Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay Read Free Book Online Page A

a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way. He felt important, included. More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied. In fact, “more recently” extended right up to this morning, he realized.
    Something had changed. He said, “Not too much, I don’t think. Pretty dark, hard to find angles. Like you said, it’s all jumbled. You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in. There’s light thereand it is really old. Way older than the rest.” He hesitated. “The cloister was open, I got a look in there, too.”
    “The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin. For someone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought.
    “Whatever. This one looked good,” he said. “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but if you don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said, “There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff. Saints on the four corners. One sculpture’s supposed to be the Queen of Sheba. She’s really worn away, but have a look.”
    His father stroked his brown moustache. Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashioned handlebar moustache. It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with two upward moustache curves. People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife liked the look, and that was that.
    Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow. We’ve got two more hours cleared so I’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to do them again. Will I need lights?”
    “Inside? For sure,” Ned said. “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up. Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”
    “Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said. “They’ll have power.”
    “The baptistry’s off to one side.”
    “Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling. Bearded Greg made a face at Ned. Steve just grinned. Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemed engaged, and she saw that as part of her job.
    Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside. Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheer routine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened. It might bring the place back to now . . . from wherever it had been this morning.
    It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew he wanted it. He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’t about to do that.
    His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when he was here. Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the Romans had discovered. Kate Wenger had just told him about those. She just about forced you to call her a geek, that girl.
    For the book, Ned’s father had to balance the things he wanted to photograph with pictures that matched Lee’s text. That was partly Barrett Reinhardt’s job: to merge the work of two important men in a big project.His idea, apparently, was to have smaller black-andwhite pictures tucked into the text that Lee had written, along with Marriner’s full-page or double-page colour shots.
    Ned didn’t feel like looking at fountains. He knew what he did need to do. Greg was going back up to the villa to upload the digitals from this morning and check them on the monitor. He was also going to confirm by phone the arrangements for shooting in Arles, about an hour away, the day after tomorrow.
    Melanie handed Greg detailed