Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  Meanwhile, every trachy I get from OSI, my estates in the Mesoge, my mercantile and other investments, goes to feed the war refugees. I live here among them in the Chrysopolis camp, sharing their bad water and their plain, barely sufficient food, and I have to say, it’s pretty horrible. We live in tents, or shacks built out of scrap packing cases. The refugees are surly and miserable, they yell at me and sometimes throw stones, because they have no idea what I’m doing there. Their idea of hygiene is rudimentary at best. I’ve nearly given up trying to keep them from slaughtering each other over trivial disputes (nearly)—beyond keeping them alive, I can’t say I’ve done very much for them. But there’s so many of them, a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand; all rabid Deodatists. Really, the only thing that keeps them going is their faith, which got them into this dreadful state in the first place and sustains them in the face of the torments of hell. The Invincible Sun, and the glorious example of His true prophet Deodatus, who died for them that they might live; except he didn’t, but I wouldn’t dream of telling them that.

  In fact, I don’t dream of anything. At first, I was bitterly disappointed. I felt I was owed, at the very least, a well-done-my-good-and-faithful-servant, followed by a long overdue explanation and, just possibly, an apology. I’d have liked something, rather than complete and impenetrable silence. But there; they say that up in the Calianna mountains there’s an ancient Velitist monastery whose monks have spent the last two thousand years waiting for their gods to apologise for the Creation. They’re hopeful, so reports say, but they aren’t holding their breath.

  One Little Room an Everywhere

  Well now,” he said, giving me a sad smile, “what on earth are we going to do with you?”

  A valid question, to which I’ve never been able to think of an answer. “I thought,” I lied, “maybe teaching?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he said. “It takes a special sort of person to teach. Besides—” He didn’t need to say it, and wisely saved his breath.

  I’d wanted to be a Brother of the Studium, an adept, a practitioner, a wizard, for as long as I could remember. “All right,” I said, “what about commercial work? I understand they’re crying out for qualified men in East Permia.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t suit you. Commercial calls for certain qualities which maybe aren’t your strongest suits. And—” He hesitated. “To be brutally frank, the Studium has a duty to ensure that the candidates we recommend for placements abroad meet certain standards. We have a reputation, which we’ve worked hard to build up. No, I can’t honestly say we could support you if you chose to go down that road.”

  I nodded. None of this was coming as an earth-shattering surprise to me. “Fine,” I said. “So what would you suggest?”

  He looked at me for about as long as it takes to recite the Abbreviated Creed. “You know,” he said, “there’s a wide selection of highly rewarding careers outside the profession which you might well consider. Your qualifications—” he glanced down at the file “—such as they are, ought really to be a gateway to your true vocation, not a cage holding you back from doing what you were born to do. Which could well,” he added gently, “be something not directly involving the day-to-day use of the talent. Let’s see, now,” he went on, grabbing the file as though it were a friendly hand and he was drowning, “you’ve got lots and lots of outside interests, according to what it says here. Painting. Play-acting. And I see you play the bassoon.”

  “Not very well,” I said. He nodded. He believed me. “A marked creative streak,” he carried on. “Maybe something in the fine arts.” He paused. “Well, perhaps not. But connected to the fine arts, perhaps. Brother Perceptuus says you’re good with figures. Accountancy—”

  As soon as it was polite to do so, I thanked him and left. I bore him no ill will. I’d come to the same conclusion quite some time ago. Ten years in the Studium, studying the Science; wasted.

  Not quite. If I’d been completely useless and talentless, they’d have thrown me out when I was twelve. I have the innate ability. I can do quite a wide range of Forms, some of them very well indeed. I can do Rooms, and I was third in my class in Voices in sixth year. But there are things I can’t do, no matter how hard I try, and they happen to be basic, fundamental skills, without which I couldn’t possibly cope in any form of practice. I can’t See worth a damn; it’s humiliating, really. We went on a field trip to a battlefield once, and I just stood there, while all the rest of the class were talking to people I couldn’t see or hear, watching invisible armies sweeping across the meadow, minutely describing things that to me simply weren’t there. The Brother was very kind to me, but I could feel his contempt. I’d have quit the Studium then and there if I’d had any place to go.

  There I was, then; twenty-five years old, penniless, unqualified—I had my basic degree, but with no references or recommendations, it was useless for all practical purposes; no family to sponge off, nothing.

  Again, not strictly true. When you leave, you’re supposed to hand in your textbooks, which are of course restricted texts, illegal to own for non-adepts. I guess I had things on my mind. I neglected to give my books back when I left, and when a nice man in the booksellers’ quarter offered me sixty-five angels for the set, I hesitated, but only long enough for him to say all right, seventy.

  One of those seventy angels bought me enough industrial-strength brandy to drown my conscience and my sorrows. Five of them got me an attic room for a month in the Tanneries. I put aside twenty-five quarters for food and so forth; the rest I spent on paints, brushes, eighth-inch ten-year-seasoned limewood boards, gesso, a fine-tooth saw, a framer’s hammer, twelve sticks of willow charcoal, two quarters’ worth of wire nails and ten sheets of gold leaf. Then I went to the Golden Spire temple, by way of the dockyards (you can always pick up a few scraps of sixteenth-inch veneer offcuts from the trash bins outside the Arsenal) and spent a day making sketches.

  I spoilt three good boards and a quarter of a sheet of the gold leaf before I came up with anything that looked like anything. The fourth board was more or less all right, but I looked at it for a bit and threw it on the fire. The fifth attempt I gilded, framed and took down to the Golden Spire steps. An hour later, I’d sold it, for nine angels. And that was that. In the few seconds it took for me to let go of the board and accept the coins, I was transformed—greater and more wonderful magic than any Form I’d learned at the Studium—into a professional iconographer.

  It’s a wonderful feeling when, after a quarter of a century of frustrating bewilderment, you finally find out who you are. I won’t say it didn’t come as a surprise, but really, I didn’t mind in the least. I imagine it’s what coming home must feel like, though of course I wouldn’t know about that.

  In orthodox icon-painting, there are nine subjects;

  1. The victory of the Invincible Sun

  2. The ascent of the Invincible Sun

  3. The triumph of the Invincible Sun

  4. The Invincible Sun in glory

  5. The Invincible Sun, wearing lorus and divitision and holding labarum and globus cruciger, receiving the homage of the First Emperor

  6. The Invincible Sun, crowned, wearing chlamys and holding acacia, giving the key of the City to the First Emperor

  7. As 3, but the Invincible Sun wears the double crown without pendetilia

  8. The transmigration of the Invincible Sun

  9. The coronation of the Invincible Sun

  >

  There are those who take the view that the limited range of subject matter in iconography tends to stifle creativity and holds back the development of the graphic arts. This is simply and demonstrably untrue. Look at icons painted a thousand years ago and you’ll see significant differences. In Category 5, for example, a thousand years ago the Invincible Sun held the labarum in his left hand and the globus in his right; these days, it’s the other way around. Category 7 was added as recently as AUC 1744, so it’s barely
five hundred years old. On a more intangible level, stylistic innovation is the only real constant; just look at the different ways in which shading is used by Symbatus, say, and Laelianus. Or take the single tear on the Sun’s face in Category 2. Scylitzes uses at least four distinct colours, from dove grey to pure linen white. Macrianus, by contrast, merely hints at its presence with a fleck of silver, visible only from certain angles. And Corydon notoriously left it out altogether in his great Recessional Triptych—which led, of course, to his temporary anathemisation, furious debates in the Golden Chapter, and a serious riot in Ap’ Escatoy. Sorry, but no; anyone who says that the conventions are a limiting factor in iconography is missing the point completely. That’s like saying all people are identical and interchangeable just because they have one head and two legs.

  Anyhow, the conventions suit me just fine. They’re a wonderful thing if you can paint the Invincible Sun, and I can. Partly it’s a gift I was born with. Mostly, though, it’s cheating.

  I wasn’t there when the silk merchant in Conessus beat his wife to death with a footstool, nor when that deranged woman set fire to the orphanage in Salim Beal. When those terrible murders were going on in the Potters’ quarter I was out of town, delivering two Category Fours to the Glorious Hope monastery. Quite obviously I had nothing to do with the plague in Antecyra, nor could anybody possibly hold me responsible in any way for the Boc Bohec earthquake, the Seal Island tidal wave, the flooding in Sembrai or the outbreak of the Second Vesani War. True, I was in the City when senator Bryennius killed his children and their nurse, and when the Olybrias family were all found dead in their beds. I was in the City; so were approximately two hundred and fifty thousand other people. There’s not a single shred of evidence to connect me to any of these terrible things. And, true, I have the ability, which I was born with; so were the six hundred or so adepts of the Studium, not to mention the staff, students and visiting fellows of the six daughter academies spread across the empire, and the unquantified number of untrained and unidentified talented who have the misfortune to live in foreign lands. I tell myself that I worry too much about these things.

  I cheat.

  You must promise not to tell anybody. For one thing, it’d destroy my reputation, and the price of my canvasses would plummet, causing distress and financial loss to all the innocent people who’ve spent so much money buying them. Also, it’s against the law. Actually, I’m not sure how anybody could bring a prosecution, since offences involving misuse of the talent are covered by canon law and therefore can’t be prosecuted by the civil authority, but since I never qualified I’m not officially an adept and therefore can’t be tried in front of an ecclesiastical court. It’s one of those grey areas, and I have no particular desire to be the cause of a bright light being brought to shine on it.

  I mentioned that I can do some Forms. One of these is a tricky little thing called talis artifex. You won’t find it in any of the books, even if you were allowed to read them. Talis artifex is proscribed, which means it’s illegal to use; also to copy out, quote from, refer to in passing, even in an approved scholarly commentary, or even to know by heart. But—well, you can’t really expect scientists to destroy data once it’s been discovered, or scholars to burn authentic source material. Worse than murder, to the academic mindset. So talis artifex still exists, in the fifth volume of the Appendix to the Universal Concordat, which is located on the closed shelves on the west wall of the South hall of the New Library, on the third floor, next to the fine stained-glass window with the scenes from the Ascension, by Scylitzes. I guess that if anyone’s to blame, it’s the architect who built the South hall, and thought it’d be a good idea to have a drainpipe running down that side of the building so close to the window; or possibly the leadsmith who made the drainpipe, and decided it’d look better with the fluted neo-Romantic decorative twiddles, which really do look very fine but which provide excellent footholds for bad people, like me, who have other uses for drainpipes beside the collection and removal of rainwater.

  (Here let the record show that the Brother who did my careers interview neglected to mention one of my most significant talents, namely climbing up things in the dark. He can’t be blamed for that, since I’ve tried to keep it quiet, for various reasons. Still.)

  So; on a moonless night in my second year, I made the acquaintance of talis artifex. Needless to say I’d never heard of it, and the book doesn’t actually tell you what it does and what it’s for; it just sets out the words and tells you what Room you need to be in and what you have to do once the words take effect. I copied it out on a scrap of waste parchment, along with a bunch of other equally illegal Forms from the same source, went back to my cell and tried to figure out what I’d just got hold of.

  A problem that inevitably goes with stealing illegal Forms you don’t understand is that there’s nobody you can ask. Presumably somewhere in the Studium there was someone who knew how you made the thing work, and what you had to look out for, and all that; but it goes without saying, I couldn’t expect any help from anyone. All I could do was try it out and see if I could figure it out for myself. Not such a problem for an accomplished adept, but for someone like me, painfully aware of his own shortcomings, it was rather a daunting prospect. Still, with the likelihood of being thrown out of the Studium at any moment hanging over me and the sure and certain knowledge that I’d have a living to make and precious few assets to help me make it, I couldn’t afford to turn my back on anything that might prove useful in my near and unpromising future. If it’s banned, I argued, it must do something, and that something must be pretty big and powerful; in which case, in the right circumstances, it’s got to be worth something to somebody. It’s reasoning like that, of course, which led the Order to prohibit such things in the first place. I only wish they’d made a better job of it.

  To perform talis artifex, you need to be in the east Room on the fifth floor. Rooms have never been a problem for me. All I have to do is close my eyes and imagine a door in the nearest wall. I open the door, and there’s a staircase. Up the staircase; there’s a first floor landing with four doors at the cardinal points, or I can carry on up to the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth floors. Actually, I’d never ventured beyond the fifth floor, because in order to survive up there, so our lecturer told us in First year, you need to be at least competent in mundus vergens, which I’ve never been able to do. Still, that leaves twenty of the twenty-four Rooms that I can get to and work in, so I’ve never lost much sleep over it.

  Fifth east is not one of my favourites. According to the Appendix to the Universal Concordat, it exists in the same elevation of the same plane as Absolute One; which means, in the split second during which you cross the threshold and shut the door carefully behind you, technically speaking you’re dead. Of course you come to life again the moment the door closes, which is nice, but you have to die again when you leave. In practice, you’re dead for such a short fragment of time that your heart doesn’t have a chance to stop beating, and you’re not supposed to be able to notice anything at all. But I always get a sort of choking fit, like I’m suffocating. Purely my imagination, of course, but none the less upsetting for all that. Also, there’s something about the Room itself that always gives me a splitting headache—not while I’m there, not after I leave and come back to the here and now, but forty-eight hours later, infallibly, like clockwork, every time. Renovare dolorem won’t shake it, and neither will willow-bark tea. I just have to lie down with the blinds drawn and keep still and quiet until about half an hour after Vespers, by which point it begins to wear off, though it leaves me weak and shaky. You look like death, people say to me when they see me like that, and I nod and say, yes, and hope they’ll go away.

  But fifth east is where you have to go to do talis artifex, so I go there. The first time—remember, at this point I had no idea what talis artifex does or what was supposed to happen—I walked in and closed the door behind me, and there was this man sitting in a chair looking
down at something he was resting on his knee. I couldn’t see his face or what he was up to because he had the light from the window behind him.

  “Oh,” he said, looking up, “it’s you.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “About time you showed up,” he said; and that was when I realised what was wrong, or at least very unusual. It made me choose my words carefully.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know me?”

  That didn’t deserve a reply, apparently. “It’s all ready for you,” he said, and then I could see what he was doing. He was painting an icon. He gave it a sort of oh-well-could-be-worse sideways glance, then picked it up carefully by the edges and held it out at me. “There you go,” he said. “Careful, the gesso’s still a bit tacky.”

  I didn’t take it, naturally. “Excuse me,” I said, “but what’s this for?”

  He gave me a bewildered look; then he started to laugh. “Oh for crying out loud,” he said. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “You don’t know what it’s for.” He gave me an enormous smirky grin and put the icon back on his knee. Suddenly I wanted it more than anything in the whole world. “You don’t know,” he taunted me. “You clown.”

  “All right.” By then I was too angry to give a damn about anything. “Let me see if I can guess.”

  He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”

  “Talis artifex,” I said (he winced), “meaning ‘such a craftsman’.”