Ilario, the Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

  Rekhmire’ paused for a moment after that last remark, gave me a smile

  that only he and I would ever comprehend, and ducked his way under

  the wood and silk awning that protected the doorway into the poop deck

  cabin.

  The ship’s captain was no different to his officers and crew, I thought

  at first glance, except for his size; he stood well over six feet tall. His broad face shone sallow in the light through the ports. Looking up at us

  from a table full of maps and charts, his heavy brows dipped down; he

  had the same small eyes as every other man on the ship. And it was

  almost as if he had been facing into a desert wind, dehydrating; or had

  been hit in the face: the flesh of his eyelids swollen up and only narrow

  slits of sloe-coloured eyes visible.

  A close-fitting black cap covered his hair, and his thin black beard was

  shaven at the sides, but fell down to touch his belt at the front. As he turned I saw his robes were slit at the side, and that under the plain ochre

  over-robes, immensely-patterned blue and red and gold thread shone. I

  could not have begun to guess at his age.

  I leaned over toward Rekhmire’’s ear. ‘Ask him if he’ll sit for me to

  paint him!’

  With perfect aplomb, Rekhmire’ remarked, ‘Shut up, Ilario,’ and

  bowed deeply in the Turkish fashion to the man evidently in command

  of this vast vessel.

  The squarish man who had greeted us rattled off something, nodding

  at me, and the tall captain held out his hand.

  Looking at the square-set officer for confirmation, I put the leather

  snapsack into the captain’s hand.

  He upended it on his desk, turning over sized parchment and tinted

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  paper. Before I could warn him, he opened a stoppered ink-horn and

  spilled oak-gall ink over his fingers. He prodded messily and suspiciously

  at the sharp point of a stylus, until I warily showed him how it sketched

  palest grey lines on a paper prepared with fine-ground bone dust. I had

  no idea if he gained any idea of the connection between that and the

  older silverpoint lines in my sketchbook that had turned brown.

  He flicked through the sewn-together pad of sketch paper with

  nothing I could read in his expression. It was not a new book, I realised,

  embarrassed, as he stopped momentarily at a few lines that held

  something of Onorata’s sleeping face.

  ‘Eh.’ He beckoned, took my sleeve, and led me round the immense

  map table.

  There were papers and brushes neatly spread out on his desk, and

  shallow white dishes. He tipped water onto a flat slate and took up a

  black stick, grinding one end on the surface as if he ground pigments.

  The brush he used to take up the wet blackness was not of familiar

  animal hair. I bent close, observing how he divided his pigment among

  pots with great or little amounts of water.

  The scent was unfamiliar but distinctive.

  He felt my sketchbook with his thumb, shook his head, and drew up a

  sheet of his own very fine, light paper. With a look of intense

  concentration, he dipped his brush first in water, and then less deeply in

  liquid pigment, and less deeply still in the deepest black. The curve of his

  wrist was very quick with that last: I just caught that he touched not the

  whole of his brush, but either side, in turn, very lightly.

  Two, three, four strokes. No more than six at most, black, the brush

  held at different angles—

  A shape glistened on the paper. Differential pigment made it

  miraculous: pale and dark lines drawn with the same swirl of a brush.

  Graduating from ink-black through pale grey to grey pearl.

  Recognition snapped into my mind.

  ‘Horse!’ My voice squeaked embarrassingly.

  As solid as if it lived, the mane and tail of a galloping horse shaped the

  wind. All its hooves raised off the earth, except for one – and that one, I

  saw as I peered closely, was not on the ground, but on the back of a

  flying bird.

  It was as if he painted darkness and used it to carve light out of the page. A horse in such living movement that I almost felt it.

  Rekhmire’, his clerks, and this captain’s officer all watched me.

  There were other sketchbooks tumbled out of my snapsack; I fumbled

  one up, and thumbed through until I found what I wanted.

  ‘There! Horse!’

  Done months ago in Rome: carts setting off with Honorius’s luggage.

  Here, a cart-horse with every muscle bunched and clenched as it began

  to shift the dead weight of the vehicle . . . Done in red chalk, or at least

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  half-done; unfinished, but the study of the forequarters had some virtue

  to it, so I had not thrown it away.

  The captain exclaimed loudly.

  I suspected I’d learned the word horse, when I could get my ear around

  it.

  He beamed down at me. I realised I was grinning back at him like an

  idiot.

  Behind me, Rekhmire’ respectfully spoke in the Turkish dialect, and

  the large foreign captain frowned thoughtfully. After a moment he jerked

  his head; I wasn’t sure whether it was assent or negation.

  ‘Cheng Ho.’ He leaned down, looking into my face intensely. He

  spoke again: this time I might have represented it as ‘Zheng He.’

  Guessing, I copied Rekhmire’’s bow. ‘Ilario Honorius.’

  He couldn’t fit his tongue around the words. He planted one large

  hand flat on the page of my sketchbook. More exchange of words in a

  number of different languages took place between him and Rekhmire’,

  while Zheng He – if that was a name, and not a rank – paged through my

  book of drawings.

  Rekhmire’ finally said smoothly, in Iberian, ‘Zheng He, the Admiral of

  the Ocean Seas, desires you to show him what you draw before you leave

  the ship. I suspect he’ll destroy anything that he doesn’t want known

  about.’

  A trickle of cold permeated my belly. ‘Don’t let him get any ideas

  about putting out the artist’s eyes, along with the preliminary sketches.’

  Rekhmire’ muttered something. For a second I saw him look genuinely

  appalled, before a diplomatic blandness reasserted itself.

  In that Iberian dialect which it was unlikely his clerks spoke, never

  mind these foreigners, he asked, ‘Is that what you were threatened with

  in Taraco?’

  ‘And it could have been done. Easily. Could you tell him I’m not a

  slave? Make sure you tell him that!’

  Rekhmire’ reverted to Turkish, in which I could pick out the word for

  slave and not much else. Then Carthaginian Latin, in an odd accent.

  After two or three exchanges with the large foreigner, Rekhmire’ bowed,

  looked momentarily puzzled, and gestured for me to take back my book.

  ‘The Admiral Zheng says every man is a slave. He himself is the

  humble slave of Emperor – “Zhu Di”, I think. Zhu Di of the Chin. Or of

  Chin. He, ah . . . ’

  Rekhmire’’s brows rose as the foreign admiral added something.

  ‘He says, this is the first civilised country he’s found in two years of sailing. Because the bureaucrats sent to meet him are slaves and eunuchs,

  as they should be.’

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  If we hadn’t been in a foreign ship’s cabin, surrounded by clerks and

  Zheng He’s armed sailors, I thought Rekhmire’ would have howled with

  laughter. When something hits his sense of humour, it affects him

  strongly.

  ‘You can tell the Pharaoh-Queen she did something right, then.’ I

  barely managed not to grin myself. ‘Should I go draw things before he

  realises I’m – not exactly what he thinks?’

  ‘That might be wise.’ Rekhmire’ bowed to the Admiral, and mur-

  mured, aside, ‘Do try not to get killed while we’re aboard.’

  ‘This ship has more arbalests on its deck than your entire navy; if these

  people didn’t want something, they’d be using them!’

  His brow rose again. Why he would think – with Honorius for a father;

  with King Rodrigo’s training – that I wouldn’t take automatic notice of

  armaments?

  The Admiral rattled off something in the oddly-toned language. He

  wiped his fingers on a cloth, surveyed his desk, swept up a small box and

  tipped the contents into his hand. Small gold-marked sticks, oval in

  cross-section, black and red – belatedly I recognised his ink-sticks. He let

  them slide and click back into the box, and thrust it into my hand.

  He wants me to draw! I all but shouted aloud.

  He spoke urgently again, and finished by pointing at the squarely-built

  officer, and then at me.

  ‘ Dong ma? ’

  That was do you understand? as plainly as I had ever heard it. I bowed.

  ‘Thank you, Admiral Zheng He.’

  I went out in the company of my minder.

  An hour later, I had the smart idea of sending in to Rekhmire’’s scribes

  to borrow more of their paper, since I’d run out.

  I persuaded Jian (my guess at the pronunciation of the squarely-built

  officer’s name) that this would do no harm. Talking to each other, each

  in our own languages, I’d added what I thought were ‘yes’ – shı`de or haô

  de – and an all-purpose apology, duı`bùqıˆ, ‘sorry’, to my vocabulary. If I hadn’t found the word for ‘no’, that was because I found he didn’t often

  like to use it. Jian would distract me, or misunderstand me, or carefully

  not hear me, if anything requiring a refusal arose. I wondered if that was

  him, or the Chin in general.

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  There was also huńdàn, but I suspected I hadn’t been intended to hear

  that one. Certainly Jian hustled me away from the lower deck tiers where

  one of the anonymous oarsmen threw it after me. I stored it away for a

  useful insult, when I could find out whether it was on the order of

  friendly abuse, or something certain to start a fight to the death. It pays

  to find that out beforehand.

  I smiled, thinking of Honorius; he’d appreciate another foreign oath.

  The ship was a marvel.

  What I took to be other officers muttered, seeing me draw the outlines

  of sails and hull, and broke out into outright complaint when I sketched

  the swivel-based arbalests they had mounted on the decks, and the exact

  number of masts and cross-trees.

  Jian screeched at them, highly-pitched as a hawk.

  What he said, I didn’t know: I suspect it was Our captain sees no sense in hiding what any man in this city can see if they sail a dhow past our moorings! Although that was not true of the interior cabins, with their great Turkish-style pillows on the mats instead of Frankish or North

  African furniture; or of the interminable storerooms and holds, that

  carried food and water enough to allow Ty-ameny’s generals to make a

  guess at what crew the ship carried.

  If it’s under five thousand men, I’ll eat my chalk, I reflected, and

  yelped and shot up into the air as a hand went up my linen tunic from

  the rear.

  Whoever it was behind went over with a scream. The old reflexes of

  slavehood either keep one perfectly still under assault, because it may be

  a master, or lash out, because it may be another slave. My reflexes

  evidently didn’t think I had a master on this ship.

  I swung around to face a gang of twenty or thirty of the foreigners, as

  well as the one writhing on the deck and clutching his knee.

  Before I could speak, the officer Jian beat his way through the crowd

  with the use of a short wooden stick. Thankfully, I saw he had a clutch of

  paper in his other fist. I stepped forward to take the sheets from him,

  and, as he yelled at me, to mime what had happened.

  The deck around us sounded like a mews when the falcons have been

  disturbed; all high screeches that set the nerves and blood on edge. I slid

  my hand into my satchel, putting my hand on my pen knife – a blade less

  than an inch long, but made of such quality metal, and taking such an

  edge, that it would go through any man’s jugular if I merely brushed his

  throat.

  Jian thwacked two of the nearer sailors with his staff, kicked the man

  on the deck, and over his loud screaming, evidently ordered the others to

  drag him away. Whether to punishment or medical treatment was

  unclear. Jian swung on his heel, exclaimed ‘ Duı`bùqıˆ! ’ as clearly as he evidently could, and scratched at his tied-back hair, plainly puzzled at

  how to get through to me.

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  With as much of what I could remember of Turkish, Carthaginian

  Latin, and the Venetian trade patois, I attempted to describe the assault.

  Jian finally beamed, and nodded. He tried several languages, before a

  combination allowed him to make himself almost understood. ‘You are

  not a masterless slave?’

  I opened my mouth to try every word for ‘freeman’ I could remember,

  thought of Rekhmire’ repeating we are all eunuch slaves here, and settled for pointing at the main cabin. ‘Master Rekhmire’.’

  The Egyptian name puzzled him until I mimed someone taller,

  broader, and – with a chop of the edge of my hand, down at kilt-level –

  eunuch. Jian grinned.

  I pointed at the steps leading up to the rear poop deck, gestured for

  Jian to sit, and tapped my chalk against the new paper.

  I was still sitting there, drawing yet another of the surrounding crowd

  of sailors, when Rekhmire’ came out to find me.

  The sun stood further down the sky. The tide smelled of weed. Jian

  cleared the audience and I stood up, brushing fruitlessly at the chalk and

  charcoal that marked the front of my linen robe, and handed the latest

  sketch off to the remaining Chin sailor. He bowed, repetitively, and ran

  off. He might have been holding the paper upside down – I wasn’t sure if

  these people could see, in any real sense, how I put things down on

  paper, but their desire for a souvenir from the mad foreign slave

  evidently overcame their lack of understanding.

  ‘Are we leaving?’ Buckling my leather case, and slinging it over my

  shoulder, I glanced hurriedly around.

  Even if not allowed back on board, I have enough to keep the

  Pharaoh-Queen’s philosophers happy. But – there is so much more—!

  ‘For the moment, we leave.’ Rekhmire’ beckoned his clerks, and

  swung himself on his crutch with the appearance of calm, towards the

  side of the great ship.

  Fal
ling back on the Iberian no man would understand but us, I asked,

  ‘Did you find out why they’re here? Are they a threat? Did the Admiral

  tell you what they want here?’

  The Egyptian reached out and rested his arm across my shoulders,

  letting me take a substantial amount of his weight. I was momentarily

  startled. Clearly he found this physically wearing.

  But to Jian, it will hardly hurt to have us appear master and slave

  again. And that is how he will take this.

  Rekhmire’ gave me a brief smile all friendship and relief. I concluded

  myself not the only one glad to be leaving. He reached for the ropes of

  the cradle in which, it was evident, they intended to lower us to our own

  vessel.

  Looking over the heads of the Chin sailors, he murmured, ‘I can tell you why this ship is here in Alexandria.’

  ‘You can?’

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  I let them tie us in to the leather sling like luggage, closing my eyes against the distance from deck to sea.

  Rekhmire’’s voice spoke Iberian in my darkness, as the ropes jolted

  and lifted.

  ‘The Admiral was clear enough about that. Although other things are

  less clear. But I think I believe him as regards this. This ship is here, in

  this port – because they are lost.’

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  ‘Lost?’

  The Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny gave Rekhmire’ a look that could have

  melted Venetian glass, never mind smashed it.

  My drawings lay spread out over the pink marble tiles of this one of

  her private chambers. She had questioned me extensively about each

  sketch. And now, when Rekhmire’ answered her question . . .

  ‘Lost,’ she repeated flatly.

  ‘Yes. And seeking a route back to this empire of theirs,’ Rekhmire’ said

  equably. ‘Which, as far as I can make out, is called “Chin”. Thousands

  of leagues to the east. Past Tana—’

  That name was one I recognised, having often heard the Venetians

  mention it: a port in the north-eastern part of the Black Sea.

  ‘—at the end of wherever the Silk Road goes.’

  I think Ty-ameny and I stared at him with precisely the same

  expression.

  ‘As for why they’re here . . . They became lost during a storm; I’m

  uncertain where. But they can at least navigate well enough to sail

  towards the sunrise, and sailing east has finally brought them to