Blind Sculptor (3)
Whoever it was who’d stepped in was, so it seemed, thrown clear out again from the Hall by the sudden shriek that echoed out of it. The door fell shut again.
Sister Noiramas had her arms covering the trembling form of Anrirathu, who had buried her face in the other woman’s lap. Who lightly brushed her brow as she came up again. Anrirathu sharply drew in air through her teeth. There had been no reason to think she might have been lying, but it was something different to feel it.
So this was what it was like. It was true.
Just the flicker of the torch, and her skin was covered with blisters.
As if the torch had been pushed right into her face.
How must it be if she was ever exposed to full sunlight.
One voice mumbled over and over again how sorry she was about forgetting to block the door.
The other voice, – Oh, it happens, it happens. The world is full of light and it cannot be helped that it sometimes strikes me.
A pinpoint of light that rose into a wall of flame.
I saw her eyes, I looked into her eyes for half a heartbeat and I won’t forget, they were clear, deep and beautiful, but that fire seemed to rise out of them. It was more than the flicker of the torch reflected. Did I that moment come close to taking her curse upon me? Was a Devil ready to step out, part those flames for a moment, seize me and draw me in?
It was dangerous what I did. I wanted to feel, but what I very nearly did, was to see.
There are things that must not be seen.
There are searing flames spat at us from beyond.
There are shadows not cast by anything of this world but still their length falls over us and chills us to the heart.
But then again, in this world imperiled by the unfathomable, there was also that man, who could see without seeing.
She told Anrirathu of him.
The blind man who left the monastery many years ago to live in the woods, out beyond the deep cuts of the ravines where weeks ago they’d found her, near dead of thirst.
Not a hermit though he was, that man; he shared his life with a woman, a tiny wizened creature, who for limbs had naught but a half-crippled arm. He carried her about in a basket on his back while she'd see for him when he needed it. Also finish his sentences. Abandoned at birth as a malformed abomination, she’d been expected to live at most a day but anyone’s best guess today was she’d outlast a century.
The man, in turn, was – unlikely as it seemed – a sculptor.
A blind sculptor.
He would run his hands over things be they living or not, caress them with his fingertips and then seemingly sink them inside, and he would know their shape forever. Then he could remake them, worked from clay or carved from wood, whenever he wanted to, starting the next day, or years later.
What he made perhaps had not the perfection of the famed marble statues that graced the gardens of Gabardine emperors, but you would always recognize them for what they truly were, see the soul, the essence of their being.
He gave his sculptures away – or he
released them, as he said, placing them somewhere in the woods, beside streams, in hollowed half-dead trees or coves in the rocks. Those which he let pass into other people’s hands were often cherished and kept as talismans or housed in private shrines.
Since he only made images of things he could touch, and never made images of things that were made as images themselves, he did not form the faces of Gods, as they did not present themselves to be felt under his hands.
Sister Noiramas recalled some disagreement was said to have resulted from that omission, instigating him to turn his back on the Order, so that few there knew of him today. But she did.
He had never been formally expelled though, and so, when her schedule allowed for it, she could take Anrirathu to him.
To have him bring the shape of her face to light again, with no pain or danger for herself or others.
Anrirathu agreed.
She could not do otherwise than bear her curse, but if there were blessings given to others in this world that allowed her to spite her tormentor, she was past all fear of doing so.
Blind sculptor, she thought,
your guess will be as good as mine.
Or better.
Guess the face that none can know, not even I who should wear it.
She knew the color of her hair and how it fell in front of her eyes, but she didn’t know her own face.
Had there ever been a looking-glass or mirror-pool about, when she was let out of her confinement?
Not once.
Did all such surfaces have to be covered to conceal a hateful reflection of ugliness?
No.
Then, I was not ugly.
I remember His glee as he watched my face melt.
What did He excel and rejoice in?
Destroying the fair, tainting the innocent, twisting the true.
So, once I must have been beautiful, she thought,
perhaps almost as beautiful as you.
Perhaps I looked much the same as you did.
Was it that what had to be concealed?
And "let down" is not how I would describe my interest in your story.
