by Pratt, Tim
Then, abruptly, Bogatryev withdrew, turning away all divine and infernal commissions. Lucifer, who had become something of a friend, visited him. Seeing Bogatryev slumped at his work table, Lucifer once again marveled at human frailty. Bogatryev wheezed, a pallid caricature of himself. “I'm dying,” he said, stick-thin elbows planted on the table.
“Would you rather stay alive?” Lucifer had to ask. Humans had odd notions about dying, sometimes.
Bogatryev laughed, but it turned into a coughing spasm. “Very much, but I didn't think that was your area. I thought you worked in the receiving department."
Lucifer put a glowing finger to his lips. “I can't do anything for you personally, but I know the right people."
Leaning on his bench, Bogatryev nodded. “I'd appreciate anything you can do."
“Man,” the voice said. Bogatryev shivered from more than his fever. The voice summoned images of dust and airless spaces, of the pause between breaths. It had nothing to do with birth or regeneration, only cessation. The voice of final entropy, Bogatryev thought.
The artist lifted his head from the bench, but saw nothing except a shimmer in the air beside him, like hot air rising from a vent. “I hear,” he said, his voice a creaking whisper, his lungs clenched in his chest.
“You will make my portrait,” the voice said, “and you will live."
“I have to see you. Unless you want to be a skull in a black robe, or a dancing skeleton."
“No. This time metaphors will not do. It must be an accurate portrait. Look on me, man, and create."
Bogatryev's eyes, trained to find form, color, and simple shape in everything, rebelled when the air opened and Azrael (the Finality, the Undoing, the Last Cause) stepped through.
Darkness blotted over him, and Bogatryev saw nothing.
“Man,” Azrael said. “I am pleased."
Bogatryev felt exhausted in every joint and muscle, but his lungs worked painlessly, and his fever was gone. He looked around blankly. The voice came from the shimmer in the air.
Momentarily forgetting the gift of health, he frowned. “I don't remember seeing you, much less doing a portrait. How can I learn from my work if I can't remember it?"
The air rippled. “Whether you remember or not, it is a good likeness. You saw the truth of my nature, and your art described it. You may live for a while yet."
“But what medium did I use? Paint? Light? Metal? Flesh? Something else?"
Azrael was gone (though not far, the artist thought; he is never far). Bogatryev inventoried his studio's supplies and found nothing missing. He checked his chronometer. He'd only been unconscious a few hours, hardly time to do a work of any complexity. His portrait of Azrael remained a mystery, even to its creator.
Lucifer visited him a few days later. “You seem better, my friend."
“Yes,” Bogatryev said, carefully slotting fossilized shark's teeth into a carved wooden head. “Please tell everyone I'm willing to take commissions again."
She came to him three years and a hundred works later. She came mocking and teasing and sure Bogatryev could not do her portrait. When she told the artist her name, he only nodded. He'd known it already. “I thought you must have died, when people stopped worshipping."
“Everyone worships beauty, by whatever name. I am Beauty. You cannot make my portrait, artist. Your fame has spread far and wide, but I have come to demonstrate your limitations."
“Give me time and your presence, and I will do you justice,” Bogatryev said.
Aphrodite frowned and worlds trembled. “My husband Hephaestus would be jealous if I brought you to Olympus.” She smiled (though she had no face, properly; she existed beyond shape, approaching essence). “I'll take you with me right away. He has grown too complacent lately. But your portrait will fail, artist, and you'll go mad trying to capture me."
“I accept your challenge,” Bogatryev said.
Before beginning his work on Beauty, Bogatryev created a portrait of surly, club-footed Hephaestus. Bogatryev didn't want the jealous god's hammer to crush his head and ruin this opportunity.
Bogatryev made an animate statue from precious metals, designed to sweat mercury, piss molten lead, and sing bawdy songs at the forge. Hephaestus loved it. He grew quite fond of Bogatryev, and welcomed the artist to his house, often showing him bits of ornamental ironwork, which Bogatryev praised.
Aphrodite never formally sat for him. It wouldn't have helped. She had no single shape, no form Bogatryev could sketch and elaborate on. He simply watched her when she drifted near, and thought, and after a hundred years began working.
Finally, many centuries later, he completed Aphrodite's portrait. He considered it the final fruit of his talent. The portrait contained every great work of art (personally and perfectly reproduced by Bogatryev), images of every natural splendor (from the high peaks of Sevon to the last remaining grotto on Morel), every shape of woman, man, and alien that pleased any eye, and many other beauties besides. The images, carefully phased out of normal time and space, flickered at the rate of a thousand per second, and still it took a dozen years to complete the cycle a single time.
Bogatryev presented his portrait to Aphrodite.
“It's my masterpiece,” he said, standing against the wall in his Olympian studio. Aphrodite watched the portrait for a long time (long enough for Bogatryev to sleep and wake and sleep again many times).
“It is perfect,” she said at last, her voice strange and flat. “You are the greatest artist of all time, and you have captured my image. But now you must destroy it, and leave Olympus, for I cannot bear to have my perfection reproduced, and I grow angry."
Bogatryev gladly complied. He had made the portrait of perfect Beauty, and it didn't matter if the work remained. He never needed to create anything else. His time as an artist had passed.
He returned to his moon, which Lucifer had maintained over the past several centuries, and slept for three days.
When Wotan, god-father of Valhalla, petitioned him for a portrait, Bogatryev graciously declined, explaining that he had retired.
When the Valkyries appeared, armored and bearing spears, Bogatryev was irritated but not surprised. He went with them quietly to Wotan's hall in Valhalla.
“Well?” Wotan demanded, his single eye blazing, leaning forward in his ivory throne. “Will you make my portrait, or not?” The two ravens on his shoulder flapped their wings in sympathetic agitation.
Bogatryev could do it easily enough. The sculpture should idealize Wotan's broad shoulders and chest, and Bogatryev could weave tiny war hammers and battle axes into the statue's white beard. A pair of live ravens would be a nice touch.
He contemplated the work, and found it tedious.
“I am retired, all-father,” Bogatryev said respectfully. “I appreciate your interest, but I no longer make portraits.” Lucifer lounged conspicuously at one of the feasting tables, and he nodded to show his support.
Wotan quivered, furious. The Valkyries and Wotan's huge-muscled sons bristled on the edge of violence. Let them kill me, Bogatryev thought placidly. I have done my greatest work, and I'm not afraid to die.
“You will do as I say, or you will be bound under the rock with Loki. You will bathe in venom and writhe on coals.” Wotan's face gleamed red with sweaty impatience.
“That is not so,” a voice said from the back of the hall. Everyone recognized the voice, even those who'd never heard it before.
“Azrael,” Lucifer said, and shivered.
“How dare you come into my hall uninvited?” Wotan demanded.
“I go where I will, and I am seldom invited. This man is not yours to dispose of."
“I only wanted a portrait,” Wotan muttered, settling down on his throne, gripping one of the skulls on his armrest. “Everyone else had one. Why not me?"
“Your vanity is unimportant now. All your vanities. Things have passed beyond that."
“Do you mean—” Lucifer began, but didn't go on.
Wotan l
icked his lips. “Is it the end, then? Ragnarok?"
“Basically,” Azrael said, and Wotan jolted in his chair. Bogatryev stood close enough to see his single pupil dilate, and the white of his eye cloud with blood. Wotan slumped. The ravens flapped their wings and pecked at his eye.
The warrior-gods shouted in alarm, but only Thor had the bravery (or foolishness) to rush Azrael, his hammer raised. The shimmer in the air darkened with a streak of blackness as Thor fell face-forward onto the floor.
“Make your peace,” Azrael said, and the gods fell. Lucifer slouched with a strangled gasp, radiant to the last.
Bogatryev closed his eyes and swallowed, waiting for death, hoping it would come without pain. He hadn't feared dying in the abstract, but now his legs shook and his bladder felt full of needles.
“You will live, man,” Azrael said. “There is a final work for you to do."
“I'm retired,” Bogatryev said, opening one eye. Cracks appeared in the high gray walls. “Is this happening everywhere?"
“Everywhere,” Azrael agreed. “Things have come to a close."
Bogatryev touched his chest, his arms, his own face. “But why me? Why am I still here?"
“Come with me,” Azrael said, and Bogatryev found himself in darkness. He could no longer feel his body, only the nothing pressing in from all sides. He had come to terminal time, entropy's last result. He felt Azrael's cold presence, a frigid eddy in the neutrality, but sensed nothing else.
“This is your work, man. Your portrait of me. You made it well."
The nullity made Bogatryev want to scream, but he had no breath, and there was no air to hold sound. Even Azrael's voice somehow conveyed sense without breaking the silence. “You understood that I am just a blankness, and you created a picture of this place that is not a place, this place beyond everything. This was your true masterpiece, not your portrait of brief beauty. Yet there is another work for you to do, and it may be a masterpiece as well."
“I can't do a portrait,” Bogatryev said without voice. “There are no models here."
“No. This work must come from inside you, man. I am the end of it all, and I have brought this inevitable nothing, but nothing is only half the universe. It is only one end of the continuum. A painting begins as a blank canvas, does it not, Bogatryev? A space to be filled."
“Then, this last work—"
“Is really only the first. I trust you will do it justice.” Then he was gone.
Bogatryev stretched his nothing limbs in the emptiness. He considered. Then, with a pallet of stars and blackness, he began to paint the nothing into light.
My Night with Aphrodite
I met Aphrodite in a bar and picked her up (I asked her sign and she showed me her constellation—you know what starry nights do to women). We went back to my place and had a few drinks and went to bed. She was perfect, tongue like honey, body like love, and she said all the right things. I was done in no time
(she is a goddess) but I helped finish her off.
In the morning she was still perfect. My breath tasted sour and she flinched away when I went to peck her cheek. I pissed and shaved and she watched like somebody seeing a snake eat a rat for the first time. I sucked in my stomach, brushed my hair, took a shower.
She followed me to the kitchen and didn't want breakfast. She gagged at the smell of frying sausage. She was still naked.
Her breasts defied gravity. I was hungover and felt like dogshit on a bootheel. I noticed that her feet didn't touch the floor. She suggested that I could be a better housekeeper, wrinkling her pretty nose at the dishes in my sink.
I walked her to the door. She didn't want a ride. My car, she said, smelled like cigarettes and fast food. She would fly. “You can call me if you want,” she said doubtfully.
“Just light a white candle, scented with rose and jasmine, and invoke my name five—"
“Sure,” I said, and closed the door.
Unfairy Tale
Molter Keen gamboled in the field: small, purple-ragged and clouded with flies. His nose wiggled, scenting the dry flowers and the bodies rotting in air. He hopped onto a sandy boulder beside the corpse wall and crossed his legs. The wall rose twenty times his own height, a terraced cliff-face. Molter craned his head and counted broad stone shelves. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five. Every shelf held a naked body and a contingent of fat crows.
And on the top shelf: The beauty, sleeping.
Wasps built a nest at the base of Molter's skull. The back of his neck burned red from repeated stings. He opened his mouth and flies buzzed out, zipping in close formation to feast on the bodies. They flew to the wall's top and circled the beauty's perfect unrotting head. Round and round they went, unable to strip her bones, and returned to the plague victims, the broken-backed old, and the infant with the too-big head.
Molter picked a wing from between his teeth and spat. Clouds streaked the sky black and dark blue, the wall was stacked with the dead (and the beauty), and the fleas in his hair slept. A blessed day in the no-longer-desert. Who cared if the air was too wet? Who cared if flowers grew where only stones had flourished? Not Molter, not today.
Mosquitoes boiled forth from his navel and flew across the sandy field. They returned quickly, full of blood, and bit him in the crook of the elbow.
Other blood mixed with his, and he grinned. Corrigan's blood. Molter did not love the new wet not-desert, but he accepted it in exchange for the gifts of the green folk from beyond the misty veil. He'd once been a wandering djinn, companion to scorpions, capable only of making a temporary body from blowing sand. After a meeting with the king of the green folk he came away with buzzing insects and a beautiful body of imitation man-skin. In exchange, he only had to defend the beauty, and accept the greening of the desert.
Corrigan approached, his white scarves fluttering, his yellow hair streaming. His eyes were the pure blue of the desert sky before the clouds came. “Hail, djinn,” he called. “Do you have any word of the mortal?"
Molter spat. Spit! Water from mouth to earth! “He doesn't come. He will not reach the desert, I think."
Corrigan shook his head. “He wants the beauty. He pursued us over an earthly continent, and then across the misty veil to the island of my people. A journey to the desert will not stop him, though we hope you will."
“He will not pass me,” Molter said. A long millipede slipped out of his mouth and started to crawl down his chin. He slurped it back in.
Corrigan covered his face with a scented handkerchief and glanced at the corpse wall. “Perhaps you should bury those bodies,” he said. “Haven't you noticed them swelling and starting to stink?"
Molter had noticed. The local tribes always put their dead on walls for the vultures and elements to reclaim. The corpses normally dried to stringy husks and dust, but since the green folk had brought flowers and grasses and rain, the bodies puffed and rotted. “There can be no burying. The sands shift, and uncover the graves."
Corrigan sighed and sniffed his handkerchief. “In a few more months, we'll have good digging soil here, and the humans can dispose of their dead properly."
Molter wanted to protest, to say “The sands sing at night, and whisper with shifting.” But he owed Corrigan's king service, and so kept silent. “The mortal has not come. No sign of sword or lips or pure heart. May I return tonight to the caravan trails, to whisper madness and make bargains with humans?"
“We gave you a body,” Corrigan said, turning his back to the wall. He looked over the spreading blot of flowers and grass. “You may not leave until your service is completed. I thought your kind were used to strict conditions, being sealed in clay pots and bound in caves for a thousand years, things like that."
Molter didn't answer. He wished to say “I am Il-a-mo-ta-qu'in, and no man has ever bound me,” but he no longer owned that name. The green folk called him Molter Keen, and they owned his service. He laced his fingers together and smiled as mites crawled from beneath his fingernails. A good trade, he thought. This fle
sh will outlast my service.
“I've been thinking,” Corrigan said. “Before the mortal comes to wake the beauty, you should prepare obstacles. Perhaps construct a castle, and put her in a tower? You could surround the tower with thorns, or thick trees that grow more quickly than he can cut them down. Or a stream full of snapping, biting fish."
“A stream?” Molter said. He knelt and took a handful of sand. Despite the flowers and the rain, the earth still sifted brown through his fingers. “There is a pool to the south, but the sand will not hold much water or ... trees?"
Corrigan kicked at the sand, uprooting several small flowers. “Damned desert. In other countries, we could arrange proper obstacles."
“Why didn't you? Why bring beauty here, then?"
Corrigan looked at him, then at the cloudy sky. “We tried the obstacles. The mortal overcame them, and nearly reached the beauty. So we brought her here, crossing distance quickly through the land beyond the veil, in hopes he would not follow. But he has. He is implacable."
“I'll tear him arm from chest, head from neck, when he comes,” Molter said.
“What?” Corrigan said. “Is that how you do things here? Such an attack is out of the question. Have you no grace, no honor? If he can reach the beauty and kiss her, he will break the sleeping curse and have her love. We may impede his path, but we cannot harm him directly."
Molter pondered. A beetle crawled from under his tongue and he bit down on it, chewing. The carapace cracked between his molars. Corrigan looked pointedly away and muttered something under his breath.
“I will stop him,” Molter said at last. “If not head from neck, another way.” He hopped from the boulder and scampered away from the small patch flowers, into the desert proper. The huge crows had driven away the local vultures with their numbers, but many still flourished over the sands. Molter had spies among the bald, reeking birds, and he wished to consult them.
I hope the mortal approaches, he thought. So that I can return to the desert, and the wet green folk will take their flowers away.
Days later, Molter sat again before the wall with Corrigan. The sweet stink of bursting bodies wafted from the shelves. Molter's bright rags hung dirty and disheveled, and grubs fell from holes in his imitation skin. “Obstacles all failed,” Molter said. A big scorpion trundled slowly from a rip in his stomach, waved its claws, then scurried back inside. “The dunes moved and filled the spike-pit. Boulders poised to fall, instead sank into sand. He jumped over the poison stream, one hop.” Molter had damaged his new body often while setting the obstacles.
