There was a cessation in the drumming. A bird sang from a garden. He thought of Chacor and Elissi, waking in their love-bed, and, for a moment, of the scent of a woman’s white hair against his mouth, across his arms and breast.
Rehger turned his head and looked up the street. The sun was spearing between the buildings, flashing on some bronze-work in the square before the hall of the Artisan’s Guild. The bronzes were the chosen pieces of those who, this winter, had earned the guild wristlet. There were only five of them: There had been many dozen disappointments. At first, like a boy, he had gone every day, to look at his success, there among the four others, the sun gilding it for glory.
It was the length and height of a wolf, the ancient prescribed measurements, raised on a five-foot plinth. A chariot and team, racing at full stretch. You were warned to work from what you knew. He had had no model, which was audacious and foolhardy, Vanek assured him. But memory, he had had that.
The group was faulty, far from perfect. Even the cast had been too ignorantly ambitious and revealed as much, after the bronze cooled. Nevertheless, it was enough to win admission to the guild. It was enough that, three days after its erection in the square, ten offers had been made for it. And a month later, sixteen more. “You do understand,” Vanek said, “some men always bid on principle for the winners.”
The Charioteer, among those who had an interest in artistic events, was however much discussed. For ail the flaws, it had essential quality. Being static—yet it moved. The hiddraxi, leaping, were one thing, like the shapes of a breaking wave. The chariot had a weightless buoyancy. The man, his hair bound back and clubbed, just the side-locks streaming, leaned into the speed-rush of the team. The reins, like astral filaments, poured from his grip into the animals’ hearts, the wheels were wrapped in winds. Grounded on its plinth, the assemblage was half in the air. Only a racer could have done it, the connoisseurs had said. Vanek did not say, They want to buy as they awarded the wristlet, because of what you were. The guild was not a charitable institution. Vanek had already mentioned that.
Rehger had modeled for the Raldnor statue some weeks before he took up a scoop of warm wax one dusk and pinched out a figure from it.
Mur had left his pumicing and gone into the yard to oversee the oven. The lamps were lit, for it was a stormy evening. Vanek came from his room and looked, and said nothing. Rehger compressed the wax into a blob, and put it down again. Vanek said, “You’ve made such figures before.”
“As a child. There was mud enough. The sun would bake them.” He did not add that then his uncle would come and kick them to bits. Vanek went back into his room.
When Mur no longer needed Rehger every day, he obtained similar employment without trouble at other studios and shops in the vicinity. Several of these were less exclusive and more populous than Vanek’s, but to stand near-naked, eaten by eyes, was hardly novel to a Swordsman. Only once had it been unacceptable. Arriving at the venue, he had found neither students nor draftsmen, but a small party of wealthy mixes without a stylus or calliper between them. Despite this, he stripped and got on the dais for them, and did nothing else until one of the women came to stand by him and to run her hands along his ribs and thigh. Then he quietly descended the dais, dressed, and left the studio.
Mur, seeing him interested and apt, was by then giving Rehger tasks to do, the rougher portions of rubbing and polishing, the upkeep of the fine utensils in the forge. When Mur rested, never while working, he lessoned Rehger in his art, demonstrating this and that, praising the young man’s quickness and ability. Mur noticed that once he had been shown what was done, Rehger seemed able to do it. Mur confided in Vanek. Rehger, coming on this scene, as if in the theater, said with no preamble, “I’ve been saving my pay. Will you apprentice me. Master Vanek?”
“You’re too old for such an apprenticeship,” said Vanek. “You’ve seen my other boys. Lads of ten and twelve.” Then he waited, head to one side. He was a cranky man, Vanek. He could use his tongue for a whip or a dousing of cold water, but he rescued flies that fell in the warmed wax, he hoarded sticks and lamp oil, and gave away the limestone off-cuts free for winter fuel to any at the door who asked. Rehger therefore, seeing the tilted head, the waiting, said, “You start them young to build the muscle. I have mine.”
“Agreed,” said Vanek, “you have at least the back and shoulders for the job.”
“But even with what I can pay you, I’ll be in your debt over the cash.”
Vanek pulled a face. He pointed to the afternoon work benches that the students had not yet returned to claim. “Go and make me something.”
It had been clumsy enough, a wax wrestler on one knee. The wire armature was improperly secured and an arm fell off at Vanek’s persistent jabbing.
“Fearsome,” said Vanek. “We must teach you to do better. But, as I told you once, you’ve done this before.”
“As a child.”
“You forget,” said Vanek, “we Lowlanders, we believe all men live quantities of lives.” He spoke scornfully, as if holding up religion like fouled cloth, between finger and thumb. “I meant you did it in a previous existence, my tall Lydian of Iscah. Then. So it will only be a question of remembering. Mur will help you remember. Mur has doubtless also been an artisan over and over. His very soul is warped into that shape.”
He did not not consider their religion. Even on the lips of his lover, Rehger had not heeded it. Even so, the craft of the sculptor came to him as Vanek said, like a slow sure remembering, flowing in wild bursts, or shut behind mental walls that must be hewn away. And once, cutting the “skin” from weathered marble, in the yard, with the rubble of marble all around him and the texture of marble in his pores and under his nails, and its flour tasting in his mouth, he recalled how he had fought through the debris, pulling up the blocks and tiles, at Katemval’s house on Gem-Jewel Street, finding wrung water-fowl and a girl’s body, a favorite chair miraculously intact, the gush of the wave having set it floating, empty. And in that minute, in Moih—but hovering out of place and time—it had seemed to him valid that the touch and smell of the marble did not seem to anchor him to destruction, rather seemed to reach quickly away from it back to some older hour, older that was than his body, heart, and mind.
But the minute passed from him. And he let it go.
Yennef pushed a way through the courtyard of the Amber Anklet, to the table under the vine. It was noon, and the Dortharian already there, as he should have been the night before. He looked up, and lifted the corners of his mouth.
“What detained you, Yennef?”
Yennef sat down.
“My own question exactly.”
“Really? Til go first then. I stopped to have a woman on Love Street. She was a very tempting woman. Very blonde and very tender. Despite this, I tore myself from her arms and arrived at our meeting point only half an hour in arrears. You, however, failed me. I kept faith till midnight. A grievous waste of time.”
“I,” said Yennef, waving over the wine-server, “was also prepared to wait until midnight. Then I was kidnapped.”
The Dortharian watched him, through iron-colored eyes. Apart from short stature, these were his only show of Lowland mix, but unnerving enough in the brazen darkness of his face. (When they unearthed the gray-eyed bandit king on the Plains, Yennef had been reminded of Galutiyh Am Dorthar, but not for long.)
“Kidnapped. By whom?”
“No one important. A wedding party. The bridegroom was a Corhl—that soldier I told you about, who slew my tirr for me on the Plains.”