Robin McKinley - Deerskin

He had been so sure he would win the commission-so sure of his talent-that he had brought a fresh canvas with him, and all his best brushes and colors, for he was very particular about these things, and knew that to paint the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms he must be more particular than he had even guessed at, thus far in his risky career. And so he had spent all his last commission-which might otherwise have kept him through the winter, so that he need not paint portraits of ugly arrogant people with money for some months-to hire a horse, to carry his exactingly stretched canvas and his paint-boxes and his beautifully tipped and pointed brushes, because this was going to be the commission, and the painting, of his life, and after this he would be able to pick and choose who hired him. He would even be able to sell paintings-large paintings-of his own composition, including the several already completed during the occasional months that he was enough ahead, for he lived frugally at all times, to paint what he wished, and not what people who did not know how to spend their money thought they wanted.

In the first days of waiting he had, set up his beautiful naked canvas and begun the first sketching strokes of the portrait he would make of the queen, for he had the kind of armored singlemindedness that enabled him to work even when other, possibly rival, painters peered over his shoulder. This was a useful talent, and one that had earned him more than one winter's rent and food at harvest festivals. But this was no quick study to be thrown off in an hour; this was a masterpiece, and he felt it tingling in his fingers, till he had no need of concentration to ignore the other painters around him, for he forgot their existence.

The queen would be standing, looking a little over her shoulder toward her audience, and her royal robes would be so gorgeous that only paint could render them, for no mere dyed and woven cloth could have produced such drapes and billows, such tints, such highlights and fine-edged hues. And yet she would be lovelier, far lovelier, than all. It hurt his heart, standing before his empty canvas, his hand poised to make the first mark, how beautiful she would be.

But he stood now in the wide, light-filled chamber, having succeeded in winning the commission that would change his life staring at the canvas with the few graceful lines on it, and his hand shook, and his mind's eye was full of shwauws, and the velvets and silks and the soft gloss of skin and sparkle of eye would not come to him. He had put the canvas away very soon in that great receiving-hall, although it was not the waiting that preyed upon him. He stared at his canvas now, and felt as mad as the king.

The word went round that the young painter never slept; he called for lamps and candles at twilight, and, as the queen had ordered that he have everything he wanted, lamps and candles were brought. More! he shouted. More! And more were brought, till the room was brighter than daylight, and the chamber was a sea, and its rippled surface was the fragile points of hundreds of burning candles and oil-soaked wicks, and the painter gasped a little as he worked, keeping his head above that sea. He pulled down the curtains that hung round his bed, and told the servants to bear them away. The chamber pot he kept not under the bed but beside it, that he need not reach into even the small vague grey shadows of a well-swept floor under a high-framed bed.

In the morning, said the servants, the candles had burnt to their ends and even some of the lamps-full the night before-were empty for they had burnt through the night; and the painter was still working. Each evening he called again for candles, and fresh candles were brought, round and sweet-smelling; and the lamps, refilled, were again set alight. And in the morning, when the servants brought him breakfast, all were still burning, or guttering, or entirely consumed, and the painter still lashed his canvas.

It was not true that he never slept; it was true that he slept little, lying down for a few minutes or half an hour, till the light flickering against his eyelids brought him awake again, rested enough to work a little longer. But the underlying truth was that he hated the dark, hated it here, in this palace, hated and feared it, which he had never done before; some of his best studies had been done of twilight, or of Moon's image across dark water. But all that seemed to belong to another life, and here if any shadow fell undisturbed by light he would move a candle or call for another one, till there was nowhere he could stand, near his new portrait of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, that did not have many tiny tongues of light flicking across his shadow, the canvas's, and that of the paintbrush that he held in his hand. It was true furthermore that he could not sleep with the queen's brilliant painted eyes upon him; no matter how he set the frame, he felt her eyes, felt her command, her passion, her presence; and so after a very few minutes' sleep he found himself pulled to his feet again, staggering toward the canvas, groping for a brush.

It was done in barely a fortnight. When the servants came in one morning they found him collapsed at the new painting's feet, and they rushed forward, full of dread that his heart had burst from overwork-or from the queen's gruelling beauty-and that the painting would remain unfinished.

But as they came up behind him they saw the painting itself for the first time, for he had guarded it from them before, fiercely, almost savagely. They cried out as they looked at it, and fell to their knees. At the sound, the painter stirred and sat up; and they did not notice it, but he carefully looked away from the painting himself, his masterwork, and looked at them instead; and he appeared to be satisfied with what he saw, and heard. She was, they said, the most beautiful woman not only in seven kingdoms, but in all the kingdoms of the world. What none dared say aloud was: she, this splendid, immortal woman on the canvas, is more beautiful than the queen ever was. Or perhaps they had only forgotten, for it had been so long since the queen had walked among them.

The servants seized the painting. The painter might have protested their handling, but they treated it with the reverence they treated the queen herself with; and someone ran for a bolt of silk to swathe it in. Already they had forgotten the painter, who had not moved from where he sat on the floor after recovering from his swoon; but he did not care.

Dimly it occurred to him that he should wonder if the paint might still be damp enough to smear; dimly it occurred to him that he might wish to protect his masterwork, for himself, or, more, from the wrath of she who had commissioned it, for he feared the queen as much as he feared the darkness in this place where the king was mad. But he did not care. When they had wrapped his painting and borne it away, he stood up with a sigh, and packed his paints and his brushes, walking carefully, for he was more tired than he could ever remember being, tired, he thought, almost unto death.

He walked very carefully around the tall, wide-raking arms of the guttering candles in their candelabra, and the slim shining globes of the oil lamps, none of whose light he disturbed, for all that the morning sun was now pouring through the windows; for even the possibility of shadows in this place was more than he could bear, especially now, as his own fatigue claimed him. Almost it was as if the painting itself had been some kind of charm, even if a malign one, a demon holding off imps by its presence, and he now felt exposed and vulnerable. He rolled up his breakfast in a napkin and made to leave the room he had not left for a fortnight.

He paused to look at the other portrait, that which had won him the commission he knew he had executed better than any other painter could have done it; very rough it looked to him now, rough and yet real, real and warm and joyous. He looked at it, and thought of the canvas under it, that he might lay bare and paint again; but he left it.

He went downstairs with his two bundles under his arms, and his cloak and his extra shirt in a third bundle on his back, and he found his way unassisted to the stables. There he took the horse he had hired weeks ago, scrambled onto it among the harness that had held his canvases, and pointed its nose for home. No one stopped him, for the word had already gone out that the painting was done and that it was a masterwork; but no one stopped him either to praise him for his genius. He rode out through the court gates, and down the road, and at the first river he had a very long bathe, and then lay on the shore for a while and let the sun bake into his skin, while the horse browsed peacefully nearby.

Then he clambered on it again, grateful that he had a horse to ride, for he was too exhausted to walk, though he knew he could not have stayed in that palace another hour; and they kept on, for the horse seemed to be glad to be going home too, or perhaps it was merely bored from standing too long in its stable, however large the box and generous the feed. And though the way was a long one, and the journey back made in a haze of weariness so profound as to be pain, he was not sorry that it was no step shorter, and he was glad that his own country shared no border with that queen and king's.

But the painter lost nothing for having left his masterwork so cavalierly, for the minister of finance sent six horses with panniers full of gold across their backs after him. And so he never painted another fat merchant again, although it was observed that he never painted a beautiful woman again either, but often chose to paint the old, the poor, the kind, and the simple. But because he was the artist who had painted the most famous portrait in the world, of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, everything he set his name to now and ever after sold easily; and soon he had not only a horse (for the first thing he did when the twelve panniers of gold caught up with him was to buy the horse he had ridden home) but a saddle. And then a house, and a wife, and then children, and he loved his family very much; and so he believed it had been worth it. But it was a long time before he could sleep without leaving a candle lit; and he never ventured across the borders of his own land again.

THREE

THE QUEEN, WHO HAD BEEN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN seven kingdoms, had her new portrait set by her bed, still wrapped in silk; and she called for the king her husband. And he came, and everyone noticed that while he was thinner, and his face was grey and haggard, he was no longer mad; and he sat down quite gently at the queen's side, and took her hand.

"I am dying," she said, through her veil, and the light cloth rippled with her breathing. The king shivered, and clasped her hand tighter, but he said nothing.

"I want you to promise me something," she said, and he nodded, a stiff, tortured little jerk of the head; and he never took his eyes from where her face was, under the veil. "After I die, you will want to marry again-"

"No," said the king in a cracked whisper, and now his trembling grew worse, and his voice sounded like no human voice, but the cry of a beast or bird. "No. "

"Yes," said the queen, and held up her free hand to silence him: or rather lifted her fingers for a moment from their place on her coverlet, for she had little strength left for movement. "I want you to promise me this: that you will only marry someone as beautiful as I was," she said, "so that you will not always be comparing the poor girl to me in your memory, and be cruel to her for it." There was a strange tone in the queen's voice; were it not so sad an occasion and were she not so weak, it might have been thought that the tone was of triumph.

The king, his head hanging, and his knees drawn up like a little boy's who is being scolded, said nothing. "Promise!" hissed the queen.

The king laughed a little wildly. "I promise! I will marry no one less beautiful than you, I swear it."

And the queen sighed, a long, deep, satisfied sigh, and gestured for the servants to display the painting. They slowly, respectfully unwrapped the long folds, but the silk was thin, so while there were still several turns of cloth over it, the splendor of the painting burned through its swaddling. When its final, perfect glory was revealed the queen stared at it-or so everyone thought, as her face-veil was turned unmoving toward it. Then she turned her head away on her pillow and gave another great sigh, a sigh so vast and profound that it seemed impossible that a figure so slight and wasted as the queen's could have made it; and with that sigh she died.

The king remained with his back to the painting, crouched over his queen's hand; and for a long time the servants dared not disturb him, dared not try to discover whether he knew that he was holding the hand of a corpse.

The funeral was three days later, as she had wished it; and as she had wished it, her body was not washed and dressed and laid out for burial. Still in her veil, her long gown, gloves and slippers, she was wrapped in layers and layers of silk and brocade, and thus laid in her satin-lined coffin. And the first stuff which they lay over her, set next to her still-warm figure, was the thin white bolt that had wrapped her portrait.

But the mourning went on for weeks after that. The whole country dressed in black, and many people dyed their horses' harness black, painted their oxen's horns black, the doors of their houses, their wagon wheels, even their own hair, though their blackened hair never fired red in the sunlight the way the queen's had. The king was quiet and polite, but his eyes were blank, and his ministers steered him through his days.

Expressions of grief and condolences came from far around; the receiving-hall grew crowded with gifts bearing black ribbons, and ministers' aides hired aides of their own to do the list-making and write the acknowledgements, which the king himself never signed, his hands limply on his lap and his eyes turned to empty space.

One king, their nearest neighbor, sent four matched black horses, without a white hair on them; another king sent a black carriage that gleamed like a mirror. The third king sent a heavy rope of black opals, and the fourth sent a cape of the feathers of the ebony bird, the cost of one of. whose feathers would feed a peasant family half a year. The fifth king, who had been twelve years old when the dead queen had married her true love, sent the same lord as had attended the wedding, older now, and the casket he bore this time contained black pearls.