Descending Star

TESSERACT

Gianna swept into Ben's guest chambers, shooed Jane from his breakfast, and congratulated him on the sizable dent he had carved into his pancakes, though she also fretted over his refusal to wash it down with the milk and juices.

She painted a determined smile on her face and informed him that the honor of his presence had been requested at an audience to be convened in his gracious hosts' Tasting Room. Ben asked Gianna if he had any choice, and the poor woman, taken aback, expressed incredulity that anyone would even think to decline the opportunity to commingle in comity with the munificent fathers of modern civilization.

"Won't you please consider taking a bath? I can run fresh water and bubbles."

"No."

"Then I beg you," she said, with an expansive gesture to the elegant ensembles she'd laid out, "please choose more appropriate garb."

"No."

Gianna huffed, "Very well. Come along. It will be my neck, you know."

To treat him to the full experience of wondrous Volterra, she led him on the scenic route, a grand arc of promenades that circumscribed the vast octagonal central courtyard, on a series of herringbone tiled pathways overshadowed by the towering flying buttresses. The marble lanes passed through glass atriums, some filled with butterflies, others stocked with fantastic aviaries of rare tropical birds, and between these fanciful crystal bestiaries stood the most grisly assemblage of topiary gardens, consisting of chained and immobilized humans mounted amid the sculpted evergreens, which grew among their live and fully aware forms, their branches and stems having spread organically below them, above them, and often even through them.

Some of these living sculptures could even speak, and the words that they uttered, as Ben and Gianna walked past, are best left unrepeated.

This cunning artistry failed to gain Ben Swan's appreciation, and he said so, pale with horror. Gianna conceded that Volterra rarely counted human boys among its honored guests, and she assailed the real and ongoing public relations challenges. Still, could he not appreciate the effort for its own sake?

"Just imagine the upkeep," she begged him. "Dozens of acolytes are kept at the gardens night and day, with their hedge clippers and shears. They have time for nothing else, the poor dears."

Ben replied by dry-heaving all over the herringbone tiles.

"Most of our visitors are duly impressed," she told him with determined obstinacy. "I'll tell you that for nothing."

Ben might have succumbed and dropped dead of his own distress, on the walk to the Tasting Room, had he not been rescued from oblivious Gianna by none other than Jane, who returned with Alec for support.

"Get thee hence, wench," said Alec. "Go clean the terrarium, before you make us cross."

Gianna knew better than to argue, when the twins were in a right state, and so she scurried away, muttering to herself, "I'm betrothed, and I'll be wielding the scourge around here, soon enough." Surely they heard, but they carried on with sanguine assurance that they had the run of the place and always would.

In response to Ben's astonishment, Alec sagely provided, "Rank has its privileges."

Ben followed Jane and Alec down a pretty lane decorated by jeweled snowflakes suspended on invisible tungsten wire, and they emerged into the central octagonal courtyard, from whence they crossed directly to the Tasting Room, which Gianna could have done all along.

"She knows the direct route, as well as any of us," Alec insisted, "but she takes guests the long way as though she owns the place."

"I still get lost," confided little Jane.