Free The Two of Swords: Part 14 by K. J. Parker Page B

didn’t mind Formalism. The idea of art, she explained, is not to show things as they are, but as they could be. Only the Great Smith could make something perfect – everything he made was perfect – but surely it was the duty of his servants to come as close to perfection as they could. Therefore, let every man be handsome, every woman beautiful, every tree and flower gracefully formed, every mountain symmetrical, every dog and squirrel as close to the ideal as possible. Portraits, in her opinion, were an abomination; a deliberate record of human inferiority and divergence from the ideal form. However, she recognised that Chanso had been sent to Beal to learn to be the best possible primitive-style carver he could become, so it wasn’t her place to try and influence him in any way. But if he could possibly make his people’s faces just a bit less ugly, she would take it as a personal favour.
    Chanso reckoned she was probably mad. But she taught him a lot of very useful stuff about using the new, strange tools, and once he’d got used to them he found them quite helpful – if nothing else, they were quicker than gnawing away a flake at a time with a knife, and you could do straight lines and square edges, assuming you wanted to. And she could get an edge on a blade better than anyone he’d ever known, including his Uncle Vastida.
    “You might want to take a look at this,” she said, on the day he finished his first large piece for her. He was proud of it – a stag pulled down by dogs, with the huntsmen closing in; she said it was a bit too busy for her taste, but she was pleased that he’d finally grasped the concept of proportion, and the dogs’ heads were the right size for their bodies.
    He looked at the thing she’d put on the bench in front of him. “It’s a book,” she explained. “You read it.”
    “All of it?”
    She looked at him. “Yes.”
    He picked the book up and opened it. “Both sides?”
    “Give it here.” She took it from him and turned the pages. “All of them,” she said. “Both sides.”
    “My God.”
    He took the book back to his cell that evening, lit the lamp, put the book down on the floor and lay on his stomach, his head propped on his hands. Extraordinary thing; the black letters on the smooth, flat white page were so much easier to make out than the scratches in the beeswax – a clever bit of design, he had to admit – and after a while he found he didn’t have to say the words aloud. They seemed to talk to him inside his head; they sounded rather like ‘Na Herec, but without the seething impatience. He couldn’t actually follow any of it – lots of names of people he hadn’t heard of and words he didn’t know; it was supposed to be about carving, but there was nothing about work-holding or following the grain, or how to get the last little flakes and fibres out of a corner – but that hardly seemed to matter. It was like a vision, or eavesdropping on angels. Sobering thought, that the people who lived in this unbelievable place read books all the time. He carried on until all the oil in his lamp was burned up; then he rolled on to his back (one thing he hadn’t mastered yet was beds; there was nothing to stop him rolling off while he was asleep, and he had bruises he hoped he’d never have to explain) and dreamed of a great voice from heaven denouncing neo-formalism, while the sea rose up and lashed at the white encircling walls.
    He was quite used to eating alone. The kitchens served two meals a day, but ‘Na Herec and ‘Na Seutz didn’t approve of eating and wouldn’t let him leave while there was still light in the sky just because of food. So when it was dark and they reluctantly let him go, he counted doors to the buttery and looked pathetic and sad until one of the bakers took pity on him. Pity usually took the form of that morning’s bread (officially stale and only for pigswill; it was the most wonderfully soft bread he’d ever tasted) and whatever