The artist put gold coins on the table. “Do you suppose you could drown him?”
The captain laughed. “You’re not the sly old devil your father was.” The coins vanished into his misshapen claw. “Sponge-diving is a hazardous job. He could drown tomorrow.”
Tiphytsorn pondered. He needed his sister’s help first. He said, “It would be better if he drowned next week.”
“Have you ever noticed that the horizon goes up at the edges? The world is neither round nor flat, it is a bowl on a table where demons feast. Any one of us can be snatched up today, tomorrow, next week.”
“Tell your demons that next week is best.”
* * * *
The artist was engrossed in shaving the stubble from Dubaphuta’s pudendum when his sister burst unannounced into his studio, but she cheerfully omitted to feign shock or disgust. Shedding dried kelp and sand on his floor of glassy-clean marble, she set down a smeary array of earthenware jars. They smelled rankly of the sea, but perhaps it was Phitithia herself who bore the odor.
He studied the pots. They all seemed to contain the same green muck, like various shades of puréed spinach, although far less appetizing. “How—?”
“You must experiment.” She rummaged among his own paint-pots, selected a pale yellow and smeared some on her palm. She dipped a finger in one of her pots and blended her potion with the pigment, then traced a childish line down Dubaphuta’s splendid thigh.
Tiphytsorn gasped. The color of a perfect daffodil exploded before his eyes. This was no painted line on his slave’s skin, it was a profound chasm that revealed the essence of Yellow.
“It tickles!” the girl giggled, not happily, but the artist had trained himself to ignore their comments.
* * * *
A festival unique to Sythiphore is Morons’ Day, when everyone masquerades as the stupidest person of his or her acquaintance. Servants ape their masters, husbands mimic their wives, wives mock their lovers. Phitithia padded herself with flesh-colored pillows, traced a pitiful attempt at a mustache on the corners of her mouth, tied a dead sprat to her loins, and paraded four tottering hags through the streets, all of them blotched with crude designs in clashing colors.
Everyone knew of her brother, and they loved the joke. To her astonishment the people demanded that she be crowned Queen of Morons at the riotous noonday ceremony before the Municipal Palace, and the mayor—whose impersonators had won this title for three years running—was delighted to oblige. The crowd went wild when Phitithia’s overstuffed caricature accepted a kiss from a striking young man who was disguised as a lumpish old sailor, although very few could say who he was or whom he was made up to resemble.
No one could take her triumph away from her, but her brother deflated it when he made his own appearance that afternoon. He wore no costume. He had forgotten the holiday in his absorption with his work, he had not slept for a day and a night, and the mummers who capered through the streets nearly panicked him with fears for his sanity.
He soon caught on, and no one noticed that he had been cringing in terror from the fantastical mob. He was ignored as they gaped in wonder at his artwork. He had risen to the challenge of his new colors, and never before had he created such bold designs. Some observers strangely insisted that they saw no painted women at all, and that the artist was preceded by an indescribable creature of pure light whose hues and patterns shifted as it floated above the pavement; but then Morons’ Day is traditionally celebrated with every sort of intoxicant.
The artist accumulated a train of admirers, while others raced ahead to spread the news of his masterpiece. Holding court on the palace steps, Phitithia was chagrined to find herself abandoned by her subjects; and much more so when she learned the cause. No one wanted to laugh at her brother. They had all gone to worship him.
“Morons’ Day, indeed!” she snarled.
“But we have each other, my Queen,” Dildosh murmured as he undid the fastenings of her padded costume and prepared to observe the holiday in true Sythiphoran style.
* * * *
It is a fine thing to feel like a god, as Tiphytsorn often had in the frenzy of creation. Even finer it is for the whole world to hail you as one, and this pleasure he now savored. No one tried to imitate him anymore. No one could. People loitered outside his gates in the hope of getting the first look at his next sensation; but failing that, they seemed happy enough to see the artist himself, to cheer him, to buffet one another for the privilege of kissing his hand or even touching his litter. Poems were dedicated to him. Songs were sung about him, and only a few of them were satirical.
He grew lazy. He rose late, stayed long at table, played idly with his slaves, napped, then went out to show himself to the public and grace the salons of noble admirers. His pots of paint congealed and crusted.
He told himself that his life was unrelieved ecstasy, but he knew that he lied. Alone in the small hours the fear gnawed him that he would never be able to equal his last work. And everyone expected him not just to equal it but to vault beyond it to some new universe of color and design whose nature he couldn’t even begin to imagine. He would viciously interrupt anyone who began a sentence with, “When—?”
Long before he intended to rise, Phitithia shook him awake one morning. “Try these,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re looking for something new, aren’t you? Isn’t that why you’re moping like a whale in a pond?”
“Moping? Ordinary men may mope, dear Sister, but artists rest and restore themselves for heroic new efforts, they digest experience, they ponder and weigh and plan—”
“When you stop moping, try these,” she said. “The forgotten craft of the Old City itself has been distilled into these pigments. No living eye has seen such colors.”
“How did you get them?” he asked, stifling a yawn as he cast a listless eye on more pots of green muck.
“It wasn’t easy. But it’s the least I can do for you. The very least.” She flounced out.
Perhaps he had been neglecting her, he thought as he disentangled his limbs from those of his slaves and lurched off to wash. That might explain her brusque manner. He had been far too preoccupied with worries about his Art to pay heed to her psittacine nugacities.
Studying the new array of pots, he suffered a pang of regret. Angry with him or not, she had taken pains to assemble the very gift he needed. He wondered how to show his gratitude. There was always Dildosh: he could rescind his death-sentence. He couldn’t tell Phitithia of this generous act, of course. He still must do something to soothe her apparently hurt feelings.
An even worse pang struck him. He rummaged through the disorder of his studio until he found a calendar. By his best calculation, rechecked twice over, he had ordered Captain Calamard to drown the sponge-diver three weeks ago. It wasn’t his fault that he’d forgotten about it. An artist couldn’t be expected to trouble his head with trivia.
It must be grief, then, not anger that afflicted his sister. If she suspected him, she would surely have accused him. More likely she would have tried to claw his eyes out. Remorse grew sharper. Instead of finding her a gift, he ought to find her a new and even handsomer sponge-diver whose standards of beauty were as flexible as Dildosh’s.
He admitted that affection for his sister seemed to be warping his judgment, so he shelved the idea until he could consider it dispassionately. He opened a new pot of green paint and mixed it with some of Phitithia’s new batch of slime. The result was a sickly gray with a markedly foul odor.
Except for the lazy Tuphaduba, whose purring snore rose from his disordered cushions, the slaves had gone off to primp themselves. He hauled the sleepy creature blinking and grumbling into the sunlight and stood her before his stool. He prodded her into bending to grip her knees and present him with a pristine surface that would have made an artist limited to such rubbishy media as wood, canvas or parchment weep with envy. The texture of her skin was doughy from sleep, but the artist soon slapped it taut.
“What?” Tiphytsorn cried, unable to believe his ears.
Tuphaduba hastily explained: “Sir, in my contemptible homeland of Parasundar, that would be a respectful salutation. It alludes to the noble tiger, whose uncountable splendors are enhanced by its rich aroma.”
“Oh. Very nice. But what about the rest of it?”
“As the testicles are the repository of all virtue, Lord, as they are the source of courage and honor and potency, we treasure those of the tiger and grant them to a favored few.”
“So that you meant to compliment me in your heathenish way?”
“Indeed, Sir, that was my pathetic intention. Forgive me if the highest accolade that my people can grant offends you.”
He might have pursued this inquiry further, but he had just smeared some of the gray slime on her skin, and he tumbled into an abyss. No longer gray, it glowed and vibrated with a green brilliance he had never beheld. To say that it resembled any known shade of green would be like saying that a sunset resembled a skillet. It was not just the color, it was a new way of seeing it. The streak on Tuphaduba’s buttocks was the gateway to another world.
He labored all that day and through the night on his subjects, painting over, erasing, blending, revising. The slightest variation on one slave threw the four-fold composition into a dizzying new perspective. Each design seemed more wonderful than the last. He rejected dozens of them, any one of which would have stunned and dazzled the world.
Licking his fingers to thin the paints, he learned that they had flavors that exactly matched their colors. He was astounded to discover that he could identify not just the taste of blue but the sound of yellow and the feel of red. Indeed, he must have been creating his compositions by the distinctive sounds and touches and flavors of his new palette, because he only now realized that he had forgotten to strike a light when darkness fell.
Sunrise painted the city with the unheard-of colors that his sister’s potions had revealed to him, and with their sounds as well. The whining and grumbling of his slaves, begging him to let them sleep, added new flavors to the banquet of light, new themes to the symphony of color he had made of them. Ignoring the vivid orange of their protests, he hustled them out into the street, even though the only people he could stupefy with his genius would be early-rising workers and late-retiring carousers.
He acquired a considerable crowd of both, who followed him in silent awe. He grinned and nodded at them in a singularly red way, inviting their indigo praise. He tried to explain what he had done, since they were so obviously puzzled, but ordinary words wouldn’t serve. He spoke new words that suited his colors and made strange gestures that evoked their music.
To his astonishment, the fools mocked and gibed. He might have borne this with the dignity of misunderstood genius if their jeers and laughter hadn’t altered his composition by adding to it a hideous, foul-tasting shade that hurt his ears.
“I’ll teach you not to fuchsia my Art, you browns!” he shrieked, attacking them with teeth, fists and feet. “I’ll mauve you!”
* * * *
It’s not easy to cause a stir in Sythiphore, and it’s even harder in that most tolerant of cities to be deemed a lunatic. By the time he was haled before a magistrate, Tiphytsorn had learned to keep his secret wisdom to himself. How could anyone understand his Art when they couldn’t even see it? The fools insisted that he had herded a stumbling flock of badly-abused slaves through the streets, not painted at all, but so leeched of all color that they looked like drowned corpses. The only nervous symptom he exhibited, and it could have been a harmless tic, was to wince whenever the magistrate made his teeth ache with one of his high-pitched, magenta gestures.
A horrifying pattern, a purple conspiracy began to emerge as witnesses to other acts came forward to testify: commercial painters he had abused, lords and ladies he had offended by refusing to paint them. Every sensible thing he’d ever said or done was put forward as a symptom of madness.
He was about to heave a sigh of relief when Phitithia appeared, fortunately not trailing seaweed but painted decorously in cloying shades of pink and yellow. Even if she had chosen to have herself decorated by some tasteless nitwit, she would set everyone straight. But he nearly strangled on his sigh when he recognized the copper-painted figure beside her as the ineffable Dildosh, who should have been drowned by Captain Calamard.
“Who is Captain Calamard?” the magistrate asked, repeating the name that Tiphytsorn had foolishly blurted out in his shock.
Phitithia said, “My Lord, I spared my poor, deranged brother the pain of the news that his dear friend, the captain, perished heroically while rescuing my fiancé from drowning. But perhaps he heard of it elsewhere, and this was what drove him completely mad.”
“My Lord!” the artist cried, rising and planning to demonstrate his sanity with a speech of the purest and most translucent violet. “As they say in Parasundar when paying homage to their greatest men, I’ll cut your balls off and eat them, you stinking beast.”
He got no further before the magistrate ordered him gagged.
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A Scholar from Sythiphore
Yodeo Globb came from Sythiphore, which typed him so handily that the people of Fandragord neglected to look too closely at the man himself. To anyone’s eye, he matched the type: plump, jolly and energetic, never failing to amuse when agitation thickened his accent and thinned his syntax.
If he kept odd hours, that was only to be expected, for any Sythiphoran behavior that cannot be classed as funny or disgusting is agreed to be inscrutable. If he sometimes smelled worse than hard work and a limited wardrobe could explain, it was ascribed to a lifetime of eating fish, and perhaps putting them to even less wholesome uses.
He said that he was an antiquary, an unworldly career for the hard-bargaining “melonhead” of folklore, but everyone agreed he had come to the right place. Fandragord was first built on the level of Hogman’s Plain, according to the story children are told, but the giants stepped on it. A new city rose on the site, but they stepped on that, too, and so on, until the present city was built on a heap of ruins too tall for them to stamp down.
Grownups who tell this story know that the “giants” who destroyed the city more than once were the feuding Houses of Fand and Vendren, not mentioned by name because so many of them are still around, and still as touchy as ever, but any sharp-eyed child who spends an afternoon scuffing through the rubbish can find enough broken weapons, regimental badges, charred bones and cracked skulls to decorate a packing-crate castle.
Since Yodeo Globb was no intellectual, even by whatever absurd standard prevailed in his native city, his pursuits were seen as similarly childish. Mention of “the scholar from Sythiphore” never failed to raise a laugh at the cheap inn where he lodged, and no one laughed more merrily than the stranger himself. Taproom idlers would be encouraged to go on to such questions as, “How’s your sister, melonhead?,” alluding to the infamously close bonds of Sythiphoran families, and he would laugh all the harder. The jokes obscured his true interest: unearthing more recent artifacts, such as gold teeth, silver spectacle-frames, and the coins traditionally placed on the eyes of corpses.
Although Yodeo’s window overlooked a brothel whose inmates were lax in drawing their blinds, he found his eyes more often raised to the distance and the mound that overshadowed the intervening expanse of Hogman’s Plain. This was only the closest of several such symmetrical hills in the wasteland, popularly known as the Giants’ Graves; and like so many other ruins and natural sites in or near the witch-cursed city, it was generally avoided.
Yodeo was not a fanciful man, but little imagination was needed to see the rough shape of a supine figure in the mound, a fancy lewdly enhanced by the lone oak-tree rising from its groin. For the first time in his career, he was tempted to step over the line that separates the grave-robber from the true antiquary. He had no faith in giants, but he did believe in ancient warlords with giant purses.
He had struck up acquaintances among the sluts across the courtyard, who had time and inclination to gossip of such news as the fatal accident to Tubok, the rich grocer, or the funeral arrangements for poor Lady Roxilla. He would often bring them extravagant bunches of flowers or odds and ends of junk jewelry, charming them with his gallantry and his queerly old-fashioned taste.
“They never was giants,” he told a pair of them one day. “They’s foot-bones would break when they do walk.”
“That’s why he’s lying down, probably,” said Poppy, the pert one. “Maybe he wasn’t a giant all his life.”
Orchid, the somber one, said, “Like all men, only more so, the giants were swine. So my mother told me. When the gods at last get sick of all this garbage—” her gesture included the courtyard, the whorehouse, the ancient city of Fandragord, and everything else under the sun—“they’ll be roused from their graves to root it out.”
“Orchid can’t wait,” Poppy said, pointing to the absurdly placed oak.
Yodeo distracted the women from the scuffle that ensued by telling them about whales, a species they believed in no more than he did in giants; but they agreed to go upstairs and examine the proof of his claim that he, like all Sythiphorans, was descended from these prodigious mammals.
* * * *
One morning he set out through the thorny desert of witchgrit and monk’s-rut that separated the mound from the city, soon regretting the economy and skepticism that had kept him from renting a mule to carry his tools and fetch back his loot. The path had been made by goats no more eager than humans to visit the mound. Fighting his way directly through the brambles soon frayed his clothes, his skin and his temper, and often led him into unexpected pockets where he could see neither the city nor his goal. He was forced again and again to wriggle his way out of dead ends and start over.
The vertical sun found him less than halfway to the Giant’s Grave. He had brought only enough crusty bread, goat-cheese and the ghastly local wine for one meal, but he saved half for later. He did not neglect a libation to Thululriel, although the offering to his sea-god had never seemed more futile than in this dusty waste.
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