Deerskin - Robin McKinley

The waiting painters began to dread the sight of the majordomo. He would appear with canvas and sketchbook-sized bundles under his arms, or in the arms of an attending footman, and beckon some unfortunate, waiting in the receiving-hall, or in what had been the receiving-hall when the queen had been well and the king had done any receiving. Occasionally, and worse, the majordomo paused in the grand arched doorway with the carved vines twining round and round the bordering columns twice as high as a man's head, and framed by this grandeur sonorously pronounced some name. And then the poor artist had to cross the long shining floor (for the house-maids were kept severely up to the mark however preoccupied the king was) under the eyes of all the other painters, and admit that the work thus displayed as a failure was his.

The selection was down to three at last. Three paintings stood cm three easels at some little distance from the queen's bed in the queen's chamber; and downstairs, very far away, three painters nibbled at the food the impassive servants brought, and fidgeted, and could not speak to each other. Even farther away the king ignored the food his closest, most anxiously loyal attendants brought, and cursed them, and cursed his ministers too when they tried to encourage him to eat, or to engage him in the ruling of his country. He paced, and tore his hair, and cried aloud.

In the queen's chamber something extraordinary happened. She asked her attendants to move the three paintings to stand directly in front of the closely curtained windows; and then she dismissed the footmen who had done the moving, and all her serving-women but one. That one she told to draw the curtains-open; let the sunlight in, to fall upon the faces of the portraits. But the woman was to stand facing out the window, with her back to the room; and she was not to stir till she was told. This woman knew her mistress well, as the queen knew; and would do exactly as she was told, as the queen also knew.

But the woman could hear. And what she heard was the sound of the queen turning back her bedclothes, and setting her feet upon the floor. She had lain there among her pillows for so many weeks that her steps were feeble and uncertain, and the waiting-woman trembled where she stood, for all her training told her she should rush to support her queen. But her training also told her that she must obey a command; and the command was that she remain where she was; and so she did not stir a foot, though her muscles shivered.

The queen stumbled-fell; "Mistress!" cried the woman, half turning-"Stay where you are!" said the queen in a voice as sharp and strong and unflinching as the fall of the executioner's axe. The woman burst into tears and covered her face with her hands, and so did not hear the queen pull herself to her feet and resume her slow progress toward the windows.

When the woman dropped her hands and sniffed, she could see, out of the corner of her eye as she looked straight ahead of her, the dark narrow bulk of the queen's body, leaning on the back of a chair. The queen moved the chair a little, her hands groping either at her own weakness or at the unfamiliarity of such a task, so its back was perfectly opposed to the waiting-woman's tiny peripheral glimpse of it. Slowly the queen sat down in the chair, facing the last three portraits of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, lit as they were now by golden afternoon sunlight, till they were almost as glorious as the woman herself had been. The waiting-woman saw the shadow of a gesture, and knew that the queen was raising her veil.

The final selection was made, and the other two painters sent on their way-with three coins each, and a silver necklace and a ring with a stone in it, because they had been good enough almost to have been chosen. Although they would not have admitted it, they were at the last relieved that their work had not found favor in the queen's eyes, and that they could go home, and return to painting bowls of flowers for rich young men courting, and dragons the size of palaces being dispatched by solitary knights in gleaming armor for city council chambers, and fat old merchants spilling over their collars and waistbands for their counting-houses and inheriting sons. For they did not like the smell of the place where the queen lay dying of her own will, who had once been the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms; and they had heard that the king was mad.

The young man who remained behind grimaced at his paintstained fingers, and wondered if those fingers, of which he had long been proud, had betrayed him.

He never saw the queen. The painting that had won him his commission was returned to him, and he and it-now standing on a jewelled easel-were established in a large sunny chamber with windows on three sides and a curtained bed pushed up against the fourth. He was asked what he wanted; he wanted very little. He wanted a plain easel-plain, he emphasized-to set up his new canvas; and enough food to keep him on his feet. No wine, he said, only water; and food as plain as his painting-frame.

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.