The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (20 page)

“This?” Gaunt exclaimed, thinking,
What do I take away from this? That life is short and art is long?

Walking Stick had recovered, and was preparing to leap at Lightning Bug.

“Wonder will out,” Lightning Bug said, grabbing plum wine from the sack and leaping at her opponent like a shooting star. Ducking under his staff, she tumbled past and guzzled the wine.

“Typical Forest behavior,” Walking Stick said, spinning. “Get drunk, then fight.”

“Those actions need not be distinct.” Lantern Bug broke the bottle and swung her arm, scattering glass and drops at Walking Stick’s eyes. He deflected with his staff, which he spun to block Lightning Bug’s stab. The remnant of the bottle shattered; she made a flying kick at his neck; he shifted back.

The flurry drew Gaunt’s attention but she forced herself to focus on the painting and its red artist’s seal . . . the seal of Meteor-Plum Long, sage painter and author of
Record of Brush Methods and Transspatial Dislocation
.

“Thank you,” Gaunt whispered to the warrior woman who seemed to be in some indeterminate place between rooftop and sky, attacking and defending, defeated or victorious. Gaunt remembered Eshe’s tales, and she knew the reputation of Meteor-Plum’s paintings.

She stared at it, and it loomed large.

“Take care of Bone,” she called out, in the last moment that she was a poet atop a roof, imagining she was upon an enchanted mountain.

Then she was upon an enchanted mountain, imagining she’d been a poet atop a roof.

“Bone,” the voice said, and the thief knew it must be the Swan Goddess, or perhaps the Painter-of-Clouds, because he’d always known, somehow, he’d report to a deity sounding like a furious drunken Eastern woman.

“Bone, get your miserable ass up. You’re not allowed to die. The painting has your lover inside it. Take it and run.”

Bone’s aching head convinced him he was alive. That, and how
The painting has your lover inside it
was exactly the kind of insanity life threw him regularly.

He took one long look at the scroll nearby, another long look at the four-armed, four-legged blur that was Lightning Bug and Walking Stick’s battle, and he grabbed the first and fled the second.

He departed Abundant Bamboo by way of the rooftops and a meandering gorge funneling a tributary of the Ochre River. There he found Shadow Margin, the abandoned hideout of the Cloud and Soil Society.

Beside the shadowed waterfall he unfolded the painting and beheld a remarkable landscape seemingly far from the Wall: a foggy realm with rocky summits rising like fingers through the white. He squinted in a shaft of moonlight. Upon the nearest summit, Bone saw a tiny brush-stroked pilgrim speaking with a tiny brush-stroked woman. The woman resembled Persimmon Gaunt.

Vertigo was unsupportable in his line of work, but Bone felt it then.

Nor was this simply the effect of his disturbed guts; for now he had the sudden sense of rushing toward Gaunt from a high starting altitude. It was as though daylight burst overhead as he flew birdlike above a sea of cloud, dotted with tall, rocky islands wreathed in pines. The tallest one nearby bore Persimmon Gaunt and her mysterious companion. He wished to be nearer—and so it was, for he swooped toward her like a hawk.

At once she turned to him and shouted. He could not hear the words through the air, but they echoed in his mind.
Return to our world! One of us must keep watch!

How do I back away, Bone tried to say, but the deed was done even as he considered it.

He returned to his senses in the cave, with his hands gripping the scroll so tight it twisted like a bow.

So. An enchantment spiriting one to the world of the painting. A place of sanctuary, perhaps. Unless the scroll was found and locked away . . . or buried . . . or burned . . .

Bone left that thought like a guard upon a wall, and set about repairing an escape boat he’d holed while chasing away the bandits. He gathered wood by moonlight, hammered by starlight, even assembled a decoy-Bone of straw in the clouded dark. He needed all his tricks, this time.

Always he kept the scroll close as a fragile lover, this greatest, un-stolen treasure.

Mist at her back, Gaunt had been deep in hushed conversation with the pilgrim of the painting when Bone’s presence rippled the fog with the wind’s cool kiss.

“Welcome,” the pilgrim had said when first she manifested. “Welcome to
A Tumult of Trees on Peculiar Peaks
.”

Looking around at white-wreathed precipices, Gaunt said, “That is certainly evocative. But not very specific. Where am I?”

“Good! You still have your wits. I’d hoped to ease the shock of transition somewhat, after the last set of visitors woke me from my long reverie.”

“That is certainly interesting, but not very illuminating.”

“As I said . . . this is Long’s
Tumult
. A landscape painting dating from the First Autumn Dynasty.” The speaker was shorter than Gaunt, as well as balder, and possessed of a wider smile. He was thick-built but hardy, and his patchy, dirt-spattered clothes hung loose upon him. He wore a hat of bark that tipped a little as he waved his strong arms.

“I remember now, the way of such paintings,” the man said. “They invited gentlemen or ladies of quality to imagine strolling through the landscape, refreshed. Well, Long’s genius lay in removing the need for ‘imagination.’”

Gaunt raised her eyebrows. “Then accessing another reality is simpler than envisioning one?”

The ragged man clapped. “In this case, yes. He enjoyed the irony.”

“You seem to know him well.”

He bowed modestly. “I am an illustration.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The painter left his self-portrait within his works. Thus the visitor might be guided. Thus too the self-portrait can keep an eye on things. I forget, sometimes . . . Sometimes I unleash dangers without meaning to . . . But such is my purpose on this cold mountain.”

“Then I must speak to you, image of the artist. I am fleeing a hostile warrior. I am with child and need sanctuary.”

The self-portrait of Meteor-Plum Long looked somber then, as though taking a splash of cold water in the face. “Garden or Forest?”

“Sorry?”

“Your foe. Is he Garden or Forest?”

It was
Which direction do you travel?
all over again.

If it’s even odds, Gaunt decided, best roll with the truth. “Garden,” she said. “I think.”

The self-portrait relaxed, though sadness clung to his eyes. “Then be welcome. You would be welcome in any case, but this way it is easier. Though he sided with the Garden most of his life, my maker made peace with the Forest in the end. Come. There is shelter atop the mountain. The monks are chatterers but they’re not so bad.”

They ascended via a meandering path. Boulders and branches seemed to lurch out to brush them. Billows of fog crossed their path like unpainted canvas. Progress was difficult, and Gaunt had to inform her apologetic companion more than once that, yes indeed, a woman in late pregnancy was this slow. The summit was only rarely visible, its red pagoda rising like a banner. Other summits blazed in shocking sunlight above the cloud-waves, though Gaunt discerned webs of shadow on the paths beneath the exposed branches and stones. The quality of color stole her breath as much as the walk itself. It seemed to her such beauty, like a provocation, demanded reply. It would be a fine thing to learn landscape painting, she thought.

“The scroll was monochrome,” Gaunt noted, pausing to rest. “This place is not.”

“Indeed,” said the self-portrait, leaning against a boulder. “It was ever the painter’s task, to provide a fragmentary window suggesting an infinite universe beyond. To imply, with brush strokes, the full range of the artist’s experience with nature, even as that experience was but a fragment implying the totality of a cosmos. Thus, for my prototype, ink and paper conveyed color, wind, mist, birdsong, fallen leaves.”

All these things were present—as well as the sound of dripping to one side, the sound of dry crunching underfoot, creaking of wind-tugged branches, little darting shapes creasing the path as they shot between boulders.

“Is this place a sort of dream?” Gaunt asked. “Or am I truly in another universe?”

He laughed. “Every place is a sort of dream. But more to your point, this place is normal.”

Now Gaunt laughed. “Having arrived via art appreciation, I question that view.”

“Come, now. The term is borrowed from your own barbarian geometry. A ‘normal’ is a line dropped perpendicular onto another, or a plane inserted likewise. All your perceptual environment can be likened to shapes on a flat plane, like strokes upon a scroll. Within a higher-dimensional framework, your realm may contact others, as scrolls toppling from a poorly braced shelf may come to rest upon each other.”

“And this painting intersects my world along a sort of perpendicular?”

“Quite. This mountaintop is sited at the ‘seam.’ In various spots here it becomes easy to move into and out of the painting, or even within the painting. Other tangents to your world are possible but are not as stable.”

Gaunt looked around her. “Could the stability be upset?”

“Do not be concerned. While a catastrophe at this peak might—wait, someone new is intruding.”

The wind had picked up. Moving by instinct, Gaunt crossed to a precipitous path-edge and looked out.

A churning filled the clouds and at their heart a misty human shape seemed paradoxically to be shrinking from giant to tiny proportions while simultaneously rushing toward her.

“Your enemy?” the self-portrait asked.

“My lover,” Gaunt said.

“Beware. If he arrives here, and your enemy is still out there, who will protect the scroll?”

Suddenly frightened, Gaunt shouted at Bone to back away, for all that she yearned for him. A look of confusion crossed his misty face and he began backing like a swimmer, growing larger and less distinct. He said something but she heard only a slow, deep voice, blending with the wind.

Then she saw only cloud.

She lowered her head.

“The monks who dwell at the summit,” the self-portrait said, “have great powers of perception. My progenitor specified them thus. With their aid you might contact your companion, should he still grasp the scroll.”

“Let’s walk,” Gaunt said. “May I lean upon you, image of a sage painter?”

“You may,” he said. Then, “The left arm, if you please. I practice my art with the right. I have to admit, I’m protective of it.”

“What do you paint?”

“I don’t.” To Gaunt’s smile he added, “I am a poet. Sometimes the apple rolls far from the tree.”

“We have much to talk about,” Gaunt said. “When I’m not so tired.”

Up and up. Reaching the summit exhausted Gaunt, and she could barely speak to the monks in green robes who took her in. The red brick pagoda (how could all these stones have been hauled up here, when she could barely haul herself?) had five levels and a pointed roof like a chess piece. At first the place seemed dilapidated and ruined, because tree limbs had pierced the tower at several points. Then it grew clear that deliberate openings admitted the branches.

Sunlight thus speared past sandstone statues of saints, of gods, of artists, of drunks, the distinctions among them uncertain. One statue depicted a bald monk resting his head on a sleeping lion, another a sage staring out from a sculpted precipice like a sail in a strong wind, a third a plump scholar seated with one leg bent beside a wine bowl, as if his next act could be to either fight or sip. An elderly monk, bearded, grinning with golden teeth like an unfinished mosaic, seemed at first a fourth statue—until he spoke.

“You are in pain.”

It was so, an ache coursing around the peculiar hollowness in her belly, from which kicks sometimes sprang. Gaunt had felt a similar pain further down the mountain path. She had learned enough from Eshe and Lightning Bug to know what this might mean.

“Have any of you delivered babies?” she said. “For one may arrive within days.”

“There is one,” said the monk, after a pause. His smile seemed frozen, and Gaunt could see that the gold leaf upon his teeth was decorated with the images of tree leaves. “A guest. I do not know if you would prefer her help . . .”