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Truth, and Other Deceptions

posted by John at 12:51 AM, March 09, 2004 | Filed under : Fiction | Comments and Followups

I cannot claim to be the best liar in the Family. I cannot even, to my chagrin, claim to be a particularly good liar within the Family, no matter how useful a skill it may be.

Especially in this Family.

Something in my nature fights against it. Perhaps the layers of disgust and uncleanliness of my life with Brand, a living piece of his grand lie to Cosmos and Family, rebel against it. Or I fear that I will fall into his madness. Or I simply *will* not.

But not all deceptions are lies. After all, deception is the living heart of many successful contests. I feint in swordplay, and feint well. I cloak an offense in Chess or ta-Shael behind layers of misdirection and defense, waiting for the move of a pawn or the turn of a latro, transforming the array from defense to offense. And every military campaign is an onion of deceptions, surrounding
secrets, encasing a pearl of truthful intent.

A lesson that many never learn at all, but which I learned young: Sometimes, the best deception of all is the truth.

I learned it young. Too young, if you count cynicism as a character flaw. But young enough to save my life. And given my relations with truth and lies, one that was as bound to develop in me as much as manipulation finds a home in Jerod’s heart.

Living in Uxmal at the season of Brand’s madness was like living in an overly symbolic short story. I’m not kidding. I knew that Good Dad was making the change into Bad Dad, when the storms lashed out of season. I had begun to understand enough of his— and my— true nature that the idea of his psyche reflected in unnatural weather no longer seemed absurd.

So I had warning, that thirteenth autumn of my life, when the storms began to whip themselves out of season. Always a creature of mercurial change, these periods raised Brand’s internal contradictions to higher and higher octaves, an enternal braided progression with the strands climbing higher in golden ratio to themselves.

He was at his most vulnerable at this time, I know, for both his selves fought for control on a momentary basis and the depths of self-deception he used against himself in this war are still beyond me. Much of his strength was bound to the effort of sustaining two full personalities. But for the vulnerability, he loathed external deception all the more, and the only detente himselves could make was in the punishment of his deceivers.

The chances of success, higher; the results of failure, catastrophic.

I did what I had to do.

I began to paint.

I knew that he would be coming for me, eventually. If not that first day of the out-season monsoon, then that week, or the week after. Something about the Change drove him to seek me out— what, I never understood, if it was even the same thing, each time. He sought me out in other moods, of course, but always at these times.

This time, when he did, he came upon a dwelling with an easel set up and a painting in progress, though not at that very moment. A few others, some discarded, some apparently finished, if hastily, scattered around the room. While I had never displayed any special interest in painting before, I had never shunned the art, either. Shunning the art of painting might have been suicidal, but I never chose to find out. However, I had displayed a reasonable interest in architecture even then, and neither Uxmal nor my imagination lacked for subjects in that area.

The painting in progress when Brand came calling was intended to be a scape of Amber, as seen from the Sea. I am no painter, even today, but I am pleased enough with that work. It served its purpose well: Brand recognized it from his own descriptions.

“I wanted a Trump, Father,” I said, when he asked what I was doing.

So true. So cynical. Of course I wanted a Trump. There was no escape from Uxmal without one, for I knew Brand would never let me take the Pattern. It was Brand’s ear that heard, “I wanted to create a Trump, Father.” I wanted to be like you, Dad.

I kept as tight a clamp on my heart rate and my breathing as I could, watching him carefully without watching him. He looked around at the paintings I had made, but his eye kept returning to the incomplete scape of Amber as my mind imagined it, cold castle on proud mountain.

The gleam of pleasure in his eye, the pride of the ambition… he was enough Good Dad in that moment to make me give up the plan. Almost.

I wonder now, though, if Martin could ever discover where it was Brand got the idea of creating of Trump of something he had never seen.

It wasn’t too much longer that I was listening to Brand in his own private studio, a place I had rarely been allowed. I learned another thing about lies, that day— the best lies, and the cruellest, are those the listener wants to believe, or needs to believe. I had not understood, until then, that despite everything, despite all his plans for me and my blood, something in Brand also wanted an heir, or perhaps a legacy. Or perhaps, to be cynical, just wanted to believe that his seed was strong enough that all his offspring would share his talents and his skills.

I wasn’t prepared for the manic episode I brought about. I hadn’t expected a reaction so strong, but I rode it the best I could. A corner of my mind clung desperately to the lesson I had just learned, but I wanted badly to believe that things were different, now. That Brand would no longer use me in his ambition to erase the Pattern he would never let me see… find another way to ascend to his godhood. I sat there, in his studio, the Trumps I had schemed so long to put my hands on now fully in my hands as Brand paced back and forth delivering a stream of lecture on the principles of Trump that I couldn’t possibly
understand, and creating and discarding dozens of schemes for my traiing and future.

I sat there, and I let him comvince me, as I looked through the pack of Trumps he had given me. I saw a Benedict, there, more guant and angular than the man I know today, but no less dangerous for the whirlwind he evoked. I saw a Corwin in an elaborately set bedroom, focussing on a woman out of the field of view, to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps not so far wrong, there. I saw a shiftless, feckless, street-punk of a Random, though from stories perhaps that wasn’t far wrong at the time, either. He seemed scarecly older than I. I saw a Fiona and a Bleys, and a big, slow, stupid looking Gerard. I do not understand how Brand could so have misread him, confusing consideration and perseverence with stupidity. No single element was wrong. The eyes were Gerard’s, the nose, the cheeks, the beard, the body language. It is not the Gerard I know.

But my heart stopped when I saw the unfinished card. It was Knife Hill, a tall, almost jagged hill, atop which set a typical Uxmali structure— a tall, thin spire of some native green stone, the height of many men, tapering to a truncated point. A tall, thin pyramid. I had always liked the site, a few miles from home, and went there often.

Brand had painted it as I saw it in my mind’s eye, when the desire to visit it came upon me. The card wasn’t finished, but the composition demanded a figure in the foreground, and I knew it would be me.

And I remembered Brand’s ultimate plans for me.

Even then, at that moment, he was becoming somewhat exasperated with me, because I couldn’t follow the train of thought he was trying to express, could not find the right, intuitive answers to his questions about the art of Trump. The scheme had taken me this far, the strength of one lie had placed the Trumps in my hands, but the danger would only grow from here.

Much as I might have liked, I could not simply activate the Trump of Amber there and then. I had no idea how long it took to work such a thing, and even now I think he might have had enough time to stop me. But I had three pasteboards the right size, shape and weight already made. I had planned to steal Trumps of Benedict, Caine, and Amber, all three, and replace them with blanks.

The desperate hope of the plan was not so much that he wouldn’t see me palming the cards. I was swift-fingered even then, and knew how to conceal the necessary motions. I might even have done it right in front of him, but I took no chances.

The desperate hope— or hopes— were that he had no mystical connection with the cards; that he wouldn’t look through them again too soon when I replaced them; that he wouldn’t notice the sheer effort of will it took me to keep my breathing steady and my cheeks unflushed with fear. If he discovered it, if he understood the deception especially in this condition, he would have killed me then and there.

I knew it.

But he did not. I altered the plan only in this fashion: Instead of taking Benedict’s token, whom he feared as much as Caine, I took my own. I could not allow him to finish it soon. Preventing, or delaying it, was an imperative I could not ignore. He did not often paint during his depressive cycle. At least, he rarely painted people. I could only hope that this would hold true, and that this cycle would last enough years for me to find a place in Shadow far enough that he could not reach me, even by Trump.

Perhaps eventually I could take refuge with Grandmother. But perhaps not— forcing a choice between Brand and myself might not be a winning gamble.

Caine, Amber, and the outlines of a Trump I would burn only days later were the only cards I could take.

Mercifully, he did not look through them. He did not see the deception just then. He was too disgusted with me, by then, and was on the point of railing at me for failing to understand some finer point of metaphyiscal discourse.

Soon after, Exit Brennan Stage Left, dodging stone palette of paint hurled like a discuss.

Soon after that, Exit Brennan Trump Amber.

Not all lies are deceptions, either.

But it was decades before I learned that.

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