Books, busts, telescopes and reliquaries made a moving field of obstacles for the diving Harlequin, who had used her stage-honed instincts to launch herself towards the floundering Graziano, the wine-merchant's son.
Make it as chaotic, disruptive, destructive as you need it to be. All the things that you and I expect out of this act of reading, this collision and cross pollination of our mental worlds, send them tumbling to the void. The Harlequin will save us. She tucks and bounces off a diagonal divan, and wraps the rope from a thermal curtain around her wrist as she skirts the jagged, glass-toothed maw of the ruined wall, then grabs the future Dottore just as the cord pulls taut, barely extricating him from the path of the piano as it strikes its fateful finale, all notes at once, strings and hammers and ivory keys exploding into discordant shrapnel.
The heavy carpet sloughed and slid, pushing them like a wave over the edge of broken wood and glass. You can leave them hanging there for a while, if you want, swinging back and forth like a pendulum of a grandfather clock, rendered irregular by the updrifts of gravity, and the centrifugal push of the skyland spinning like a top, slamming them against stones veined with roots and jasmine.
They were both clammy with sweat and trauma, near-delirious from six days and nights of debauchery and drinking. Heat rose from the baked earth, mingling with the chill from the apergic vines and roots. The sun had set, turning everything the color of roses.
Look, don't assume anything about what these two characters think and feel about each other based on what you know about the author. They were masks and archetypes long before I planted them in his mind, and he knows more than to trap them in some conventional romantic plot. Graziano looked at the haggard face of Lucrezia, grimacing from strain, and felt awe, but also anger, because he had wanted to die. His life of profligacy and privilege had ended no less abruptly and completely than the acrobat's career.
This book isn't about their love, but about the art that it would eventually produce. The greatest show. It would be that, not the Harlequin, that saved him.
Spavento fell from the sky in smoke and fire, his ears ringing.
For three years he had been carried, as a conscript, on one of the empire's largest citadels, over the Balearic and Tyrrhenian sea, to join forces with the mercenaries and zealots loyal to the Spanish crown, plowing north into the papal territories, sowing them with blood and terror.
He went from a farm boy, staring wide eyed at the wonders of the world beyond the hills where he tended goats and chased amorous maidens, to a scarred and scouring veteran, grizzled beard covering his dark face almost up to his haunted eyes, matted hair pushed under his dented and blood-stained helmet. Barely twenty years old, his muscles were hardened from lifting the ballast ropes and sails, his spirit blasted from military drills and horror.
Spavento was, in a way, already becoming the comic mask of the Captain, the soldier who hid his cowardice behind impossible boasts and braggadocio. His moral failure, though, his consuming hatred of himself to be expressed in slap-stick violence, didn't come from running away from battle, but by being carried into it, turned into an instrument of death and mutilation, without finding the courage to throw himself from the flying island spewing cannon smoke and blades.
When he did fall, then, after locking eyes with the ascensionist whose ankles, had he not hesitated, he could have dagger-sliced, he didn't feel fear, but relief. He wouldn't be forced to kill again, to know the thoughts and feel the pain of the men whose flesh he cut and mangled.