The Golden Key (156 page)

He walked slowly after his son, stopped when he saw which party inhabited the alcove. Baltran had stopped, too, held there by that irresistible force which attracts an isolated child to any group of animated children.

Eleyna Grijalva had brought a class of youngsters to the Galerria. They sat in front of Guilbarro Grijalva’s famous
Birth of Cossima
, each with a sketchpad and pencil, copying the master’s work. Baltran barreled over to his “Grandzia,” bowed shyly, and was rewarded with a stately kiss. Then he sidled over to two girls seated demurely on a bench, their sketchpads resting on their knees, and promptly began to interrogate them.

Eleyna swept back her silver hair and turned. She caught sight of Alejandro. Smiling, she walked over to him.

“Your Grace,” she said in her lovely voice. She had a magnificent self-confidence, but of course, how could she not? She was the acknowledged master of painting in all of Tira Virte. Acolytes came from foreign lands for the privilege of studying with her. Kings and queens begged her to paint their portraits. “It is always
good to see you, ninio. You haven’t been to a drawing lesson for two months.”

“The cares of state,” he said, but he could not smile, though he meant it to be a jest.

“Alas,” she said, and nodded, understanding.

“Is it too late?” he asked suddenly. “Is it too late for me to ever learn properly?”

“To learn to use your Gift to its fullest? It likely
is
too late, Alejandro, though I’m sorry to say it if it pains you to hear it.” He bowed his head, and she went on. “But it is never to late to study painting, not if you truly wish to learn. It is never too late to use the time left you to its fullest. Many have come late to painting and yet flourished because of their desire to learn and their willingness to work. You are talented, and you love to paint, only—” She gestured toward the walls, indeed, to the entire Palasso.
His
Palasso, now.

“Eiha. That is the great irony, is it not, Zia? The Grand Duke has many duties, and painting is not among them. In ten years Baltran will be twenty and I could retire without too much fuss, but I will be forty and at the end of my life, no?”

“How long your life will be compared to Limners who used their own blood and tears every day we cannot know. And can any one of us truly know how long we will live? You must not think of that, ninio. You have your duties, and you have discharged them well. You are a good man and a fine Grand Duke, Alejandro.”

“Even if my heart lies elsewhere?” He gestured toward the
Birth of Cossima.

“That is up to you. You may not go as far as you wish. You may not have the talent you hope for. Even in Palasso Grijalva only one in each generation became Lord Limner.”

He reached and took hold of the chain that hung round her neck, lifting the Golden Key. “You are not Gifted, yet you wear this.”

She smiled softly, sadly. “I have earned it.”

Alejandro looked at Baltran, who was chattering excitedly in his high voice about steam locomotives.

So many mysteries to be solved. So many secrets to be learned. Eiha! There was no use in bemoaning what had gone before. “I will come next week. I promise you.”

“I will look for you, mennino.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went back to her students.

All those do’Verrada faces, painted by all those Grijalva hands. And here he stood, Grand Duke Alejandro do’Verrada, the second of that name. He who was also a Grijalva Limner, half trained but
without question Gifted. It was a strange ending, indeed, to the story that had started with his mother four hundred years ago.

Nothing in the least remarkable about Sario Grijalva. Not outside, where men could see.

She halted before the portrait, a vigorous woman still though her once-glorious hair was now white except for a few streaks of black, the last reminders of her youth so very long ago. She was still beautiful, for age and dignity grant a new kind of beauty to women, to those who have endured.

The Mirror of Truth
, they called it, and perhaps they were right to call it by that name. But to her it was now and had always been a reminder of her own prison, though thirty years had passed since she had walked into freedom, through a door bound with iron and the painted oscurra of a Lord Limner, into a changed world.

Out of necessity she had made a life. She was not unhappy. Like a new pigment handed to an eager limner, there were ideas abroad in this world, colorful, bold, and exciting, that she was glad to have seen. Would never have seen, in the Meya Suerta of her birth, stultified by the drab and rigid rules of compordotta. Here, they accepted her as Gifted Limner. Indeed, for thirty years she had led them, Premia Sorella, as they called her now. Not once had they questioned her right to stand among them. Never again, after the acrimonious departure and undisputed success of Eleyna Grijalva, had they questioned the right of the unGifted Grijalva limners to forge out on their own, to make their own reputations, free of their service as Grijalva copyists.

It was a good time to be alive, en verro.

For every gift there is a price to pay.

She studied the painting. He stood, dressed in a dark coat with long tails extending midway down his thighs, with cuffs fastened by ivory buttons, barely visible, for she could see only his back. His back—and a hint of his face in profile, an undistinguished face, dark eyes, black hair.

But that was not the face she saw in the mirror. The mirror caught the light of candles and lamps at angles and within its confines showed her the other face, his true face: brown hair, brown eyes, desert-dark skin. Nothing in the least remarkable about Sario Grijalva. Nothing, except for his Luza do’Orro, that shone more brightly than any other’s. Perhaps it was an illusion given by the afternoon
sunlight, but she thought she could see it, his Luza; actually
see
it, a tremor in the depths of the mirror, a ghost of light trembling around him.

She found his gaze and held it, he who looked out at her from the mirror. He saw her; she
knew
that he saw her. Who better to know, who had once endured this captivity?

’
Vedra.

His voice. Was it only her imagining, or did he, too, as she had, hear voices, see the parade of faces and fashions that passed in that same mirror, his view onto the world outside his prison? Her prison, once.

So must he wait now, as she had done for so many many years while all that she knew died and passed into dust and distant memory. Eventually the candles and lamps that illuminated his prison would burn low and then, finally, their light would fail altogether, leaving him in endless night.

They had all agreed it was a fitting punishment.

Again, more insistent now: ‘
Vedra!

He loved her still. He would always love her. This burden she bore in silence. And a greater burden yet, that she still loved the Sario she had once known, the boy she had grown up with. What he had done could never be forgiven and must not be forgotten, so that the boys—few now—still born with the Gift might understand the dangers of power gone unchecked.

But neither could she forget nor dismiss his Light.

“You are the best,” she said, for it was true. It was in her to tell him the truth. He was the greatest Limner born into the Grijalva line. “And yet you were also least among us, for in the end you gave in to the worst in yourself, because you only cared about yourself, no matter what you said about your duty to art.”

I know what I am.

“Was that not also your downfall?” she asked him. “Could you not have acknowledged your great Gift, served the Grijalvas, and accepted your fate, as the rest of us do?”

Never.

En verro, she believed him. It burned in him so brightly.

But she was older now. She had lived, and she had endured. She had lost her beloved. Had lost a kind-natured and solicitous husband. Lost an infant child but borne four others who yet lived and had themselves produced grandchildren for her. She was a Gifted Limner, acknowledged as a fine painter, and was foremost among the Viehos Fratos. And her son—first-born and most beloved, for
he was the fruit of the passion of her youth—reigned as Grand Duke of Tira Virte.

It was in her, this gracious spring morning, to be generous. She folded her Golden Key within her hand, kissed her fingers, and signed him a benediction.

(from La Guide Michallin,
by Enrei Michallin; Librairie dei Arteio; Aute-Ghillas, 1419
)

This huge canvas, depicting the opening of the newly elected Corteis, is the most famous Tira Virteian painting of the last century. Its sheer technical brilliance and subtleties of characterization, demonstrate why the artist was the most sought-after painter of her time. In a triumph of movement, lighting, and composition, the legislators are shown taking their seats, greeting friends, chatting with the Premio Oratorrio, sorting through papers—all in morning sunlight streaming through the high windows. Note particularly the illumination of the arched palm branches carved in relief above the Oratorrio’s podium, representing the Victory of the People. Certain famous personages are brought into prominence by their placement in pockets of warm golden light. The artist’s husband, Rohario do’Verrada, is flanked by Ruis Albanil, the mason’s apprentice who had just begun his tempestuous rise to power; several men who would make their mark on the law are similarly set off. The artist herself is seen in the shadows, identifiable by the paintbrush half-tucked in her pocket and the Chieva do’Orro around her neck.

A family portrait in the style fashionable throughout the mid 1300s, this painting of Grand Duke Alejandro II, Grand Duchess Teressa, and their two children is remarkable not only for its charm but also for the informality and curious humor with which it treats its serious subject.

Alejandro, seated, offers the do’Verrada signet ring to his son Baltran, who kneels at his father’s right. The youth is primly dressed in a black suit relieved only by the singular corsage pinned to his lapel: red clover for Industry, a fig leaf for Argument, and daisies for Innocence. The young Mechella leans affectionately against her father’s left leg; a circlet of oak leaves, for Independence and Bravery, crowns her head. Scholars who argue for a later date than 1358 cite this circlet as evidence, for at that time no one could have predicted the affairs (she refused to marry her long-time lover, the composer Friedrich Shopan, claiming that marriage was a prison devised by men for women), scandalous essays, and impassioned public debates that would mark her notorious career as a campaigner for the rights of women.

Grand Duchess Teressa stands behind her husband’s right shoulder, one hand on the back of his chair; she regards the painter—and the viewer—with an ironic eye. At her waist, half-concealed by the chair, she holds a small wicker basket of walnuts, signifying Intellect and Strategem and, no doubt, the Grijalva propensity for smothering their paintings in often nonsensical floral symbolism, especially since Teressa was the most self-effacing of Grand Duchesses, conscientious about her children and her charities but certainly uninvolved in the cares of government.