Tales of Wonder (11 page)

The Number Two card is Moon, those who know the seasons' turning and can reckon the changes—the seers and priestesses, dressed in white. Three, Arcs and Bows: the warrior–hunters. Four, Waters and all who plow there. Five, Rocks who wrest gemstones from the mountain face and craft them. Six, Stars, who carry our world's knowledge and script that knowledge into books. And Seven, the queen's own, the Royals, the smallest family of all.

Seven Grievers, seven families, all who were touched by and who touched my master.

Then the Cave card. The Queen of Shadows. The Gray Wanderer. The Singer of Dirges. I have spoken of them already. The Cup of Sleep and the Man Without Tears.

The first thirteen were known as the Cards of Dark, for all the faces on the original pack were dark since I drew them in in my grief. The thirteen cards added later by the gamesters are called the Cards of Light, and all the figures grin, their whitened faces set in a rictus, a parody of all we hold sacred.

Here, you can see the difference even in this pack. In my drawing of the Man Without Tears, he wears a landing suit and holds his hands outstretched by his sides, the light streaming through a teardrop in each palm. But his face cannot be seen, obscured as it is by the blackened bubble of his headgear. Yet in the gamesters' thirteen, he wears a different uniform, one with stars and bars on the shoulders. And though his hands are still outstretched, with the light reflecting through the palms, his face is drawn as plain as any griever's, and he smiles a painful, sad grimace.

You can see the difference also in the Queen of Shadows card. In my pack, she is dressed in red and black, and her picture was a dark portrait of the queen then on the throne. But the packs today are no-faced and every-faced, the features as bland as the mash one feeds a child. There is no meaning there.
My
queen wore a real face, but the card looked back to an even older tale. You know it, of course? The queen mourning for her dead consort who went into the cave at the center of the world. She wore a red dress and a black cloak and carried a bag of her most precious jewels to purchase his release from Death. In those days Death was thought to live in a great stone palace in the world's center surrounded by circles of unmourned folk who had to grieve for themselves.

The queen followed the twisting, winding cave for miles, learning to see in the dark land with a night sight as keen as that she had used to see with in the day. Many long night-days passed, and at last she stopped by a pool and knelt down to drink. She saw, first, the dartings of phosphorescent fish, as numerous as stars. Then she saw, staring up from the pool, her own reflection, with shining night-eyes, big and luminous. She did not recognize herself, so changed was she from her journey. But she fell in love with the image, a queen from the dark sky, she thought. And she stayed by the poolside, weeping her diamonds and pearls into it, begging the jewel-eyed star woman to come up to her.

After thirteen days of weeping, her grief for her consort was forgotten and her precious gems were all gone. She returned home empty-handed. But her eyes remained wide and dark-seeing; she had become a visionary and seeress who spoke in riddles and read signs in the stars and was never again quite sane. She was called Queen of Shadows.

You do not understand the other cards in my deck? The Singer of Dirges? It is named after the simple singer who first brought my master into her fame. He was of no great importance otherwise—a helper, a pointer of ways. And so the Singer card within the deck simply helps the other cards along, leading them from place to place within the pattern, being nothing in itself, only indicating the path to take.

And the Cup of Sleep? It is the changer. If it precedes a card, it changes the card and the pattern. If it follows a card, it does no harm. And the only card it cannot change is the Cave.

There, now you know the deck as well as I. Are you a player with the cards? Do you use them to tell you what will be, waiting on the message before you make a choice? Neither? Good. Only a fool uses them thus. They are grief cards, to help you understand your own grieving, as they helped me with mine.

We are each a card, you know. I am like the Singer card, a pointer of ways. I point back to the old ways of the Wanderer, and forward to what will come.

And you, starfarer, bring change. You and your people are like cups of sleep. Without changing yourselves, you deal out death to our ways. The Wanderer knew this, but she could do nothing to stop it. And neither can I. I can but tell you what you do, force you to look backward and forward. That was the real reason I said that you could come and capture me in your boxes. But you, yourself, starfarer, who are a woman and might have been a griever or a queen, listen to me well. Forget your boxes, and hear my words in your heart and bones. Do you mean to be a death card? Do you know what it is you do?

So much telling. My mouth is dry. Hand me that cup, the one on the table. Yes, it is a lovely thing. The engravings are quite old. From the third kingdom, I believe. I need to moisten my tongue. That is good.

What do the writings mean? I will read them to you. “Here is the Cup. Take it willingly. May your time of dying be short.”

Do not look so startled. I know what I do. And now you know, too. Remember, there is no penalty in our world for giving a peaceful death. Tell your people that. Mine already know.

But you can do something for me. Grieve for me. Grieve for all of us in this quiet, dying land. You owe us that immortality at least.

Now go, for I feel sleep coming on me. The time of dying will, indeed, be short. I hope my lines of mourning will be very, very long, for I want to see my beloved Gray Wanderer again in the cave beyond all stars.

Old Herald

Old Herald closed his eyes and reveled in the dancing stars. The last few days had become darker and darker. He did not begrudge his dying, only the loss of light. He wanted to see the world brightly as he went out of it. He wanted to glimpse again the riot of color that he had captured so lovingly and well during his life. His hands could barely hold the color sticks; his veins were all but dried up of paint. But his eyes could still praise color and light. He did not want to fail now. Not now. Surely, he thought, the greatest of all the Life Painters—those who quite literally bled onto the canvas—should not end in darkness but in a great rainbow burst of eternal light.

“Critics!” he cried out, refusing to disguise the agony in his voice. His crabbed hands scuttled into the air.

The two hurried to his side. Prime, a short, stocky woman with a noticeable mustache and a brilliant smile, put her arm around him and whispered into his ear, “I am here. I am always here.”

Secondary, a gray-haired boy-man with faded good looks, hovered by Old Herald's feet. His hands fluttered nervously, crossing and recrossing as if they were pale butterflies seeking a place to land.

“Bring me the sticks,” Old Herald ordered. “I feel a painting. I want to paint one last canvas before I die.”

“But … but you can't … can't …” Secondary began in his hesitant way. It was that stuttering, an affliction of judgment rather than tongue, that made him a Secondary. He would never rise to Prime in the pantheon of artists. It was only because he had been around for so long, serving his apprenticeship under boy-loving Life Painters, that he had ever risen so high.

“Of course, Visionary,” said Prime. She plumped the pillows around the old man's head and pushed him gently but sternly back against them. “And the colors?”

Old Herald had drifted off to sleep, but awoke with a start at her questions. “Reds. Bloods. Crimsons. The Phoenix rises.”

“I serve,” said Prime, placing her hand over her heart.

The old artist did not seem to hear, falling back into the half-sleep of age.

Prime nodded to her companion critic and went out of the room. His hands touching one another helplessly, Secondary followed. When they were out of the old man's hearing, he pulled on Prime's sleeve.

“He can't see,” Secondary said. “We both know that.”

Prime turned on him, her eyes severe behind the thick glasses. “Our duty is to serve him and criticize his work. If
he
wants to paint a final picture, then we get him the paint. And the canvas. We serve art. We do not dictate to it.”

She turned from him and her white robe billowed around her, making her look even broader than she was. Her feet, surprisingly small and well shaped, tapped out a steady rhythm on the mosaic floor. Secondary followed.

He caught up with her in the Color Room. While she rinsed the paint sticks first in water, then in the antiseptic solution, he tried to argue with her.

“How can he paint if he cannot see?” Secondary began.

“We are not artists,” she answered. “We are critics. How can we know what he sees or does not see until it is on the canvas?” She took the paint sticks and set them in the autoclave, untangling the tubing and making sure that there were no weak, spongy sections where paint or blood might leak out. Her knowing fingers found no soft spots.

Secondary tried again. “But … but it is our … our duty to know.”

“That has always been your mistake,” Prime said, closing the top of the autoclave and setting the dial at maximum heat. With the older artists it was especially important that germ-free tools be used. After a lifetime of painting, they were easy prey to infection. “You equate
knowing
with
understanding:
you think that knowing how to mix colors and insert the color tubes with the minimum of pain gives you an insight into the artist's mind. But all you have is access to his veins.”

The autoclave hummed its single note at them, and Prime nodded back at it, satisfied. She went to the palette, a large, many-drawered counter rimmed with tubes of paint in plastic holders. Taking out a spray can from one of the drawers, she sprayed antiseptic on the marble countertop. Then she took the array of reds from their side of the palette and squeezed them with practiced care onto the marble, creating a rainbow of reds. With a palette knife from a second autoclave she spread the colors, mixed them, swirling one red into another, pulling ribands of lighter shades through the darker, twining tints into a loose braid. Finally she blended several of the darker crimsons to create the mix Old Herald had dubbed “the Phoenix” and which he was famous for. Her memory for color was as good as his. She was, in her own way, an artist, though she would have denied it. She knew she was the best Prime Critic in the world, just as Old Herald was the best Life Painter. They had worked together for over fifty years. Prime had sometimes wondered, heretically, if Herald could have been as good an artist without her. The Trinity of Artist and Critics was an article of faith to her. But the artist was first. Still … what if Herald had only had this Secondary, who was good with the tubings but whose eye for color was, at best, only a Landseer to her Turner. She called silently on the old gods and crossed her hands briefly in front of her, wrists up—the old ritual—to ward off the full brunt of the gods' anger.

The autoclave signaled the end of its work with a loud bell. Secondary went over and claimed the instruments, his hands encased in the formfitting plastigloves.

Prime nodded and put on a pair of gloves herself. Then she took the paint sticks from him and carefully scraped the color mix into the tubes. In the artificial light of the Color Room, the red paint in the coils of tubing looked like human veins. She held the color sticks straight up. It would not do for them to receive any paint before Old Herald was ready. Not that they could, with the color clamp on so tight at the end. She tested the clamps. They were secure.

Prime and Secondary marched back into the old painter's room. It was such a contrast to the rest of the house: spare where the artist's manse was sumptuous. It was a deliberate attempt to reproduce the garret where the god Modigliani, one of the true precursors of the suffering artist-gods, had worked. Prime had apprenticed in a much different atmosphere to an artist whose painting room was yellow outside, with a red-tiled floor and whitewashed walls like the studio of Van Gogh. Prime remembered sourly how she had left when the artist had tried to emulate the crazed god, insisting on unantiseptic coffee grounds being mixed into the paints. Not surprisingly, the artist had died of sepsis and in agony, his critics being unable to dissuade him from his folly. He had not, Prime thought uncharitably, been a particularly good painter either.

Old Herald was still asleep when they entered the room, but their footsteps on the uneven wooden floor wakened him. His eyes flew open, the faded blue of the irises contrasting sharply with the rainbowed veins running a zigzag course across the whites.

“Who is it?” he shouted at them.

“Your critics, Visionary,” said Prime.

“Your second eyes, Maestro,” said her companion, the ritual words coming unbidden to his lips.

“Damned if I want
your
eyes,” muttered the old man. Then he shouted, “I want my own eyes back. The light, the light is fading. I will not have it.” He sat up in bed, his eyes rheumy with pink tears. “I will not have it.” His voice broke, but he would not cry.

Prime put the coils of tubing down beside the bed in the bowl of solution on the floor. She set the sticks upright in their holders. “Do you still wish to paint?”

“Paint? Paint?” the old man mumbled, then looked up again, a sly expression on his face. “What would I like to paint?” he asked.

Prime soothed his forehead with her gloved hand. “You said something about ‘Reds. Bloods. Crimsons. The Phoenix' …”

“Rises!” shouted the old man triumphantly. “I was just testing you. But you always know, don't you. Too bad you're so damned homely, Prime, or I'd have married you long ago.”

Secondary gave a quick smile behind Prime's back.

Prime nodded. “I know. I know,” she said. She did not remind the old man that they had been married forty years before, when she was young and her small, dark body had attracted him. She had never begrudged him his subsequent mistresses, most of them models. Nor had she ever mentioned their marriage to any of his Secondaries. It was enough that she remembered. She wondered, briefly, if Old Herald, the god, remembered; indeed, if any gods remembered.