got up and danced across the ground, arms outflung, face lifted. “Time to learn drawing,” she said.
After learning the alphabet and numbers by drawing them in the dirt, Tamim felt frustrated at returning to the beginning. Sakera was relentless, however. She made him review the basics: how to hold a brush, how to make perfect single strokes. Then she made him learn each letter all over again, with the initial, medial, and final forms that she had omitted the first time around.
“Couldn’t you have taught me all the forms to begin with?” Tamim said.
“You wouldn’t have sat still for it,” she said.
When she deemed him ready, Tamim wrote out a passage she dictated to him, words that had no meaning to him and probably had no meaning to anyone but Sakera.
“It’ll do,” she said when the ink had dried and she had a chance to inspect it minutely. “We’re running short on time. I hope you have a good eye for motion.”
She brought out a chart of the human body, except it was boxed off and marked with numbers. “What do you make of this?”
At first he was bewildered by the sheer number of lines and curves. Then, as he studied the chart, pieces came clear: notes on the proportion of head height to body height, head width to shoulder width, the range of motion of the major joints.
“I can memorize this,” Tamim said.
“You have to do better than memorize,” she said. “You’ll have to draw. This is the kind of thing you’ll have to produce.” She brought out another chart—no, a sheaf of drawings on translucent paper—and showed him how to flip through them. Each paper in the sheaf was numbered.
The drawings showed something very simple: a man—no, woman, from the wider pelvis—walking, the motion depicted in painstaking detail, from the lift of the feet to the shift in balance.
Tamim closed his eyes and visualized Sakera walking, although she had a peculiarly straight-hipped stride for a woman. How would he draw a diagram for Sakera? He opened his eyes. “We can already make the giants walk,” he pointed out.
“That’s true,” Sakera said, “but walking is the fundamental thing. If you can master walking, the rest will follow.”
“Do we have time for this?”
“We have to make time. I don’t want to take any chances with the sorcerer.” She bit her lip. “I’ve already underestimated him once; how do you think I got this tremor?”
Tamim bent his head, studying the diagram some more. He didn’t miss Sakera’s hum of satisfaction.
In the days that followed, Tamim learned to draw the human form with graphite sticks. He grew accustomed to having greasy, grey-smeared fingers. “Does it matter whether I’m drawing the living or the dead?” he asked.
“You’re showing the giants the pattern of the motion,” Sakera said. “That’s what matters.”
He stared down at his latest tracing of one of Sakera’s beautifully inked drawings: a woman in the midst of a leap. The vast quantity of her papers was daunting, but when he wasn’t drawing—everything from butterflies to murderous trees to doomed birds, everything but Sakera herself—he was studying them. “How do you decide the interval of motion?” Sometimes the difference between two drawings in a sequence was fractional, and he had to hold both up to the sunlight to see what had changed.
“Think of it as equal intervals of time,” Sakera said. “You don’t need to be this meticulous to draw the motion for the giant; you’ll be mediating the action through your hands. All it needs are the distinguishing moments. But it’s useful to know the motion’s rhythm.”
“How many drawings like this does the sorcerer have?”
“Too many.”
“You can’t just burn them?”
She gave him a pained look. “Once they’ve been painted in ink—anything permanent—by the necromancer’s own hand, they’re available to every ghoul he raises. He’s probably burned them himself, to keep others from stealing his knowledge.”
“Ink,” Tamim repeated.
“Why do you think I’ve been having you work in graphite even though your calligraphy’s passable?”
“I had been wondering, yes.”
“You can start working with ink tomorrow,” Sakera said, as though she were granting him a favor. “Try not to mess it up.”
“I wish I could do something for your hands,” Tamim said.
She grimaced, and he regretted bringing it up. But she said only, “I can still do most necessary things. But a brush is sensitive to small motions. I can’t risk it anymore. Why don’t we organize the sketches that you want to do in ink, so we can increase your giant’s range of motion?”
“How