Ilario, the Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

  and other passengers sleeping with their heads to the hull and their feet

  to the middle, where their luggage lay as a central barrier.

  White sand ballast filled the ship to the level of this deck, as the

  Dalmatian showed me when he took up a plank and unearthed his bottle

  of wine and his eggs, which he had stored there to keep cool.

  The stench of the bilges, combined with the idea of food, sent me

  rapidly up to daylight before I had a chance to look for Carrasco.

  If not for Honorius, I would be travelling there. I doubt Onorata would survive it.

  In the cabin, Onorata was screaming again.

  I put her into the sling and took her up on deck.

  The buckram and linen sling encompassed Onorata, supporting her

  body and head, although I kept my arm under her until I should grow

  used to it. I brought my cloak around her, to shield her from the ripe

  brisk wind blowing from the pine headlands of the coast. Her tiny

  screwed-up features showed dwarfed in her fur-lined hood. I wriggled

  my finger in to touch her neck, and judged her neither too warm nor too

  cold.

  Rekhmire’ stomped to stand beside me at the ship’s rail, in that open

  middle area around the mainmast that they call ‘the market-place of the

  galley’. The crutch’s ferrule scraped on the deck. He cocked an

  interrogative brow at the sling.

  ‘Well thought of,’ he approved.

  ‘Ramiro Carrasco made it for me,’ I said, taking the opportunity for

  truth.

  The Egyptian scowled.

  ‘It’s perfectly harmless!’ I protested. ‘Safe. One of the things you learn

  in a large family, it appears.’

  ‘If he were not a necessary shield to you—’ Rekhmire’ broke off, took a

  visible effort to collect himself, and gave it up. ‘Have you lost your mind?

  Taking help from him? The man tried to murder you!’

  His words brought the memory of Ramiro Carrasco in prison sharply

  to my mind’s eye. ‘ I came nearer to killing him. I cracked his skull.’

  Rekhmire’ snorted.

  ‘Besides which,’ I added, ‘you need not either trust nor like him, but –

  I need a servant! And since he had to come with us, it might as well be Messer Carrasco.’

  ‘Plain Carrasco the slave!’ Rekhmire’ corrected with a snort.

  He stomped off down the deck before I could add more.

  This voyage would be infinitely easier if those two men co-operated.

  Watching Rekhmire’s rigid back, I thought, It won’t happen.

  ‘Say what you like!’ Exhaustion made me stubborn. ‘I haven’t slept in

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  twenty hours – again! – and you neither. Attila has to be on guard and Tottola asleep. There is no one else!’

  ‘You’d trust Carrasco with your child?’

  The note in Rekhmire’’s voice was far closer to pique than to concern,

  I thought.

  His heavy lids hooded his eyes. Had things been right between us, he

  would have made some joke regarding the necessity of strangling the

  bawling brat in any case.

  ‘I don’t care how trustworthy he is!’ I raised my voice over Onorata’s roaring. ‘I have to sleep!’

  The same went for Attila – curled up on his pallet, all of his clothing

  and blankets pulled over his head and wrapped about his ears – and for

  Rekhmire’ himself. Spattered ink showed his failure to compose report-

  scrolls away up on the deck in a brisk wind. The cabin seemed full of

  something tangible, as if you could touch Onorata’s hopeless wailing.

  Blue patches marked Rekhmire’’s eyes that were nothing to do with

  kohl. ‘You trust that—’

  Evidently an epithet escaped him.

  ‘“Spy”?’ I suggested sweetly.

  ‘“Would-be murderer”!’ Rekhmire’ snapped.

  ‘I just want him to sit here for an hour and watch her! Then I’ll walk

  her on the deck again.’ I thought my muscles might easily recover from

  their weakness after the Caesarean, given the amount of exercise I gained

  walking and crooning to the baby. ‘I don’t believe he’d hurt her.’

  Rekhmire’ threw down a stoppered ink-horn. ‘You cannot propose to

  put your child into that man’s care!’

  He said considerably more, but tiredness blurred the edges of it. At

  this moment, I thought, I am a greater danger. If I sleep now, I’ll roll over and suffocate the child; at least if Ramiro Carrasco has her for an hour,

  I’ll be less exhausted.

  ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘Tottola can watch him for an hour, instead of the

  door.’

  I sent Attila to unchain Videric’s spy and my slave.

  Ramiro Carrasco had not benefited from his week in the hold, I saw,

  with those Alexandrine slaves not involved in rowing or sailing the

  trireme. He stumbled into the cabin half-awake and fearful, hair in

  spikes.

  ‘You’re looking after Onorata,’ I said bluntly. ‘Nurse her. Feed her if

  she carries on crying. You know how to do that?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked stunned.

  I did not dare not stand up to pass her over, dizzy as I felt. Carrasco

  squatted, not meeting my eye, gently taking Onorata from my arms into

  his.

  I strung words together. ‘If she sleeps, and Attila’s awake by the next

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  ship’s bell, get him to help you make her feed. Wake me if anything is

  wrong, or if you even think there is. Understand?’

  Carrasco didn’t rise. He unwittingly echoed Rekhmire’, in a hoarse

  whisper. ‘You’d trust me with your child?’

  ‘If I thought you were a man even capable of harming my child . . . I would have sent a lying message to Videric, telling him I’d bought you,’ I

  said. ‘And I would have paid the Venetian jailer to cut your carotid artery

  while I stood and watched, to make sure.’

  There was no threat in what I said. What threat could ensure the safety

  of Onorata? I saw him take in the reality of the situation, however, before

  I lay down and wrapped my cloak over my ears, and sleep came over me

  as black and dark as the sea beneath the galley’s hull.

  Before the Sekhmet, I would have thought it only possible to fear storms,

  sea-thieves, clouds that obscure the stars, and pestilence-banners flying

  from harbours we desired to put in to, for just so long.

  Had I been travelling alone, this might have been the case.

  As it was, I fretted from the Adriatic to the Aegean, week on week, and

  I missed the company of the book-buyer.

  If Rekhmire’ was much absent in conversation with the captain – a

  man originally from Rhodes, or Cyprus, or some such island – Tottola

  and Attila attended to their guard duty with considerably more

  attentiveness than when they had comrades to take responsibility from

  their shoulders. One always slept, one always woke; and they assumed a

  demeanour that made Menmet-Ra’s returning slaves (when I could

  strike up a conversation) regard them as the worst kind of cannibal

  Franks.

  The Master of Mainz never slept, or not in our cabin. I felt no

  inclination to blame him: I would have slept elsewhere if I could.

  Gutenberg busied himself with every aspect of the trireme he could

  investigate, from the Greek Fire weapon at the prow to t
he bussola

  nautica that indicates the position of the magnetic poles. I changed Onorata’s shit-rags.

  Onorata bawled.

  Ramiro Carrasco sung her a lullaby that, after final frustrated inquiry,

  I discovered to be only the rose of the compass sung to a tune of his own

  devising. Tramontana, Griego, Levante, Sirocho, and so on to include all eight winds.

  If it had not granted me sleep, I would have resented my daughter for

  attending more to the man who would have killed her than to her

  mother-father.

  ‘“Ostro, Garbin, Ponente, Maistro” . . . ’ Since she appeared soothed

  by only that lullaby, I learned the song by default.

  Being in constant attendance on the child, I found myself taken for a

  woman, for all I dressed in hose. Attila pointed out that I might be a

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  woman dressed in male clothing for travelling, as many do. That gave

  me pause to think of where I was going. If I had been on better terms

  with Rekhmire’, I might have asked to borrow Alexandrine clothing.

  For all I had been thinking of it league after league, the arrival at

  Constantinople nonetheless took me by surprise.

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  8

  Harsh light blazed up off the water, and the land to either side.

  ‘I dreamed of bears last night.’ I blinked, surprised to hear myself

  sound morose.

  Tottola glanced down from where he leaned on the ship’s rail, at my

  right hand. ‘That only counts if you dream before you embark.’

  Attila’s massive elbows came to rest on the sun-baked wooden rail at

  my other side. He murmured, ‘Just don’t sneeze, now . . . ’

  I managed a sneer at him, for his superstition, as well as I might for the

  jumping frogs of nervousness in my guts.

  Other than leaving Rome – when I had other matters in my mind – I

  always observe the politenesses of travel that I was taught along with

  court behaviour. Step on board a ship with the right foot, never with the

  left. Avoid sneezing or coughing as one comes on board. Sailors have

  been known to tip a supposed bad-luck passenger overboard before now.

  But they’re only ancient delusions: certainly I wouldn’t go so far as to

  delay a voyage if I dreamed of bears or boars or any other Heraldic beast

  on the night before sailing.

  ‘Besides,’ I said aloud. ‘That’s the harbour: we’re here now. If we sink,

  I’m sure somebody can fish us out . . . ’

  ‘Assuming they’d bother,’ Rekhmire’’s voice remarked, more amiably

  than he had for some weeks. He directed a shame-faced smile in my

  direction. ‘Are you certain you wish to associate with us so closely?’

  He claimed this land to be no further south than Taraconensis, merely

  much further east. I, having sweated the more as the ship sailed south

  past each Greek island, doubted him. Confronting him a week ago, I had

  borrowed what garments of an Alexandrine bureaucrat might fit me.

  ‘I look like one of your people,’ I said mildly, hitching at the wrap-

  around linen kilt that I wore. Over it I’d belted a sleeved robe – made from a single thickness of linen fabric, light enough to bear the heat of the morning but enough to keep my skin from burning.

  And enough to hide my bare chest.

  Rekhmire’ didn’t need to hide his. He had his braided cloth and reed

  headband tied around his forehead, this time over a voluminous hood or

  veil of flax linen, which held it so that his shaven head and his neck were

  protected against the sun.

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  ‘Pireaus and the last three Greek ports, they took me for an

  Alexandrine eunuch,’ I added, smugly.

  ‘That,’ he observed, ‘is why no one will bother to fish you out of the

  harbour. Far too many of us here as it is. Place is swarming.’

  I failed to stifle a snicker. And thought myself regrettably comfortable

  in his company, for a man with whom I had not settled a quarrel. If we

  had quarrelled. And if I was certain over what.

  Ramiro Carrasco shot me a puzzled look, standing holding Onorata

  among the baby’s luggage. Which, if you leave out of the calculation any

  sketchbooks I may have brought on the voyage, or any Greek scrolls that

  found their way into Rekhmire’’s hands, was the largest single amount of

  baggage in our expedition.

  The crop-haired Herr ‘Mainz’ strolled past Carrasco, his gaze going

  between me and Rekhmire’. ‘This. This is Constantinople?’

  Rekhmire’ murmured a phrase in Alexandrine Greek, and then added,

  ‘Franks still call it that. We call it the cities of the Pharaohs of exile. Or

  New Alexandria, if that’s easier for you, Master Johannes.’

  The German guild-man nodded absently, his gaze still fixed on

  rocking water, packed hulls and bare masts, and the massive and

  monumental stone walls of the city.

  I thought, I have seen nothing like it since Carthage, and Carthage’s

  walls are no longer seen in daylight!

  My hands itched to be at chalk and paper.

  Rekhmire’ was still talking to the German. ‘How would you prefer to

  be introduced to the Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny? As Master Mainz?’

  ‘It may be best.’ The German didn’t shift his gaze from the bright

  waters. ‘The Guild in Mainz dismissed many of us when they threw out

  the patricians. If your Pharaoh-Queen will not think it odd?’

  The German is as nervous as I, I realised.

  Thoughts of Videric, deliberately pushed into the background all this

  month we sailed south, intruded back into my mind. Between that and

  the vista rising from the water beyond the Sekhmet’s prow – great walls decorated with painted bands and enamel, the ochre-coloured domes,

  the temples and the obelisks lining the skyline – I felt amazingly small.

  And I have essentially come here – to ask for help.

  I must be mad.

  That thought was purely honest.

  No one here will have any reason to help me, no matter what I can

  testify about the Empty Chair and Masaccio’s death.

  And here I may see again the thing that murdered him.

  My fingers shook, cold despite the heat. I thrust one hand up each

  opposite sleeve, folding my arms, and leaned on the rail again. One of

  Menmet-Ra’s slaves, by name Asru, giggled in a high-pitched voice, and

  I glanced aside from the magnificence of Alexandria to see her flirting

  unsubtly with Attila. She had one of her hands clasping at his arm, trying

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  to run her fingers through the thick fair hair that, unbound, fell to his waist.

  Beyond her, Ramiro Carrasco de Luis, with the baby’s baggage piled

  up in a mountain about his knees, cradled Onorata up against his

  shoulder. His hand, huge against her tiny cloth-wrapped body, rubbed at

  her shoulder-blades with two fingers. In an undertone, he murmured,

  ‘There we go . . . ’

  Onorata’s face screwed up. She jerked, and made a sound like a kitten

  sneezing.

  A gobbet of something white and half-digested hit Carrasco’s neck and

  doublet-collar about equally.

  The baby’s unfocused blue eyes returned to gazing out at sunlight

  fracturing off the water. The assassin, still supporting her by one hand

&
nbsp; and the sling, scooped at his neck with his fingers, dragging the mess out

  from between his linen doublet and his steel collar. He wiped his hand

  down his hose. I heard him heave a half-exasperated and half-satisfied

  sigh as I got to within a pace of him, and he placidly went back to

  stroking Onorata’s shoulders, humming under his breath.

  ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ I demanded, since it was in no way

  the way I burped her.

  He leaped as if I’d stuck a sword point in him. My daughter began to

  howl. Tottola and Attila put hands to weapons as one – assessed the

  situation instantly – and took an automatic pace away across the ship’s

  desk. Away from a disturbed baby.

  Red-faced, I muttered, ‘Shit . . . ’

  ‘She’s done that. I changed her.’

  I glared.

  Between distracting her and petting her, Carrasco and I persuaded

  Onorata that she desired to sleep more than she desired to scream like

  the fabled steam-ball of the Alexandrine philosopher Heron. I found it

  difficult to be soothing when I wished to strangle the man beside me.

  I shot him a glance, and met harassed dark eyes. And snorted. ‘Maybe

  I should light another candle to Rekhmire’’s Hermopolitan Ogdoad. It

  seems to work.’

  ‘Or it was colic, and now she’s older . . . ’ He rocked her a little, in her

  linen wrappings. She settled curled up onto his breast, nosing momen-

  tarily for something she would not get from him.

  Or from me. I was momentarily bleak.

  ‘Amazing,’ Rekhmire’ remarked, at my shoulder, ‘how “wet-nurse”

  comes in the list of required talents for an assassin.’

  The dark-haired Iberian immediately lowered his gaze.

  He’s picked up some slave habits, I realised. Among which is the

  necessity of hiding your thoughts from your owner.

  ‘Give her to me.’

  The solid, warm bundle in my hands felt so breakable that, even with

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  the sling, and Onorata tucked into the crook of my arm and with my

  other hand supporting her head, I couldn’t convince myself that she was

  safe in my arms.

  Ramiro Carrasco muttered something, and I looked up and raised a

  prompting brow.

  He moved his shoulders under the patched doublet. His iron collar