by Sean Stewart
She loved Audubon’s willingness to use any medium to accomplish the task at hand. It was from him she learned to use pencils and watercolor together, letting the graphite give a sheen and iridescence to wingtips and eyes that watercolor alone could not achieve. Often he would use coats of resin, particularly on the eyes, to add gleam and luster. From his paintings of smaller birds she learned some basics of composition. These paintings, filled with wrens or finches in flight around tangles of bramble or willow leaves, allowed her an opportunity to use her love of detail without creating mere jumble.
For a while she believed these small studies had allowed her to master the difficult art of perspective. She was quite pleased with her development—until the Southside humbled her.
When Raining first came to Nick’s country, she tried to make the sky too small. The scale of the prairies nearly defeated her. The action in her paintings took place in spaces little larger than the living room in Cedar House. She never saw the narrowness of that vision until she stood before her easel in Nick’s farmhouse, looking out at the immense emptiness of the plains.
It destroyed her perspective. All her techniques for conveying depth and volume relied on the massing of detail; objects in front of other objects, gestures from foreshortened arms, the neat tactical gradations in size that separated her teacup on the windowsill from her mother’s cup on the coffee table. Her tricks of hand were no use to her here. The prairie obliterated them.
Watercolors were her best medium, but she knew they did not have the strength to grasp that naked land. Perhaps a genius, a Turner, might have been able to bend them to the subject; but even Turner’s great sea-and city-scapes depended on the gauze and lambency of rising steam or rolling fog or falling rain. It did not rain in Nick’s country, not in winter, and the only fog came with your breath. In winter even the snow fell dry as ash.
She settled on oils. Acrylic would probably have been a more reasonable choice. She could have grasped the flatness of the prairie with it. But to paint the snow fields in flat matte white would have been a terrible lie.
It took her weeks to learn to render snow. Nick had mixed a gallon of wonderful zinc oxide white paint for her, using a recipe from her Companion to Art. In Vancouver she had long been forced to make do with lead-white. This meant scavenging lead from old car batteries and exposing it to urine. The mixture had to be left buried for weeks under a midden heap. This made for a lovely warm white, very opaque and easily mixed with various media, but it was highly reactive when exposed to air or other pigments. (The reactive properties of lead-white and lead-yellow were responsible for any number of medieval Miracle Paintings: black Madonnas, weeping Christs, bleeding saints and so forth.) Using the stuff required absolutely painstaking glair work, using an egg white medium to seal the lead paint so it didn’t touch any others. And of course the lead was poisonous. But here on the Southside, Nick had dared the Stelco plant and salvaged a veritable trove of zinc oxide, bringing Raining’s whites into the modern era.
Only she found she couldn’t paint the Southside winter in plain white. She had to learn to break her colors completely anew. She tried the ecstatic white fire of Monet’s cathedrals first, only to abandon it and walk snow-blind into a different kind of whiteness: the whiteness of Munch, broken into heavy blues and strange, cold greens.
She had to learn to lose the liquid shimmer of coastal air. Always before, unthinking, she had been painting filtered light. Light coming through clouds, through leaves, through windows, through the heavy sea-level air; light sinking into the ground like water. On the prairies, the sun burned untouched through emptiness. She went nearly crazy trying to capture the fierce light until the day she understood that here it shone not only down from above, but sprayed up like white fire from the snow.
In Nick’s country she learned to paint with new clarity and harshness. Gone were the encircling trees of her childhood, whose knotted limbs were the truest geometry to her eyes; to be replaced at first by the long, receding angles of snowdrifts, highways, fence lines. Finally, she gave up all her old tricks of perspective, stopped adding those fake positional markings where they didn’t exist, and went back to Turner to learn atmospheric perspective, situating objects spatially by changing their color values: realistic colors close, trees and hills dark and darkly shadowed in the middle distance; then, at the edge of sight, dim shapes in blue and lavender.
There was a certain picture she painted using the driver-side window of Nick’s truck as a frame. The cab of the truck was a welcome brown touched with warm highlights: perhaps light reflected from a flannel shirt. On the far left, through the crack of the opening door, the plain swept into eternity. Small copses of scrubby trees dotted the prairie around Nick’s farm, mostly bare-branched cottonwoods huddled around a creek or pond, or more occasionally, stands of birch and pine. She painted herself standing beside the nearest cottonwood. She was too far from the truck for her features to be visible, but still she was careful in the modelling of her own figure: her body hunched inside her heavy coat, her shoulders tight, a touch of red at her mouth. One arm raised to touch the cold trunk of the nearest tree, uncertain. Even the trees were different here, their muscular forms wasted to cylinders and sticks.
The warm truck door—opening? Closing? The silent fury of the snowy field. Herself, standing by the shelterless trees. Waiting.
This was her marriage.
Chapter
Seven
The bells of St. Paul’s on the Southside had just chimed midnight. The last guests in the Visitors Pavilion sat talking over chicory and nibbling leftovers. Eight hundred kilometers west, in the Southsider barracks at the edge of Chinatown, there was still an hour of Friday night left. Emily’s banished governess, Claire, had gone to bed early and lay among scores of sleeping soldiers. She was dreaming, and in her dream she knew she had to die. That much was expected of her.
She stood alone in Parkallen Cemetery. No one had bothered to attend her funeral. She was forced to prepare her own funerary pyre. With no one else there to pass the sacrifices through, however, if she cut her throat or chose to shoot herself, she would arrive on the North Side cold and naked. It was a problem.
So they had abandoned her, even in this.
She was surprised at how bitterly alone she felt. Emily had always said how cold she was, how unfeeling, and secretly Claire had agreed. It had never occurred to her to think, But there is one thing you feel, and that is alone. Alone like the white prairie in winter. Alone like the endless empty sky.
But there it was, no one would burn a sacrifice for her. She studied the funerary pyre. Then she leaned forward, gripped the edges of the brazier, and like a woman thrusting her head into cold water at daybreak, she plunged into the coals.
Claire woke from the nightmare gasping and unbearably hot. Her heart hammered painfully in her chest. She was lying on an army-issue cot. Her cot. It was dark in the barracks, and hot. Agonizingly hot and close. The darkness like hot cloth, stifling her, smothering her. She shoved a thin foil blanket off her body and gripped the edges of her cot. Her forearms were rigid and her chest heaved as she tried to catch her breath in the oven heat.
Soldiers slept in tiered bunks all around her. The aisles between the bunks, and the paths to toilets and exits, were traced by glow-in-the-dark orange arrows that burned like embers in the coal-black floor. Thirty meters away, at the far end of the barracks shell, a few soldiers were still awake, playing cards.
Claire was burning up, but she wasn’t sweating. Her skin was dry as wood baking in a kiln. She remembered feeling like this once before, running a 40° C temperature with a bad case of pneumonia. With shaking fingers she flicked on her bunk light and pulled on a shirt and pants. Picking up her familiar, she buckled it around her waist. It felt like a band of fire. She queried her temperature.
—One hundred seventeen degrees, her familiar responded.
—Celsius, please.
—One hundred seventeen Celsius.
&
nbsp; —That’s impossible. That’s over the boiling point of water.
—One hundred seventeen Celsius.
She burned her fingertips taking the familiar off. The plastic buckles were going soft with heat. Nobody else was waking up. At the other end of the barracks, the card players dealt another hand.
She stood up. A black char-mark outline showed where she had been sitting on the bed. She followed the floor lights toward the end of the barracks. The synthetic flooring stank with heat. She felt it stick to the bottoms of her boots. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was heaving but there was no oxygen in the furnace air.
The card players had all taken off their familiars to make the game more sporting. “I call. Three queens,” one of them said. His hair was on fire. “What have you got?”
His opponent put down a fan of cards. They blackened and began to bubble. “Read ’em and weep.” He reached to gather in the pot.
Lieutenant Jackson, the man with three queens, swore and threw down his hand. Black patches spread across his uniform and flowered into flame as he glanced up at Claire. “Hey, Grandma. Got any money worth losing?”
“Split lip keeping you up, Claire?” The victor stacked his winnings. “That slant really stung you. Dirty bastard.” Fire burst from his eyes.
“I-I need some air. I need to step outside.”
“You on perimeter tonight?” Jackson said. Claire shook her head. “Go ahead, then. But stay within easy radio range, and stay on the Chinatown side.” He waved her away. His hands had burned down to the bone.
She stammered her thanks and fled.
Outside, the night was cool and damp. It must have rained earlier in the evening. Reflections from their perimeter floodlights gleamed wetly on the asphalt. Steam rose hissing around her boots.
A dim figure in white walked slowly out of the parking lot and onto Carrall Street. Claire knew at once it was the white goddess Southsiders called The Harrier. The Harrier was Claire’s mother, and all Claire’s visions came from her. Claire ran after her, footsteps loud in the night, breath ragged. Without her familiar she was blind. No ghostly UV vision. No blocks of color scanned in infrared to show her the position of the perimeter pickets. Just shadows and cloudy sky, hazed into brightness around the lonely street lamps.
The sound of her footsteps changed as she hit Carrall Street, echoes slapping back off the storefronts. She was closing quickly now. “Mother!”
The white goddess did not stop.
Aged in casks of fear you came
Whiskey-eyed, ten thousand dragon
And cut the strings of my derelict limbs,
And careless, spilled red wine from my brothers.
But this is only poetry. I hide
Behind words as well as wine.
What is real? My weeping son. Honor.
This broken cup. Overhead,
Two gulls wing strongly into twilight,
And vanish into the borderless dark.
Water Spider’s father had written that.
The whiskey-eyed dragon kept pace with him as he walked the empty streets back from his prostitute’s apartment in the New Moon Manor. It was late Friday night in the hour of the Rat: a weak, cunning time of night, in which the streets were always full of headless ghosts. Water Spider felt them as a stiffness in his back and shoulders. A fair price for what he had put Jen through the previous afternoon, he supposed.
There was a reason Water Spider was out so late alone and unguarded; his prostitute, Pearl, was Jen’s mother. Water Spider was careful that the boy not be with him when he visited the mother. Both had their pride.
The fourth streetlight he passed had burned out. An unlucky sign. Water Spider’s sword in its leather sheath slapped gently against his left calf, and his boots went tip-tap, tip-tap, on the weathered cement. Timbers creaked and groaned in the building beside him as a ghost scampered through its walls; he glimpsed it in the glass window-front. With the sword he wore, Water Spider was not afraid of ghosts. He smiled a little, remembering how Jen had tried to get him to trade in his antique for a fine new weapon with a ceramic body and a flaked diamond edge. Jen’s sword would cut through a lamppost as if it were cobweb—but would pass through a ghost as if it were empty air. The Old Man at Water Spider’s side knew the color of spirits’ blood.
Pearl was only seven or eight years younger than the Honorable Minister for Borders. Water Spider was too old to listen to what a mere girl had to say, and too wise to care about impressing one. Life had given Pearl a more complex flavor, like a better quality of tea. A disappointed woman, in his judgment, but she bore it with good humor. She no longer had expectations.
She never smelled of flowers. She used a scent like tea leaves instead, fresh from the canister. Sometimes, after they made love, he would sniff at her sweat-slick body, and arch his eyebrows, and ask her, Was she steeped yet? Still brewing, she would answer, and roll back on top of him to give him her taste, touching his lips with the fine, silky hairs under her arms if she was finished, or between her legs if she was not.
And each time he came to her, before they fell onto her rumpled bed, she would serve him tea, and take with hers a little pill. Once he had asked what the pill was for. She laughed and said, “This is the love potion my herbalist makes for me.” Only tonight, after he had spent his seed, had he realized the pill must be a contraceptive. Odd, that this understanding had come to him so late. The knowledge had a strange effect on him. Her great aphrodisiac: not to bear his children.
He had never liked the hour of the Rat. Too late for people of good intention to be abroad. Too early for scoundrels to be in bed.
“To be without posterity…”—something something—“…is an offense against the whole line of ancestors, and terminates the sacrifices to them.” Meng-tzu, wasn’t it? Meng-tzu and K’ung Fu-tzu were full of dictums and analects about how men of Water Spider’s class could best fulfill their duty to the Emperor. But the throne in Government House had been empty for seventy years, after the Emperor had carelessly allowed himself to be slain before ensuring his posterity.
Perhaps Meng-tzu was right. Too many edicts. Too few children.
The streets seemed lonelier than usual. Where the street lamps shone, cherry and apple blossoms lay scattered on the road. He thought of Pearl in her small apartment, drowsing or asleep perhaps; or playing solitaire. Or entertaining another visitor.
What is real? My weeping son. Honor.
This broken cup.
It occurred to Water Spider for the first time that perhaps they were both disappointed people.
The moon came around the corner, and the goddess of the moon, and met Water Spider on Pender Street. Her flesh was the color of bones. Beautiful and terrible she was as a hawk in flight; beautiful beyond all singing. She reached out with one hand to trace the line of his forehead with her finger. Her touch was the distance to remote mountains.
She beheld him utterly: his silk coat and his discipline and the fumes of his weakness. Her beholding dissolved him. His blood and flesh became knots of wind. The moonlight stirred in him. Seeing him thus, she bade him name his deepest desire, and he knew that she in the fullness of her power would grant it to him. Wisdom. Riches. Sovereignty. Anything.
He heard himself reply, “a cup of tea.”
She stroked his brow a second time, her touch like deep snow falling. She laughed, and then she was gone.
Water Spider fell to his knees, empty with the absence of the goddess. And yet a last scent of her remained; the fragrance of that tea called Silver Needles diffused through his lungs and blood.
Footsteps pounded up the street, followed by a lean Southside woman, flushed and gasping. It was the one who had beaten Jen so severely. “Damn it!” she yelled.
“You look like her,” Water Spider whispered. “The goddess.”
This broken cup.
Claire ignored him. “Damn it, Mother. Come back! Why send me such a horrible vision?”
Water Spider was still s
taring at her when sudden fire burst into the night from the barracks behind her. Where Claire’s fellow soldiers had moments before been sleeping or pissing or playing cards, there now came a series of deep, concussive blasts.
Then munitions detonating, like strings of deadly firecrackers.
Glass shattering.
Screams.
Volleys of startled gulls and pigeons rose into the sky from the rooftops of Chinatown, breaking and re-forming. A tremor ran through the sidewalk. Firelight and shadow wrestled madly across the streets and buildings. “Sweet gods,” Water Spider breathed. “Your people were in there!”
Claire turned, crying out, and watched them burn.
Some parts of the nonflammable barracks shell were black, others milky. Large patches were completely translucent, accidental windows onto the inferno raging inside. Something had punched a hole in the shell and fired incendiaries inside. Fat arcs of current jumped and spat among the flames.
A yelling mob of nightmares roared from Downtown, the monsters the Southsiders were supposed to repel. In the throbbing firelight Water Spider could make out a dark carnival of the grotesque and deformed. A stick-limbed man as tall as a house, armed with a plastic spear; a four-armed woman, clutching a glass-tipped rubber whip in each hand; another man, long as a car, bounding on all fours, each foot shod with steel cleats; a man with faceted eyes that winked like gems in the firelight; a woman with a hole in her stomach; a huge man in a formal suit and tie who wore sunglasses and carried a semi-automatic rifle.
“Run!” Water Spider yelled, grabbing Claire’s arm. “Your friends are dead. There is nothing you can do for them.”
Claire swore and turned and ran like hell and Water Spider followed, sprinting wildly, his sword banging at his side. If he died now, his bones would be devoured. If he died now, he would have no heirs to make sacrifices for his spirit. He would be a wandering ghost, a thin hunger without end. After all the duties of his life, after all his service, what a bitter finish: to be a restless nothing, an empty shadow.
