The Shade Trees of Lucca, Part 2 (Divine Comedy fanfiction: Virgil/Dante, R/NC-17)
Title: The Shade Trees of Lucca, Part 2
Fandom: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy; the setting here is post-Commedia.
Pairing: Virgil/Dante
Rated: R-to-NC-17 for poetically-rendered, explicit sexuality (M/M slash). Italian poets like to make love often (or, at least, write about it). Any questions?
Summary (Part 2): Virgil has been granted leave to visit Dante for three days and nights, as they have both missed each other sorely since parting near the top of the mountain of Purgatory. On the third night, they sleep outside, under one of the titular shade trees of Lucca. The next morning, they wake in time to witness a striking phenomenon of time-strata, and are able to visit the city of Lucca as it existed in Virgil's lifetime (1st century B.C.). Virgil gives Dante some explanation of how all this relates to their love for each other, and how love has broadened his horizons and given him a greater degree of freedom in the spiritual realm (including their ability to reunite on occasion).
Warning: In addition to the non-canon homoeroticism, the theology here is decidedly heterodox, if not outright heretical. Religious conservatives (and Dante purists) may well be outraged. Oh well. Love conquers all, and sometimes broadens the horizons of "virtuous pagans." There is also a rather speculative conceptualization of how time appears to, and is traversed by, discarnate souls on the "Other Side."
Disclaimer: All content of The Divine Comedy, and Dante and Virgil as literary characters, belong to the Estate of Dante Alighieri. I'm just in love with this pairing, and like to play with them now and again, without profiting from it in any way.
A/N: This is a sequel to my first Dante/Virgil fic, Thrice Purified, which is itself a sequel to a charming Inferno fanfic by mayhap called Matters Then Befitting Well. The present story deals with the unhappiness I experienced at age 11, when Dante and Virgil had to be parted near the end of Purgatorio, as Virgil was judged by Christian theology to be "unsaved", through no fault of his own (he died in 19 B.C., after all). I always thought this was very sad and unfair, after all they'd been through together. And so, after pondering this situation for over 35 years, I decided, "To heck with dogmas; these guys belong together!" Besides which, I decided that Virgil should be sprung free of his postmortem constraints in Limbo, and be free to wander the earth in various strata of time. Mind you, I have no idea what time and space look like to those who have departed; but I have been questioning many of our culture's notions and language about death and the afterlife since my Dad passed on in March 2009.
A/N 2: Dante's feelings of grief and letdown in Part 1 were inspired by my longtime sense of loss after the death of my all-time favorite singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, in August 1997. I have written elsewhere about my own feelings that something was missing everywhere I went, that pieces of life's puzzle or mosaic were, for me, missing key pieces or threads. Also, the unfolding time-strata scene is borrowed directly from a shamanic meditation I did relating to Nusrat, in which I witnessed a similar phenomenon occurring partway through this exercise.
Historical Note: Dante Alighieri did, in fact, spend time with wealthy friends in the city-state of Lucca during his exile from his native city of Florence. The city/republic of Lucca (the largest independent/extra-Roman republic in northern Italy) dates from Etruscan times, a couple of centuries before the Christian era, and still houses some Etruscan and Legurian architecture, to which I refer in Part 2 of this story.
*****
For three nights and days, then, Virgil lodged with me; and the world surrounding me revived in its color, its spirit, and its liveliness together with me. I became his guide through Lucca and its forests and plains, as he had once guided me through nether worlds. We strolled the streets side by side, as he chided my generation on our neglect of the art of road-paving. He would find shade trees some distance from the roads, and we would lie beneath the largest and most inviting one of their breed. Facing him, I would quote to him in Latin some passages from his own books, watching his eyes light up in recognition. Then he would repeat each one to me in Lombard, his own mother-tongue, his hand pressed to mine, as one vowing betrothal.
We ate, drank and read together through the next evenings; and throughout the second night, my body became again the book of verses my cherished guide had stored in his heart for more than a thousand years. He composed with his hands, his lips, his loins, his full being. And I--with my arms and heart and the core of myself inhabited by him--found myself inundated with words flowing up from every corner of my soul. Lines, stanzas, tomes of verses flashed through my mind with the force of thunderbolts, often faster than I could later write them down.
At sunset on the third night, Virgil bade me gather some bedding, and come outside with him to the shade of one of our trees, further on the outskirts of Lucca than I usually walked. As the sky lit up, then darkened, and the moon floated up from the forests to the east, our disrobing and lovemaking proceeded in silence and gentleness. He unwrapped me from my clothing as a woman unfolds linen from a lover's present, stroking and kissing my exposed skin as he went, after which I repaid him in kind, our heads--and soon enough, all ourselves--naked to the night sky. The sounds of breezes, birds, leaves and crickets were the chorus to which we composed, I knew, our last ballate di amore together (unless, reader, my sweet master could have leave to visit me again this side of my death). Though the air slowly chilled, Virgil's lips, hands, and flesh linked with mine easily kept me warm and light of heart; and we crested in enchanted pleasure at nearly the same moment.
I fell asleep soon enough in Virgil's arms, as I had done midway through the two previous nights. But it was not the birds, nor breezes, nor the dawning sun that woke me at that night's close, but my guide's whisper in my ear: "Look, Dante--but not at the sun, nor the amber sky; look at the slopes and fields, and the road we trod to our rest last night!"
I looked down the slope, but saw nothing at first but the play of sunlight and shadows, try as I might. But then, what I thought an illusion struck my eye as the lifting of the very ground from itself--slowly at first, and then faster in layers of earth lifting and dissipating into the air, as women lift newly cleaned blankets from dry grass! "What is this, and how does it?" I cried, when I could speak at all; and still the layers of grass, rock and soil folded, lifted themselves, and disappeared before our eyes. But Virgil merely laughed and kissed me, as though naught was amiss, or even singular.
"Now you see this country under some layers of time", he instructed me. "See the city where you have lodged, now in the time I walked the earth. See the homes, the ampitheater, the temples built by Roman hands; and the more ancient shrines of the Legures--all of them before your lords, before the saints, before the Christ"--here he leaned closer to my ear, half-whispering, "--and before Dante." Virgil rose to his feet and stretched his arms to the lowest branches of our tree. "This, my son", he continued, "Is the time and place to which your love has released me. Your heart, joined with mine, has lightened both heart and soul within me, so that I am locked no more in the gloom of Limbo, but am free to wander and lodge in the stratum of time which I inhabited bodily." At this, he pulled me to my feet, and handed me my garments while pulling on his own; then, lacing his arms about my neck, he half-chanted, smiling gaily, "Seggendo in piuma in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre1!"
Leaving our blankets under the tree, we proceeded toward the walled city that I had known, and where I had lived, now a smaller republic by comparison, in the scene before me. I hesitated at first to leave the spot where we had lain by night; but Virgil clasped my hand and led me on with reassurance, as he had done through our long journey of some months since. There were houses, and official buildings, but none that I could recognize. Here, to the northeast, was the Etruscan ampitheater--quite new!--that lay near-ruined in a square, in the Lucca of my age. And yet, the roads were laid through the town in a pattern nearly identical to those of my generation; and, indeed, of a far superior paving than that to which we were accustomed.
Still, I could not suppress the gnawing question, even as Virgil drew me by the hand toward the nearest wine-seller: "Dear master, I almost fear to ask; but how is it that we have entered Lucca as it was fourteen centuries before mine? Am I in a fever, or mad, or under some strange conjuration?" Virgil made no answer at first, but handed me a cup filled with wine of fine flavor, if less potency, than that of my age. With a knowing gaze, he pulled me down beside him on a long stone bench, taking a few draughts of his own cup, and stroking my shoulders with his free hand.
"My son, let fear pass. There is no evil spell afoot, nor madness, or fever. I have granted you a vision of time as it appears to me, and to all now discarnate. The pages of time are all present before me, like layers of rock within outcrops. Past and future are but pages to be turned, layers to be unearthed or laid as bricks on a wall are built or knocked asunder. In the span of a thought, I can traverse these layers from your age to mine, and to all ages before them, because your heart has lightened mine, and your affection has sparked the same within me. My mind is more at ease in your love, and my spirit dances. Thus, I thought it not amiss to show you the workings of time as we, untethered from time, see them."
I looked about, marveling at all that I saw and heard and felt. It was as if I had entered a story in the midst of composing it. The birds and frogs sang as they did when I lived and breathed; and the people looked much as those I was wont to see each day, though their speech was that of Legurian clans to the north. What I did not see was chapels and shrines of the Church; and in that was a great difference in all things. It made a variance in each soul about me, even in the air we breathed. The shrines of this generation housed gods of which I had only read, or heard, in scraps of books and crumbs of stones. Presences I knew not wisped through our breath and the wind, and applied the perfume of flowers offered them throughout this ancient city made young by the unpeeling of time.
"But these people seem to me alive, not as shades", I began to question Virgil again; but he only rose and took my hand again, once we had drained our cups. He strode with me toward the sounds of music coming from the ampitheater, his head thrown back, his laughing eyes taking in the noonday light, the cloudless sky, and all the sights and sounds of heathen Lucca. He was a thing of such beauty here that I could not have noticed through the dim lights of Limbo and Purgatory. How could I now let him part from me?
"They are indeed as alive as you, Dante", he replied, turning to me with a smile. "Not in your span of time, of course; but this is their sheaf of time in life, not death. Those spirits of this generation who can find their hearts lightened as mine by love may also be found freely visiting their span of time again, though they will not see nor sense their living selves here." I could not but with difficulty fathom this new teaching, but I vowed to write it down, should I arrive safe at home in my own age again, and meditate upon it until I understood it implicitly.
Soon, with all manner of cajoling, pushing, laughing and prodding, my master made me take part with him in the festivities of this people, now near the end of summer. We linked arms and joined in the harvest dance from the square through the streets, to the sounds of singing and tambourines. We garlanded houses and columns with flowers and green branches; we helped children make kites of linen scraps, and flew some of them from perches on the city walls. I would not enter pagan shrines; but waited outside them for Virgil to return from carrying in armloads of flowers and corn rigs with other folk as offerings of first fruits to their gods. Then we joined circles of celebrants feasting on fish, cakes and wine of flavors not already strange to me.
As our repast ended, I turned to my guide; and a sad chill overtook me, as I found his eyes looking past the raucous crowds to the sun, dimming to twilight, and the shadows stretching longer across the square. "I must take you home now, child", he muttered. "That is to say, to your own generation of this city." Virgil leaned toward me and pressed his face into the rich-scented flowers still wreathing my head. I then heard him whisper, "I cannot return with you; but I can also not part from you forever, for my heart is joined fast with yours. Should you be in desperation, I can be with you in a thought; but I can most readily rejoin you at the quarters of Nature's yearly turn." He stood, and helped me to my feet with our pairs of hands joined, adding, "Therefore, I can next come to you in a few months, at the time you call 'Eve of All Saints', and stay with you until the morning after your day of 'All Souls'." At this, he took a silver band from around his wrist, and placed it upon my own arm. On the same impulse, I took my ring of betrothal from my hand, and slipped it onto my master's corresponding finger. He kissed me quickly, then said, "Now come! We are nearly late returning to the tree."
It was well that we had left our bedding under the shade tree in order to recall it, for it was nearly dark when we reached our resting place again. Virgil pulled me down into a tight embrace upon the blankets, and we kissed and gripped at each other fiercely, as if wrestling for a purse of gold. After a time, I felt the kisses slow and grow deeper from one to the next, until there seemed to be nothing between our two forms, and then nothing separating our hearts or souls. I knew then, somehow, that he would be with me even beyond death, forever, and that all Heaven or Hell could not put us asunder.
The dew and first rays of the next dawn's light awoke me, still on my makeshift bed under the tree. I was alone, and yet my heart was full; Virgil's silver token still circled my wrist, and all seemed well with me. My beloved master was gone, and I was once more in the Lucca of Anno Domino thirteen-hundred-and-two; but I knew that its forebears were still alive alongside its current age, and likewise all veils of time yet to come. I gathered my blankets and walked slowly back to my lodgings, sweet-scented breezes glancing my cheeks all along the way.
*****
A/N 3: 1Virgil throws in one Dante quote under the tree where they camped out, to get the younger man up and about: Seggendo in piuma in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre: "Lying in a featherbed/Will bring you no fame, nor staying beneath the quilt (Inferno, Canto XXIV, lines 47-48)".
Fandom: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy; the setting here is post-Commedia.
Pairing: Virgil/Dante
Rated: R-to-NC-17 for poetically-rendered, explicit sexuality (M/M slash). Italian poets like to make love often (or, at least, write about it). Any questions?
Summary (Part 2): Virgil has been granted leave to visit Dante for three days and nights, as they have both missed each other sorely since parting near the top of the mountain of Purgatory. On the third night, they sleep outside, under one of the titular shade trees of Lucca. The next morning, they wake in time to witness a striking phenomenon of time-strata, and are able to visit the city of Lucca as it existed in Virgil's lifetime (1st century B.C.). Virgil gives Dante some explanation of how all this relates to their love for each other, and how love has broadened his horizons and given him a greater degree of freedom in the spiritual realm (including their ability to reunite on occasion).
Warning: In addition to the non-canon homoeroticism, the theology here is decidedly heterodox, if not outright heretical. Religious conservatives (and Dante purists) may well be outraged. Oh well. Love conquers all, and sometimes broadens the horizons of "virtuous pagans." There is also a rather speculative conceptualization of how time appears to, and is traversed by, discarnate souls on the "Other Side."
Disclaimer: All content of The Divine Comedy, and Dante and Virgil as literary characters, belong to the Estate of Dante Alighieri. I'm just in love with this pairing, and like to play with them now and again, without profiting from it in any way.
A/N: This is a sequel to my first Dante/Virgil fic, Thrice Purified, which is itself a sequel to a charming Inferno fanfic by mayhap called Matters Then Befitting Well. The present story deals with the unhappiness I experienced at age 11, when Dante and Virgil had to be parted near the end of Purgatorio, as Virgil was judged by Christian theology to be "unsaved", through no fault of his own (he died in 19 B.C., after all). I always thought this was very sad and unfair, after all they'd been through together. And so, after pondering this situation for over 35 years, I decided, "To heck with dogmas; these guys belong together!" Besides which, I decided that Virgil should be sprung free of his postmortem constraints in Limbo, and be free to wander the earth in various strata of time. Mind you, I have no idea what time and space look like to those who have departed; but I have been questioning many of our culture's notions and language about death and the afterlife since my Dad passed on in March 2009.
A/N 2: Dante's feelings of grief and letdown in Part 1 were inspired by my longtime sense of loss after the death of my all-time favorite singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, in August 1997. I have written elsewhere about my own feelings that something was missing everywhere I went, that pieces of life's puzzle or mosaic were, for me, missing key pieces or threads. Also, the unfolding time-strata scene is borrowed directly from a shamanic meditation I did relating to Nusrat, in which I witnessed a similar phenomenon occurring partway through this exercise.
Historical Note: Dante Alighieri did, in fact, spend time with wealthy friends in the city-state of Lucca during his exile from his native city of Florence. The city/republic of Lucca (the largest independent/extra-Roman republic in northern Italy) dates from Etruscan times, a couple of centuries before the Christian era, and still houses some Etruscan and Legurian architecture, to which I refer in Part 2 of this story.
*****
For three nights and days, then, Virgil lodged with me; and the world surrounding me revived in its color, its spirit, and its liveliness together with me. I became his guide through Lucca and its forests and plains, as he had once guided me through nether worlds. We strolled the streets side by side, as he chided my generation on our neglect of the art of road-paving. He would find shade trees some distance from the roads, and we would lie beneath the largest and most inviting one of their breed. Facing him, I would quote to him in Latin some passages from his own books, watching his eyes light up in recognition. Then he would repeat each one to me in Lombard, his own mother-tongue, his hand pressed to mine, as one vowing betrothal.
We ate, drank and read together through the next evenings; and throughout the second night, my body became again the book of verses my cherished guide had stored in his heart for more than a thousand years. He composed with his hands, his lips, his loins, his full being. And I--with my arms and heart and the core of myself inhabited by him--found myself inundated with words flowing up from every corner of my soul. Lines, stanzas, tomes of verses flashed through my mind with the force of thunderbolts, often faster than I could later write them down.
At sunset on the third night, Virgil bade me gather some bedding, and come outside with him to the shade of one of our trees, further on the outskirts of Lucca than I usually walked. As the sky lit up, then darkened, and the moon floated up from the forests to the east, our disrobing and lovemaking proceeded in silence and gentleness. He unwrapped me from my clothing as a woman unfolds linen from a lover's present, stroking and kissing my exposed skin as he went, after which I repaid him in kind, our heads--and soon enough, all ourselves--naked to the night sky. The sounds of breezes, birds, leaves and crickets were the chorus to which we composed, I knew, our last ballate di amore together (unless, reader, my sweet master could have leave to visit me again this side of my death). Though the air slowly chilled, Virgil's lips, hands, and flesh linked with mine easily kept me warm and light of heart; and we crested in enchanted pleasure at nearly the same moment.
I fell asleep soon enough in Virgil's arms, as I had done midway through the two previous nights. But it was not the birds, nor breezes, nor the dawning sun that woke me at that night's close, but my guide's whisper in my ear: "Look, Dante--but not at the sun, nor the amber sky; look at the slopes and fields, and the road we trod to our rest last night!"
I looked down the slope, but saw nothing at first but the play of sunlight and shadows, try as I might. But then, what I thought an illusion struck my eye as the lifting of the very ground from itself--slowly at first, and then faster in layers of earth lifting and dissipating into the air, as women lift newly cleaned blankets from dry grass! "What is this, and how does it?" I cried, when I could speak at all; and still the layers of grass, rock and soil folded, lifted themselves, and disappeared before our eyes. But Virgil merely laughed and kissed me, as though naught was amiss, or even singular.
"Now you see this country under some layers of time", he instructed me. "See the city where you have lodged, now in the time I walked the earth. See the homes, the ampitheater, the temples built by Roman hands; and the more ancient shrines of the Legures--all of them before your lords, before the saints, before the Christ"--here he leaned closer to my ear, half-whispering, "--and before Dante." Virgil rose to his feet and stretched his arms to the lowest branches of our tree. "This, my son", he continued, "Is the time and place to which your love has released me. Your heart, joined with mine, has lightened both heart and soul within me, so that I am locked no more in the gloom of Limbo, but am free to wander and lodge in the stratum of time which I inhabited bodily." At this, he pulled me to my feet, and handed me my garments while pulling on his own; then, lacing his arms about my neck, he half-chanted, smiling gaily, "Seggendo in piuma in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre1!"
Leaving our blankets under the tree, we proceeded toward the walled city that I had known, and where I had lived, now a smaller republic by comparison, in the scene before me. I hesitated at first to leave the spot where we had lain by night; but Virgil clasped my hand and led me on with reassurance, as he had done through our long journey of some months since. There were houses, and official buildings, but none that I could recognize. Here, to the northeast, was the Etruscan ampitheater--quite new!--that lay near-ruined in a square, in the Lucca of my age. And yet, the roads were laid through the town in a pattern nearly identical to those of my generation; and, indeed, of a far superior paving than that to which we were accustomed.
Still, I could not suppress the gnawing question, even as Virgil drew me by the hand toward the nearest wine-seller: "Dear master, I almost fear to ask; but how is it that we have entered Lucca as it was fourteen centuries before mine? Am I in a fever, or mad, or under some strange conjuration?" Virgil made no answer at first, but handed me a cup filled with wine of fine flavor, if less potency, than that of my age. With a knowing gaze, he pulled me down beside him on a long stone bench, taking a few draughts of his own cup, and stroking my shoulders with his free hand.
"My son, let fear pass. There is no evil spell afoot, nor madness, or fever. I have granted you a vision of time as it appears to me, and to all now discarnate. The pages of time are all present before me, like layers of rock within outcrops. Past and future are but pages to be turned, layers to be unearthed or laid as bricks on a wall are built or knocked asunder. In the span of a thought, I can traverse these layers from your age to mine, and to all ages before them, because your heart has lightened mine, and your affection has sparked the same within me. My mind is more at ease in your love, and my spirit dances. Thus, I thought it not amiss to show you the workings of time as we, untethered from time, see them."
I looked about, marveling at all that I saw and heard and felt. It was as if I had entered a story in the midst of composing it. The birds and frogs sang as they did when I lived and breathed; and the people looked much as those I was wont to see each day, though their speech was that of Legurian clans to the north. What I did not see was chapels and shrines of the Church; and in that was a great difference in all things. It made a variance in each soul about me, even in the air we breathed. The shrines of this generation housed gods of which I had only read, or heard, in scraps of books and crumbs of stones. Presences I knew not wisped through our breath and the wind, and applied the perfume of flowers offered them throughout this ancient city made young by the unpeeling of time.
"But these people seem to me alive, not as shades", I began to question Virgil again; but he only rose and took my hand again, once we had drained our cups. He strode with me toward the sounds of music coming from the ampitheater, his head thrown back, his laughing eyes taking in the noonday light, the cloudless sky, and all the sights and sounds of heathen Lucca. He was a thing of such beauty here that I could not have noticed through the dim lights of Limbo and Purgatory. How could I now let him part from me?
"They are indeed as alive as you, Dante", he replied, turning to me with a smile. "Not in your span of time, of course; but this is their sheaf of time in life, not death. Those spirits of this generation who can find their hearts lightened as mine by love may also be found freely visiting their span of time again, though they will not see nor sense their living selves here." I could not but with difficulty fathom this new teaching, but I vowed to write it down, should I arrive safe at home in my own age again, and meditate upon it until I understood it implicitly.
Soon, with all manner of cajoling, pushing, laughing and prodding, my master made me take part with him in the festivities of this people, now near the end of summer. We linked arms and joined in the harvest dance from the square through the streets, to the sounds of singing and tambourines. We garlanded houses and columns with flowers and green branches; we helped children make kites of linen scraps, and flew some of them from perches on the city walls. I would not enter pagan shrines; but waited outside them for Virgil to return from carrying in armloads of flowers and corn rigs with other folk as offerings of first fruits to their gods. Then we joined circles of celebrants feasting on fish, cakes and wine of flavors not already strange to me.
As our repast ended, I turned to my guide; and a sad chill overtook me, as I found his eyes looking past the raucous crowds to the sun, dimming to twilight, and the shadows stretching longer across the square. "I must take you home now, child", he muttered. "That is to say, to your own generation of this city." Virgil leaned toward me and pressed his face into the rich-scented flowers still wreathing my head. I then heard him whisper, "I cannot return with you; but I can also not part from you forever, for my heart is joined fast with yours. Should you be in desperation, I can be with you in a thought; but I can most readily rejoin you at the quarters of Nature's yearly turn." He stood, and helped me to my feet with our pairs of hands joined, adding, "Therefore, I can next come to you in a few months, at the time you call 'Eve of All Saints', and stay with you until the morning after your day of 'All Souls'." At this, he took a silver band from around his wrist, and placed it upon my own arm. On the same impulse, I took my ring of betrothal from my hand, and slipped it onto my master's corresponding finger. He kissed me quickly, then said, "Now come! We are nearly late returning to the tree."
It was well that we had left our bedding under the shade tree in order to recall it, for it was nearly dark when we reached our resting place again. Virgil pulled me down into a tight embrace upon the blankets, and we kissed and gripped at each other fiercely, as if wrestling for a purse of gold. After a time, I felt the kisses slow and grow deeper from one to the next, until there seemed to be nothing between our two forms, and then nothing separating our hearts or souls. I knew then, somehow, that he would be with me even beyond death, forever, and that all Heaven or Hell could not put us asunder.
The dew and first rays of the next dawn's light awoke me, still on my makeshift bed under the tree. I was alone, and yet my heart was full; Virgil's silver token still circled my wrist, and all seemed well with me. My beloved master was gone, and I was once more in the Lucca of Anno Domino thirteen-hundred-and-two; but I knew that its forebears were still alive alongside its current age, and likewise all veils of time yet to come. I gathered my blankets and walked slowly back to my lodgings, sweet-scented breezes glancing my cheeks all along the way.
*****
A/N 3: 1Virgil throws in one Dante quote under the tree where they camped out, to get the younger man up and about: Seggendo in piuma in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre: "Lying in a featherbed/Will bring you no fame, nor staying beneath the quilt (Inferno, Canto XXIV, lines 47-48)".