by Mary Gentle
I moved my foot. ‘I don’t disagree. But a clear explanation and less
public noise might be of more use than a political discussion. Florence
isn’t my republic, and I’m not a servant of Leon Battista Alberti.’
And Herr Mainz must take me for a man, I realised, with my back to
the open door’s light, and cloaked as I am. Since he doesn’t treat me as a
woman.
‘I’m from the Alexandrine embassy,’ I persisted.
‘The woman said, no messages; that she would not take even letters
from me!’
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That confirmed every suspicion. Damn Neferet! I wondered which of the sacred Eight one appeals to in such circumstances.
Honesty still remaining my best option, I said, ‘Madonna Neferet was
a conspirator along with Leon Battista; they both had their reasons for
wanting you to stay here in Venice. They’ve both been sent into exile,
now. The representative of Alexandria has been looking for you.’
He snorted derisively.
I brought out the hand-bill, hoping it would act as my credentials.
Tilting the paper to catch the grey light, I observed, ‘I’ve seen nothing
like this before. The edges of the letters are sharp as if they’d been cut.’
‘They are.’ Herr Mainz sounded smug.
I nodded at long metal stylus-shapes in his hands. ‘But if your type is
made from lead – I know lead—’
My mind clearly sees a silver-grey smear on the masonry of a bridge.
Saverico’s brigandine; Rekhmire’’s leg. This may be an even more
dangerous use for lead.
‘I’m not ignorant,’ I offered. ‘Men have been talking about the dangers
of a mechanical scribe, and if one could be built, since I was a child.
Lead’s soft. It deforms. The type would be crushed after printing a few
sheets, the edges of the letters smeared.’
He gave me an abrasively close-mouthed smile, confirming himself
secretive as other German Guildsmen, and no fool.
I took a breath, and pressed the limits of my authority.
‘Alexandria wants you and your printing- machina in Constantinople, if
you’ll come. The Pharaoh-Queen may be willing to become your patron,
if the printing works.’
The light gave Mainz – Gutenberg – oddly silver eyes. He looked
stunned. ‘I have not dared to go out, to search . . . The Doge’s officers,
here . . . ’
I took a swift glance around the shabby workshop. ‘What do you need
to bring with you, to replicate this device in Alexandria?’
Herr Mainz looked at me for a long moment, turned his back, and
emptied his handful of long metal type into a large canvas bag.
The contents of a rattling shallow tray followed.
‘What I need? All of it!’ Gutenberg freed one hand to tap the side of
his head, without turning round. ‘But all is here, safe, I do not forget!’
‘No, but accidents happen to any man.’
He shrugged, as much as a man may who is rapidly tying up the neck
of a sack. ‘What, you’d have me tell my Guild secrets? The ratio of
antimony and tin to lead, so that the edges of these letters stay sharp?
Then what is stopping your theft of that?’
I could find no quick answer that I thought would convince him.
I squinted through the gloom. The machina’s screw was turned by
wooden shafts, thick through as a gondola’s oar.
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‘We can send men back to dismantle the printing- machina and bring
it.’
I glanced around, uneasy for no reason I could pin down, and wished
for the first time in many months that I had a sword, and a more recent
memory of my knight’s training in Taraco.
‘If I may, I’ll call my father’s guards, and we can go to the embassy
now.’
I found myself glad of the grey cloud and sleet, that brought twilight in
ahead of its time.
A gondola took us as far as the Canal Grande, and then another boat
over to the Dorsodura quarter, where we reverted to foot. In a maze of
small alleys and waterways that bemused my sense of direction, Tottola
took one long stride and caught up, dipping his head to murmur:
‘There are men behind us. Somewhere between ten and twelve, lightly
armed, no armour except breastplates.’
Dread twisted cold in my belly. ‘The Venetians were having his
workshop watched!’
Attila, as closely attached to Herr Mainz’s side as he might be without
rope binding them together, spoke something in one of the Germanic
tongues of the Holy Roman Empire, to which the printer responded.
Reverting to Visigothic Latin, Attila said, ‘Council of Ten.’
Increasing my pace put a line of pain across my lower abdomen.
‘I can’t run,’ I confessed, feeling my face burn hot against the cold
wind. ‘ Get him to the embassy. Don’t wait for me. Once you’re there, they can’t touch him.’
The Germanic brothers exchanged a look over my head.
Tottola grunted. ‘ I’m not waiting to see what the captain would do if
we left you!’
He moved swiftly enough that it took me by surprise. As Attila and
Herr Mainz burst into a run, Tottola scooped his arms under my
shoulders and knees, and lifted me clear off the cobbles.
Abandoning the parcels of paper, and the ceramic pots of green earth
pigment that shattered as they fell, Tottola clutched me against his chest
and began to run.
‘Bar the gates!’ Attila bawled as he hustled Herr Mainz ahead of me.
‘ Turn out the guard! ’
Berenguer and Saverico hauled the iron trellis of the Alexandrine gate
open, stood ready, and slammed it on the heels of our passing through.
The bare garden of the Alexandrine house filled with running men,
Sergeant Orazi at their head. Tottola breasted the flood – and failed to
put me down, despite urgent request. The house door banged open; we
entered from cold to warmth.
Rekhmire’, balanced on crutches in the entrance hall, shouted at me
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immediately he saw me. ‘How could you leave this house where you’re
safe!’
Pointing out that I am most safe wherever Honorius’s Hunnish
soldiers are, I thought would not help me.
‘I’m back here safely,’ I snapped, as Tottola set me down on my feet
like a child in the entrance hall. ‘Even if the Venetians are on our heels!’
That turned out not to be a wise thing to say: Rekhmire’ broke into a
flood of Alexandrine Latin – much of which I understood, although I
would rather not – and then into Pharaonic Egyptian.
A glance at Honorius as he stomped in from the gate showed him
unlikely to help me with translation.
Not that I need it, I reflected, watching Rekhmire’ balance his two
crutches precariously in his armpits, so he could windmill his arms while
he shouted at me. It all amounts to ‘You can walk around Venice, I can’t,
and this gives rise to fear.’
‘We have the officers of Foscari’s council on our doorstep,’ Honorius
announced matter-of-factly. He surveyed the man from Mainz, where
the German stood dishevelled and panting, and then turned his attention
to me. ‘An
d you found him, why?’
‘Because I engaged in a paper chase!’ I rearranged my cloak, that had
been rucked up in the chase. In peripheral vision I saw Gutenberg blink
as he caught a glimpse of my skirts. ‘As to the Doge’s men – I thought
they had no idea of where he was.’
It had seemed reasonable, as we were rowed back, to suppose that the
Council of Ten must be hunting for a large facility, a factory or a large
scriptorium, or a workshop where woodcuts had somehow been made
able to cut small letters. Not one man in a shed.
The Egyptian got out hoarsely, ‘They surely must have failed to find
him while Alberti was here, or they would have stopped him.’
Talking to Gutenberg in the gondola had given me somewhat of his
background; I summarised it.
‘He was setting three or four pamphlets a week. As fast as Leon could
write them. They went off in bales on mule-back, to Florence. After
Leon and Neferet left, he didn’t have business contacts, and he heard the
Doge’s council wanted to speak to him and went into hiding.’ I cocked
my head, listening to raised voices at the outer gate. ‘They must
have found him and been watching him, hoping to pick up other
conspirators.’
‘Instead, they found us.’ Honorius scowled. Noise rose louder from
the gate. Evidently the Council of Ten weren’t used to being defied by
armed foreigners.
Honorius’s household guard are not a large number of men, I realised,
compared to how many soldiers the Doge of Venice might call to arms.
Suppose we end with Carmagnola outside the Alexandria House?
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Rekhmire’ abruptly closed a hand over my shoulder. His eyes shone
bright in the lantern-light. ‘Listen.’
I could pick out nothing among the voices, strain as I might.
Honorius, when I caught his eye, shook his head bemusedly.
Rekhmire’ secured his grasp on his crutches and swung himself
awkwardly and rapidly out into the late afternoon twilight, seeming
oblivious to the cold sleet landing on his bare head.
I barely caught Honorius’s signal to Attila, to stay with Gutenberg, and
then my father strode with me as I stumbled outside again in the
Egyptian’s wake.
Lanterns illuminated the gate area, but made the desolate garden even
darker. The scent of canal-water pervaded the air. Voices lifted in
screaming confrontation at the iron grille of the Alexandrine house,
where iron bars had been dropped into sockets across the gate.
Words rang like brazen trumpets in the language of the lagoon, and in
Visigothic and Frankish Latin – and in another tongue that I only
recognised as I caught it for the second time.
‘ Listen! ’ I echoed, seizing Honorius’s arm. ‘That’s Pharaonic Egyptian,
I swear it!’
The mercenary soldiers made way automatically for my father, their
faces grim under the lanterns, helmets and pole-axes and swords
catching the light.
The circle of torches and lanterns beyond the gate was wider, and the
Council of Ten’s officers more numerous, but I hardly spared the
Venetians a look.
In chiaroscuro, their reddish-brown flesh covered by lamellar leather
armour, and with spears in their hands, a squad of some fifty or so men
in Alexandrine clothing formed a double line towards the gate.
Down the path between them, across the S. Barnaba campo, a well-
padded male figure strolled, not shivering despite his linen kilt and bare
legs. His scarlet cloak flowed out behind him, light sparking from the
fabric where droplets of rain lodged in the weave.
He stopped before the iron of the gate, a yard or two of space
separating us.
His features took me back instantly to another city and another
embassy. I found myself rubbing my hands one against the other, as if
my skin felt still sticky from trying to pry stone fingers out of Mastro Masaccio’s throat.
The Alexandrine cast a leisurely eye around, the uproar from the
Doge’s soldiers quietening as he did so, and ended with a nod of greeting
to Rekhmire’.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lord Menmet-Ra remarked. ‘Am I interrupting some-
thing?’
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4
He seemed so consciously pleased with his pose that a man could hardly
resent it.
Inadvertently, I broke the silence. ‘You’re not in Rome!’
Heads turned. I blushed. That sounded foolish!
I had thought that, having drawn so many sketches now of Masaccio
in ink or silverpoint or charcoal, I had begun to have difficulty in
remembering Masaccio himself. This tall round eunuch in Alexandrine
kilt and lapis-lazuli collar returned Masaccio’s dead features intensely to
my mind.
‘Ilario.’ He nodded to me.
‘Lord Menmet-Ra,’ I apologised.
The last time I saw the Alexandrine, he had been dishevelled and in a
night-robe, Masaccio’s blood staining the hem. The torchlight gave him
stature, although he was still clearly fleshy. He carried an air of authority
that he had barely seemed to in Rome.
He added, ‘I was hoping to speak with you, Messer Ilario. I have a
message for you, from the Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny.’
It may have been anticipation or dread, or only the icy wind, that
made my eyes water and my throat ache.
Menmet-Ra turned back, raising his high tenor voice that rang over
the darkening square.
‘Go home, men of Venezia! This is Alexandrine soil – as much so as
the ambassadorial warship in San Marco basin, that has brought me to
your city. Go ask your superiors if they wish to offend the Pharaoh-
Queen through her newest ambassador, before you rashly act here!’
Heads bowed together in the dusk; I heard whispered consultation.
The officers and men of the Council of Ten faded into the darkness,
only boots echoing between the high brick walls to mark their departure.
The gate being unbarred with a clash, Menmet-Ra signalled his men to
follow, and swept through with some gravitas, despite his body having
the smoothness of fat rather than muscle. I did not truly note what words
he and my father exchanged, but I stumbled dumbly in their wake, back
into the house.
Established in a carved chair by the great hearth in the main room, the
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Alexandrine looked unhappily at Rekhmire’’s crutches, and then lifted
his kohl-lined eyes.
‘Ty-ameny says you must bring the German. As to the other
matter . . . ’
‘Carrasco.’ Rekhmire’ spoke brusquely. ‘Fetch wine.’
Ramiro Carrasco went out, wordless. Lord Menmet-Ra extended his
hands to the fire. There were goose-bumps on his arms, despite the
oncoming spring, I saw. The waters of Venice make anywhere cold, no
matter if you’re used to Taraco or Constantinople.
‘Well, our cousin got me at last . . . ’ He looked up ruefully at
Rekhmire’. ‘You see before you the newest appointee to the position of
Ambassador in Venezia.’
‘So I gathered,’ Rekhmire’ remarked dryly, seating himself on the oak
&
nbsp; settle by the fire. I took a place silently beside him, as quiet as slaves are
when hoping not to be noticed.
‘With a warship?’ Rekhmire’ added, one brow raised.
‘Trireme,’ the older man’s light voice said. ‘I believe the Queen, all
praise to her ten thousand ancestors, thinks the Doge of Venice needs a
reminder who rules the eastern seas, and not merely some few fathoms of
the Adriatic . . . ’
They exchanged looks that I thought in less professional men would
have been broad grins.
‘ . . . And so no making my way here on hired boats,’ the new
ambassador concluded. ‘I come with flags, banners, arbalests, a company
of marines, and all to impress. Ah—’ Menmet-Ra rose to his feet with the
grace of a much thinner man. ‘Lord Honorius.’
My father pulled the door closed behind him and Ramiro Carrasco,
stepping forward, and giving the impression he ignored Carrasco as the
younger man served wine into Venetian goblets.
‘I’ve got my sergeant sorting your men into quarters. Just as well I’m
leaving, or we’d be sleeping six in each bed!’
Honorius had discarded sallet and sword, and was in nothing more
martial than a pleated doublet and hose. Nonetheless, as he crossed to
the hearth and planted himself with his back to the fire, no man could
have taken him for anything else but a soldier.
I knew my father well enough, now, to realise this entirely deliberate.
‘I hear you want to speak with my son-daughter,’ he added bluntly,
flipping up the back of his doublet-skirts to take best advantage of the
heat on his arse.
If the subject had not put a thrill of fear through me, I might have
snickered at the Lion of Castile playing the blunt mercenary
commander.
All but inaudibly, Rekhmire’ murmured at my ear, ‘ How long do you
suppose it will take to house-train the man?’
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His fellow Alexandrine heard, as I thought he had been intended to.
Encourage him to underestimate the Iberian barbarian . . .
Menmet-Ra seated himself again, and spoke with deliberation. ‘If you
are aware of an incident in Rome, at which Ilario was present—’
Honorius nodded curtly. I chose it as my moment to interrupt.
‘Lord Menmet-Ra.’ I leaned forward on the settle, my gaze on him.