‘Errant’ isn’t the word for a man who sets out to destroy a pupil who rightly looks to him for protection and friendship. “These are really deep critical waters,” I protest.
“Or these are real critically deep waters,” he says.
Not dumb, to shoot that back so quickly.
Maybe a fool, but not dumb. Dim people ride a mule to their conclusions, bright ones a racehorse—but not always in the right direction.
He’s still waiting. How did I get backed into having this conversation anyway?
“Growing up, I had a friend whose mother fancied herself a singer. A strangling cat would make more pleasing noises. She was . . . wretched. But I liked her very much. So. If I can like a person but hate their art, I can do the opposite as well. Those who can’t do so reveal their own limitations, not Art’s. So no, I don’t think Gollaïr’s villainy makes me judge him more harshly. I think his art deserves harsh judgment. But I understand he was a local here, and thus nets a bit more praise on that account. Just as every parent thinks their child is especially gifted, though at least half must be wrong.”
Lord Dariush weighs me, curious. “Am I in that half?” he asks. It isn’t clear whether he’s speaking about the painting or about his daughter. A moment later, I see that the ambiguity was intentional.
Well, shit. Trying to avoid a ditch, I seem to have fallen into a pit instead.
But you know what? To the seventh hell with him. All these games. Seven days here, and I’ve only seen Felia from afar, while her widowed elder sister, Ninharissi, and her mother and even her little brother have vetted me. These cretins and their traditions.
“How much honesty do you want?” I ask.
“More,” he says, his eyes fierce.
“More? Do you think me dishonest, or guarded?” I ask, dragging that accusation out like a worm to writhe in the hot glare of Orholam’s Eye. Very well, then. I can use the tool that’s fit for the job, even if it’s honesty. But I go on before he has to answer. “Felia is clearly possessed of superior giftings when compared with all the people in the Seven Satrapies, else I’d not have trekked so far. But whether you think she is especially gifted among the circle of other eligible young women of our class, that I do not know, nor to what degree you believe so. Certainly, I should hope a father would see what is laudatory in his daughter.”
And I expect it here, where there is a traditional bride price to be negotiated.
He doesn’t blink, nor back down from his accusation of me giving him half truths. “One might do well to remember, then,” he says, “that the feelings that affect our judgments that impact the value we place on what we’re about to lose also affect the price we wish to exact for that loss, depending on our affection or disaffection for our counterpart.”
“I’m not sure I follow.” Actually, I do. I just don’t like what I’m hearing.
“If I might inflate the bride price for my beloved daughter because of my love for her—perhaps even while believing my judgment is objective—how else might my other feelings factor into a negotiation?”
I’m not sure if he’s heading for a subtler point here, because this seems like the obvious dressed up in a philosopher’s garb. “If you don’t like me, you’re going to demand a higher price,” I say.
Which is why I was trying not to call you stupid or blind or a fool with bad taste, old man.
“I suppose, then,” he says, “if you are incapable of being a man unmirrored, then perhaps what you ought to have set as your first objective in this visit was figuring out exactly what I do like.”
“ ‘A man unmirrored’?” I ask.
“An old colloquialism. A man who doesn’t practice pulling faces in front of a mirror. A man who is himself. A forthright man,” he says.
We have an absolute imbalance of power here, the two of us. He can say anything, unless my pride and I want to pack up and leave without even having spent even an hour with Felia.
And then it dawns on me.
This is all negotiation!
The old fox. No wonder he’s rich.
I see it now. Frustrate me with delays and promises while he knows I need to be elsewhere, and raise the stakes of my own time investment. The longer I’ve spent here, the harder and harder for me to walk away empty-handed. I’ll be more willing to compromise—without him even having to broach the subject.
The manipulation of my emotions is lovely! Wonderful! Brilliant!
It’s exactly what I’ve been hoping to add to the Guile line. I might even learn a thing or two from Lord Dariush.
Well. Unlikely.
But now I know the game. You want honesty from me, you wily old weasel? No, you want me to open the door to the henhouse so you don’t have to go to all the work of wriggling under the floorboards is all.
“It really is sadly terrible, isn’t it?” he asks, pensive, staring at the painting.
“Huh?” I ask.
“Poor brushwork, uneven tone, what should be complementary colors ever so slightly off.”
I say nothing, disconcerted. It seems safest.
“But it’s not a forgery,” Lord Dariush says. “Gollaïr spent years figuring out his luxin pigments. He originally intended simply to sell his paints to artists, not use them himself. He knew he wasn’t a good painter. But he worked up a few demonstration paintings with garish colors, intending them only to show what was possible—and they caused a sensation. People called him a genius, and he quite liked it. He started acting the artist, hoping only to buy time, but the worse he behaved, the more he was hailed. The more he demanded, the more he was given. He very quickly trapped himself. He was a barely competent drafter with poor color differentiation. But he couldn’t get secret tutoring to become better at either drafting or at painting, because he was famous for both. It’s common for successful artists to fear they’re impostors, but some are impostors.
“And Gollaïr was their king. Finally, he was forced to take on a pupil by a patron whom he couldn’t refuse, and he found that the boy wasn’t just better than he; the boy was a master for the ages.
“For years Gollaïr had kept his fraud going, and he had almost begun to believe he was as good as he told everyone else said he was. Solarch threatened it all. After destroying the boy, Gollaïr publicly retired, but secretly he planned a triumphant return. He was studying the boy’s technique from the one small painting that he hadn’t destroyed. Not a figure study—Gollaïr knew he could never match Solarch on that—but a landscape using the boy’s sense of color and much better luxin-work. And this painting is what Gollaïr made.” Lord Dariush smiles sadly, then goes on. “This shoddy thing is the last Gollaïr, and the only one whose pigments survive—that at least he learned from Solarch. But it still has all the same fundamental flaws of his other work. It was the best thing he ever did, but he never sold this last painting. He never even showed it. After he finished it, he retired to his estate and watched his reputation wither. He never picked up a brush again. It’s said—but this part I don’t know for certain—that every day he went to see this painting and his last Solarch. He kept them side by side, a reminder of what was and of what could have been.”