When I nodded he walked there and picked two sticks, giving me one. "Now imagine you are him," he said, and placed himself in front of me. "We were in what fencers call a misura larga, which is simply the distance from your opponent in which you can touch him with a lunge. It is a very dangerous place, where you do not want to stay too much, because the more you stay there the more are the chances you will get wounded or killed and vice versa. Better be a bit more distant and safer."
Girolamo extended his arm with his stick and let stay it a little out of the line of his body. "I did something even riskier at this point, what we would call an 'invitation' as my arm was not protecting my right flank and the center of my body; I was basically baiting him to attack there. I was not truly expecting him to attack, because he should have known I was setting a trap. I was expecting a false attack followed by a true lunge somewhere else, and I was ready to parry the true attack with my dagger. Instead he went ahead and simply lunged in the area I left unprotected. I do not know what he was thinking. When he lunged," he signaled me to do it, "in the time it took for his point to arrive close to my body, I had all the time to parry with the shell of my sword and place my point right at his throat like this." I felt the point of the stick right at the base of my neck, a few fingers below my Adam's apple. "Then I moved my rear foot back, brought my torso forward and my sword went through the base of his neck all the way. He was unconscious before hitting the ground, and died shortly thereafter. There was nothing the surgeon could do. Such a shame."
"You feel sorry about it, don't you?" I asked, lowering the cane.
"Of course I do. No one sane of mind likes taking a human life, especially like this. It should have not happened."
"Why?"
"Because at the core of fencing is the art of defense, the skill of hitting someone without being hit back. There was no way he could have lunged so openly without being hit. He took a chance. And he could only have won if I had fallen asleep, because any trained swordsman who is fully awake could have stopped his attack without blinking. What a waste. This is fencing; you do not take those chances."
"It is almost like you regret it. Maybe there is some good quality in you after all."
"Oh don't get me wrong, I am glad to be alive, glad to be running while his body is probably in the ground now. And I know it sounds stupid, because, after all, I was there to kill him. I just wish. . I just wish he had not wasted his life so foolishly."
"And then what happened?"
"Oh, then things started going downhill pretty fast. The surgeon no sooner declared Vorhauer dead than one of the seconds jumped onto his horse and rode belly down toward town. I knew then I had to leave and fast. It took me four days to make it back here. I mostly rode at night on back roads and across fields. I imagine his family pressed charges against me and I am surprised no agents have showed up yet; they knew my name and the fact I was coming from Grantville. This is why, Johannes, I have to run now. You never saw me."
"Where are you going now?"
"I won't tell you now." Master Girolamo got up, picked up the few personal objects left to pack and began stuffing them in his pack. "However one of the things I learned from the Americans is that in a crisis there is also deep opportunity. And I learned about the Risorgimento, the resurgence. Interesting people would live in the peninsula 200 years from now according to the stories of another universe. So I guess it is time we find another Garibaldi and Mazzini." He grinned.
"For now I will cross the Alps and then we will see. There are plenty of good causes to be picked back in Italy. If Germany can become one under the Americans, we can't let them have all the fun. You never know, you may hear about me sooner than you expect," he said and then started singing some uptime lyrics.
O mia Patria, si bella e perduta!
O remembranza si cara e fatal!
Still humming the motive of this aria, Master Girolamo gave me a rough embrace and left the house. Riding into the sunset the Americans would say. Of course, that night it was more like riding into the moonset.
Yesterday I received an anonymous letter with a very familiar handwriting that said Master Girolamo was across the Alps.
Before he departed, Master Girolamo left instructions on how to handle the company and the rest of the investments. And I now know where to send the dividends, which, based on the orders we have in hand, should be significant.
Master Girolamo also said I should inform you of what occurred as soon as I knew that he was safe, and that every communication to him will have to be addressed to Giuseppe Verdi. Witness that this letter accomplishes that.
Please let me know if there is anything I should do for either you or Master Girolamo.
With the greatest respect,
Johannes Fichtold
Giacomo lowered the pages. "Girolamo, Girolamo, always a bit too ready with the point and the edge. And once again you are leaving everything behind while you ride away from trouble."
He looked up to see Elizabeth looking at him. "Did I ever tell you how he came to join me on my quest to Grantville?"
Elizabeth smile. "More than once. I guess once a duelist, always a duelist."
"Maybe so," Giacomo said. "Maybe so. But I fear for whomever will try to stop that gentleman. Or maybe we need to learn to call him Verdi."
Elizabeth laughed, looked around, and said, "Everything's ready. Let's eat." She went to call the children.
Giacomo folded the letter and tucked it in an inner pocket of his doublet. He then crossed himself and muttered a quick prayer for the safety of his friend. "Not that I doubt his ability to keep himself safe, you understand," he said at the end of the prayer. "But as many risks as he takes, he could use some extra protection."
He crossed himself again as the children ran in.
After the Ring: A Musical Perspective
Introduction
What will music be like after the Ring of Fire? That was the question I set myself some months back when Paula Goodlett asked me for a panel topic for the 1632 mini-con at WorldCon in Chicago in 2012. The previous couple of years I had done a presentation on how down-time musicians might have reacted to 369 years of musical development being dumped in their laps all at once in 1631. But this new question would require me to do some forecasting-some extrapolation-to arrive at a presentation. But I managed to do so, and I made a presentation at WorldCon that seemed to be well received.
When I got done building my presentation file, I had about twenty minutes of musical clips for a presentation time allotment of 70 minutes. I was actually a little worried about whether I had enough. As it turned out, there was so much audience participation that I actually had to skip a few of the samples at the end because we were running out of time.
The Editorial Board plan was for my presentation to be video-recorded and posted on YouTube. Unfortunately, we had technical difficulties, and my session was one of the ones that didn't get recorded. But Paula and I had a conversation afterward, the net result of which is I am going to attempt to recreate the experience of the presentation in a narrative form.
Unfortunately, not only did the video not happen; I also managed to lose my only copy of my crib sheet with its very abbreviated hand-written speaker's notes. That means I'm trying to reconstruct this from my totally fallible memory as I listen to the audio track. Those of you who were at the presentation may therefore notice some slight differences in remarks or in sequence of clips because of that. But one way or another, the presentation went sort of like the following.