City of Stars (3 page)

It was always a mistake to defy Russell. He laughed unpleasantly.

‘I bet I do. I bet that's why you like going there. They've probably started hitting on you. And you're probably glad. After all, no bloke would ever look at you. Unless he was drunk and on a bet.'

He was wandering round her room, picking up her things and putting them down carelessly. Georgia inched round till she had her back to the chest of drawers, shielding the winged horse from his gaze. She was going to have to hide it; it was too precious to let Russell get hold of it.

‘Actually, that's not a bad idea,' he was carrying on. ‘Why don't you put up the money to get one of my friends hammered? And for a bet, to give you one? It'd be better than riding.'

Georgia clenched her hands. A wild rage was building inside her and she wanted to hurl herself at Russell and pound him with her fists, even though she knew she would just look ridiculous against his bulk.

Just then, the phone rang and Russell went off to answer it. She heard the casual supercool tone he adopted when talking to his friends. Georgia leapt to her door to lock it. Her hands were shaking. There was no way she would go back out to clean her teeth tonight; she would just go to bed and risk the plaque.

Cesare took his lunch out to the stable, relieving Paolo from guard duty. He stroked Merla's nose and spoke soothingly to her mother. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘We'll soon have you safe. No one will take your foal.'

He propped his back against a post and stretched his legs out in the straw. The grey cat emerged from nowhere and pushed her way on to his lap, purring and thrusting her wedge-shaped head into the hand holding his bread and cheese.

Georgia lay on her back in the dark, tears seeping out of the corners of her eyes and trickling down into her ears. She was clutching the flying horse. She had never been as unhappy as this. Even when her baby brother had died and her dad had disappeared and her mum had cried all the time, Georgia had not been miserable herself. She had been a kid then and more concerned about whether there would be cake at tea-time and what to call the new doll Mum had given her when Ben was born.

But now her life was a nightmare. She had few friends at school; most of the girls she had known at primary school seemed to have moved on in their lives. There was only one new girl, Alice, who seemed as if she might turn into a real friend. Russell was right in a way – Georgia was retarded, socially. She didn't get asked to parties and she knew that the in-crowd in her class went to pubs and clubs at the weekends – places she would never have got into. Even with make-up and a short skirt and heels and a top that showed her belly button. In the dark, Georgia managed a small smile at the thought.

And life at home had turned into one stratagem after the other to avoid Russell. But now keeping out of his way wasn't enough. He was actively seeking her out, never happy unless he was tormenting her. She simply couldn't carry on like this. If Mum wouldn't help her, she would have to run away.

Georgia fell asleep with the model of the flying horse in her hand, wishing she could find a place where horses had wings and she could fly away from her troubles for ever.

Cesare was dozing. It was the cat who woke him up. She suddenly tensed on his lap, sitting bolt upright, her fur sticking out in all directions and a growl rumbling in her throat.

He saw straightaway what had alarmed her. A boy, cowering in the corner, his eyes wide and terrified. Cesare leapt to his feet, amazed. He hadn't really believed that one of the Ram's enemies would send someone to kidnap Merla – least of all a skinny boy like a scared rabbit. But maybe he was just a spy?

Cesare stepped forwards and raised his fists.

‘What do you want?' he asked roughly. ‘You've got no business here – be off with you!'

Georgia understood nothing, except that she was in a stable. It was only the warmth and the familiar comforting smell of horses that was stopping her from screaming. She had no idea how she had got there or who the angry brown-haired boy was. He seemed to be deliberately blocking her view of something behind him. Something in his stance reminded her of herself shielding her ornament from Russell. Slowly she unclenched her hand that was holding the winged horse.

The boy gasped. And as he moved forward to get a better look, she saw behind him a miraculous creature that could have been the model for the horse in her hand. A beautiful coal-black foal with two small feathery wings folded at its shoulders.

Chapter 2

A New Stravagante

The two figures in the stable were frozen in time, each staring wide-eyed at a flying horse. Cesare relaxed a little. This strange boy, who didn't seem much of a threat, was obviously completely surprised by the sight of the black filly. But why then did he hold a model of her?

‘Where did you get that?' he asked.

‘Where am I?' asked Georgia at the same time.

It was such an odd question that Cesare forgot his own. He took a closer look at the boy. He was very odd indeed. His clothes for a start were made of some fine material such as only a rich merchant would wear in Remora, but they were baggy and shapeless without any grace of design or ornament, like something stitched together by the humblest of peasants. Yet he wore precious silver in his ears, like a young prince, and on his brow – something Cesare had never seen in Talia. It was all a riddle. Especially his not knowing where he was.

‘How did you come here, if you don't know where you are?' asked Cesare.

Georgia shook her head. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘One minute I was in my bed in London, the next I was here in this stable. But it's not part of the stables I go to. I don't know any of these horses. Especially that one. But she's a real wonder, isn't she?'

Cesare recognised a fellow-enthusiast. He let Georgia move closer to the little filly. Surely, this strange boy who loved horses wouldn't harm her?

‘And yet you carry her image,' he said. ‘It is surely too much of a coincidence that you should arrive in the Twelfth of the Ram within hours of her being born, if you didn't know she was here.'

‘But I didn't,' said Georgia. ‘How could I? I mean, horses with wings aren't real. They just don't happen.'

‘They do in Remora,' said Cesare proudly. He couldn't help himself. ‘Only once a century or so – and this time the honour falls to the Ram.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Georgia. ‘I don't know what you mean by the Ram.'

‘Aren't you from Remora?' asked Cesare.

‘No,' said Georgia, ‘I told you. I live in London, in Islington.'

Then, as the boy still looked blank, she added, ‘In England. You know – Europe, the earth, solar system, the universe,' the way she used to write it in her schoolbooks.

‘Anglia?' said the boy. ‘But you are in Talia now. In Remora, its most important city. How could you have come here without knowing it?'

He looked closely at the boy to see if he was lying. Then he noticed his swollen eyes and the dirty tracks of tears down his face and felt ashamed. Something had made this lad desperately unhappy. He was only a year or so younger than Cesare but the Talian boy couldn't ever remember being so unhappy that he had cried like that.

‘Is there something wrong?' he asked awkwardly. ‘Has someone been hurting you?'

And then it all came flooding back to Georgia. Russell's bullying, her feeling of being trapped in her room, her longing to escape to a world where horses could fly. Maybe she was back in the time and place where the Etruscans lived? What was that called – Etruria? But the boy had said Remora, in Talia, and she hadn't heard of either of those places. She closed her eyes wearily. Perhaps when she opened them again he would have disappeared, along with the miraculous filly and the whole stable?

What happened instead was that a big, grey-haired man, so similar in appearance to the boy that he must be his father, came into the stable and looked at her in amazement.

‘Who's this, Cesare?' he asked abruptly, but not unkindly.

‘I don't know,' said Cesare truthfully. ‘He was suddenly just – here.'

‘I'm Georgia O'Grady,' she said, realising that Cesare had no idea she was a girl.

‘Giorgio Gredi,' said the man, and Georgia realised that she had again been mistaken for a boy. But there was no chance to put it right now.

‘I am Paolo Montalbano, Horsemaster of the Twelfth of the Ram,' said the man formally. ‘And you seem to have met my son, Cesare. Now please tell us what you are doing here.'

*

In another stable in the city less than a mile away, a new groom was being introduced to his charges.

‘And this,' said Riccardo, ‘is Benvenuto, our choice for the Stellata.'

The new groom cast an appraising eye over the bay. He scratched the horse between the ears. He was enjoying being back among animals; it had been unnatural in Bellezza with nothing to ride. In fact he was glad to turn his back on the whole poncy, trumped-up city, with its elaborate life-style and its crazy worship of its woman ruler.

Enrico was off women; give him horses any day. His one serious relationship had led to disaster: his fiancée had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, run off with another man, as he now suspected. But her father had given him half the dowry anyway, and his old employer, Rinaldo di Chimici, had paid him handsomely for services rendered in Bellezza. Enrico didn't really need this job in Remora.

But spying was in his blood. And he was coming closer to the beating heart of the di Chimici family. His new employer was the Pope, Rinaldo's uncle, member of the senior branch of the family. And Enrico's job, nominally to work in the stables of the Twins, was really to ensure that their horse won the Stellata, by whatever means necessary.

‘
Siamo a cavallo
,' he said softly to Benvenuto. ‘It's in the bag,' and the horse whickered back.

*

It was about halfway through Georgia's story that the Montalbani, father and son, realised their intruder was a girl. ‘But why do you dress as a boy?' asked Paolo.

Georgia looked down at what she had on – grey tracksuit bottoms and a baggy T-shirt – her usual nightwear. She shrugged.

‘This is the sort of thing boys and girls both wear where I come from,' she said.

‘Girls wear pantaloons?' said Cesare, disbelievingly. ‘And they cut their hair like that?'

‘Not all,' admitted Georgia, running her hand across her spiky head. ‘But they do all wear pant ... I mean trousers. Jeans, usually, during the daytime, leggings or tracky bottoms at night.'

Then she had a thought. ‘It's not night-time here, is it?'

For answer, Paolo threw open the stable door and the bright sunlight flooded in. The cat strolled over to the doorway and started washing her ears in the sunshine. Cesare gasped. Georgia saw that he and his father were both staring at her open-mouthed, amazed by her all over again.

‘What?' she asked, feeling very self-conscious.

Cesare pointed behind her. ‘You haven't got a shadow,' he said.

*

After his courtesy visit to the Twins' stable, Niccolò di Chimici crossed the city to the Twelfth of the Lady. His route took him into the no man's land of the Strada delle Stelle, which ran from the Gate of the Sun in the north of the city to the Gate of the Moon in the south. It was a broad thoroughfare, wide enough for two horse-drawn carriages to pass one another. At the halfway point, the centre of the almost circular city, lay the Campo delle Stelle, the spacious round Piazza, divided into fourteen sections, where the annual Race of the Stars was run.

Niccolò paused on the edge of it, surveying the bustling life of the Campo. In the dead centre was the fountain with its circular stone parapet which provided the best view of the race. Rising up out of the fountain, surrounded by its spouting fish and its marble nymphs with overflowing water-pots, was a tall slender column, little more than a pole, surmounted by the figure of the wild lioness suckling Remus, founder of the city, and his twin brother Romulus, who had wandered further south and set up the rival city of Romula.

The houses around the Campo and the grand Palazzo Papale where Niccolò's brother Ferdinando lived all had elegant balconies overlooking the racetrack. In a few weeks' time every balcony would be draped with the colours of the Twelfth they supported – white and rose for the Twins on the Papal balcony, green and purple for the Lady, red and yellow for the Ram ... Niccolò ground his teeth at the thought of the Ram.

‘Some refreshment for your Grace?' said a bold stallholder, coming up to the Duke with a tankard of iced lemon sherbet.

It was a timely interruption and Niccolò drank deeply, tossing the man silver far in excess of the cost of the sherbert. Then he paused to wonder if he should have been so reckless. He didn't normally eat or drink anything outside his family's palaces, where he had tasters to check for poison; he was getting careless in his old age. But today he was lucky – it was just a drink of lemons.

Niccolò crossed the Campo and plunged into one of the narrow passages on the other side that led to the main street of the Twelfth of the Lady.

‘Careless again,' he muttered, looking over his shoulder. But no assassin was following him and the Duke proceeded along the Via della Donna to the main Piazza of the Twelfth, passing many statues of the Lady, who in some places looked like an Eastern goddess, in others like the gentle mother of the baby born to be the world's king. The discrepancy didn't bother Niccolò. He was a Talian through and through and used to believing in two religions simultaneously, or at least paying lip-service to them.

He felt more at home in the Twelfth of the Lady than anywhere else in Remora. Its allegiance was given to Giglia, just as every Twelfth owed allegiance to one of the city-states that made up the country. So it was a little slice of the City of Flowers here in the City of Stars. Niccolò would have his money on the Lady's horse, even though his brother's household would of course cheer for the Twins'. That Benvenuto of theirs was a good-looking animal; it was time he visited the Lady's stable to see what his own people would be running.

*

Paolo was trickling the remains of Cesare's lunchtime ale into Georgia's mouth. She had gone very white and sat down suddenly in the straw when she saw that she cast no shadow.

‘What does it mean?' she asked now. ‘Does it mean I am not really here?'

‘In a way,' said Paolo seriously. ‘It means you are a Stravagante.'

This meant nothing to Georgia, but she saw Cesare making what looked like the sign of the cross, as if he had been told she was a witch or devil.

‘What shall we do?' he asked. ‘We can't hand her over to the authorities.'

‘Certainly not,' said Paolo calmly. ‘We shall merely get in touch with another Stravagante.'

‘How will we do that?' asked Cesare, clearly very worried. ‘Aren't they dangerous and powerful magicians in places like Bellona?'

‘Not necessarily,' said his father, smiling. ‘For example, I am one myself.'

Now it was Cesare's turn to sit down suddenly.

Georgia didn't know what a Stravagante was, nor how she and this broad-shouldered man could both be one, especially since he clearly did have a shadow. But she could see that Paolo's information had been a terrible shock to Cesare.

‘Come,' said Paolo. ‘It's time that you knew. I had been thinking of telling you for some time. Two of my brethren will be visiting here in the city in the next day or two and they will advise us what to do about young Georgia. In the meantime, we must find her some clothes that will make her less conspicuous.' He turned to Georgia. ‘But because of your hair, I'm afraid you must wear boy's gear. And you'd better continue to be Giorgio while you're here.'

‘That's all right,' said Georgia hastily. She dreaded to think what girls wore in this ancient-seeming place she had somehow fallen into – wimples perhaps, definitely corsets.

Cesare went off at his father's bidding to find her some spare clothes and Georgia went to take a closer look at the winged filly. She showed Paolo the model.

‘It's uncanny, isn't it?' she said. ‘It must have something to do with why I'm here.'

‘It does,' said Paolo. ‘It's a talisman. All Stravaganti have them. They're the key to travel between our worlds. But if I were you I'd keep it hidden. Particularly here in Remora. The city is a stronghold of the di Chimici and they are very interested in stravagation.'