“Where is this one’s work?” she demanded.
Orla was crouching by the wall, her hands thrown over her face like a painted mourner. I thought she was ashamed of me, but now I wonder if she wasn’t feeling a deeper shame. What similar scenes might played out before I entered the house?
Slowly, she lowered her hands and raised her eyes. “In there, mistress,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the heap of panels.
“Locate it,” said Lisane. “Now, please.”
Laboriously, as if pushing herself through an invisible substance, Orla went to the middle of the room and dug through the pile until she found my most recent effort. She laid it carefully on the floor.
Lisane gave it a brief, disgusted glance. “This one’s work is not improving.”
Her gaze moved from the painting up to me, her expression displaying utter loathing. She shook her head and swept out of the room, leaving others to straighten the mess.
Orla began picking up the panels. One by one, the other journeymen stooped to help. A sweet-smelling dusk breeze blew through the open shutters, ruffling their sleeves. It was dim and the shadows were gathering.
Angry oranges now, bright and uncompromising, jagging down the canvas like lightning bolts. Snarls of unflinching, determined white, tangling in the corners and then stretching into tendrils, writhing blindly toward something neither they nor I could reach.
When I finished at last, I steeled my nerve to turn back to the bed. Lisane was gone—not a husk, not an ash, not a trace. Only her rumpled sheets remained beneath her enormous headboard.
Whatever had happened to her soul, it was finished now.
I stood shaking by her empty bed for a long time, wondering if I was mad. I did not feel mad, but I did feel different: a trifle colder, a trifle more resolute.
The angle of the sun’s rays shifted through the shutters, creeping toward me across the floor. Eventually, Orla came up the stairs. She lingered in the doorway, holding a lit candle even though it was daytime, her head bowed as if she was afraid to see what I’d done.
Age had stolen the peachy smoothness from my rival’s skin, but she’d gotten heavier instead of lining so she still looked young. Wrapped around the candle, her short fingers were rough, her knuckles knotted. Stained fingertips testified that she continued to paint even though many teachers became indolent once they had students.
She braced in the doorway, ready to defend herself. “I wasn’t sure if it was over,” she said, glancing at the empty bed for a moment before looking hastily away.
I wanted to berate her for standing in front of me, acting as if we were equals when Lisane had given her the house, had given her everything. Instead, I snapped, “There are no ghosts here.”
“Of course not,” she said, looking guiltily at the lit candle. Cautiously, she set it on Lisane’s bedside table before snuffing it out. “You’re not—” she began. “You don't seem—”
“I’m not mad.”
She peered shrewdly at my face. “No,” she said eventually. “You don't seem to be.”
“Did Lisane tell you I would be?”
“She said to be careful. She knew she was taking a risk.”
“You mean I was taking a risk.”
She nodded.
“Lisane thought you might have enough magic to protect you . . .” Orla said.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t the magic.”
Orla raised her brows. “No? Then what?”
I tried to imagine what it would have been like to paint a stranger, to be overwhelmed with all their unfamiliar memories and desires. I’d had a lifetime of bending myself around Lisane’s passions.
I didn’t want to discuss it with Orla. I gestured at the portrait to distract her. “It’s done.”
Orla had been avoiding the canvas until I called her attention to it. Now, at last, she turned.
A tremor ran through her body. She stepped carefully forward, approaching with a mixture of reverence and fear. She reached out to touch the surface and then pulled her hand back as if it were radiating heat.
“It . . .” she said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s Lisane.”
“It looks . . . determined. Passionate. Angry.”
“It’s Lisane.”
She moved even closer, angling her head as if preparing for a kiss. The expression on her face was beatific. Wisps of hair fell loose from her cap and the morning light seemed to make her features glow. She reached out again. This time her fingers skimmed a white tendril.
As I watched Orla’s rapture, a sudden realization struck me. I no longer loved Lisane. Something had changed during the day and nights I’d spent painting. The expression on Orla’s face was familiar, but also foreign, a memory of something past.
Orla shook herself like a bird after a bath. She turned from the canvas. “We need to take it down to the cellars. Lisane left instructions. The journeymen are preparing. I’ll let them know it’s ready.”
“Must you?” I murmured despite myself.
She blinked at me as though I’d gone mad after all. “What else would we do?”
My gaze slanted away. “I'm being foolish.”
“No,” Orla said, almost sighing as she looked longingly over her shoulder. “Anyone would want to display it. It’s astonishing, Renn.” Her voice was quiet, but hard with pain. “She said it would be.”
Lisane, oh my Lisane. You spent your life making me. Then I spent my heart remaking you.
After the disaster in the studio, I never begged you to take me back again—but I still followed you when I could, hiding in the shadows so you wouldn’t know I was there. I watched you instruct the other students, and in those moments when your fingers inevitably intersected theirs, I imagined their coolness brushing mine. I reveled in your lingering scent. You smelled more like paint than flesh, but wasn’t that the way it should have been? You always cared more about art than bodies.
All of us watched you from the shadows. Orla and Giatro and Xello and Rey and Cosiata, back to the first. The painting of our lives shows you striding forth brilliantly into the light while the rest of us crouch in your wake, hastily sketched into the background by an artist late on his commission.
I watched from the top of the stairs while they prepared to take the portrait down to the cellars where it would bide until all of us were dead. A journeyman covered the wet canvas with a protective cloth. Another, holding a lit oil lamp aloft, led the way out. Orla followed, cradling the wrapped painting like an unwieldy child. Others trailed behind, solemn as a funeral procession.
Giatro was the last to go. He lingered in the lee of the doorway, watching the others. Even from a distance, I could see he hadn’t slept. His eyes were hollow and dark, smudged beneath with a color like ash. Without thinking, I saw him as a composition of shapes and colors: the oval of his head bowed toward the shaking rectangle of his chest, his newly shorn hair dark against his pale scalp.
He wept alone in the shadows for a few moments before departing.
When the hall was empty, I descended the stairs. I crossed away from the basement, my footsteps heavy on the russet tile, and pushed open the heavy oak door that guarded the manor from the street. The morning was overcast, the foliage deep emerald against the white. Complex shadows folded beneath the shrubbery, changing shape as the wind tousled the leaves. The sundial’s shadow fell, arrowlike, across stone and herringbone brick, pointing toward an early hour.
I could never paint anyone else into canvas, never make another masterpiece. I would always be surrounded by tools I could never master while being forbidden to use the one I could. I’d return to my cold studio to spend my life painting pedestrian landscapes for clients who wished they could afford better artists.
And yet, I’d gained something, too. I’d spent my life trying to please Lisane. Now I was finally free to move out of her shadow.
I trudged across the meandering pathways, enclosed by the hea
vy scents of late-blooming flowers and the whistle of lonely birds. Overhead, the clouds blew into new formations of grey and white. My hand lingered on the latch for a moment before I opened the gate and left Lisane behind.
“Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia” copyright © 2012 by Rachel Swirsky
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON
Alaya Dawn Johnson (born 1982) is an American writer of speculative fiction.
Alaya (rhymes with “papaya”) lives, writes, cooks and (perhaps most importantly) eats in New York City. Her literary loves are all forms of speculative fiction, historical fiction, and the occasional highbrow novel. Her culinary loves are all kinds of ethnic food, particularly South Indian, which she feels must be close to ambrosia. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures, and has lived and traveled extensively in Japan.
Her most recent novel is The Summer Prince, which has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. It is a Junior Library Guild selection for Spring 2013 and has been longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies Zombies vs. Unicorns, Welcome to Bordertown and Interfictions 2, among others.
A Song to Greet the Sun, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
i.
Will her brothers mourn
the loss of their jeweled seed?
Her mother has baked all night
dead silent in the kitchen.
The ashes are bitter as cacaotl grounds
But give no liminal visions.
Sunrise: the bread is dense, each slab gray as evening moss.
The father will not eat his slice—
It’s salted with his tears.
He used the natleoc, the stick of thorns covered in dust and spores above his doorway, for that was what the priests prescribed and he would have this done as the gods demanded. She did not cry when the sharp points broke her skin, and so he hit her a second time. They both stared at the blood coursing down her arm and breast, astonished and a little afraid at the beauty of the forbidden liquid.
“Father?” she said, just like that. Mild and trusting, and he recalled when she had been younger, a child, not the disobedient strumpet before him, and a red cormorant had stolen the choicest wood-ear from her basket.
“Father?” she had said, and he’d given her two of his own, and she’d smiled.
As she’d smiled for that barbarian? That bare-chested metl?
The sun god shalt not suffer a disobedient daughter to live. And his priests shalt not suffer her father to receive the twelfth district tax appointment, the one for which he had slaved these more than twenty years, without extreme repentance.
“Father?” she said again, as the blood dripped onto his floor, marking his house with his spilled honor. Condemning her to death. There had been spores on the natleoc, more than enough to poison her blood, even without the miasma of river air. But she didn’t seem to understand.
He must finish it. They said he must, to reclaim his family’s honor.
But he could not speak. So he hit her again, across her cheek. The thorns bit deep, and this time she did cry out. She stumbled to her knees.
“Is this about Colqi?”
The whole district already knew. He was a laughingstock. His friend Ollin, the twelfth district constable, had told him of his daughter’s disobedience and recommended he see the priests. “Your daughter has been seen by the river, holding hands with a metl. The one who plays reeds in the cacaotl house.”
And the priests had given him a feather, yellow for vengeance, and told him to break her skin. He would dye it red with her blood and bring the proof back to them, and by such measures would his shame be expiated.
He killed her then, closed his eyes to the sight of her blood, his ears to the sound of her sharp breaths.
“Father,” she said, “you have killed me.”
So he shattered her jaw and she could not speak.
So he crushed her windpipe and she could not weep.
And in her lips, he put a wizened wood-ear, because he remembered she had loved them, and went off to fetch his wife. His sons were good boys; they had held back their mother long enough.
ii.
His legs are long, lithe with unearned grace
His fingers dance like caterpillar legs
Over the reeds of his pipes
He hides from the sun
But the river hears—it loves him as she does.
She, the sun’s daughter, by conquering fathers forbidden
To keep her heart in the basket of his reeds—
Fragile beneath the one-eyed god’s stare.
Constable Ollin is out traveling. So the girls whisper and laugh at Number 12, the cacaotl house where he and the other petty bureaucrats of the twelfth district like to partake in the evening. Zorrah regards him with mild curiosity between her sets. It’s not like the dour constable to order such fine mushroom grounds in his cacaotl—he is known to enjoy less stupefying brews.
She’s dressed in little but her cochineal hair and clacking castanets. When she dances, Ollin stares along with the rest, but who knows what music he sees, or what rainbows he hears.
“Her hair sounds just like morning,” Ollin says, late in the night. Another patron, deep into Number 12’s legendary Quetzal brew, nods in complete understanding.
The rumor of what happened to that girl, that daughter of the crabbed tax collector Mazatlin, spreads through the tavern like the bitter resin of grounds steeped overlong in a brew. She hadn’t been very pretty, Zorrah remembers, but she had a smile that could coax the sun to love the moon.
An honor killing? That little man? That beautiful smile? “Old Miq had better retire soon, else Mazatlin might honor kill him too!” one passably bold wit offers, but the constable merely nods his head to unseen music. The others laugh nervously. Old Miq, the twelfth district comptroller whose job Mazatlin so violently desires, has been known to deny favors to those with indiscreet tongues.
Halfway through the night, the piper Colqi seems to choke on his reeds. He’s metl, but it’s a lax crowd at Number 12, more concerned with the potency of the brew and the tapestry of the music than the fickleness of imperial policy. That’s just their day job. Still, the jeers as he stumbles off the stage have a cruel aftertaste, a privileged savor.
“Your mother teach you to suck like that?”
“What can you expect? Bunch of lazy monkeys.”
“Leave him be!” shouts Zorrah, and they all do. Cochineal hair commands respect.
The music resumes, absent silent pipes. The metl goes traveling, hunkered down in the shadows like a wood-ear on the underside of a rotting log.
“From the muddy banks of the Nanacoal,” says the constable, a vague quotation, involuntarily uttered.
The metl has heard. “I have gathered the reeds,” he says, finishing the line.
The constable: “I wove them tightly enough for a desiccated heart.”
And oh, the metl’s voice is suddenly like that of his reeds, dark as silt, turbulent as the river:
“Not yet have I found you.
And I am left with this basket of the river’s weeds
Filled only with my longing
And the one-eyed god’s flesh.”
The constable begins to weep. Everyone sees, but no one makes much of it. He’s traveling, after all.
“I saw you smiling by the river,” the constable says. “You touched her arm. That smile could greet the sun!”
“That’s not how it goes,” giggles one of the other girls as she comes up behind him. “Don’t you know your Ilticloc? Maybe someone should refresh your memory.”
The constable follows her lead, stumbles up the stairs.
The metl travels alone.
iii.
The reeds are a safe place to hide a heart
Says Ilticloc, and who are we to argue?
Where can the moon and sun love, but in the shadows
?
But she steps beyond their fall
To the one-eyed god’s embrace—fierce and fleeting.
My love, says the moon’s son
Caterpillar fingers dancing along her breast.
Stay by my side, and we will always sing the brightest colors.
My love, says the sun’s ward
Her smile a tongue of its flame.
I would put the pomegranate seed between your lips,
I would strike my shells to the beat of your heart,
Were my will my own.
Sweeter than any jeweled seed, that kiss
Emboldened by her fickle sun.
High above the riverbank, the constable—
Who has longed for her symphony these many years—
Sees all.
We loved her, never let them say otherwise, in all the ways brothers can love a sister. Every summer, at high sun, she would spend all night gathering wood-ears and glow tongues to weave into wreaths. The best in the district, and she made them for both of us, so the girls would look as we walked along the river, and wonder if we might ask their fathers for permission.
To our mother, she gave the best of all, with the reds of wild soma and the blues of poison nightshade. At night, mother would glow like the empress, and our father was proud.
We loved our little sister, you see, but our father is our family’s sun, his word a surrogate for the god’s, and she had defied him. We had no choice; there will be war at the end of the rains, and we will make our names in it, so long as we may bear our father’s sign and his grace.
Our mother did not understand. We held her arms as she wept and cursed, and though we spoke to cover the sound, we all heard our sister’s cries, blue as the poison nightshade she’d once wreathed around our mother’s neck.
“Do you remember, mother,” we said, “when our sister was ten and father lost her in the streets by the palace? How we all looked for hours, calling her name, peering inside every door? And do you remember that night, after the moon had risen and ascended its heights, a woman leaves the palace by a side gate. Her hair is silver with blight, her eyes reflective as a cat’s. And she is holding our sister’s hand, and they are talking like the moon to the stars? The woman was princess Xocotzin, mother, do you remember? Before the emperor banished her to that convent.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 507