Academic Exercises (63 page)

There was this client. He was a dealer in cotton, ivory and nutmeg, fifty-six years old, member of the Board of Trade, governor of his local Temple. His daughter was getting married, and he needed a special gift for his son-in-law’s parents; father was a judge, mother was an off-relation of the Vatatzes, so it’d have to be something really outstanding. He knew for a fact that they were buying him a snow-white eagle; “and I don’t do falconry, I don’t have the time, I hate the outdoors, but they’ll expect me to go hawking with them on the Downs, so I’ll just have to grin and bear it. You understand, I’m sure. I need to be able to hold my own, to fight back, or they’ll swamp me. Please,” he said, “can you help me? Money isn’t an issue.”

My heart bled for him, as I’m sure yours would have done; so, for three thousand angels I agreed to paint him a Category 6. He was delighted. I could see him filling up with joy, like he was a jug or something. “That’s fantastic,” he said. “Really wonderful, the best news I’ve had all year. When will it be ready?”

“I’m a bit busy right now,” I said. “But before the spring, definitely.”

He looked at me. “The wedding’s in ten days,” he said.

I always tell them I’m busy. It’s not true. “Fine,” I told him. “It’ll be ready.”

I used to paint at an old beechwood kitchen table. It was already there when I moved in. I shifted it a little so it was next to the window, to catch as much light as possible. Silly, really. Given my method of creating works of art, I could just as easily have worked in a pitch-black cellar with my hands tied behind my back. All I needed was a wall, to imagine a door in. I didn’t even have to be able to see the wall, just as long as I knew it was there. But I’d read somewhere about real artists’ studios, and they have four really big windows, one in each wall, so they can get all the light that’s going, every degree and graduation. It’s supposed to be different for iconographers, who paint by the inner light. Zeuxis was blind, and Symbatus used to paint with his eyes shut. Bardanes the Younger worked in a tower with solid walls and a single small hole in the roof, so that all the light came from above. I think I liked sitting by the window because it meant I could look out, let me rephrase that, so I could look
down
, on the heads of the poor people in the street, one of whom I would’ve been, if I hadn’t found a good way of cheating.

So anyway, I painted the poor fool his Category 6, or at least it got painted while I sat with my eyes shut; a day for everything to dry properly—tell me why, for crying out loud, if it’s all done by magic, why is it always still slightly wet? Would it kill them to dry the paint and cure the gesso, just once?—and then send a page round to say it’s ready for collection. I made them come to me, of course. Catch me climbing up and down all those stairs. Bad enough doing it in Rooms, where you never get tired or out of breath—

He was thrilled with it, naturally. I got my draft, drawn on the Tarasius Brothers, so as good as a big stack of coins and far less heavy to cart about. Thanks, I said; no, thank
you
, he said, and left. And, as he walked through the door (I guess he thought I couldn’t see him at that angle) his face changed slightly. Just a hint of—oh, I don’t know. Maybe
I got away with it
, maybe
I fooled him
. Maybe a touch of spite, gloating, savage happiness. And maybe I imagined it.

But I wasn’t there, I really and truly wasn’t anywhere near, I have witnesses, when a Court of Appeals judge strangled his aristocratic wife with his bare hands before slashing his wrists with a razor. When I heard about it, in some bakehouse somewhere, I didn’t make the connection straight away. It was only later, when I overheard someone saying that the wife was a Vatatzes on her mother’s side and the family were furious, up in arms, that I remembered what my client had told me, and the look on his face I wasn’t supposed to see.

What do you take me for? Some kind of hero? What did I do? I did nothing. I thought about it, a lot, but I was able to persuade myself that there was insufficient evidence to form anything apart from a purely intuitive connection between the unfortunate judge and my icon and the prohibition on
talis artifex.
The latter, I’ll admit, had given me a degree of concern; but there were all sorts of good reasons why the Studium should’ve decided to outlaw such a confoundedly useful Form. Think about it. If any adept could perform any work of art or craft simply by going to a Room and placing an order, it’d be the ruination of artisan industry right across the Empire. We exist by permission of the untalented. They put up with us partly because they really have no idea what we can or can’t do, partly because we keep ourselves to ourselves and don’t throw our weight around. Upset that delicate balance and you’d have riots and adepts burnt alive in the streets (which is precisely what happened in Auxentia about ninety years ago). Now that’s a perfectly good reason for prohibiting
talis artifex
; logical, reasonable and no need to dream up anything dark and sinister to account for the ban. That’s what I told myself, and I ended up believing it. I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve been a lawyer.

But then there was the silk merchant in Conessus, and the fire in Salim Beal, and a bunch of other sad news items, and I went to the Bank and asked how much money there was in my account, and the clerk went away and looked in the book, and when he came back he was much more polite than he had been; he offered me a seat and a glass of wine, and was there anything else he could do for me? I walked home slowly. The whole point of painting icons was making money, surely; enough money to live on, to be comfortable, not to have to worry any more. Well, I’d reached that point, passed it, all my troubles were over. It occurred to me that I was still living in a horrible dark, damp room in the Tanneries and eating stale bread and cheese that was only fit for pigs or students; as if I was still waiting for something. But that something had happened, and it had all worked out just fine, so why was I still there? Why was I still painting icons?

Not, it goes without saying, because I’m a natural born artist who lives only to create things of beauty and joys forever. I don’t actually know if I
can
paint; I haven’t tried since I was sixteen. Certainly not because I’m driven by my faith to glorify the Invincible Sun, since I don’t believe in Him and I never have. The best explanation I could come up with was that I’d become addicted to making money. I believe it’s a common complaint among people who used to be poor, and who can never quite bring themselves to believe that they’ve got enough now and will never be poor again. Just another five hundred or another thousand, they tell themselves, to be on the safe side, just in case, because you never know. I could believe that that was me; but even if that was what was keeping me in the nasty attic room doing illegal magic, there was no reason why I had to carry on that way. Other methods of making money—respectable methods, practically harmless—were now open to me. I could buy into a trading company, or get a farm or two, or invest in a building consortium in the City. Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case. It was time, I couldn’t help thinking, that I got out of icon painting and into some decent line of business.

But you know how it is. A good night’s sleep, followed by an early morning visit from the president and guardians of the Scriveners’ Guild—two thousand angels for a Category 1, to be hung above the altar in the new chapel they were building at the Guildhouse. One possible explanation I hadn’t really considered; maybe I just don’t like saying no to people. Anyway, I took the commission. They were delighted; and so what if their joy came from knowing that they were going to get a genuine Epistemius, while their deadly rivals in the Clerks’ Federation had nothing more impressive in their chapel than a small, smoke-blackened bit of old plank optimistically attributed to Narses the Elder. Joy is joy, and it’s contagious. 

So, after a light lunch and an hour reading Saloninus’
Essays
(which always helps me clear my mind), I closed my eyes and thought of a door. It swung open, and there were the stairs, and shortly afterwards I closed the door of fifth east carefully behind me.

Now it’s a well-known fact about Rooms that they’re rarely the same twice. There’s a bucketload of theories to explain it; the truth is, nobody knows and practitioners don’t really care. On this occasion, fifth east was looking particularly fine. The walls were covered in the most exquisite mosaic—hunting and pastoral scenes, I think—while the ceiling was a gilded fresco in the style of Dalassenus, a sort of giant Category Five but with attendant troops of angels and transcended saints watching from the sidelines. There was a stunning rose window, with blue, yellow and red glass, which drew the accents out of the walls and sort of mixed with them, creating colours I’m not sure I’d ever seen before. Instead of the usual table there was a great big marble slab, behind which sat a short, thin dark-haired young man with a weak, unshaven chin and huge brown eyes with bags under them. He looked up at me and gave me a shy smile. He was me.