The ship lurches again and he steadies himself against the crate. Something pricks him. He sucks air between his teeth and lifts his hand so he can examine it in the faint candlelight. A thin wooden splinter has lodged in his wrist, a faint dark line running shallowly beneath the skin. A bead of blood trembles like mercury where it has entered. Joao tugs out the splinter and wipes the blood with his sleeve. Pressing to staunch the flow, he stares at the squat, shadowed box and wonders why his God has deserted him.
“You are a pretty one, Marje. Why aren’t you married?”
The girl blushes, but she is secretly irritated. Her masters, the Planckfelts, work her so hard, when does she find even a chance to wash her face, let alone look for a husband? Still, it is nice to be noticed, especially by such a distinguished man as the Artist.
He is famous, this man, and though from Marje’s perspective he is very old—close to fifty, surely—he is handsome, long of face and merry-eyed, and still with all his curly hair. He also has extraordinarily large and capable-looking hands. Marje cannot help but stare at his hands, knowing that they have made pictures that hang on the walls of the greatest buildings in Christendom, that they have clasped the hands of other great men—the Artist is an intimate of archbishops and kings, and even the Holy Roman Emperor himself. And yet he is not proud or snobbish: when she serves him his beer, he smiles sweetly as he thanks her and squeezes her own small hand when he takes the tankard.
“Have you no special friend, then? Surely the young men have noticed a blossom as sweet as you?”
How can she explain? Marje is a healthy, strong girl, quick with a smile and as graceful as a busy servant can afford to be. She has straw-golden hair. (She hides it under her cap, but during the heat and bustle of a long day it begins to work its way free and to dangle in moist curls down the back of her neck.) If her small nose turns up at the end a little more than would be appropriate in a Florentine or Venetian beauty, well, this is not Italy after all, and she is a serving-wench, not a prospect for marriage into a noble family. Marje is quite as beautiful as she needs to be—and yes, as she hurries through the market on her mistress’s errands, she has many admirers.
But she has little time for them. She is a careful girl, and her standards are unfortunately high. The men who would happily marry her have less poetry in their souls than mud on their clogs, and the wealthy and learned ones to whom her master Jobst Planckfelt plays host are not looking for a bride among the linens and crockery, and have no honorable interest in a girl with no money and a drunkard father.
“I am too busy, Sir,” she says. “My lady keeps me very occupied caring for our household and guests. It is a difficult task, running a large house. I am sure your wife would agree with me.”
The Artist’s face darkens a little. Marje is sad to see the smile fade, but not unhappy to have made the point. These flirtatious men! Between the dullards and the rakes, it is hard for an honest girl to make her way. In any case, it never hurts to remind a married man that he is married, especially when his wife is staying in the same house. At the least, it may keep the flirting and pinching to a minimum, and thus save a girl like Marje from unfairly gaining the hatred of a jealous woman.
The Artist’s wife, from what Marje has seen, might prove just such a woman. She is somewhat stern-mouthed, and does not dine with her husband, but instead demands to have her meals brought up to the room where she eats with only her maid for company. Each time Marje has served her, the Artist’s wife has watched her with a disapproving eye, as if the mere existence of pretty girls affronted Godly womanhood. She has also been unstinting in her criticism of what she sees as Marje’s carelessness. The Artist’s wife makes remarks about the Planckfelts, too, suggesting that she is not entirely satisfied with their hospitality, and even complains about Antwerp itself, unfavorable comparisons between its weather and available diversions and those of Nuremberg, where she and the Artist keep their home.
Marje can guess why a cheerful man like this should prefer not to think of his wife when it is not absolutely necessary.
“Well,” the Artist says at last, “I am certain you work very hard, but you must give some thought to the other wonders of our Lord’s creation. Virtue is of course its own reward—but only to a point, after which it becomes Pride, and is as likely to be punished as rewarded. Shall I tell you a story?”
His smile has returned, and it is really a rather marvelous thing, Marje thinks. He looks twenty years younger and rather unfairly handsome.
“I have much to do, Sir. My lady wishes me to clear away the supper things and help Cook with the washing.”
“Ah. Well, I would not interfere with your duties. When do you finish?”
“Finish?” She looks at his eyes and sees merriment there, and something else, something subtly, indefinably sad, which causes her to swallow her sharp reply. “About an hour after sunset.”
“Good. Come to me then, and I will tell you a story about a girl something like you. And I will show you a marvel—something you have never seen before.” He leans back in his chair. “Your master has been kind enough to lend me the spare room down here for my work—during the day, it gets the northern light, such as it has been of late. That is where I will be.”
Marje hesitates. It is not respectable to meet him, surely. On the other hand, he is a famous and much-admired man. When her day’s work is done, why should she (who, wife-like, has served him food and washed his charcoal-smudged shirts) not have a glimpse of the works which have gained him the patronage of great men all over Europe?
“I will...I may be too busy, Sir. But I thank you.”
He grins, this time with all the innocent friendliness of a young boy. “You need not fear me, Marje. But do as you wish. If you can spare a moment, you know where to find me.”
She stands in front of the door for some time, working up her courage. After she knocks there is no answer for long moments. At last the door opens, revealing the darkened silhouette of the Artist.
“Marje. You honor me. Come in.”
She passes through the door, then stops, dumbfounded. The ground-floor room that she has dusted and cleaned so many times has changed out of all recognition, and she finds her fingers straying toward the cross at her throat, as though she were again a child in a dark house listening to her father’s drunken rants about the Devil. The many candles and the single brazier of coals cast long shadows, and from every shadow faces peer. Some are exalted as though with inner joy, others frown or snarl, frozen in fear and despair and even hatred. She sees angels and devils and bearded men in antique costume. Marje feels that she has stepped into some kind of church, but the congregation has been drawn from every corner of the world’s history.
The Artist gestures at the pictures. “I am afraid I have been rather caught up. Do not worry—I will not make more work for you. By the time I leave here, these will all be neatly packed away again.”
Marje is not thinking of cleaning. She is amazed by the gallery of faces. If these are his drawings, the Artist is truly a man gifted by God. She cannot imagine even thinking of such things, let alone rendering them with such masterful skill, making each one perfect in every small detail. She pauses, still full of an almost religious awe, but caught by something familiar amid the gallery of monsters and saints.
“That is Grip! That is Master Planckfelt’s dog!” She laughs in delight. It is Grip, without a doubt, captured in every bristle; she does not need to see the familiar collar with its heavy iron ring, but that is there, too.
The Artist nods. “I cannot go long without drawing, I fear, and each one of God’s creatures offers something in the way of challenge. From the most familiar to the strangest.” He is staring at her. Marje looks up from the picture of the dog to catch him at it, but there is something unusual in his inspection, something deeper than the admiring glances she usually encounters from men of the Artist’s age, and it is she who blushes.
“Have I something on my face?” she asks,
trying to make a joke of it.
“No, no.” He reaches out for a candle. As he examines her he moves the light around her head in slow circles, so that for a moment she feels quite dizzy. “Will you sit for me?”
She looks around, but every stool and chair is covered by sheafs of drawings. “Where?”
The Artist laughs and gently wraps a large hand around her arm. Marje feels her skin turn to gooseflesh. “I mean, let me draw you. Your face is lovely and I have a commission for a Saint Barbara that I should finish before leaving the Low Countries.”
She had thought the hand a precursor to other, less genteel intimacies (and she is not quite certain how she feels about that prospect) but instead he is steering her to the door. She passes a line drawing of the Garden of Eden which is like a window into another world, into an innocence Marje cannot afford. “I....you will draw me with my clothes on?”
Again that smile. Is it sad? “It is a bust—a head and shoulders. You may wear what you choose, so long as the line of your graceful neck is not obscured.”
“I thought you were going to tell me a story.”
“I shall, I promise. And show you a great marvel—I have not forgotten. But I will save them until you come back to sit for me. Perhaps we could begin tomorrow morning?”
“Oh, but my lady will...”
“I will speak to her. Fear not, pretty Marje. I can be most persuasive.”
The door shuts behind her. After a moment, she realizes that the corridor is cold and she is shivering.
“Here. Now turn this way. I will soon give you something to look at.”
Marje sits, her head at a slightly uncomfortable angle. She is astonished to discover herself with the morning off. Her mistress had not seemed happy about it, but clearly the Artist was not exaggerating his powers of persuasion. “May I blink my eyes, Sir?”
“As often as you need to. Later I will let you move a little from time to time so you do not get too sore. Once I have made my first sketch, it will be easy to set your pose again.” Satisfied, he takes his hand away from her chin—Marje is surprised to discover how hard and rough his fingers are; can drawing alone cause it?—and straightens. He goes to one of his folios and pulls out another picture, which he props up on a chair before her. At first, blocked by his body, she cannot see it. After he has arranged it to his satisfaction, the Artist steps away.
“Great God!” she says, then immediately regrets her blasphemy. The image before her looks something like a pig, but it is covered in intricate armor and has a great spike growing upwards from its muzzle. “What is it? A demon?”
“No demon, but one of God’s living creatures. It is called ‘Rhinocerus,’ which is Latin for ‘nose-horn.’ He is huge, this fellow—bigger than a bull, I am told.”
“You have not seen one? But did you not...?”
“I drew the picture, yes. But it was made from another artist’s drawing—and the creature he drew was not even alive, but stuffed with straw and standing in the Pope’s garden of wonders. No one in Europe, I think, has ever seen this monster alive, although some have said he is the model for the fabled unicorn. Our Rhinocerus is a very rare creature, you see, and lives only at the farthest ends of the world. This one came from a land called Cambodia, somewhere near Cathay.”
“I should be terrified to meet him.” Marje finds she is shivering again. The Artist is standing behind her, his fingers delicately touching the nape of her neck as he pulls up her hair and knots it atop her head.
“There. Now I can see the line cleanly. Yes, you might indeed be afraid if you met this fellow, young Marje. But you might be glad of it all the same. I promised you a tale, did I not?”
“About a girl, you said. Like me.”
“Ah, yes. About a fair maiden. And a monster.”
“A monster? Is that...that Nosehorn in this tale?”
She is still looking at the picture, intrigued by the complexity of the beast’s scales, but even more by the almost mournful expression in its small eyes. By now she knows the Artist’s voice well enough to hear him smiling as he speaks.
“The Nosehorn is indeed part of this tale. But you should never decide too soon which is the monster. Some of God’s fairest creations bear foul seemings. And vice-versa, of course.” She hears him rustling his paper, then the near-silent scraping of his pencil. “Yes, there is both Maiden and Monster in this tale...”
Her name is Red Flower—in full it is Delicate-Red-Flower-the-Color-of-Blood, but since her childhood only the priests who read the lists of blessings have used that name. Her father Jayavarman is a king, but not the king: the Universal Monarch, as all know, has been promised for generations but is still awaited. In the interim, her father has been content to eat well, enjoy his hunting and his elephants, and intercede daily with the nak ta—the ancestors—on his people’s behalf, all in the comfortable belief that the Universal Monarch will probably not arrive during his lifetime.
In fact, it is his own lack of ambition that has made Red Flower’s father a powerful man. Jayavarman knows that although he has no thought of declaring himself the devaraja, or god-king, others are not so modest. As the power of one of the other kings—for the land has many—rises, Jayavarman lends his own prestige (and, in a pinch, his war elephants) to one of the upstart’s stronger rivals. When the proud one has been brought low, Red Flower’s father withdraws his support from the victor, lest that one too should begin to harbor dreams of universal kingship. Jayavarman then returns to his round of feasting and hunting, and waits to see which other tall bamboo may next seek to steal the sun from its neighbors. By this practice his kingdom of Angkor, which nestles south of the Kulen hills, has maintained its independence, and even an eminence which outstrips many of its more aggressive rivals.
But Red Flower cares little about her plump, patient father’s machinations. She is not yet fourteen, and by tradition isolated from the true workings of power. As a virgin and Jayavarman’s youngest daughter, her purpose (as her father and his counselors see it) is to remain a pure and sealed repository for the royal blood. As her sisters were in their turn, Red Flower will be a gift to some young man Jayavarman favors, or whose own blood—and the family it represents— offers a connection which favors his careful strategies.
Red Flower, though, does not feel like a vessel. She is a young woman (just), and this night she feels herself as wild and unsettled as one of her father’s hawks newly unhooded.
In truth, her sire’s intricate and continuous strategies are somewhat to blame for her unrest. There are strangers outside the palace tonight, a ragtag army camped around the walls. They are fewer than Jayavarman’s own force, badly armored, carrying no weapons more advanced than scythes and daggers, and they own no elephants at all, but there is something in their eyes which make even the king’s most hardened veterans uneasy. The sentries along the wall do not allow their spears to dip, and they watch the strangers’ campfires carefully, as though looking into sacred flames for some sign from the gods.
The leader of this tattered band is a young man named Kaundinya who has proclaimed himself king of a small region beyond the hills, and who has come to Red Flower’s father hoping for support in a dispute with another chieftain. Red Flower understands little of what is under discussion, since she is not permitted to listen to the men’s conversation, but she has seen her father’s eyes during the three days of the visitors’ stay and knows that he is troubled. No one thinks he will lend his aid—neither of the two quarreling parties are powerful enough to cause Jayavarman to support the other. But nevertheless, others beside Red Flower can see that something is causing the king unrest.
Red Flower is unsettled for quite different reasons. As excited as any of her slaves by gossip and novelty, she has twice slipped the clutches of her aged nurse to steal a look at the visitors. The first time, she turned up her nose at the peasant garb the strangers wear, as affronted by their raggedness as her maids had been. The second time, she saw Kaundinya himself.
<
br /> He is barely twenty years old, this bandit chief, but as both Red Flower and her father have recognized (to different effect, however) there is something in his eyes, something cold and hard and knowing, that belies his age. He carries himself like a warrior, but more importantly, he carries himself like a true king, the flash of his eyes telling all who watch that if they have not yet had cause to bow down before him, they soon will. And he is handsome, too: on a man slightly less stern, his fine features and flowing black hair would be almost womanishly beautiful.
And while she peered out at him from behind a curtain, Kaundinya turned and saw Red Flower, and this is what she cannot forget. The heat of his gaze was like Siva’s lightning leaping between Mount Mo-Tam and the sky. For a moment, she felt sure that his eyes, like a demon’s, had caught at her soul and would steal it out of her body. Then her old nurse caught her and yanked her away, swatting at her ineffectually with swollen-jointed hands. All the way back to the women’s wing the nurse shrilly criticized her wickedness and immodesty, but Red Flower, thinking of Kaundinya’s stern mouth and impatient eyes, did not hear her.
And now the evening has fallen and the palace is quiet. The old woman is curled on a mat beside the bed, wheezing in her sleep and wrinkling her nose at some dream-affrontery. A warm wind rattles the bamboo and carries the smell of cardamom leaves through the palace like music. The monsoon season has ended, the moon and the jungle flowers alike are blooming, all the night is alive, alive. The king’s youngest daughter practically trembles with sweet discontent.
She pads quietly past her snoring nurse and out into the corridor. It is only a few steps to the door that leads to the vast palace gardens. Red Flower wishes to feel the moon on her skin and the wind in her hair.
As she makes her way down into the darkened garden, she does not see the shadow-form that follows her, and does not hear it either, for it moves as silently as death...