Ilario, the Stone Golem
Page 53
Ilario. I did the right thing, staying with you, my lord. If you asked me to
do anything, I would have done it – but it’s so difficult, knowing he, she,
he was my own flesh . . . I tried.’
I thought of her voice, muffled among the green leaves whose water
supply could keep hundreds of poor men in Taraco from thirst. ‘ Run! ’
And she had let me run.
‘I tried,’ Rosamunda repeated. Her bound restless hands crept down,
pressing against her belly. ‘This last year or two, I’ve bribed the servants
to lie when they did the washing and say I still had my regular courses.
My mother, she was free of the moon’s curse early; she wasn’t forty. And
my grandmother too. But if you knew there was never a chance of a
child, now – I didn’t know how you’d act. If you’d change towards me.’
She didn’t look at me. Only at Videric.
‘It would have been easier to obey you and kill Ilario if I hadn’t known
I could never give birth again.’ She sighed. ‘It feels as if I’ve spent all of
my life avoiding pregnancy! But . . . I did have a child. Even grown to a
man . . . a woman . . . Ilario’s still mine. Even if I never fed her, him, at
my breast, he’s still my son, my daughter. But I . . . did try.’
Videric took in a deep breath through his nostrils. He looked at her,
merely looked at her, entirely in silence, until I felt the stone walls might
burst apart from the force of that silence.
He spoke, finally.
Gently, he said, ‘I wish you’d told me. We might have worked out
some other way it could be done. I assumed yours was the only hand I
could trust to it, but – it might have been arranged differently.’
‘How could I tell you? What man wants to be told he’s loved because
he’s barren?’
Videric nodded thoughtfully. ‘Still, we might have done it some other
way.’
The stillness broken, I cut in on his words, a cold shiver prickling the
hairs at the nape of my neck. ‘I don’t know what bothers me more – that
you can discuss it this calmly, or that you can discuss my murder in front
of me.’
Aldra Videric’s smile turned very ironic indeed. ‘We’re family, Ilario.
We need have no secrets from each other.’
Rosamunda ignored his macabre humour. Her gaze on me was
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brilliant, and I wished I had my drawing-paper. It would take me a year
to uncover the emotions in how she looked at me.
Her mouth twisted. ‘At least you can pass as a man, Ilario. That’s your
escape. There’s no life for a woman here; it’s worse than being a slave.’
As cruelly as I could, I said, ‘You would blame it all on something else,
Aldro Rosamunda, wouldn’t you? It’s because you were born a woman;
it’s because women have no rights in law . . . If you felt that badly about
it, what was to stop you running away to Alexandria, say? You might
have been raped a couple of times on the way, but Alexandrine women
can enter their government and needn’t marry.’
I smiled at her, making sure she saw teeth.
‘But, thinking about it – this should please you, then: what’s to
happen. Everybody’s equal under the Mother Superior, in a convent-
house. And you’ll hardly be in danger of conceiving a child on Jethou.
It’s a shame you didn’t think of running away to the Church when you
were twelve . . . ’
Her complexion blanched. Instinct hadn’t led me wrong, I thought;
nine years in the court as Rodrigo’s Freak gives you an edge for
protecting yourself by attacking people in their keenest fears.
I saw that she had wanted to run, but hadn’t found the courage.
Or the court sparkled too brightly, and it drew her too strongly. But
somewhere in her heart, she still reproaches that girl who has first had
her courses, and then marked her arms with blood.
I said, ‘You think if I hadn’t been born, things would have been
different? You think if I hadn’t been born a hermaphrodite, none of this
would have happened? I think you were set on this course long before I
was born.’
My voice went up and down the scale, out of control from anger and
pain.
‘I’ll tell you what would have made it different.’ I stepped right up close, staring down at Rosamunda, and over her shoulder at Videric. ‘I’ll
tell you. If, when I was born – no matter who fathered me – both of you
had acknowledged me. Yes, I would have grown up a man-woman, but
gossip only lasts so long. If you’d acknowledged me as your child, no one
could have blackmailed you later. That fear wouldn’t have made you
think you should kill me. What could anybody have done to you if there
hadn’t been a secret?’
I couldn’t speak for a moment.
‘I wouldn’t have been a slave, or a King’s Fool,’ I said quietly, ‘but
those are things that only caused hurt to me. When you think about
where you are, why things are as they are – think what would have happened if you’d kept me in the family and raised me openly as what I
am.’
I walked past Rosamunda and Videric, past Honorius and Rekhmire’,
my knees shaking. At the arch, I stopped and looked back.
357
My father and Rekhmire’ looked at each other, and walked to join me.
I turned to go, and could not.
I looked back at Rosamunda.
This tie will not be undone or cut, not without death, and perhaps not
even then. The past informs the present. And all I can do is speak as
honestly as I have learned to be.
I said, ‘The truth of it is – if I could find any way at all to get you free
of this, I would do it. Still. But if I did find a way . . . I wouldn’t hope for anything else. Not now. That’s gone.’
I stepped back from the archway.
Videric grasped her bound wrists and led Rosamunda past me, and
away into the palace.
The fountain rang clearly and bright on the stone, and my mother
stumbled, but she never looked back.
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Epilogue: Twenty-Four Years After
Rekhmire’ spent time in Alexandria afterwards, but never lived there
again, and he did not live to see the final fall of that great city in the year
1453, dying a few months before it.
Frankish Europe mourned Alexandrine Constantinople as the last of
the Egyptians gone; Carthage was jealous; Mehmet II gloated; I mourned
for the men and women I knew there, and for the aged Ty-ameny going
out to fire cannon on the walls of Alexandria itself, before the Turkish
bombards reduced all to flying splinters of rock. Fragile flesh vaporised,
no trace ever found.
Frankish Europe mourned until the tide of manuscripts and books
flooded to its shore; then it gobbled up science, medicine, and art in
equal greed. Carthage fumed, no trace being found of how Alexandria’s
mathematicians had disabled their golem. But, since the Turks appeared
to build none themselves, Carthage concluded that at least Alexandria
had not learned to build what it could break.
Neferet, visiting me after Rekhmire’’s funeral, announced herself an
importer
of books – products of the Royal Library’s machina, which she
sold the length of Italy and France.
When she asked how I would live without Rekhmire’, I inquired as to
how long it was since she had seen that cardinal’s secretary and man of
letters, Leon Battista, and we parted with a quarrel that more than
twenty years had made familiar.
In the same year, Ramiro Carrasco and I travelled back to Iberia,
reaching Taraco a few weeks before Licinus Honorius died falling from
an untrained stallion, at the age of seventy-five. He lived long enough to
require me to escort Onorata to Italy, and to look at me with boundless
love.
Onorata apprenticed herself to a painter in the Empty Chair, and
introduced me to men as her brother. I dressed as a male, as I had done
with Rekhmire’, for one kind of freedom – though dressing as a female
gave me the right to kiss Rekhmire’ publicly.
Six months after a rumour followed us from Taraco, it became
known that I was a hermaphrodite, and Onorata took the Italian name of
Rodiani, and asked me not to contact her for a time. I had no need to
worry: her friendship with Honorius’s soldiers had lasted all through her
359
own childhood – which was at least hermaphrodite in its education and
training – so I might always ask Orazi for news of her.
Ramiro Carrasco sought her out before we left the Empty Chair, and
never told me what he said, but Onorata came out to say farewell in the
public street, and gave me the kiss of kinship within the sight of all men.
North, south, hill, valley: I could wander where I liked, and draw what
I might, but the absence of Rekhmire’ was an unbearable pain to me.
Carrasco, having studied me for six weeks, chose to remark that
eunuchs lived no great long lifetimes, like as not – certainly not while
they were employed as book-buyers – and it was possible hermaphro-
dites need not live too long either, based on that principle.
It should not have eased pain, to hear Carrasco suggest it; it did,
however. He knew me, also, after so many years.
‘We might go to Carthage again,’ he said, one day, out of a sky
containing no warning cloud.
I declined. Instead we went north, to Jethou.
I found Rosamunda a keenly sharp abbess, hair white with age, but all
six establishments of the Order of St Gaius under her skilled control. She
did not manage men – or women, in this case – with the ease of one born
to it, but what she had learned with pains and study, she had learned
well.
I met her in a cold room, the casement window open to the grey sea,
and her black Bride’s clothing covered in addition with a fur-lined cloak,
where she stood gazing at the implacable, endless sea.
‘How did you manage,’ I asked, ‘when Videric was assassinated, and I
answered none of your letters?’
If I hope to see pain made less raw by time, I did not see it on her austere face.
‘Find yourself an occupation,’ she said harshly.
I found the truth of it as I spoke. ‘There is nothing left to do.’
‘Then do what you will.’ Rosamunda shrugged, under the heavy wool
and wolf’s fur. ‘And remember.’
When I reached Carthage, to speak to Marcomir (Donata long since
buried in the Fields of Baal and Tanitta), I found Onorata had been
there before me, and I was not welcome.
I ended as I had begun, in Burgundy, in Bruges, in the house in which
Rekhmire’ had cursed the cold of all northern lands, suffered a week of
coughing and wheezing, turned surprised eyes on me as he woke one
morning, and died.
‘Go back to your family,’ I instructed Carrasco.
‘Give me my collar again,’ he grumbled, ‘if you don’t believe I’m
already with my family, here.’
We slept back to back, for comfort in the northern cold, since I did not
believe Rekhmire’ would begrudge it.
When spring came, I walked the length of Burgundy to Dijon, in the
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south, and we lived within sight of the Good Philip’s castle, and worked
on painting panels by open windows, to the thundering of Dijon’s water-
mills.
And in the Duke’s library, while my sight remained keen enough, I
ornamented frontispieces for those books of his that were translations of
the flood of knowledge to come to Europa after Alexandria fell, while the
effect of those printed volumes began to change the world.
361
About the Author
MARY GENTLE published her first novel at the age
of eighteen, and has a master’s degree in Seven-
teenth Century Studies and another in War Studies.
The author of several novels, including A Sundial in a
Grave: 1610‚ she lives in Stevenage, England, with her
partner Dean Wayland.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on
your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Mary Gentle
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye
A Sundial in a Grave: 1610
The Wild Machines
Lost Burgundy
A Secret History
Carthage Ascendant
Golden Witchbreed
Credits
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover illustration by Cliff Nielsen
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are
drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
ILARIO: THE STONE GOLEM. Copyright © 2002, 2006 by Mary Gentle. All
rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the
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Document Outline
Title Page
Contents Part One: Serenissima Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Two: Alexandria-in-Exile Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three: Herm and Jethou Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue: Twenty-Four Years After
About the Author
Also by Mary Gentle
Credits
Copyright Notice
About the Publisher