The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [192]
“Gods, I doubt if you’ll find me as harsh a master as Cullyn of Cerrmor must have been. Now, let’s see. It’s easier to start with a picture than it is with a solid thing, somehow. We can search the marketplace for a painted scroll.”
“Oh, come now, you don’t expect to find some rare dweomer book right out in the Myleton market, do you?”
“Of course not, but we don’t want one. What we need is the sort of thing a merchant’s wife would have in her reception chamber to amuse a guest, a little scroll with four or five colored drawings on it, maybe pictures of famous temples, maybe seacoast views—that sort of mundane thing. Trained slaves copy them out by the hundreds, so we should be able to find one with little trouble. You need somewhat complicated enough to keep your mind alive while you do the wretched exercises.”
“Whatever you say. What comes after learning to hold pictures in your mind?”
“Oh, extensions of the basic work. You start by maybe changing some details of the picture you’re seeing mentally—adding clouds in the sky, say, or putting in a tree. Then, let’s see … uh, well … eventually you have to pretend you’re in the picture yourself and looking around at all its various parts…. I know we did that …” His voice trailed away.
“You don’t really remember it all, do you?”
“You may berate me for a wretched and most frivolous elf, if you wish, because, alas, alack, well-a-day, and so on and so forth, you speak the truth. I do remember the beginning banishing ritual, though, and that’s truly important for someone in your state of mind.”
“Well and good, then. What is it?”
“There’s no time to go into it right now. If we’re going to buy horses, we have to get to the market before it closes for the midday heat, so let’s wait till we’re out on the road. But don’t let me forget to show it to you.”
It occurred to Jill that as harsh ordeals went, learning dweomer from Salamander was going to have its moments.
When they left Myleton, Jill and Salamander had opted for the direct if difficult route straight south from the city, and for over a week now they’d been winding their way through the hill country. Since the traveling was slow and tedious, and the imaging exercises kept her mind off Rhodry, Jill poured herself into the work and made such rapid progress that Salamander admitted he was impressed. Before they’d left Myleton, they had indeed found a picture scroll for her lessons. About a foot high and five long, it unrolled right to left, all backwards to Salamander’s way of thinking. Since she’d never read a Deverry book or scroll, to Jill the direction seemed as good as any other. She rather liked the paintings themselves, three scenes from the history of Myleton, showing the first colonists founding the new city, a famous tidal wave of some hundred years later, and finally the election of an archon known as Manataro the Good. Each picture was crammed with small details, all cleverly arranged so that it seemed she was looking into a box, not down onto a flat surface.
Yet, after days of staring at the historically renowned tidal wave and working on seeing it as if it were real in her mind, she was heartily sick of the scroll and the practice both. The banishing ritual she found more tolerable, even though Salamander drilled her mercilessly, because she could see its direct benefit, the control of the floods of imagery that threatened to overwhelm her whenever she was angry. First she would place those images in her mind as if they were practice lessons, then banish them with the sign of the flaming pentagram. At times she still failed, and the fires of rage would seem to burn around her unchecked, but every time she succeeded she felt her skill growing, and over the days the out-of-control images came less and less often.
On the afternoon that they reached the center of the island, everything seemed to go wrong with her workings. First she stumbled over the words of the ritual, drawing the gerthddyn’s scorn. Then when she tried a new picture from the scroll, she could