Margin: The green here is the green Ringhold has been pretending to have for a hundred years. I could weep. I won't. I'll negotiate.
Hareaveldi is a sand-realm with about fifty oases scattered through it, and each oasis gives a colour. Along the northern river, facing Emarrea, the oases are green, from the plants that grow in their water; along the two rivers that cross the country, blue, from the clays of the riverbeds; in the east toward the Wildreach, red, from barks and resins; on the coast, gold and ochre from the earth. Pigment is the country's wealth, and every colour has a home.
Panjrang, the capital, is five oases in a ring on the south coast with the city between them, and the five give green, blue, red, gold and white, the white the desert's own gypsum and lime, the ground every painter lays down first. Panjrang is the one place every colour meets.
The rarest colour comes from the sea. On the three islands the Azarketi dive for the shells of a sea snail, and it takes thousands of them to make a thimble of purple. The Tajvar buys every thimble, and the purple is the crown's colour. The sand cannot take it. It goes on what should last, the frames of the boards, the lintels over the windows, the names on a grave, and never on a self.
Margin: The WINDOWS. Every window in the street has a painting around it, out to exactly as far as whoever lives there can reach. You can see the reach! Short arms, small paintings.
In Hareaveldi everyone paints. Doors are painted, and walls, pots, boats, shop-fronts, the inside of a lid and the bottom of a bowl where only the one who drinks will see it. Children paint and the old paint. People paint the land and the day, the things that are, the things that have never been, and the things that might one day be. Almost every one of these paintings is just a painting.
Every resident may paint the wall around their own window as far as their arm will reach, with whatever they like. A street in Panjrang is a patchwork of arm's-reach paintings, each window ringed with its own: an old man's river with a fish the size of a door, a child's enormous red bird, a moon added on an ordinary afternoon because it was the evening for it. A child's bedroom window is the child's to paint. When someone lays down a self, the window is often painted anew.
Margin: She said no, it's finished, she was only waiting for it to be done, the way you'd wait for a kettle.
A Nagaji lays down a self and grows the next one, and in Hareaveldi each finished self is painted one last time. At sunrise the family carries the portrait out to the rangzar, the field of boards outside the town, and stands it on a low stand facing the sun among the rows of others. This is the carrying-out. The sand does the rest: it takes the red first, then the gold, then the green, and the blue last, until the board is blank.
The blank boards stand at the ends of the rows, and they are anyone's, for anything. A person takes one home, mends the frame, planes the board and paints on it, and when they are done with it, or done being whoever painted it, they carry it back out, let it go, and take the next empty one. Nobody owns a board. The only price is taking care of it. A board may leave the country under the same rule, and nothing checks it. Boards break, and some never come back; then someone buys a new one and sets it out at the end of a row. Panjrang's rangzar lies outside its east wall, and every town has a smaller one.
A child's first painting is on a board from the rangzar. At the end of childhood a young person paints their own childhood self, often the first portrait of themselves they make, carries it out at sunrise like any laid-down self, and chooses their first empty board for whoever they are now. Before it, others paint you; after it, you paint yourself. Nobody sets the age. A young person carries it out when they know that self is finished, and their parents see it coming.
The carrying-out is done for the Tajvar too: the crown's last portrait goes out to the rangzar with everyone else's.
Now and then the elham takes a painter. It is a moment of seeing, and a painting made in it shows what is true: the self a sitter is becoming before the sitter can see it, the shape a thing will take, the country as it will be. Most painters have the moment a handful of times in a life. A few have it often, and those are the great painters, called Ostad, honoured and a little feared. Some people would rather not sit for one.
Folk say a true painting comes true. A great painter's name draws sitters from far beyond the country, and Emarrea's court commissions them more than anyone, and likes the results least.
The moment the elham takes a painter, folk say, is Tani's child face, the goddess's future face, looking out through the painter's eyes, and that is why a true painting shows what is coming.
A painting made when the elham takes a painter pulls toward what it shows, as hard as the painter reached. A true portrait of a sitter's next self draws the sitter toward that self; a true painting of a thing that may be draws the world a little toward it. A painting pulls no harder than its painter reached, which is why a child's sun with a shield and a sword is only a child's painting.
That is why some people refuse to sit for a great painter, and why a portrait of a candidate as Tajvar has decided reigns: the five houses' custom of heeding such paintings is, without their knowing it, a custom of being pulled. And Ostad Kaveh Negar Naqqash's portrait of the Tajvar pulls her toward her next self, and she can feel it.
"I painted what was there. Ask her who she is now."
Hareaveldi has a crown, and the crown lasts one self. The Tajvar takes it as one self and lays it down with that self; when a Tajvar's self is finished, the crown returns, and the last portrait of the Tajvar as ruler goes out to the rangzar with everyone else's.
The shed crown is a Dark-Era law. When the realm was coming apart, a Tajvar laid the crown down at her shedding instead of keeping it, and the realm held; the chronicle keeps her given name, Roshanak, and the self that ruled went to the sand with her portrait. Since then nobody in Hareaveldi has ruled longer than they remained who they were.
Panjrang's five oases each have a house: Sabz, Lajvard, Sorkh, Zard and Sefid, green, blue, red, gold and white. Their wealth is the colour trade. When the crown returns, the five choose the next Tajvar from among those who have kept an oasis well, because water and pigment are the work of ruling here: the wells, the river routes, the trade.
When the elham takes a great painter and the portrait shows someone as Tajvar, it weighs on the houses' choice. It does not bind them, but they rarely choose against one. Who says a painting was made when the elham took its painter is the painter's name and the houses' judgement.
Until the houses choose, they rule together: the eldest of the five receives envoys, no treaty is signed, and nothing is built but what the wells need. It usually lasts weeks. The longest lasted a month, while the houses put off the choice to keep the rule among themselves, and it ended when a second great painter painted the same candidate as Tajvar.
The Tajvar rules day to day with the five houses, receives envoys, signs treaties with the houses' assent, keeps the arghavan, and builds the wells, the roads and the river landings; each oasis keeps its own well-house and builds for itself. By law, the Tajvar alone says when the Tajvar's self is finished. By custom, the great painters often say it first.
Golnar Bahar Rangraz has reigned as her Bahar self for some twenty years. In 2531 the elham took Ostad Kaveh Negar Naqqash while he was painting her, and the portrait shows her next self already growing. By custom that is the sign the reign is ending. She says her self is not finished. Some of the five houses want the reign over, and some fear that a reign ended by a painting, against the Tajvar's own word, would leave every Tajvar after her at the mercy of the great painters. The country, which teaches every child to carry out a finished self, is watching whether its Tajvar is doing what so many of its old folk do at home: keeping a self.
Hareaveldi feeds itself: dates and gardens at the oases, grain along the northern river, fish along the coast and off the islands, goats at every well. In a lean year Emarrea's orchards and the Duchies' valley make up the difference.
It sells its colours, every one of them in grades, from the first and finest to the stairwell grade: the oases' greens, the blue clay of Lajvard, which lasts, the red bark of Sorkhab, which fades in a season, the golds, the white. A colour's price runs with its grade and with how long it keeps. Ringhold buys by the barrel, and so does every painter and dyer on the southern network. It sells painted things too, boxes and bowls and panels, the ordinary work of a country that paints everything. The boards are never sold. It buys timber for the boards and frames from Emarrea's forests, salt from Galdua Jendea's rocks, glass jars from the Golden Coast to keep the pigment in, sake and orchard goods from Emarrea, and cloth and metal off the network.
The roads. A branch line runs from Biozuri in Emarrea down to Panjrang along the old pigment road, the Golden Empire's road the colours once travelled. Emarrea's barges go down the river along the western edge to the Duchies, and ferries cross the northern river all day. Panjrang has a harbour on the Hafra, and boats go out to the islands. The buyers travel by barge, with their jars.
The day is worked early and late, at the wells, the gardens and the dye-pits, and the heat of the day is for rest. The evening light is the painting light: when the heat breaks, the windows fill with people leaning out with brushes.
Everyone has colour on their hands, and a native can tell which oasis a stranger is from by the stain. The dye-pits smell of resin and wet clay. The bread is baked in the hot sand under the embers and eaten with dates. Someone not seen in years is greeted who are you now?, and nobody asks about a self that has been laid down: that was another closes the subject kindly.
Keeping a self. The vice is keeping a finished portrait at home instead of carrying it out: sentimental, a little shameful, and common in the old.
A portrait kept at home instead of carried out, folk say, keeps its self from going, and the house feels it: an old voice in the next room, a habit that comes back. Mothers say it to stop their children keeping one.
Hareaveldi goes on foot and by Stokkul between the oases, by caravan along the rivers, by barge, by the branch line, and by boat to the islands. At sunrise, somewhere in every town, a family is walking out to the rangzar with a portrait.
A visitor takes the rangzar for a cemetery, and the natives laugh: it is a laundry line. A visitor tries to buy a board. A visitor calls a painting true as a compliment, and a native winces, because the word means something here.
Children paint from the start, and the first board is theirs before they can carry it. The young go out at night with ladders and paint the high walls no window reaches; the old pretend not to see, and the painting stays until the wall's owner decides. The first carrying-out ends a childhood.
Tani is the country's goddess, and the face Hareaveldi keeps is the child's, the future face: it is painted on the doorposts, and children paint it first. The rebirth-rites of the Tani church carry a Nagaji cadence, and the carrying-out is done with a word to her.
Hareaveldi speaks Sokhan, a tongue of the south-western sands. Scholars argue over a likeness between Sokhan and the fragments recovered from the Blackened Lands, and over its kinship with Hizva, the tongue of Ida; the argument has not been settled.
A Hareaveldi carries a given name, a self-name and a family name: Golnar Bahar Rangraz. The given name is kept for life, and the family name is inherited, mostly from an old craft or a place. The self-name is taken at a carrying-out, and when that self is laid down, its name goes to the sand with its portrait and is not spoken again; it is usually a word, a season, a colour, a thing. So Golnar Bahar, Golnar in her spring self, may one day be Golnar Payiz, and who are you now? is asking for the middle name. A child carries a given name and a family name; the first carrying-out gives the first self-name.
Given
Self-names
Families
Whole names
The Tajvar: reigning as her Bahar self for some twenty years; of a dyers' family.
A great painter, of a painters' family; painted the Tajvar's portrait in 2531.
The Dark-Era Tajvar who laid the crown down at her shedding; the chronicle keeps her given name.
A Gnome of Kaosadaemi, buying colour for Ringhold; kept the order book.
The order book Odelind Ringhold Mordant kept on the road in 2531 MR, buying colour for Ringhold. The ledger column is the work; the margins are hers.
Came down from Biozuri on the river barge and over the border water at dawn. Five oases in a ring with the city sewn between them, and every one of them a different colour from the air. The Prince's purse should have sent me ten years ago.
Ordered: nothing yet. Looking first.
(margin: The WINDOWS. Every window in the street has a painting around it, out to exactly as far as whoever lives there can reach. You can see the reach! Short arms, small paintings. One old man's has a whole river going round it and a fish the size of a door. A child's is mostly one enormous red bird. Nobody painted two the same. At home we'd have quartered the whole street in somebody's hair by now and called it a day.)
(margin: A woman leaned out of her window while I stood there and added a moon to hers. Just like that. In the middle of the afternoon. I asked why. She said it was the evening for it.)
| Colour | From | Quantity | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green, zangar | Sabzab | 40 jars | dear | worth it |
| Green, second grade | same | 12 jars | fair | for the stairwells; nobody looks at stairwells |
(margin: The green here is the green Ringhold has been pretending to have for a hundred years. I could weep. I won't. I'll negotiate.)
(margin: Every door in this oasis is painted, and the inside of every lid, and the bottom of every bowl, where only the one who drinks will ever see it. I asked a potter who it was for. She looked at me as if I'd asked who breathing was for.)
| Colour | From | Quantity | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue, the clay | Lajvard | 30 jars | very dear | lasts forever |
| Red, the bark | Sorkhab | 25 jars | cheap | fades fast; Ringhold won't notice, Ringhold repaints by spring |
(margin: The blue lasts forever and the red is gone in a season, and they price them backwards to how I'd price them. I asked the red-man why the cheap one was the fast one. He said the fast one was for the things you were finished with. I wrote it down without understanding it. I understand it now. See below.)
Ordered: nothing.
(margin: There's a field outside the east wall where they put the faces. Rows and rows of portraits on little stands, all turned to face the sun, the way you'd put out laundry. The new ones are bright. The old ones are going. The sand takes the red first, then the gold, then the green; the blue goes last, and it does go, I watched where it had been.)
(margin: A woman was sitting on the ground in front of one, wrapped in a shawl, drinking something hot. The face on the stand was hers, younger, sterner, with the colours half off it. I asked if that was her. She said it was. I asked if it didn't hurt to watch. She said no, it's finished, she was only waiting for it to be done, the way you'd wait for a kettle.)
(margin: The blank ones stand at the end of the rows, scoured clean, and they're ANYONE'S. You take one home, mend the frame, plane the board, paint whatever you like on it, and when you're done with it, or done being whoever painted it, you carry it back out, let it go, and take the next empty one. Nobody owns a board. I tried to buy one. A man told me to just pick one. The only price is taking care of it.)
(margin: A little girl came out with her mother and chose a board that was taller than she was. Her first painting, the mother said. She's going to paint a sun with a shield and a sword. I asked what for. She said for the sun.)
(margin: All my life I've thought changing was the easy part.)
| Colour | From | Quantity | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green, zangar | Sabzab | 1 jar | full price | not for resale |
| A board, from the field | the east wall | 1 | taking care of it | not for resale; not mine either |
(margin: Ringhold has no window right and no field. Ringhold is going to have to argue with me about both.)