The Throne of Bones (39 page)

Wearing a wide straw hat and a loose robe against the cruel sun, he slogged over dunes. His spirits revived as he contemplated his own fortitude and intrepidity. He laughed at the lesser men who would have demanded a litter for this heroic journey, or even a guide. The hiss and slap of the surf, displaying none of the rhythmic regularity that poets ascribe to it, guided him to the sea.

At last he stood atop a dune and saw it, stretching to a horizon that seemed unaccountably higher than the point where he stood. Before his fear of the enormous space could creep up on him, his eyes were opened to the splendor of its colors. Seven different shades of green shone in the sea, not counting various shoals of weed and the mosses on certain wet rocks, and the wooded hills to his left displayed at least four others. Only the laziest eye would have said that the sky was a uniform blue from its pellucid horizon to the height of its blazing dome. A shell that he picked up contained a pastel rainbow. His palette held none of these exact hues.

He scanned the beach below him, where stone blocks peeked through the sand like the ground-down teeth of giant jawbones, tracing dim outlines of former streets and plazas. Symmetrical depressions might have marked the sites of grand temples and palaces; or they might merely have been symmetrical depressions. No one knew for sure who had built the Old City, or when the sea had reclaimed it, but it had inspired many unpleasant fables. Its ruins were shunned by all but antiquarians, students of dubious disciplines and eccentrics: in one or more of which classes, Tiphytsorn admitted, his own sister might be numbered.

He had come here to find her, but his heart sank as he recognized her awkward figure lurching through the foam. He could hear nothing from the dune, but she spoke and gesticulated with great animation as she traced a zigzag course along the beach. Another observer—fortunately there was none—might have said that she was casting spells or praying to strange gods. Her brother assumed she was talking to herself.

He scrambled down the slope to put himself in her path. She had twined her hair with seaweed and draped herself with strands of shells and questionable wrack. Her face was twisted with the intensity of her senseless monologue. He wondered, not for the first time, if he shouldn’t confine her at home. But she was ingenious, unfortunately, and he had no doubt that she would break loose and get even by revealing any number of family secrets.

She looked not at all surprised to see him, merely annoyed. She made to pass, but he caught her arm.

“Go away. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

He resisted an impulse to mock this nonsense and said, “I need your help with my Art.”

“Your
Art?
Ha! Why should I help a
slave-shaver?”

A wave burst over his feet and soaked the hem of his robe. The sand crumbled under his heels as the wave pulled out, making him stumble. It was as if attenuated tendrils of the sea fumbled for a grip on his ankles. He drew Phitithia onto dry sand, keeping one wary eye on the water.

“You have a special knowledge of the sea. You know certain secret properties of its plants and creatures—to cite one example purely at random, the poisonous nature of blowfish ovaries.”

“Whom do you want poisoned now?”

He scanned the beach nervously, but it was empty. The sea took advantage of his inattention to assault him again, drenching him to the knees and making him cry aloud. He dragged his sister higher, suspecting she had something to do with this. Allowing for her depraved cast of features, her expression was altogether too innocent.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone, I want to benefit everyone with my Art—” he pressed on through her bray of laughter—“by using pigments that no one else can copy.”

“Again, why? Why should I help you?”

“Dear Sister, you know I don’t prostitute my Art with private clients. When Lady Dwelphisteena herself begged me to create a design for her birthday, I refused. But you—here, look at you, you’re not wearing a smudge of paint today, you’re not only unfashionable, you’re immodest. I could make you the envy of all Sythiphore.”

“With those same fingers that probe loathsome sluts from Parasundar? You’ll never again lay a filthy hand on me!” As an afterthought, she jerked her arm out of his grip and brushed it with sand until it blushed red.

He was fond of his sister, but anyone who could spurn his Art like that had to be a prodigy of malice and ignorance. He struggled to keep his hands at his sides as he roared, “Then what is it you want from me, you impossible bitch?”

Instead of responding in the same style, as she normally would, she turned sickeningly coy. With lowered eyes she murmured, “There is a certain young man named Dildosh.... If you would get word to him that he need no longer fear our family and hide from me....”

He studied her dispassionately. Marrying this gawky grotesque into a noble house, or into any kind of house at all, seemed an impossible hope. He doubted it was fear of him that kept the odious sponge-diver in hiding. “Done. Help me as I wish, and you can marry the beast. I’ll be proud to call myself uncle to mouthing sub-humans with webbed feet.”

“Brother!” she cried, and forgetting all her reservations about his unwholesome habits, she flung herself into his arms and kissed him with a passion he had almost forgotten.

Captain Calamard had been a trusted henchman of Tiphytsorn’s father. When they returned to the city, the young man took him aside to a wine-shop, ostensibly to make amends for knocking him into the bay.

“Do you know a sponge-diver called Dildosh?” Tiphytsorn asked.

The older man flexed a gnarly hand whose broken knuckles had knit badly before he replied, “I think of him often.”

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?”