Illuminations, p.3
Illuminations, page 3
And she wasn’t finished, because she hadn’t found the armadillo. Had she even looked for it?
No, she’d been looking in the closet and then…
…then she’d turned around and walked away in a hurry.
Now why did I do that? wondered Rosa.
She went back to the closet, looked at the box with the crow, and found herself back at the pile of boxes again. She had to go do…something…else…didn’t she?
No, I don’t. I have absolutely nothing else to do, and that’s why I’m here. Because I’m bored. Stop telling me I have to go do something else.
Rosa began to get a suspicion about what was going on, but Uncle Alfonso always said that the third time was the charm. She turned back to the closet, keeping her eyes fastened on the ceiling.
When she was firmly in front of the closet shelves, she lowered her gaze slowly.
Top shelf, hat-boxes, nothing.
Next shelf, Coronation calendar and a couple of bags of yarn, nothing.
Middle shelf…
Rosa’s feet turned her around and her brain tried to tell her that she had something else to do somewhere else.
“It’s an illumination!” said Rosa aloud.
You didn’t grow up in a studio full of illumination painters without learning to recognize when a magic charm was actually working on you. She didn’t recognize the crow and she couldn’t look at it long enough to make out what was in its claws, but it was undoubtedly an illumination.
Now that’s interesting.
An illumination that could make people go away like that wasn’t completely unheard of. Aunt Nadia made illuminations to keep burglars away, sometimes, although they were expensive. They only kept casual burglars from deciding the house looked promising, though; they wouldn’t stop someone who was already determined to rob you.
To last this long, and to actually turn somebody around and send them off, instead of just making the box look boring or moldy or covered in spiders…that was a powerful illumination.
Why would somebody put an illumination like that on a box? thought Rosa, then immediately answered herself—To protect something inside it.
Something valuable.
It could be gold. Jewels. Piles of money. Or something expensive we could sell.
Rosa considered for a few minutes. Then she took out a pen—she always carried a pen in her pocket, because you could be struck by a really good idea for a painting anywhere and you had to write it down at once or it might be lost forever, and even though all her good ideas seemed to be radish-related, it was still a good habit for an artist to have—and she wrote on her left hand, “crow box in basement.”
Then she climbed over the pile of boxes and into the main room.
There was always a way around magic, but sometimes you had to come at it sideways.
One good thing, Rosa knew, as she climbed the stairs up, she was most definitely not bored.
SIX
Night
Garlic Day
Messidor, the Month of Harvest
* * *
When she got into the studio, Rosa went at once to the Iconographer’s Concordance, that other great book, and set a hand on the cover.
The Concordance was the opposite of the Codex. Instead of containing lists of charms, it contained lists of subjects, and would tell you what each one did if you painted it in an illumination.
For example, if you had a painting of a blue-eyed cat, (which you will remember wards away mice) you could look up cat and read:
Cat
with blue eyes
wards away mice
with wings
brings friendship
cat-headed man
helps find squirrel nests (best in lockets)
And it would go on for pages and pages like this, every possible variation of cat paintings that did anything if you made an illumination of them. Many paintings were so obscure or so useless that there was really no practical reason for them. For example, if you painted a white cat riding on the back of a moose, it would keep your shoelaces from being eaten by badgers. Nobody bothered painting illuminations like that.
Rosa ran a finger over the heavy leather cover. There was a jellyfish embossed on it, holding paintbrushes in its tentacles.
Now what was I going to look up…?
It had seemed important at the time but Rosa was having a hard time remembering now. Something from the basement, wasn’t it? Was there something else I was supposed to do?
The leather jellyfish had a ridged texture as she rubbed it. She looked down at the cover and at her hand, and read “crow box in basement” in smudgy blue ink.
“Ha! You won’t get me that easy, crow!”
Uncle Alfonso glanced up from his painting. “Hmmm?”
“I found a neat box in the basement,” said Rosa. “It’s got an illumination on it to make you leave it alone, though.”
“Interesting,” said Uncle Alfonso. “I wonder if they had a reason?”
“I’m going to find out.”
He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Any luck on the stuffed armadillo front?”
“Sorry, Uncle Alfonso. I didn’t see it.”
“Ah, well.” He sighed. “In life, we are always seeking after something. Love…fame…glory…stuffed armadillos. It is the human condition.” He dabbed more paint onto his brush and went back to work.
Rosa opened the heavy cover and dragged the pages over to the C’s.
She found the crow section and her heart sank.
There were a lot of crow illuminations.
Most animals had at least one illumination attached. Even the hippopotamus could be painted on nail clippers to prevent hangnails. But crows…crows were popular.
Rosa ran her finger down the Concordance. The list of crows went on for six and a half pages, and the print was very small.
There were some very odd notes in it, too.
For example, one said:
Crow
with two pupils in each eye
(BANNED. DETAILS REDACTED.)
It wasn’t the only listing like that, either. Crows holding salamanders were also banned and redacted, as were crows with their heads cut off—yuck, thought Rosa—and crow-headed men holding horse skulls and crows with flaming arrows for tongues.
And yet many of the entries were perfectly normal. Crows holding leafy branches were an illumination to ward off arthritis and a crow holding a glowing seed in its beak kept you from losing your keys.
“Uncle Alfonso?”
“Yes, Rosalita?”
“What does it mean when an entry in the Concordance says, ‘Banned. Details Redacted?’”
Uncle Alfonso paused, and then set down his paintbrush. He cleaned his glasses very deliberately on his apron and set them back on his nose. “Well,” he said. “Well. It means that painting that illumination is forbidden.”
“Why would it be forbidden?” asked Rosa.
“Because it does something wicked,” said Uncle Alfonso. “It could bring sickness or misfortune or anger. It could bring death.” He paused, studying her face. “Creating magic paintings is a responsibility, not just a gift, Rosalita. There are people who will paint unkind paintings and not care who they hurt with it.”
Rosa had never heard of bad illumination painters before. It was a fascinating thought. She rubbed her thumb over the word crow on her hand, smudging the ink further.
“You never told me about unkind painters before,” she said.
Uncle Alfonso shrugged. “There are a great many bad things in the world,” he said, “but there is no point in dwelling on them. And there are very few makers of such illuminations.”
“Have you ever met one?”
“Once,” said Uncle Alfonso. “And I do not propose to tell you about it, Rosalita. It was a long time ago and I was young and foolish.”
Rosa scowled horribly, but he wasn’t looking at her. Even though she was dying to know about the evil illumination maker, she asked a different question instead.
“What would happen if you painted one of the bad illuminations? By accident?”
“It’s rare,” said Uncle Alfonso. “We are always very careful when we paint new illuminations. If we’re worried, we check the Concordance. But yes, sometimes accidents happen, and then we apologize and we give the client a newer and much better illumination to replace it.” He smiled briefly. “Your Cousin Sergio once tried to make a very fancy illumination for a restaurant, of a bird nesting. It was supposed to keep food from spoiling. But he got so carried away painting the branches of the tree that he wove them together into knotwork, and it turns out that knotwork olive branches form an illumination that makes everything in the kitchen taste of sardines. The cook was very upset and we had to sand the painting down and paint another one.”
Rosa giggled. “He didn’t check for that?”
“Well, it had never come up before. I don’t think anyone had any idea.” He picked up his paintbrush again. “Very bad illuminations tend to be very specific illuminations. If someone wants to do a bad thing, they must be very precise. If you keep the details secret, it’s unlikely that someone would stumble on it casually.”
Rosa considered this. None of the listings under crow said “keep people away” or “make people go do something else.” But it was possible that one of the banned illuminations would have said that, if the details weren’t redacted.
I shall have to look at the box more closely, and see exactly what the crow looks like. Then I’ll know what to look for in the book.
But how could she do that when the box kept driving her away?
She closed the Concordance and stared at the jellyfish, thinking.
Even when Grandmama called “Dinner!” and the whole family piled out of their studios and into the kitchen, Rosa did not stop thinking. The answer would come to her, she was sure of it. She just had to keep picking at it.
SEVEN
Morning
Wheat Day
Messidor, the Month of Harvest
* * *
While she was waiting for the answer to come to her, Rosa set out to make herself useful, and perhaps find a way to restore the Mandolini fortunes.
This was more difficult than she expected.
For one thing, useful things were often not very interesting. Grandmama felt it would be quite useful for Rosa to do the dishes. Rosa did not feel that this was a good use of her talents.
She tried elsewhere. “Uncle Marco? Do you have anything useful I could do?”
“Help me find Walter!” he suggested. “He’s wandered off again.”
Rosa let out a sigh that seemed to come from the bottom of her toes.
Uncle Marco was painting a commission for a local nursery, to keep the babies from getting diaper rash. For no reason that anyone knew, the illuminations to prevent rash were paintings of stag beetles, which are enormous beetles with large clicky mandibles. They could be any color that you wanted, but they had to have the mandibles.
Nurseries have a lot of babies. Uncle Marco’s commission was to paint seventy-three stag beetles on a board twenty feet long. The end of the board stuck out of the bay and people kept having to detour around it.
Uncle Marco preferred to work from life, which meant that every single one of the seventy-three stag beetles was actually based on a single beetle named Walter.
(“Why Walter?” Rosa had asked.
“He looks like a Walter,” said Uncle Marco.)
He painted them all the colors of the rainbow, red and orange and indigo and violet, but all of them started with Walter. Walter was very well treated, for a beetle, but sometimes he got the urge to go exploring.
“I’ll look high and you look low,” suggested Uncle Marco.
Uncle Marco had a bad leg and he walked with a cane most of the time, but when he was painting, he sat on a wheeled stool and pushed himself back and forth along the length of the board. He pushed himself along now, checking behind bottles of paint, and Rosa got down on her hands and knees, looking under the table.
Walter was nowhere to be found. “I’ll check the other bays,” she said.
There were no beetles in Uncle Alfonso’s bay, and none in Grandmama’s bedroom. Aunt Nadia was standing in front of her immense painting for the Merchant Council. Each face glowed with angelic light, as if lit from within. Rosa knew that it was a trick done by putting very thin layers of color over bright white paint, but knowing how it was done didn’t make it look any less impressive.
The real magic—the power of an illumination that was beginning to come to life—was still faint, but it was growing.
“It’s beautiful, Aunt Nadia,” Rosa said.
“It’s getting there,” said Nadia wearily. “So much left to paint…”
She picked up the brush again. Rosa checked in the corners for Walter, but didn’t find him.
She went up on the roof, in case Walter had decided to get some fresh air. The air in the city often smelled like—well, like city, like dust and horses and people and the strong, murky scent of the canal. But the recent rain had washed the air clean and it smelled like fresh laundry and growing things.
The Studio Mandolini was taller than the three surrounding buildings. Rosa could look down onto the roofs of her neighbors. Everyone had their little rooftop gardens, full of basil and vining tomatoes, all grown in pots with illuminated grape-leaves on them. (Three grape leaves together were a very simple illumination to make plants grow.) Their neighbor on the left kept chickens on the roof, including a very confused rooster who crowed at odd hours. Their neighbor on the right had a laundry line flapping in the breeze.
All the buildings were made of brick, patched with big gray splotches of adobe. Some of the windows were boarded up. There was a spot on the roof where Rosa wasn’t supposed to walk because the boards creaked alarmingly. It wasn’t the most wealthy neighborhood, but everyone was friendly and pleasant, except for maybe the rooster.
Past the three immediate neighbors, there were much taller buildings. Rosa couldn’t see over those. One had a line of rooftop apartments with balconies, and even though they were cheap apartments, the windowboxes spilled over with red geraniums and tumbling orange nasturtiums. Every window had an illumination on it to prevent breakage. If she turned her head right, Rosa could just see the magic out of the corner of her eye, as if the windows were glowing.
Because she was surrounded on all sides by buildings, Rosa sometimes felt like she was in a little valley looking up at mountains. She had never been to the mountains, but she had seen so many paintings of them that she had a fair idea what it must be like.
Serena’s rooftop at the Studio Magnifico had a better view. It was taller than the Studio Mandolini and you could see to the market square and one of the canals.
“You can even see the spire of the Great Cathedral, too,” Serena had said once. “Look, between those two buildings!”
“I think that’s a weathervane,” Rosa had said doubtfully.
“No, it isn’t. It’s the Great Cathedral.”
“The Great Cathedral doesn’t have a chicken on top of it.”
“It’s an angel, not a chicken!”
Rosa had decided that she wasn’t going to win that one, so she’d changed the subject. “Will you get married in the Great Cathedral?”
“I will!” said Serena. “In a grand procession with people throwing rice. The train of my dress will be twenty feet long and there will be a dozen people to hold it up.”
“I’ll be the Maid of Honor,” said Rosa.
“Of course!” said Serena. “And I’ll enter the Cathedral—”
“—Just as a gargoyle descends on the steeple! And swoops off with your husband!”
Serena paused, adjusting her fantasy to accommodate an unexpected gargoyle. “And I shall swoon with horror!” She put the back of her hand to her forehead and staggered backward dramatically (though away from the railing around the roof.)
“Noooo!” cried Rosa. “I shall save you! Where is my sword?”
“I may die of grief!”
“Then I will avenge you!”
Rosa stood on the rooftop and heaved a sigh at the memory. It had been a good game. But she wasn’t talking to Serena after she’d been so mean.
“I still think it was a weathervane,” she said, trying to cheer herself up. It worked a little, but not as much as she’d hoped.
Despite the view, Walter was nowhere to be seen. Rosa came down the stairs, checking each step for beetles.
At last she wandered into Cousin Sergio’s studio and found him painting a mermaid on a door.
“Prevents flooding!” he said, painting scales. It was wonderful to watch. The mermaid’s tail was flat green and Sergio had a brush with a lighter shade of green paint on it. He made quick little flicks of the brush and each little flick became a scale and suddenly the flat green paint looked alive, as if the mermaid might dive off the door and into the sea.
Rosa could feel the magic radiating off the painting. It felt like a warm mist against her skin. Cousin Sergio was odd and abrupt and he was always losing things, but he was a great painter. Every scale made the painting more powerful. When he was done, you could pour a hundred of gallons of water outside that door and the inside wouldn’t even get damp.
Her radishes didn’t have the warm, misty feel of a working illumination, but sometimes there was a strange, here-and-there heat to them, as if she was standing in a breeze that swirled and eddied and occasionally brought a touch of warmth with it. Rosa wasn’t sure what to make of that. She hoped that it meant she would be an illuminator someday, when she got older, or got the trick of it, or something. She tried not to think that maybe the radishes were the best she’d ever be able to do.
There was no sound in the studio for a minute but the soft flick of the brush as Sergio highlighted scale after scale and the magic grew and grew.
“She’s got awfully pointy teeth,” said Rosa, a bit doubtfully.
“Eats sailors! Not nice!”
