Tales of Wonder

by Jane Yolen

  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.

  “I don’t know,” Old Herald suddenly whimpered. “It hurts, the brushes, the paint. It is painful to put color on canvas. I don’t know.…”

  Secondary knelt by his bed. “I would never hurt you knowingly, Visionary. My hands are gentle. You always said you liked my hands. I can rub painkiller on the tubes. That way you would feel nothing as they slipped in.”

  “Idiot!” murmured Prime.

  “Idiot!” shouted Old Herald. “It is the pain that makes the artist. How can a man be a god without pain? Art—truly great art—is lifeblood spilled upon the canvas. Here, here are my wrists. Shove away. And do not spare me the pain.”

  He turned his hand upward toward them, and they could see the mark of the artist, the suffering god, stamped on his wrists. Set in the center of the large vein, where it crossed the wristline, was the brush hole, the circle of hard plastic with the valve that only opened inward. Because Old Herald had been an artist for so many years, the valve was yellowed with age. His branching veins stood high above the skin of his arms, like the traceries of a bas-relief sculpture. The thin, still-muscular arms disappeared into the flowing sleeves of his blue-black robe.

  Prime unrolled the plastic apron, shaking it out, then tied the strings around his neck. Helping him sit up, she placed a backrest behind him that braced against the wall. Finally she got out a canvas that had been newly stretched that morning. She placed it before him.

  “A new one?” he asked. He could see that much.

  “I stretch a new one every day for you,” she said, her voice soft, on the edge of tears, “Just in case.” She started to turn away.

  “I should have married you,” he said. Then he winked.

  Secondary moved toward the bed, and Prime stepped back. She picked up the coils of tubing and fed them slowly to her brother critic.

  Secondary concentrated on the old man’s hands. Sometimes they shook with the palsy of old age, but this time they lay like two withered leaves in his lap. Secondary picked up one, turned it so that the wrist was facing him, and, matching the tube’s end to the valve, began the careful threading process. Slowly, carefully, he pushed the tube through the radial artery, never forcing. A forced vein was a severed vein: that was the first rule a critic learned. They practiced on lemurs first. The tube tracked its way up Old Herald’s arm. Secondary could feel it slip into the brachial artery and snake its way across the old painter’s chest, then turn and make a path down into his heart.

  Old Herald did not speak again, though his labored breathing was comment enough. The threading was always painful to some extent. Young artists usually bore it stoically, though deep breathing and self-hypnosis damped the worst of it. The mediocre artists were the ones who insisted on painkillers. But sometimes an old artist, even a great one, called for relief, and no one thought the worse of him.

  The slight pop told Secondary when the tube had reached Old Herald’s heart, but he already knew from long experience when it would happen, just seconds after the easy push through the larger subclavian artery. The second tube, into the artist’s right wrist, went as smoothly. Secondary was, as always, very good with his hands.

  Prime set the paint sticks into Old Herald’s palms and turned the clamps.

  There was an instant of spurting which coated the brush tips.

  “It flows,” Old Herald said, nodding his head. Then he turned by instinct alone to the canvas.

  The mixture of paint and blood oozed out of the stick and onto the canvas. Old Herald moved his arms in great swoops and swings, the faultless penmanship of the true artist. The reds coruscated onto the canvas and trailed down the face of it as if weeping crimson tears. Then his right hand faltered and stopped. The left hand stuttered and was still. His eyes were closed.

  “He is asleep,” whispered Secondary.

  “Perhaps,” answered Prime.

  Something in their voices woke the old man. “Is it done?” he asked, his eyes opening.

  “There is nothing …” Secondary began, but trailed off into silence when he was pushed aside by Prime.

  She placed her massive body between the old man and the canvas. “It is done,” she said to him, pushing him gently back against the pillows, removing the backrest at the same time. “It is your best work.”

  “My best,” he mumbled back to her. “You have never said that before. My best. And a critic never lies to her artist. Never.”

  “Never,” Prime agreed, pulling the covers up over his feet and legs. She untied the apron strings and stripped the plastic from him.

  Old Herald smiled up at her. “One must always rage against the dying of the light. Some ancient poet-god said that. He was right. We must end our lives in a burst of color. Remember that. Tell them all—all who come after—that I said that. I did. Old Herald.” He paused, then asked again as a child might, “It was my best?”

  “Your heart’s blood is there, there on the canvas. Would a critic lie?” Prime answered. “It is done.”

  “Done,” Old Herald sighed. Then, with his eyes still open, he ceased breathing.

  Prime disengaged the paint sticks and tugged at the tubes. Slowly they slipped out of the hole, slippery with old blood. She let the pieces clatter onto the germ-laden floor. She wept openly as she pulled the covers up over his thin body.

  “You lied to him,” hissed Secondary. “You did not tell him the truth about the painting. It is nothin
g but a few sweeps of color. Any child could do better.”

  Prime closed Old Herald’s right eye and spoke fiercely. “All these years he has made us—forced us—to see what he wanted us to see. It was his greatest gift. Surely there was no reason at the end to let him know he had failed us.”

  “I thought … thought a critic was chosen to speak … speak truth to art,” said Secondary. “It’s in our oath.”

  “But mercy is in the oath, too. How would it have served Old Herald’s art now?” asked Prime. “Besides—it is his final statement—rage against the dying of the light. A proper title for the picture, wouldn’t you say? Rage and blood and tears. What more could an artist—a god—do?”

  Secondary said nothing, but cautiously closed Old Herald’s color-clotted left eye.

  Wordlessly, the two critics crossed the artist’s desiccated hands across his genitals, signaling the public parts over the private. They turned the hands wrist up to show the paint-clogged veins. The plug of color, a dull red, showed at the brush hole. They tied a white cloth over his head and under his chin to keep his jaw from dropping open, and Secondary picked up the tubes and brushes from the floor.

  Prime looked around the room one last time. By law she could never return to it. She looked longest at the man she had loved, the artist she had served. Then she opened the outer door into the gallery where lines of mourners were already threading their way down the passage, and left Old Herald to his worshipers and to eternal light.

  Sule Skerry

  Mairi rowed the coracle with quick, angry strokes, watching the rocky shoreline and the little town of Caith perched on its edge recede. She wished she could make her anger disappear as easily. She was sixteen, after all, and no longer a child. The soldiers whistled at her, even in her school uniform, when she walked to and from the Academy. And wasn’t Harry Stones, who was five years older than she and a lieutenant in the RAF, a tail gunner, mad about her? Given a little time, he might have asked her dad for her hand, though she was too young yet, a schoolgirl. Whenever he came to visit, he brought her something. Once even a box of chocolates, though they were very dear.

  But to be sent away from London for safekeeping like a baby, to her gran’s house, to this desolate, isolated Scottish sea town because of a few German raids—it was demeaning. She could have helped, could have at least cooked and taken care of the flat for her father now that the help had all gone off to war jobs. She had wanted to be there in case a bomb did fall, so she could race out and help evacuate all the poor unfortunates, maybe even win a medal, and wouldn’t Jenny Eivensley look green then. But he had sent her off, her dad, and Harry had agreed, even though it meant they couldn’t see each other very often. It was not in the least fair.

  She pulled again on the oars. The little skin boat tended to wallow and needed extra bullying. It wasn’t built like a proper British rowboat. It was roundish, shaped more like a turtle shell than a ship. Mairi hated it, hated all of the things in Caith. She knew she should have been in London helping rather than fooling about in a coracle. She pulled on the oars and the boat shot ahead.

  The thing about rowing, she reminded herself, was that you watched where you had been, not where you were heading. She could see the town, with its crown of mewing seabirds, disappear from sight. Her destination did not matter. It was all ocean anyway—cold, uninviting, opaque; a dark green mirror that reflected nothing. And now there was ocean behind as well as ahead, for the shore had thinned out to an invisible line.

  Suddenly, without warning, the coracle fetched up against a rock, one of a series of water-smoothed amphibious mounds that loomed up out of the sea. Only at the bump did Mairi turn and look. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a quick scurry of something large and gray and furry on the far side of the rocks. She heard a splash.

  “Oh,” she said out loud. “A seal!”

  The prospect of having come upon a seal rookery was enough to make her leap incautiously from the coracle onto the rock, almost losing the skin boat in her eagerness, her anger forgotten. She leaned over and pulled the little boat out of the water, scraping its hull along the gray granite. Then she upended the coracle and left it; it looked for all the world like a great dozing tortoise drying in the hazy sun.

  Mairi shrugged out of her mackintosh and draped it on the rock next to the boat. Then, snugging the watch cap down over her curls and pulling the bulky fisherman’s sweater over her slim hips, she began her ascent.

  The rocks were covered with a strange purple-gray lichen that was both soft and slippery. Mairi fell once, bruising her right knee without ripping her trousers. She cursed softly, trying out swearwords that she had never been allowed to use at home or in Gran’s great house back on shore. Then she started up again, on her hands and knees, more carefully now, and at last gained the high point on the rock after a furious minute of climbing that went backward and sideways almost as often as it went up. The top of the gray rock was free of the lichen, and she was able to stand up, feeling safe, and look around.

  She could not see Caith, with its little, watchful wind-scored houses lined up like a homefront army to face the oncoming tides in the firth, Gran’s grand old house standing to one side, the sergeant-major. She could not even see the hills behind, where cliffs hunched like the bleached fossils of some enormous prehistoric ocean beast washed ashore. All that she could see was the unbroken sea, blue and black and green and gray, with patterns of color that shifted as quickly as the pieces in a child’s kaleidoscope. Gray-white foam skipped across wave tops, then tumbled down and fractured into bubbles that popped erratically, leaving nothing but a grayish scum that soon became shiny water again. She thought she saw one or two dark seal heads in the troughs of the waves, but they never came close enough for her to be sure. And overhead the sky was lowering, a color so dirty that it would have made even the bravest sailor long for shore. There was a storm coming, and Mairi guessed she should leave.

  She shivered, and suddenly knew where she was. These rocks were the infamous Sule Skerry rocks that Gran’s cook had told her about.

  “Some may call it a rookery,” Cook had said one morning when Mairi had visited with her in the dark kitchen. Cook’s cooking was awful—dry, bland, and unvaried. But at least she knew stories and always imparted them with an intensity that made even the strangest of them seem real. “Aye, some may call it a rookery. But us from Caith, we know. It be the home of the selchies, who are men on land and seals in the sea. And the Great Selchie himself lives on that rock. Tall he is. And covered with a sealskin when he tumbles in the waves. But he is a man for all that. And no maiden who goes to Sule Skerry returns the same.”

  She had hummed a bit of an old song then, with a haunting melody that Mairi, for all her music training at school, could not repeat. But the words of the song, some of them, had stuck with her:

  An earthly nourrice sits and sings,

  And aye she sings, “Ba, lily wean!

  Little ken I my bairn’s father,

  Far less the land that he staps in.”

  Then ane arose at her bed-fit,

  An’ a grumly guest I’m sure was he:

  “Here am I, thy bairn’s father,

  Although I be not comelie.

  I am a man upon the land,

  I am a selchie in the sea,

  And when I’m far frae ev’ry strand

  My dwelling is in Sule Skerry.”

  A warning tale, Mairi thought. A bogeyman story to keep foolish girls safe at home. She smiled. She was a Londoner, after all, not a silly Scots girl who’d never been out of her own town.

  And then she heard a strange sound, almost like an echo of the music of Cook’s song, from the backside of the rocks. At first she thought it was the sound of wind against water, the sound she heard continuously at Gran’s home where every room rustled with the music of the sea. But this was different somehow, a sweet, low throbbing, part moan and part chant. Without knowing the why of it, only feeling a longing brought on by the wo
rdless song, and excusing it as seeking to solve a mystery, she went looking for the source of the song. The rock face was smooth on this side, dry, without the slippery, somber lichen; and the water was calmer so it did not splash up spray. Mairi continued down the side, the tune reeling her in effortlessly.

  Near the waterline was a cave opening into the west face of the rock, a man-sized opening as black and uninviting as a collier’s pit. But she took a deep, quick breath, and went in.

  Much to her surprise, the inside of the cave glowed with an incandescent blue-green light that seemed to come from the cave walls themselves. Darker pockets of light illuminated the concave sections of the wall. Pieces of seaweed caught in these niches gave the appearance of household gods.

  Mairi could scarcely breathe. Any loud sound seemed sacrilegious. Her breath itself was a violation.

  And then she heard the moan-song again, so loud that it seemed to fill the entire cave. It swelled upward like a wave, then broke off in a bubbling sigh.

  Mairi walked in slowly, not daring to touch the cave walls in case she should mar the perfection of the color, yet fearing that she might fall, for the floor of the cave was slippery with scattered puddles of water. Slowly, one foot in front of the other, she explored the cave. In the blue-green light, her sweater and skin seemed to take on an underwater tinge, as if she had been transformed into a mermaid.

  And then the cave ended, tapering off to a rounded apse with a kind of stone altar the height of a bed. There was something dark lying on the rock slab. Fearfully, Mairi inched toward it, and when she got close, the dark thing heaved up slightly and spoke to her in a strange, guttural tongue. At first Mairi thought it was a seal, a wounded seal, but then she saw it was a man huddled under a sealskin coat. He suddenly lay back, feverish and shuddering, and she saw the beads of dried blood that circled his head like a crown.