The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

composed portraits of the Bellman’s Wood in the night, studies of its trees in the rain, a series of small pictures of lichens, another of mosses, and innumerable vast canvases depicting one particular clearing, a glade over which presided an ancient oak, easily the oldest and most substantial tree in the wood, itself an abstract or epitome of every colour and quality that the wood at large contained.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ asked the Keeper, again and again, when she passed by, touching his brush lightly at its end, with just the right pressure to steer it to an unfinished corner, or to transfer a rich smudge of colour to the canvas below.

Fitz remembered learning to paint with oils, here in the Keep, sitting beside Dina and at times questioning, at times copying her. Under her patient instruction he had developed the ability to blend pigments, to compose and to layer them. From her he had learned brushwork, how to stroke and dab, how to stipple and fade in hue and in value. He had worked on figure, tone, shadow, and all the elements of composition, in work after work, exercise after exercise. No stroke or canvas was wasted; with each new attempt, he could both feel and see how his technique extended itself, how his capacity for representation grew, how he had come ever closer to a true account of the wood that he knew, in all its seasons and shapes, in all its hues and moods, in every last ridge of its bark and each of its countless sprays of ferns. He looked at the drops of rain that he was painting, proud on a leaf still unshaken after a sudden shower in May – and began to think they were in some sense truer, in some sense more substantial, than those he remembered seeing, or tasting with his finger, in the woods where he had in some other life, once, walked.

‘Dina,’ he said. ‘Something strange is happening.’

‘Yes, little brother, what is it?’ She leaned over from her desk, where she was halfway through painting another seascape, dark, thunderous, and pregnant with violence. A solitary island of rock and moss reared in the distance from the inaccessible horizon towards which in canvas after canvas she laboured. She examined his painting – a detailed study of a fern, surrounded by half-rotten chunks of wood. She was troubleshooting, and her eyes moved methodically across the canvas.

‘It’s not the painting,’ Fitz said. ‘It’s something about the morning.’

‘Ah,’ said Dina. ‘You’ve noticed. It’s been a while.’

‘It’s been morning for a long time. It’s been morning almost as long as I can remember.’

‘We’ve been painting together for weeks, little brother.’

‘Why has the morning not ended?’ Fitz asked her.

Dina settled back into her chair and returned to her painting. She might have painted for a long time.

‘It’s the stack,’ she said without any hesitation. ‘It’s a root, ground up very fine. The Commissar adds it to our food at breakfast. The effects are a little different on everyone – some people don’t experience much change, but for others it transforms everything. Its purpose is to enhance your concentration, so that you can focus with more intensity and productivity on whatever it is that you’re doing. But a consequence of that concentration is that, whenever you are in a given situation, you tend to forget that you have ever done anything else. You haven’t stopped living normally; if you think very hard about it, you will remember, even here, that we have been doing other things. You will recall our afternoons, and our nights. But when we go to them, later, you’ll almost completely forget about this painting – until we come back tomorrow. And then it will feel as if we had never stopped, as if we had never left this place, as if brushes and colours and canvas are all that we have ever known.’

Fitz closed his eyes and tried to imagine his life outside the Keep, in a place where the Keeper didn’t shuffle back and forth, absorbed in thought, between the tall shelves of her library and the bright, windowed tables of her workshop. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried to push his mind to think past his surroundings and the sensations present to him in his immediate experience, he couldn’t conjure another space or action – at least, not one that felt to him like his own, like something he himself had been doing. He remembered hearing a story, or a collection of stories, over the last few days, or weeks, about another life that he might have lived. In these stories, he and Dina studied biology and medicine alongside the Commissar, and worked on engineering topics with the Sweeper. He had been told, he was sure, that he would be examining logic and paradoxes, mathematics and formulae with the Jack, and when he thought about it, he seemed to know exactly what they would be studying, not only the topics but the individual examples, and was able to run over in his mind the precise manner in which their conversations were going to turn – so much so, that he had the uncanny sensation that they had already talked about these topics and examples, that these conversations had already taken place. He could predict them all. And he knew that the other Prents were going to their lessons every day, each alone to quiet study and training; he remembered, as if long ago, passing them in the courts, and meeting them at Feeding, hearing their stories, receiving advice and guidance. But it was all so far away.

‘So none of this – this feeling, what I’m feeling – is – real?’ he asked.

‘It’s all real, little brother,’ answered Dina. She sat back from her painting – a huge chalk cliff, seen in partial shadow from a dinghy at sea, swirling with seabirds, whose movements seemed to imply the complex currents of wind surging around the shore.