It was the first face that I had done a portrait of that I will never forget. Unseeing, unable to see me, his face so transformed from the model in my reticule, it was as if Yevgeny’s soul had fled into the clay, leaving only madness behind.
The gendarmes said something incomprehensible in their language, elbowing me aside. I replied in the Langue, that I didn’t understand what they said, and watched as three of them arrested the one who had been my friend, whose love I had dreamed of. The fourth gendarme, who could speak a passable Langue, met my eyes.
“Madame,” he said, for he did not know my station, “you are a foreigner? Guest of the empress? Have you been to the cathedral before? Perhaps go to the cathedral roof again. Perhaps you will understand what came on the poor wretch. Poor damned soul.”
My feet echoed on the stairs of the cathedral like the hoofbeats of the Guardian had echoed. Like the heels of the madman—of Yevgeny—had drummed as they dragged him away.
From the cathedral’s dome, the alleyways and schools and the common rooftops were all just as I had last seen them. I counted them. I have the portraitist’s eye. I remember such details.
Beyond the city wall, there was nothing. Mud and tidepools. Shards. Circling flocks of carrion crows that dared not veer into the Guardian’s Nevarim.
Not the houses that my maid’s children had lived in. Not the home of Yevgeny’s merchant family. Not the pines beside them that had given the wood for my portrait.
I had been so certain in my purpose when I made the head, on saving all that was beautiful in the city, with my talent and my art. The people outside the city, who did not share our language, who did not want our customs, had not crossed my mind.
And that was what Merlinnet had feared: that I, with all my talent, could not envision the whole of what the Guardian should protect, to tell it that a charwoman’s child and hut had as much value as a cathedral.
I removed my gloves and ran my bare hands over my face, the living flesh feeling like the clay wet with cold brackish water, like the face of a stranger, a lover. Like the faces of the drowned beneath the muddy seawater that had risen and gone elsewhere when my Guardian repelled it from the city. Like the face of the foreigner, summoned, whom royal decree had killed and royal decree had ordered her beauty preserved.
So that men centuries hence could behold the churches that I had saved, and the face a woman had put on that bronze idol. He had yanked the northern city up on its rear legs above a flood for a breathless moment, giving men time to admire its beauty. At the cost of the sea seeking prey less well-born, paths less beautiful than my own choice.
The empress awarded Merlinnet a gold medal for the Guardian, and me a silver one for the Guardian’s head.
At home, back in the Patrie, I keep the medal hidden under the little head that looks like me, carved of sap-smelling northern pinewood.
All I think, when I see it, is that wood floats on seawater.
.
Copyright © 2015 Tamara Vardomskaya
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Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Besides previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, her fiction has also appeared on Tor.com. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago.
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COVER ART
“Sundown,” by Feliks Grzesiczek
Feliks Grzesiczek is a self-taught artist from southern Poland. He worked many years as a graphic designer in visual advertising and a publication designer in a printing company. He grew interested in landscape painting after 2005. His work spans both digital and traditional painting mediums and includes portraits as well as cover art for gaming cards and audio CDs. View more of his work at fel-x.deviantart.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
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