Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Painting requires many techniques. That’s always been your downfall. You’ve only mastered one.” She paused, her breathing labored. “The true difference between master and student isn’t knowing how to use the techniques at one’s command. It’s knowing when to use them. That’s always been my talent. I know when to use my tools. Now it’s time to use you.”

  I stood still for a moment, hating her. Yet I couldn’t help being flattered as well, that of all her former students and lovers, it was me who she’d asked to memorialize her, to remake her as paint.

  “I’ll go mad,” I repeated.

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “Maybe you’re skilled enough to escape it. Who knows?”

  The light flickered over her face, luminescence blending with shadow.

  “Then again, perhaps you will,” she added. “And so? What is art but madness anyway?”

  Through all the fog of love and hatred that had always kept me from seeing Lisane clearly, I nevertheless recognized what she was offering. This was my chance to transcend forgettable snowscapes.

  “I'll paint you,” I said.

  Lisane smiled. It was clear she’d never believed I might decline.

  At first, no one was alarmed when Lisane’s school failed to produce a great painter.

  Lisane still had time to train a protégé. Meanwhile, her students made modest careers painting murals or illustrating pages of expensive books. A few made names for themselves as portraitists, traveling throughout the ducal cities, taking on clients who couldn’t afford to travel to Patagnia and pay Lisane’s fee.

  Five years passed. Ten. Fifteen. Some whispered that Lisane would be the end of her artistic line. Others countered that she was still young. Prudent voices prompted that genius was not like a crop to be planted in summer and harvested in the spring—that sometimes more than one brilliant voice would emerge in a generation, while other generations lay fallow. No blame attached, they said. It was simply the way of things.

  Such good sense might have taken root if Lisane hadn’t given in to her frustrations. Rumors spread. Someone’s cook had overheard Lisane raging at her journeymen, accusing them of being lazy and venal and squandering her tutelage. Someone’s sister who dabbled in oils had gone to buy dyes and seen Lisane pass by three of her former students, refusing to stop when they called her by name.

  Other women fell into fits of guilt about barren bellies, but Lisane was responsible for continuing a greater line.

  Then the nadir—Firo Torreschi, a minor artist and one of Lisane’s past favorites, returned from Senze with the news that he was being patronized by an elected official. He insisted on attending a banquet at Lisane’s home later that week, during which he presented her with a small still life painted on a convex mirror. According to the gossips’ recounting, Lisane held the painting in her hand for a silent minute, and then shouted for him to be thrown out of her house, the painting after.

  Now that Lisane’s frustrations were officially public, the wags frenzied with gossip. Those who’d nursed grudges against the flamboyant portraitist hinted that her lack of a protégé was no surprise given her heritage. How were students supposed to be properly nurtured by some slop’s bastard daughter?

  By the time I left Lisane’s school to take my own commissions, it was clear the place had become nothing but a source of bitterness for her. She resented each moment she spent teaching students whose failures reminded her of her own. She allowed the journeymen to take over more and more of the instruction—but still, she kept the school open, hoping a student would appear who was worthy of becoming her protégé.

  None did.

  The day Lisane first summoned me to her chamber, I was newly fourteen, my birthday just passed. I was still ignorant of what all Patagnia knew—that Lisane would never marry her fiancé or anyone else. Lisane slept with aristocrats, artists, anyone she found alluring. In public, she boasted that she’d never spent more than one night in anyone’s bed. In private, she’d eye someone’s blushing wife and admit that she had occasionally spent a second night in a marital bed—with a different partner.

  Few women could have escaped censure for such behavior, but Lisane was an exception to every convention. She was a genius.

  Lisane had another famous peculiarity—from time to time, she chose an apprentice to share her bed. She selected boys and girls, well-bred and bastards, talented painters and those who struggled. Once she was through with them, the only trait they had in common was that they were all passionately, relentlessly fixated on Lisane.

  I knew none of this as I entered her chamber that night. She was sitting in a high-backed chair, her garment partially unbuttoned, her jewels discarded in a glimmering heap atop a nearby chest.

  She watched, heavy lidded, as I gazed around the room with awe. I’d only seen one painting of Lisane’s before—a small canvas that hung near the house’s entrance, showing a disheveled child standing in an archway. (It was a self portrait, I was later informed, of Lisane remembering what it was like to have been a child looking in on the world of wealth and art from the outside.) Lisane’s room was filled with her sketches. Some were drawn on fresh, expensive sheets, while others were scrawled hastily in book margins, as if Lisane had been overtaken by an irresistible inspiration. One series showed dozens of figures contorting into different positions. Another depicted a cathedral from an array of perspectives, each rendered with dizzyingly crisp two- or three-point perspective.

  Lisane watched me stare until, at last, with a contemplative tilt of her head, she asked, “Have you tried magic yet?”

  I shook my head. Magic was not for apprentices. That much I knew.

  “This might be interesting,” she said.

  She took me by the shoulders and directed me to a small easel where a spoiled panel had been prepared for new work. She gave me a horsehair brush and withdrew a moist cloth from her palette, revealing usable oils.

  “What should I have you paint?” she murmured to herself, looking me over as if she were testing a composition.

  She moved to the chest, shifting her jewelry so she could open the heavy lid. From inside, she dug out a worn velvet slipper.

  “Feel the texture of this,” she instructed, extending the slipper. “Feel how soft it is. Run your fingers against the nap and see how it becomes rough.”

  I did as she said, marveling in the delicate sensation. Spontaneously, I rubbed my cheek against it. The fabric felt rich, sensual. It smelled musty, like old sweat, but also held lighter scents underneath, reminiscent of perfumed people dancing in elegant halls.

  “Ordinarily, you’d paint an impression of the slipper before transferring its essence,” said Lisane, “but let’s experiment. Pull the softness on to the panel with your brush.”

  I stared at her, unsure. “I don't know how.”

  “Follow your instincts.”

  I dabbed my brush into faint yellow and turned to the panel. I concentrated on the memory of the slipper’s softness against my cheek. The bristles compressed against the panel as I made my first stroke.

  Lisane inhaled sharply. “Well,” she said with a hint of amazement.

  I turned back to see her staring thoughtfully at the panel, her usual air of detachment replaced with surprise. The slipper in her hands had begun turning ashen, but Lisane paid it no heed.

  She reached toward my brushstroke. I watched as her finger neared; it did seem soft, as if she might brush real velvet instead of wood. She halted a moment before touching the oil, as if reminding herself that it was only an illusion.

  She looked down at me, her expression changed from indulgent amusement to something else entirely. “You’ll never be a great painter. But the magic…”

  I didn’t even hear what she said next. My heart beat at a furious pace. I knew she was going to kiss me a moment before she did. I closed my eyes to savor the feeling of her lips, softer than any velvet.

  Once I consented, the house went into tumult. Lisane called Giatro to give him t
he news. Apprentices went out to notify journeymen and masters who had their part to play in the plan, preparing the ague victim and running errands elsewhere in the city.

  A determined young journeywoman began setting up a canvas on an easel in Lisane’s chamber. I knew Lisane preferred canvases, but I had always worked on wood; I protested that I should be allowed to choose my materials, but the journeywoman informed me in a flat voice that Lisane had given specific instructions. Lisane, lying with her eyes closed, added nothing. The journeywoman hurried me out the door so she could begin laying out her bundled supplies.

  I went downstairs. Through the archway, I glimpsed the teaching hall which resounded with voices and footsteps. Orla's name rang back and forth, an acoustic centerpiece to their plans.

  I ducked away from the activity, moving into the kitchen where I’d sometimes spent time as an apprentice, sitting alone with a pan of coals after the cook had gone to bed. I was surprised to see Giatro seated on a bench by the fireplace, slumped over with his hands resting on his knees. Firelight lit the planes of his face with saffron, amber, and crimson. Smoke billowing from the low fire made his body smudged and indistinct.

  The smoke stung my throat. Giatro looked up as I dabbed my watering eyes. He slid over on the bench, making room for me to sit beside him.

  “People will find out.” His voice was a low grumble, thick with smoke and emotion.

  I gestured toward the hall. “I thought all this uproar was supposed to prevent that.”

  “It’s against the law,” he protested. “It’s not…it’s not right. You could still say no.”

  A passionate flush made his skin ruddy underneath the flickering colors. He seemed so young, even though I’d been no older when I started sleeping in Lisane’s bed. “Lisane, she…favors you…am I right?”

  His flush deepened. He looked away.

  “I know how—how hard it is to let go of someone when you feel that way, whether it’s an illness that comes between you, or something else.” I paused. “She’s not going to live through this whether or not I paint her. You know that, don’t you?”

  Giatro turned beseechingly toward me. His position shifted the play of shadows and light. His right half brightened while his left fell into darkness, dividing his face vertically into yellow and black like a festival mask. “What will happen to her soul?”

  “I don't know,” I said, as gently as I could.

  My other answer—the genuine one—was that I didn’t care.

  I never knew which were more splendid: the nights I spent in Lisane’s bed, or the mornings I spent drawing by her window.

  At dawn, she would pull back the heavy drapes that curtained the bed from the world at night, and I’d get up to throw open the wooden shutters, letting in the sun and fresh air. Below, women made their way through the streets, chattering as they carried jugs to the river. Early light brought out undertones of rose and lavender in the nearby stone buildings and dazzled off the cathedral dome just visible in the distance. Peddlers carrying meat and fruit stopped to knock at familiar doors, waiting for gruff-countenanced cooks to emerge and haggle. Breezes carried the scent of their wares to our window, along with the echoes of women’s chatter and footsteps on the cobbles.

  Lisane reclined on the bed, watching as I sketched. She gave me fresh paper to work with instead of the wax tablets the apprentices used, which never took precise lines, however sharp the stylus.

  She taught me the principles of composition. One morning she saw me begin sketching a set of majolica dishes she’d lain on a chest beneath the window. “What are you doing?” she demanded, roused from her bed. “You can’t just draw what you see. First you have to arrange it into art.”

  She taught me to arrange objects so they created drama with different shapes and sizes. The eye was drawn to curves, she said, and to triangles. A tea cup’s handle could gesture the eye toward a pitcher, which in turn rose tower-like above a stack of plates. Or a platter might lead the eye to a tall candlestick, which in turn would draw the viewer’s attention to a silver finger bowl set behind the others as if it were an afterthought.

  “Art is lain out in shapes,” she said, “and brought to life with color.”

  She instructed me in linear perspective, the technique that had been invented by her teacher’s teacher, Umo Doani Nazatore. Begin by viewing your composition as a window on another plane, she said, teaching me to draw the painstaking lines that determined whether surfaces should be lengthened or foreshortened.

  I loved the beautiful work that could be created using linear perspective—but I was not made for methodical measurements. I worked for hours, struggling to sketch the lines correctly, but they always came out sloppy and badly placed.

  When my eyes welled with frustration, Lisane was always there to lay kisses on my clumsy fingers and up my arm, her body pressed against my back, her breath warm in my hair.

  “Let me show you again,” she’d say, guiding my hand so the art was drawn from our mingling.

  Lisane looked mad under the flickering oil lamps. Yellow light highlighted her sallow undertones and brightened her feverish eyes.

  I suddenly did not want to paint her at all. “We should wait until morning,” I said, gesturing to the shutters.

  Lisane gave a fervent shake of her head. “It must be now.”

  “The light…”

  “There’s plenty of light.”

  Giatro’s objections didn’t seem so easily dismissed anymore. “What will happen to your soul if I—”

  “My soul! Spare me your maundering. Paint! It must be now!”

  I forced my fingers to remain steady around the brush.

  The journeywoman had lain out a rainbow of mixed paints, preserved wet and ready by techniques I didn’t know. I dabbed carnelian onto horsehair. The shade was a vivid memory—the same as Orla’s long-ago dragonfly wings—wholly inappropriate for sallow Lisane.

  I went to wash the brush. Lisane called out, “Use the red.”

  I turned back. She’d pulled herself up against the headboard. The whites of her eyes were clouded and bloodshot. Her mouth gaped into a grotesque expression.

  Her tone was like a knife. “Did you think painting a person would be like painting a slipper?”

  “I thought—”

  “Don't think. Paint!”

  With an ordinary object, one begins by painting a representation. The careful painter will render a detailed facsimile. Magic can be done with less—even a hint of yellow can steal a measure of velvet softness—but there must always be something that reflects the real object.

  Or so I’d believed.

  I mixed carnelian and yellow, slopping them on in messy, concentric whorls. When my brush seemed inadequate, I used my fingers, my palms, my face, whatever parts of my body I could bring into contact with the canvas.

  Lisane’s breath hissed through her lungs. I turned, afraid I would see that she’d disintegrated into a heap of ashes—but she was still there, leaning toward me, wearing a predatory look.

  “Keep painting,” she said. “You’re doing it. You see?”

  The whites of her eyes were wholly red. Her skin dripped like wax, hanging in folds from her skinny bones.

  “Stop staring at me! Paint!”

  She shrieked with all the remaining power in her withered lungs.

  “Paint, blast you! Paint!”

  The slipper had turned to ash. People decayed in different ways.

  “She’ll get bored with you,” Orla said one afternoon when I was late for instruction, my clothing still rumpled from Lisane’s bed. Her tone was low, but jagged with resentment.

  I tried to pass her and gather my wax tablet. She caught my shoulder.

  “It happens to all of us,” she said. “It happened to me. It happened to Xello. It happened before him, too, to Rey and Cosiata and I don’t know how many others. Most of us are from the city. At least we knew what she does. It’s not fair that no one told you.”

  I felt fl
ushed. I tried to pull away. She held fast.

  “Did she teach you magic, Renn? Tepri said you told her that Lisane showed you how to paint velvet.”

  “Tepri’s a liar.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Renn!” Orla shook her head. “Lisane is getting desperate. She’s started doing strange things to the apprentices—she says if normal teaching techniques only produce normal students, then she has to act exceptional. She wouldn’t let me learn any magic at all until I’d mastered everything else. Now I can hardly use it. It’s like a limb that atrophied. What’s going to happen to you?”

  I held still, breathing hard. Orla’s grip was painful on my shoulder, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t accept what she was saying about Lisane.

  “There’s a reason no one teaches magic to apprentices, Renn. It changes how they relate to art. She’s going to ruin your ability to paint—if she hasn’t already. And then she’s going to throw you out of her bed, too. You won’t have the art. You won’t have her. You won’t have anything.”

  She tried to hold my gaze. Her eyes were too deep. I turned my head.

  She released my shoulder. Her next words were so soft I barely heard them. “I didn’t believe it either,” she said, her skirts rustling as she turned to leave.

  It should have taken longer, but the magic was feverish. Morning came. Day passed. Night fell again. My brush moved with impossible speed and surety.

  I’d known Lisane before. Now I knew her better than I’d ever known anything.

  I painted the furled anger of her childhood, growing up in the shadow of her household’s disdain. A crack of possibility opened when Signore di Gael accepted her as a student—but even that joy was tempered by her simmering fury at always being treated as less than, as if she were some kind of dog that had jumped onto the table in the middle of a banquet and insisted on eating his supper off of silver dishes.