One Stroke, One Year

In the palace they had prepared a small inner room for him. A long sheet of pale paper had been stretched on a board on the floor. Beside it, ranged in shallow dishes, were the colors he had asked for: cinnabar ground in honey, malachite green powdered fine, azurite the deep blue of a winter river at dusk, ochre the color of old straw, and lampblack so dark it drank the light around it. Behind a thin curtain on the far side of the room the king lay listening. The painter could hear his breathing, careful and shallow, like someone walking on ice.

He knelt. He laid out his brushes the way he always had — fat ones for the body of the beast, narrow ones for the whiskers and the curl of the tail, one fine point kept aside in its own dish for the eye. Then he lifted the largest brush, dipped it in lampblack, and made the first stroke.

It was the spine of the tiger, one long confident arc from shoulder to haunch. He felt the year leave him as cleanly as breath leaves a window in cold weather. He was not surprised. He had been preparing for this since he was a boy of twelve.

He worked slowly. He laid down the ribs of black outline first — the great round head, the heavy paws, the broad smiling mouth, the upturned tail curled like a question — and with each line he counted, quietly, the years left in him. Forty, he had thought, when he began. He drew the ears. Thirty-eight. He drew the long muscled back. Thirty-five. He drew the four stout legs planted square against the paper.

Then he opened the cinnabar. The red went on flat and unhesitant, the color of pomegranate seed, the color of a child's painted lip. He filled the tongue. He filled the inside of the mouth. The tiger began to grin out of the paper at him with a kind of bewildered tenderness, as if it had only just discovered it existed and was pleased about it.

Malachite next, for the stripes — bold green bands laid across the body, no shadow, no shading, only the bright unembarrassed pattern of a thing made to be looked at and loved. Then azurite for the inner curl of each stripe, and ochre for the belly. The room around him grew warm with color. Behind the curtain the king's breathing slowed and steadied, as if even the half-finished beast were already lending him its strength.

He paused often. He drank water. He looked at his own hands and found them thinner than they had been at dawn, the knuckles more prominent, the skin grown loose around the bones. He smiled at this, privately, the way one smiles at an old friend arriving on time.

By late afternoon the tiger was nearly whole. It stood the full length of the paper, flat and grinning and gloriously alive, every color a clean unmodulated block against the cream of the ground. There were no shadows on it anywhere. The light in the room fell on red and blue and green and was not absorbed but simply returned, as if the painting refused, on principle, to admit that anything in the world could darken.

Only one thing was missing. The eye had its lid, its lash, its round amber iris — but the pupil was still a small empty circle in the center of all that color, and without it the tiger could not see, and a beast that cannot see cannot guard.

The painter set down his other brushes. He took up the fine one he had kept aside, and he loaded it, very carefully, with lampblack until the tip was heavy and gleaming. He knew what this stroke cost. He had known since the messenger came at dawn. Ten more years for the king, all at once, and for himself the ending of the count.

He held the brush above the paper for a long breath. Then he smiled — a small, almost amused smile, the kind a man might wear at the end of a long walk home — and no one in the room, not the kneeling attendant, not the king behind his curtain, could have said with any certainty whether the smile was made of surrender or of fear, or of something quieter than either.

He lowered the brush and set the dot.