Read Online Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay - Free Book Online

always know, or admit to themselves, along the canals, in palaces, sanctuaries, warehouses, shops, in the bordellos with their music, the studios of artists making images of the city and the sea.
    Seressa, on its silted marshland by the water, wedded to the sea as a bride, was dependent on it for everything. But the duke also knew that such an existence was transitory, precarious as wind, clouds, as a dream vivid and bright, and gone when morning comes.
    An image in his mind, not for the first time: a small religious retreat, an old mosaic behind the altar, perhaps, an attached dwelling (good walls and roof, reliable fireplaces for winter), on one of the outlying islands of the lagoon. He saw a walled garden, fruit trees, a bench in summer shade, holy men surrounding him, leading prayers at proper hours, reading sacred texts together, discussing matters of faith and wisdom in voices that were never too loud.

    In most cities, painters tended to live and work in the less expensive districts, for obvious reasons.
    Those overcrowded areas often lay where activities such as tanneries or dyeworks were located, the smells having a downward effect on the cost of a small room and studio. This was very much true in Seressa, which had never been the most pleasingly scented of cities in any case. Port towns rarely were, and Seressa in its lagoon was the queen of all ports.
    On the other hand, those who bound and sold books—and Seressa was queen of that trade, too—were naturally unwilling to have their shops and binderies located where noxious odours could penetrate and infuse their product. They paid, of necessity, a higher rent to be in more salubrious districts.
    Which was why the young artist Pero Villani was making his way home through dark streets on a windy night at the beginning of spring. He had been at the bookshop and bindery where he worked most days—to make a feed-himself wage, and for access to the books.
    He’d been binding an edition of
The
Book of the Sons of Jad
in red leather for a buyer from Varena. He had finished towards sundown, the shutters open and the light still adequate. After, he’d lingered in the shop, as usual, with the owner’s permission (Alviso Sano was a good man), under instructions to lock up when he was done. He was studying the sheets (as yet unbound—they only bound them when an order was placed) of a new, magnificent text on anatomy.
    An artist needed to understand the workings of the body, muscle and organ and bone, in order to render it properly on a canvas, or on wood or a wall. What lay beneath the flesh of a soldier lifting a sword or golden-haired Jad offering his open-palm blessing to mankind
mattered
. His father had taught him that.
    His father was dead, his mother was dead. Their only son was too young to be established as a painter judged to be worth engaging. He could get a position doing backgrounds in the studio of one of those major artists who employed assistants. He might be forced to do that. It would be a surrender in his own mind. But the truth was, Pero had needed to be older, further along in his career, before his father was taken away from him, struggling to breathe, then not breathing at all.
    Life didn’t always (or ever?) allow you what you needed, in the way of time, or anything else. That was Pero’s sense of things, atany rate. It didn’t seem to matter if you prayed or if you didn’t. Not a thought he shared.
    Pero knew he had talent. His friends knew he had talent. They said so, often. Their opinion didn’t seem to matter much to the world. Not if what you needed was the attention of those who could afford to buy paintings, so you could make a living with your art.
    He’d had exactly two commissions since his father died. One was more or less a gift he’d offered another artist, a friend, and his wife—a sketch in charcoal of their new baby. He’d wanted to study an infant anyway. Most painters