by Mary Gentle
knew Rosamunda saw no one here except the man who she thought had
power over her.
Certainly I will never hear, I’m sorry I tried to kill you in Carthage.
For her, that’s forgotten; gone.
‘ You could shout as loudly as she,’ Videric observed. ‘This palace is infested with servants: someone would hear you and raise an alarm. So I
see no reason not to disclose to you what I’m about to do. Then, if you
wish to scream for your friends . . . ’ He shrugged. ‘Captain.’
The captain directing them, the men-at-arms went out through the
archways; nominally out of earshot. If I concentrated, I could hear their
boots shifting on the marble tiles.
‘He’s a trustworthy man,’ Videric said, a nod of his head to the
departing captain’s back, deliberately not mentioning the man’s name.
‘Like Ramiro Carrasco. But I never like to give a man more information
than he ought to hear.’
Trustworthy for the same reason as Carrasco?
I’d trust Orazi or any of Honorius’s men. But if I explain why to
Videric, he’ll regard me as even more of a fool.
‘My mother,’ I said. ‘Your wife. She’s an Achilles’ heel to you. You
can’t keep her at court. She won’t be safe back on your estates.’
I would have touched Rosamunda’s hand to comfort her, if I didn’t
know from her expression that she would jerk them away.
‘You won’t murder her.’ I brought the word out coolly, ashamed a
moment later when Rosamunda’s eyes snapped open and she gazed
about the hall, rumpled and clearly terrified.
Where is Rekhmire’? Where is my father?
I managed to say, ‘This doesn’t leave much, Aldra Videric.’ I wiped at
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my sweaty forehead. ‘In fact, I don’t see that it leaves anything. If you send her away to any branch of her family—’
Like most of the nobles of the Iberian courts, she has relatives in
Aragon, Castile, Granada, Catalonia, and the Frankish lands beyond.
‘—Carthage will track her down. So. Tell me what you have planned.’
Videric nodded slowly. ‘Rodrigo is the only other man to know. I don’t
suppose the King will be in the least surprised to hear that you’ve found
your way into this.’
His smile was oddly poised between sympathy and malice.
‘I’m half inclined to tell you all and let you decide, Ilario. Unfortunately, since it seems to need both Rodrigo Sanguerra and myself to keep
the Carthaginian legions at home, I can’t do that.’
‘You’re not so necessary,’ I said coldly. ‘If you died, Rodrigo would
have another man in your place, performing perfectly well, inside three
days.’
Videric smiled. ‘But as you, especially, will have discovered – it doesn’t
matter what the truth is. It matters what people think the truth is.
Because that’s what they act on. In fact, my death may well bring the
legions marching up the Via Augusta. So I must hope to be as long-lived
as my grandfather . . . ’
He got abruptly to his feet, pacing, gazing up at the arcing droplets of
water. Stopping in front of both of us, he looked only at Rosamunda.
‘I couldn’t do anything to harm you. You’ve always known that.’
She brought her head up with that artificial arch of the neck that allows
a woman to look up at a man through her lashes. It was familiar enough
that I suspected the court deportment tutor, Dolores, had taught both of
us. Mother and . . . son-daughter.
She fixed an intense gaze on him. ‘Don’t do this. Even when I was
with Honorius, it was foolishness, infatuation—’
She cut her gaze across to me.
‘—and I’ve been punished.’
I didn’t hear what she said next; couldn’t decipher the low, intense
conviction in her words. It may have been some effort to recall their
sexual connection to his mind.
‘ I’ve been punished.’ After all this, this is what I am to you?
A piece on the board to be moved, to convince Videric how remorseful
you are towards him.
Why did I imagine anything else? I should know, by now.
Videric’s voice interrupted my dazed state. ‘Hope dies last.’
He might have been referring to himself, or to me. Or to us both, I
thought.
‘Perhaps unfortunately,’ he added, looking down at Rosamunda, ‘this
doesn’t depend on Honorius, or on Ilario’s parentage, or on your
infidelity. If it did, I think I might eventually teach myself to hate you.’
Her huge dark eyes brimmed.
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I could have told him, even at thirty or forty years younger than he,
that hate is no different to love. Not in the intensity. Not in how much it
occupies your mind, and wastes your time.
Videric shook his head. ‘You’re a weapon, Rosamunda. I’ve been fool
enough to show myself besotted with my wife. That makes you a sword
at my throat. And whatever the story is here, in Carthage the Lords-Amir
know that you attempted murder—’
‘Because you told me to!’
I winced at the shrill note in Rosamunda’s voice. Shrill as when she
claimed the same thing about my infant exposure: He made me.
‘No one ever made you do anything,’ I interrupted. ‘You just chose
whichever was easiest at the time and didn’t think of what would happen
after.’
Her eye caught the light as she turned to me. She had the blank-eyed
gaze of a marble medusa.
‘You be quiet, you monster! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened to me!’
I drew as much of my hard-earned court composure about me as I
could, and looked at her without shaking, or weeping. I found voice
enough to say, ‘If I were in your position, I’d be trying to make an ally of
both of us – Videric, me. But I don’t know if you’re too stupid to think of
that, or if you just hate me too much.’
She narrowed her eyes, so that the smudge of kohl at the corner of one
bled out into the incipient wrinkles there. ‘All your fault!’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Videric said gently.
Her face shifted; showed ingratiation and confusion.
He went on: ‘You think I have the power here today, and you can
sacrifice Ilario to that. But the truth is, I have no choice either. I did all I could in coming up with an alternative that Rodrigo preferred to your
quiet and immediate execution.’
Rosamunda’s eyes and mouth rounded.
She seemed to fall into herself, staring around the hall as if she
searched out any way she could run.
‘I doubt that’s wholly correct.’ I didn’t trust myself to do more than sit,
my hands shook so hard. ‘If King Rodrigo knows she can be used to get
at you, and knows that without you the legions sail for Taraco . . . He’d
have killed Aldro Rosamunda long before now. Except for one thing.’
Videric cocked his head invitingly. Odd, how I had always wished to
have him take what I said seriously. Beware what you wish for.
‘It’s truly hard to make a death look like an accident if it isn’t,’ I said.
‘That only happens in bards’ tales. And if anybody kills Rosamunda
under those circumstances, you’d know
the King was responsible. And I
don’t think you two could work together after that, not like you have
done. So he loses you anyway.’
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I shook my head, trailing fingers in the cold green endlessly disturbed
water.
‘As usual, you’ve got things so that you can do exactly as you want.
Except . . . that I don’t see how you can have what you want. Even if you hide – her – away as well as you can, someone would follow you to her,
eventually.’
‘I must personally congratulate Queen Ty-ameny, the next time I go
on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople.’ Videric’s smile was wry, and
genuine. ‘You appear to have had a considerable education in the last
twelve months.’
‘Some of it in things I never wanted to know.’
It was not something I imagined saying to this man, my father, my
stepfather. I saw how he looked at me when he turned. He may even
have been a little impressed. I wished I were still the Ilario who could appreciate that.
I said, ‘Even if you formally put her aside, nullify the marriage to a
barren wife, no one would believe it. Not after you gave up your position
at court for her.’
The position second only to the King’s.
Not death, not divorce . . . what?
Rosamunda, her chin lifting defiantly, snapped, ‘I am not barren!
Remember the cathedral, lord husband? It may be a monster of a child,
but I conceived and bore Ilario! And never anything from you, monster
or not!’
She must see how she’s affecting him—
I stopped breathing for a second, and caught it again in a rush.
Is it possible she’s behaving this way, angering him, so that he doesn’t
feel so guilty over what it is he has to do? Is she sparing him anguish?
I looked at the lines that anger was starting to pinch permanently into
the corners of her mouth. Nothing visible except anger, resentment –
and the resentment seemed to be that all this should happen to her.
Hope dies last.
She snorted under her breath. ‘If it’s your doting that’s the problem,
then . . . I made you love me, Videric. I could make you stop loving me.’
Her sneering grated on me. If I could have got words out at that
moment, they would have been, I am ashamed to be your son-daughter!
Christ the Emperor knows, Videric is a bad enough man, but
Rosamunda came close to making me pity him.
‘Let me show myself at the Court of Ladies here tomorrow and take a
lover,’ she said coolly. ‘Two or three, perhaps. Gossip will get around
quickly enough. Carthage is ruled by men. They won’t believe you could
love me and let me fornicate with soldiers and stable-hands.’
She took my breath away.
More, I thought: ‘soldiers and stable-hands’ fell too easily off her
tongue.
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If she hasn’t already practised what she advises, she certainly has her
eye on particular men she’d like to seduce.
Videric stood with the arc of the fountains behind him, utterly
motionless. In ten years I’d never seen him at a loss for words. He stared
at Rosamunda in a dazed way, as if he looked into a bright light, and
didn’t speak.
My hatred for Videric is almost impersonal. What he’d tried to do to
me, he would have done to anyone in my position; it didn’t matter to him
that I was Ilario.
It made it just that much easier to throw a rope to him, as I would have
thrown a rope to a drowning enemy.
‘That wouldn’t succeed,’ I said quietly. ‘Rosamunda, look at him. I
know he’s a courtier. But no one is going to believe he’s unaffected if you
take a lover. Do you really think even he can hide that?’
Over Videric’s mumbled protest, Rosamunda repeated with casual
cruelty, ‘I can make him stop loving me.’
‘No.’ Videric’s burly shoulders were back, and his usually bland face
tightened from the emotion in him. ‘No. You didn’t make me love you.
You won’t make me stop. If it were possible for me to stop . . . I would
have done so by now.’
No sound but Videric’s sandals on the marble floor as he began to
pace again; Rosamunda utterly silent as her head turned back and forth,
following him.
‘Then tell me how you can make me safe.’
I heard the echo of other demands in that one. Thirty years since he
married his child-bride of fifteen; thirty years of Videric, make it right for me, and him finding his satisfaction in pleasing this woman.
I should have thrown the portrait in the sea before I let Videric look at
it. That, or only showed it to Rosamunda, so she’d know I understood
her game. But no, I have to be so damn clever . . .
Videric’s pale gaze met mine as if he could follow every thought and
feeling in me.
Fifty years of experience. He may as well read minds! What’s the difference? How did I ever imagine I was going to out-plan someone who’s been at court longer than I’ve been alive?
‘I’m not putting Rosamunda aside.’ Videric spoke to me, but his gaze
continued to slide sideways to her. ‘The reverse, in fact. What will
happen is that Rosamunda is going to apply to me, formally, to end the
carnal part of our marriage—’
A choked sound from her bore no resemblance to a word.
‘—and permit her to retire to a place of religious contemplation. To a
nunnery, or a convent. So that she can purify her soul for the next world,
and glorify the Emperor-Messiah with prayer.’
Rosamunda stood, her fists clenched before her straining against her
bands. ‘ How long? ’
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It is not unusual for widows, or wives who are known not to be able to
bear their husband’s rapes and beatings, to apply to the King for
permission to retire to a convent. Whether it’s an order of educated
women, writing scrolls of theology, or whether it requires digging turnips
to feed the other sisters and novices, evidently it seems preferable to what
they can expect of life in the world.
I asked Rodrigo Sanguerra myself, once; when I was worse than
desperate to escape the humiliations of being Court Fool. He made a
public theological debate of it, with bishops arguing whether I could be
allowed to join a monastery – where I would contaminate the men with
the parts of me that were sinful woman – or a nunnery. It collapsed in
riot when one of the male courtiers offered the opinion that I would be
far too popular in a convent as a nun with a prick.
These days the thought makes me smile, if with an edge. Trust a man
to think I would be popular for what so many of those women are
escaping from.
‘How long?’ Rosamunda’s voice echoed back from the marble walls,
over the noise of the fountains.
Videric spoke as if he talked only to me. ‘The Aldro Rosamunda will
stay at several different convents, to flush out and elude pursuit. These
will all be nunneries used to taking court ladies. The civilised establish-
ments where the Mother Superior is often a rich noblewoman in her own
right, and music and literature is practised as well as the worship
and
glorification of God.’
I found myself nodding as if entranced.
‘Truthfully,’ Videric said, ‘I expect the agents of Carthage to have
found and investigated every rich convent of that nature within three
months of the announcement being made. Before Yule, certainly. There
aren’t more than twenty establishments that a woman of Rosamunda’s
rank would find appropriate.’
The water splashed in my palm where I intercepted a fountain-jet. If it
smelled of metal pipes, it was nonetheless ice-cold. I dabbed it on my
forehead, feeling it run down inside my tunic, over my small breasts, as it
dried in my body’s heat.
‘However.’ Videric’s spine stiffened, seemingly without his volition.
He didn’t look in Rosamunda’s direction. ‘There are hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of ordinary religious households in Taraco and Aragon and Granada. Small convents, closed to the world; poor nunneries that rely
on local charity and the land to support ten or twenty praying Brides of
Christ the Emperor. And a woman takes a new name when she enters
religious life as a novice. Who’s to know one “Sister Maria Regina” in a
thousand convents where there are hundreds of Maria Reginas every
year?’
Rosamunda repeated in the numb way that Brides tell their Green
beads: ‘How. Long?’
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‘They’ll search Taraconensis, and Aragon,’ Videric observed, ‘and
likely the smaller kingdoms if they get desperate. But no matter how hard
the King-Caliph drives them . . . ’
He blinked, as if he saw something far off.
‘ . . . For all their Crusades, the Franks haven’t yet taken the Northern
Islands from us. Jersey, Guernsey, Sark; they all have thriving Iberian
populations and fishing ports. If you look at the royal maps, you’ll see
them clearly marked as part of the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre.’
He paused.
‘What you won’t see, because they’re too small, are the other islands of
the archipelago. Some are mere rocks.’
Videric finally turned his head to look at Rosamunda.
‘Midway between Sark and Guernsey, with twelve leagues of sea
between them and the mainland, lies Herm. Herm is a mile and a half
long, half a mile wide. It has a fort on it, and a small fishing village, and
enough grass to graze milch-cows . . . And a stone’s throw away from