Still more astonishing had been the information that Benden's Lord and Lady Holder were willing to pay more than half his fees.

Now he must earn as much as he could, as soon as he could, to show his family that their sacrifices had not been wasted.

Undoubtedly Lord Chalkin would be difficult. Undoubtedly there would be problems, but the marks promised for the commission would pay the land transfer fee. So he'd initialed the contract; a copy was made for Master Domaize's files and it had been returned to Lord Chalkin.

Chalkin had demanded, and received, a verification of Iantine's skill from his Master and then returned the signed contract.

Best re-read it, Ian, Ussie said when Iantine waved the doc.u.ment about in triumph.

"Why?" Iantine glanced down the page and pointed to the bottom lines. Here's my signature, and Master Domaize's, alongside Chalkin's. That is, if that's what this scrawl is supposed to be." He held it out to Ussie.

"Hmmm, looks all right, though I haven't seen Chalkin's hand before. My, where did they find this typewriter? Half the letters don't strike evenly." Ussie pa.s.sed the doc.u.ment back.

I'll see if there're any other examples of Lord Chalkin's signature in the files," Iantine said, "though how... and why would he deny the contract when he himself proposed it?"

"He's a Bitran, and you know how they are. Are you sure that's your signature?" Ussie grinned as Iantine peered with a suspicious glare at his own name. Then Ussie laughed.

"Sure, I'm sure it's mine. Look at the slant of the t. Just as I always make it. What are you driving at, Ussie?" Iantine felt the first twinges of irritation with Ussie's att.i.tude.

"Well, Bitrans are known to forge things. Remember those bogus land transfer deeds five years ago? No, I don't suppose you'd have heard about them. You'd've still been a schoolboy." With an airy wave of his hand, Ussie left a puzzled and worried Iantine.

When he brought the matter up to his master, Domaize could produce a sample of Lord Chalkin's signature on a doc.u.ment much creased and worn. Domaize also put his gla.s.ses up to his eyes and peered at his own name on the current contract.

"No, this is mine, and I recognize your slanting t-bar." He put the doc.u.ment in the to-do tray. "We'll copy it into our workbook."

"If you have any trouble though, at Bitra Hold, let me know instantly."

"It's much easier to sort things out when they start, you know. And don't," and here Master Domaize had waggled a stern finger at him, "allow them to entice you into any games of chance, no matter how clever you think you are. Bitrans make their living at gaming. You can't compete at their level."

Iantine had promised faithfully to eschew any gaming. He'd never had much interest in such things, being far more likely to sketch the players than join the game. But gambling was not a thing that the Master would have meant, Iantine was learning. What did fall into that category: especially the nuances of the word satisfaction. Such a simple word that can be so misconstrued. As he had done.

He had done not four miniatures, but nearly twenty, using up all the materials he had brought with him so that he had had to send for more from Hall Domaize since the wood used in miniatures had to be specially seasoned or it would warp, especially in a damp environment like Bitra Hold. He had done the first four on the canvas he had brought with him for the job, only to discover - along with a long list of other objections from Lord Chalkin and his wife, Lady Nadona that canvas was not satisfactory" If it isn't the best quality," and she ran one of her almost dragon-talon nails across one canvas, snagging a thread so badly the surface was unusable, "it doesn't last long."

"Skybroom wood is what you should be using."

"Skybroom wood is expensive."

"You're being very well paid for these miniatures," she said.

"The least we can expect is the best grade of materials."

"Skybroom wood was not stipulated in the contract."

"Did it have to be?" she demanded haughtily. "I made sure that Domaize Hall has the very highest standards."

"Master Domaize provided me with the best canvas," and he pushed his remaining frames out of her reach. "He said that is what he always supplies. You should have stipulated skybroom wood in the contract if that's what you wanted."

"Of course it would be what I wanted, young man. The very best is none too good for my children."

"Is there any available in the Hold?" he asked. At least with skybroom you could clean off unsatisfactory work without the risk of damaging the surface.

"Of course."

That was his first mistake. Nevertheless, at that point he was still eager to do a proper job to the best of his abilities.

However, what skybroom there was turned out to be substantial lumber, being cured for furniture, and not thin enough to be used for miniatures: miniatures' which were now twice the ordinary size.

"High on the list of unsatisfactory" were the poses of the children, although these had been suggested by the Lady Holder herself.

"Chaldon doesn't look at all natural," Lady Nadona said. "Not at all. He looks so tense, hunching his shoulders like that."

"Whyever did you not tell him to sit up straight?" Iantine forbore to mention that he had done so frequently, and within Lady Nadona's hearing. "And you've given him such an odious scowl."

"Which had been Chaldon's natural expression."

"Standing?" he suggested, cringing at the thought of arguing any of them into standing for the sittings". He'd had enough trouble getting them to sit still. They were, as Ussie had foreseen, not biddable and had such short attention spans that he could never get them to strike the right pose, or a.s.sume an even halfway cheerful expression.

"And why on earth did you paint on such a small canvas"?

"I'll need to use a magnifying gla.s.s," Lady Nadona had said, holding Chaldon's likeness away from her as far as her arm would reach.

Iantine had known enough about his patroness by then to suppress a remark about her farsightedness.

"This is the customary size for a miniature -"

"So you say," she replied repressively. "I want something I can see when I'm on the other side of the room."

As she was generally on the other side of her room whenever her children were in her vicinity, the need was understandable. They were the messiest pre-adolescents Iantine had ever encountered: plump, since they were indolent by nature, dressed in ill-fitting apparel since the Hold's seamstress was not particularly adept, and constantly eating: generally something that ran, smeared or left crumbs on their chins and tunics. None of them bathed frequently enough and their hair was long, greasy and roughly cut. Even the two girls showed no feminine interest in their appearance. One had hacked her hair off with a knife...

except the long tress she wore down the back, strung with beads and little bells. The other had thick braids which were rarely redone unless whatever fastened the end had got lost.

Iantine had struggled with the porcine Chaldon, had realized that the child could not be depicted naturally and tried to retain enough resemblance so that others would know which child had been painted.

"But his portrait was unsatisfactory". Only the youngest, a st.u.r.dy lad of three who said nothing beyond 'No' and carried a stuffed toy with him from which he could not be parted, was deemed marginally 'satisfactory'. Actually the dirty bear was the best part of Briskin's portrait.

Iantine had tried to romanticize Luccha's unusual hairstyle and was told that she'd look better with proper hair which he could certainly add in if he was any good at all. And why did she have such an awkward expression on her face, when Luccha had the sweetest smile and such a lovely disposition?

(Especially when she was busy trying to unite the Hold's cats by tying their tails together, Iantine had added mentally. Bitra Hold did not have a single unscathed animal, and the spit-boy said they'd lost seven dogs to accidents that year already.) Luccha's mouth was set aslant in her face, the thin lips usually compressed in a sour line.

Lonada, the second daughter, had a pudding face, with small dark holes for eyes, and her father's nose: bad enough in a male, but fatal for a female.

Iantine had also had to buy a lock from the Hold steward to prevent his sleeping-furs from walking out of the narrow little cubicle in which he was quartered. He knew his packs had been searched the first day; probably several times by the variety of smeared fingerprints left on the paint pots. As he had brought nothing of real value with him - not having many possessions - he hadn't worried.

Holds usually had one light-fingered person, and the Hold steward usually knew who it was and retrieved what had gone astray from guests' rooms.

But when Iantine found his paint pots left open to dry out, he protested. And paid for a lock. Not that he felt all that secure, for if there was one key to that lock, there could be duplicates. But his furs did remain on his bed. And glad he was to have them, for the thin blanket supplied was holey and ought to have been torn up for rug lengths long since.

That was the least of his problems at Bitra Hold, however.

Having heard all that was wrong with the next set of miniatures he managed to produce, a third larger than the first, Iantine began to have a somewhat clearer grasp of just how the parents envisaged their offspring. On his fifth set, he nearly won the accolade of satisfactory". Nearly. Then the children, one after another, succ.u.mbed to an infant disease that resulted in such a rash that they could not possibly sit".

"Well, you'd better do something to earn your keep," Chalkin told his contract portraitist when Lady Nadona had announced the children were isolated.

The contract says I will have room and board - - -, Chalkin held up a thick forefinger, his smile not the least bit humorous. When you are honoring that contract - But the children are sick Chalkin had shrugged. That's neither here nor there. You are unable to honor the specific conditions of the contract.

Therefore you are not ent.i.tled to be fed and housed at the Hold's expense. Of course, I can always deduct your leisure time from the fee... The smile deepened vindictively.

"Leisure..." Iantine had been so enraged that the protest burst from him before he could suppress it. No wonder, he thought, shaking with the control he had to enforce on himself, no-one else at Hall Domaize would sign with Bitra.

"Well," Chalkin went on, as if he were a reasonable man, "what else does one call it if you are not engaged in the lab ours which you are contracted for?" Iantine had to wonder if Chalkin knew how necessary it was for him to earn the exact fee promised. Iantine had held no conversations with anyone in the Hold; they were so sullen and uncommunicative a group at their best - which was usually at mealtimes - that he hoped he'd be spared them at their worst. He had steadfastly refused to have a little game with cooks or guards, which accounted for a good deal of the general animosity towards him. So how would anyone know anything about his personal life or his reasons for working here?

So, instead of already being on his way home with a satisfactory contract fulfilled and the marks for the transfer fee heavy in his pouch, Iantine spent his leisure time touching up the faces of Chalkin's ancestors in the main Hall murals.

"Good practice for you, I'm sure," Chalkin had said, all too amiably, as he made his daily inspection of this project. "You'll be better equipped to do satisfactory portraits of this generation." Pig faces, all of them, with the ancestral bulbous nose, Iantine noticed.

Oddly enough, one or two of the ancestresses had been very pretty girls, far too young and attractive for the mean-mouthed men they had been contracted to. Too bad the male genes dominated.

Of course, Iantine had had to make up batches of the special paints required for mural work, having initially had no idea that such would be required. He also found his supplies of the oil paints drastically reduced by the repeated 'unsatisfactory' portraits. He had the choice of sending back to Hall Domaize for additional supplies and paying transport charges, plus having to wait for them to reach him - or finding the raw materials and manufacturing the colors himself - which was the better option.

"How much?" he exclaimed in shock when the head cook told him what he'd have to pay for the eggs and oil he needed to mix into his pigments.

"Yiss, an' that doan include cost of hiring the equipment," the cook added, sniffing. The man had a perpetually running nose, sometimes dripping down his upper lip. But not, Iantine devoutly hoped, into whatever he was in the process of preparing.

"I have to hire bowls and jars from you?" Iantine wondered how the cook could have become infected with Chalkin's greed.

"Well, if I ain't using em, and you is, you should pay for the use, seems like." He sniffed so deeply Iantine wondered there could be any mucus left in his sinus cavities. "Shoulda brought yer stuff with ye if ye'd need it. Lord Holder sees you usin" things from his kitchen and one of us'll be paying for it. Won't be me!" And he sniffed again, shrugging one dirty white shoulder as emphasis.

"I came with adequate supplies and equipment for the work I was hired to do," Iantine said, curbing an intense desire to shove the man's face in the thin soup he was stirring.

"So?"

Iantine had walked, stiff-legged with fury, out of the kitchen.

He tried to tell himself that he was learning, the very hardest way, how to deal with the client.

Finding the raw materials for his pigments had proved nearly as difficult since it was, after all, coming on to deep winter here in the Bitran hills. He discovered a hefty hunk of stone with a rounded end that would do as a pestle, and then a hollowed-out rock that would act as a mortar. He had found a whole hillside of the sabsab bush whose roots produced a yellow color; enough raw cobalt to get blue, and the paw berry leaves that boiled up one of the finest pure reds with neither tint nor tinge of orange or purple. With the greatest of luck he also came across ochre mud. Rather than rent" containers, he used chipped crockery he unearthed from the midden heap. He did have to pay the price of best oil for the substandard stuff which was all the cook would sell him.

And that mark, he was sure, would never be pa.s.sed on to Lord Chalkin as fee.

He managed to get enough saucers or mugs - they used a very cheap pottery in Bitra Hold - to hold the different colors he needed. He hadn't quite finished the repair work when Chaldon recovered sufficiently from the rash to be able to sit/ stand once more.

Chaldon had lost weight during the fever which accompanied the emergence of the rash. He was also lethargic and, as long as Iantine could think up funny stories to tell as he worked, he stayed reasonably still. Calling himself the worst kind of panderer, Iantine made the boy resemble the best looking of the ancestors he'd relimned. The boy was certainly pleased and ran off to find his mother, shouting that he did look like Greatgranddaddy, just as she always said he did.

The same ploy did not quite work on Luccha's portrait when she had recovered. Her skin was sallower, she'd lost hair and too much weight to improve her undistinguished looks. While he had aimed for her great-grandmother thrice removed, she didn't have the right facial structure and even he had to admit the result was unsatisfactory.

"Her illness," he'd mumbled when Chalkin and Nadona recited the long catalogue of dissimilarities between their daughter and the portrait.

He did better with Lonada and Briskin who, several kilos lighter, had the look of his great-uncle - pinch-faced, lantern jawed and big-eared. Iantine had judiciously reduced the size of those ears even as he wondered what artist had got away with such unflattering appendages on great-uncle.

He redid Luccha's after the other two: she'd put on some weight and her color was better - not much, but better. And he set her eyes wider in her face, which improved her no end.

Too bad it couldn't be done to the model. He vaguely remembered that the First Settlers had been able to remodel noses and bob ears and stuff like that.

So, grudgingly and after making him touch up each of the four not-so miniature paintings to the point where he was ready to break something - their heads for preference the Lord and Lady Holder considered the four paintings satisfactory. The final critique had lasted well into the night, which was dark and stormy: the winds audible even through the three-thick-thick cliff walls.

So, as he descended wearily but in great relief to the lower floor cubicle, he became aware of the intense chill in this level.

The temperature in the big Hall had been somewhat warmed by the roaring fires in the four hearths, but there was no heating down here.

In fact, it was so cold that Iantine did no more than loosen his belt and remove his boots before crawling on to the hard surface that was supposed to be a mattress. It looked and felt like something recycled from the ships of the First Crossing. He curled up in the furs, more grateful than ever that he'd brought his own, and fell asleep.

Arctic temperatures swirling about his face roused him. His face was stiff with cold and, despite the warmth of his furs, when he tried to stretch his body his muscles resisted. He had a crick in his neck and he wondered if he'd moved at all during the night. Certainly it was cold enough to have stayed in the warm of the furs. But he had to relieve himself.

He crammed his feet into boot leather that was rigid with ice and, wrapping his furs tightly about himself, made his way down the corridor to the toilet. His breath was a plume of white, his cheeks and nose stung by the cold. He managed his business and returned to his room only long enough to throw on his thickest woolen jumper. With half a mind to throw his furs around him for added warmth, he ran up the several flights of stone steps, past walls that dripped with moisture.

lIe paused at the first window on the upper level: solidly snowed closed. Then he went up the next short flight and opened the door into what should have been the relatively warmer kitchen area.

Had every fire in the place gone out overnight? Had the spit-boys frozen on their bed-shelf? As he turned his head in their direction, his glance caught at the window. Snow was piled up against the first hand's breadth of it. He moved closer and looked out at the courtyard, but it was all one expanse of unbroken snow. Indeed, where the courtyard should have stepped down to the roadway the snow was even, concealing any depression where the road should have been. No-one moved outside. Nor were there any tracks in the expanse of snow-covered court to suggest that anyone had tried to come in from one of the outer holds.

"Just what I needed," Iantine said, totally depressed by what he saw. I could be trapped here for weeks!" Paying for room and board.

If only the kids hadn't come down with measles... If only he hadn't already freshened up the murals - - How would he survive? Would he have anything left of his original fee - that had seemed so generous by the time he could leave this miserable Hold?

Later that morning, when half-frozen people had begun to cope with the effects of the blizzard, he struck another bargain with the Holder Lord and Lady: and very carefully did he word it. Two full-sized portraits, each a square thick on sky broom wood to be supplied by Lord Chalkin, one of Lady Nadona and one of Lord Chalkin, head and shoulders in Gather dress, with all materials and equipment to make additional pigments supplied by the Hold; maintenance for himself and quarters on an upper floor, with morning and evening fuel for a fire on the hearth.

He completed Lady Nadona's portrait without too much difficulty she would sit still, loved nothing better than to have a valid excuse for doing nothing. Half-way through the sitting, though, she wanted to change her costume, believing the red did not flatter her complexion as well as the blue.

It didn't, but he talked her out of changing and subtly altered her naturally florid complexion to a kinder blush, and darkened the color of her pale eyes so that they seemed to dominate her face. By then, he'd heard enough of the supposed resemblance between herself and Luccha so that he improved on it, giving her a more youthful appearance.

When she wanted to change the collar of her dress, he improvised one he remembered seeing in an Ancient's portrait - a lacy froth which hid much of the loose skin of her neck. Not that he had painted that in, but the lace softened the whole look of her.

He had not been so lucky with Chalkin. The man was psychologically unable to sit still - tapping his fingers, swinging one leg as he crossed and uncrossed them, twitching his shoulders or his face, making it basically impossible to obtain a set pose.

Iantine was nearly desperate now to finish and leave this dreadful place before another snowstorm. The young portraitist wondered if Chalkin's delays, and the short periods in which he would deign to sit, were yet another ploy to delay him - and rake back some of the original fee. Though Chalkin had even invited him to come into the gaming rooms - the warmest and most elegant rooms in the Hold - Iantine had managed to excuse himself somehow or other.

"Do sit still, Lord Chalkin, I'm working on your eyes and I cannot if you keep moving them about in your face," Iantine said, rather more sharply than he had ever addressed the Lord Holder before.

"I beg your pardon," said Chalkin, jerking his shoulders about angrily.

"Lord Chalkin, unless you wish to be portrayed with your eyes crossed, sit still for five minutes! I beg of you." Something of Iantine's frustration must have come across because Chalkin not only sat still, he glared at the portraitist.

And for longer than five minutes.

Working as fast as he could, Iantine completed the delicate work on the eyes. He had subtly widened them in the man's face and cleared up the oedemic pouches which sagged below them. He had made the jowly face less porcine and subtracted sufficient flesh from the bulbous nose to give it a more Roman look. He had also widened and lifted the shoulders to give a more athletic appearance, and darkened the hair.

Further, he had meticulously caught the fire of the many jeweled rings.

Actually, they dominated the painting, which he felt would find favor with Lord Chalkin who seemed to have more rings than days of the year.