Deerskin Read online

  The princess slipped away from her nursemaid, who would have wished to make her present herself formally. But even a royal nursemaid’s jurisdictions end at the ballroom door. The princess found a chair standing next to a curtain and shadowed by the column at its back, and set herself silently down.

  When the princess’s return was noticed, and the dancing started again, one or two young men approached the princess hopefully. But she disliked her dancing lessons, and disliked being touched and held so by strangers, and she drew back in her chair and shook her head emphatically at her would-be partners. They went away, and after a little time no more came. She curled up on her gilt chair and rested her head softly on one of its velvet arms, and watched her mother and father dancing, their footsteps as light and graceful as the dainty steps of the royal deer.

  TWO

  IT WAS TWO YEARS LATER THAT THE QUEEN FELL ILL, AND NO doctor could help her; and at first no one thought it was serious. Indeed, some went so far as to hint that nothing at all was wrong; that the queen merely needed taking out of herself—or perhaps putting back into herself, for she gave of her presence and her beauty too freely, and was wearied by the adoration of her people. At first it was only that she rose late and retired early; but the weeks passed, and she rose later and later, and was seen outside her rooms less and less; and then the news came that she no longer left her bed, and then that she could not leave her bed.

  And then it was said that she was dying.

  The doctors shook their heads, and murmured long words to each other. The people wept, and prayed to their gods, and told themselves and each other many stories, till the real story sounded no truer than the rest. The story that contained the most truth, although it was not the story that was listened to the most often, was that the queen might not die, except that her illness, the strange invisible illness with no name, had robbed her of the tiniest fraction of her beauty. Her brilliant hair was just a little dulled, her enormous eyes just a little shadowed; and when she guessed she might no longer be the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms she lost her will to live.

  She had the window curtains drawn first, that the sun might not find her out; she did not care that he might miss her, even as her people did, or that his warmth might be less cruel than her own eyes in the mirror were. Nor would she listen to her doctors, that sunlight might mend her; for she heard behind their voices that they knew nothing of what was wrong with her and therefore nothing of what might heal. She sank deeper into her pillows, and had her bed-curtains drawn as well.

  The king was frantic, for after a time she refused to see him either; but she was convinced to yield to her husband in this thing after all, for he grew so wild at her denial that his ministers feared he would do himself an injury. So the queen drew a scarf over her head and a veil across her face, and gloves upon her hands, and permitted one candle only to be lit in her dim chamber; and it was held at some distance from the queen’s bed, and shaded by a waiting-woman’s hand.

  The king threw himself across the queen’s bed in a paroxysm of weeping, and tore at the bedclothes with his finger-nails, and cried aloud; and the waiting-women all trembled, and the candle flickered in the hands that held it, for they all thought the king had gone mad. But it could be seen that, through the veil, the queen smiled; and one hand, in its lacy, fragile glove, reached out and stroked his shoulder. At this he looked up at her, with a great snarl of bedclothes in his big hands, pressing them to his face like a child.

  “There is something I would have you do for me,” she said in the whisper that was all her voice now.

  “Anything,” he said, and his voice was no stronger than hers.

  “I want you to commission a painter,” she said, in her perfectly controlled whisper, “and he must be the finest painter in this or any other land. I want him to paint a portrait of me as I was, for you to remember me by.”

  “Remember you by!” screamed the king; and some time passed before even the queen could calm him. But in the end he agreed, because it was true that he would do anything for her, and she knew it.

  Now every painter in the seven kingdoms considered long when the news of this commission came to them; although very few painters responded from the kingdom of the sixth king, who had married the girl with thick legs. It was said, scornfully, that this was because, in that kingdom, there was no beauty to inspire the painter’s art. But very many other painters came from the other five kingdoms. Most of all, however, painters came from the queen’s own country, from the towns where the king and queen had brought sunshine to harvests and celebrations. All brought drawings they had made over the years of the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms, for they all had found her an irresistible subject. The highest number of painters from the smallest area, however, came from her uncle’s, now her brother’s, little fiefdom, and they brought drawings of a raven-haired child and young girl who would obviously grow up to be the most beautiful woman in seven kingdoms.

  It was originally assumed that the king would attend the interviews and make the decision, but this was swiftly proven false, for the king did nothing but crouch by the queen’s bed, clinging to her hand, and wetting it with his tears, until, sometimes, the queen tired of him, and sent him away. When he first tried to stand after the long hours of his vigil, he could barely walk for his grief, and without aid would have crawled like a beast. The burdens of the queen’s desire thus fell upon his ministers, and they shared among themselves, some staying near the king, some hearing the most pressing matters of statecraft, some leafing through portfolios and sending away the most conspicuously inept. The other artists were made to wait, day after weary unbroken day—while their work was shown to the queen herself. And she did not hurry to make her decision.

  She ordered the king to leave her while she looked at unfinished sketches and finished portraits; he grew so distraught, she said, that he distracted her. At first he was banished merely to the next room, but the queen could hear him, pacing, muttering brokenly to himself, and she said that even this fatigued her, and that she needed all her small remaining strength for the task at hand. And so the king was sent, stumbling, to a far wing of the palace, till she sent word that he might return.

  The queen studied every painting, every fragment, every chalky shred, brought to her; and every one was beautiful, for even awkward artists could not fail to capture some beauty when they set out to portray her. She lay in her bed and stared at paintings till her attendants were exhausted by the intensity of her purpose.

  After the first few days, every day or so thereafter she would discard one or another painter; and he would have his work returned to him, be given a coin for his trouble (everyone thought this royally generous, since none of the painters had been under any obligation to answer the invitation), and sent on his way. No one, apparently, thought to remark on the fact that all the artists hoping to paint the queen’s portrait were men; although one maid-servant, who worked in the king’s kitchens and was rarely allowed upstairs, and who had cousins who lived in every one of the seven kingdoms, did comment that the sixth king’s official court painter was a woman. But she was only a maid-servant, and no one found this statement interesting.

  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 thre
e at last. Three paintings stood on 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 paint-stained 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 single-mindedness 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 shadows, 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 ha
d 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.