by Mary Gentle
I found the reference to Neferet as he unexpectedly jolting.
Rekhmire’ drained his glass of the dark wine. ‘Neferet had sufficient trouble before leaving Venice.’ He caught my puzzled look. ‘You heard none of the gossip? I suppose not. It was widely said of your wedding that Master Leon Battista had thrown Neferet over in favour of a “real woman”.’
My father and I looked at each other for a long moment. He hit his thigh with the flat of his hand several times, straining to breathe. I bit down hard on the root of my thumb, not knowing whether I desired to laugh or cry.
‘If they knew.’ I shook my head.
‘It would be additional danger,’ Honorius said mildly. ‘As if you needed it! The longer you stay in Venice, the more likely it is some rumour will be spread by the midwife or priest–although God He knows we bribed them well enough! Or a story will come north that you got married in Rome, and not to Messer Leon.’
Rekhmire’ repeated, ‘Come to Alexandria.’
Nothing but being contrary moved me to say, ‘Give me one good reason why!’
He pushed himself to his feet. For all he stood like an Egyptian monolith, I thought he seemed oddly uncertain.
‘I can protect you there.’
‘Oh, you can?’ I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a smile on Honorius’s face. ‘Why can you protect me in Alexandria? Why would you want to?’
Rekhmire’ looked surprisingly pained.
‘I think of you as a friend, not a master,’ I said hastily. ‘But shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, off buying more scrolls?’ I gave him a slant look. ‘Or finding more mechanical copyists for the Pharaoh-Queen?’
Rekhmire’’s lips made a compressed line that spoke much of irritation, to one who knows the man. His gaze, when it met mine, was in part amused, and in part annoyed.
‘I do have to escort Master Mainz back to the city—’
For Egyptians, I think, there is only one city in all the world. Without qualification, the words mean Alexandria-in-Exile.
‘—and it is the weather for sea travel.’
I wondered momentarily whether the voyage from Ostia Antica had been dogged with sickness because I was with child. If not, I swear never to set foot off land again!
‘Come to Alexandria,’ Rekhmire’ repeated, as if he would go on tirelessly repeating it like water wearing down granite. ‘I can protect you.’
I looked him in the eyes. ‘Why?’
Sounding momentarily confused, Rekhmire’ said, ‘What?’
‘Why can a book-buyer for the Royal Library protect me?’ I jerked a thumb at Honorius. ‘I can understand it with the Captain-General here, and his thugs in livery—’
‘Thanks!’ Honorius grinned, as I intended him to.
‘—but why do you say you can protect me?’
The monumental face smoothed out into complete immobility. It was possible to read nothing from him. I might have painted that face, or rendered it in marble, and no man could have got any clue as to his thoughts.
The Egyptian wiped his hands down his linen kilt and looked up from his chair.
‘This may come as a shock,’ he said sardonically, ‘but I have certain resources I can call on. Menmet-Ra will help with the voyage. You would travel under a pass-port of the Pharaoh-Queen’s protection, which I would provide.’
‘And you can do that because…’
Rekhmire’ began to look cornered.
I folded my arms and gave him a recalcitrant stare.
‘Why should I trust you to get me–and my daughter–to Alexandria? What makes a buyer of scrolls so capable of that?’
‘Ilario—’ He bit off whatever he had been going to say, glared back at me, and snapped, ‘Because I’m a spy!’
The room poised, full of silence.
‘Ah.’ I didn’t look away from his gaze. ‘Good. I did wonder when you might tell me…’
Rekhmire’ positively snarled at me. ‘What!’
Honorius slid down a little on the bench beside me, hammering at his thigh with his fist. Small tears easing out of the corners of his screwed-shut eyes. I couldn’t make out what he wheezed.
‘Father?’
The Captain-General reached for the bottle and glasses, tipping a fair amount of wine from one into the other. He pushed a glass at me, and held one out to Rekhmire’, ridiculously delicate in his warrior’s fingers, never mind the Egyptian’s large hand.
Honorius lifted his own glass, as in a toast. He remarked cheerfully, ‘I bet you don’t get a lot of that.’
5
At Rekhmire’’s suggestion, Honorius broke off from packing long enough to send ten men, in conspicuously, to pack up and bring back Herr Mainz’s printing-machina from his workshop.
They found the anonymous shed stripped bare.
I supposed the Venetians might gain some knowledge from the construction of the machina itself, but the German Guildsman’s satisfied smile confirmed that the metal type was key.
Since mercenaries must be expert at moving their habitation, and Rekhmire’ I knew to be more than used to packing up as a book-buyer, I left the household to their skills.
Ramiro Carrasco entered the room I had come to think of as mine, just as I completed packing what art supplies I judged worthy into a chest for transport, and throwing out what paper I had wasted on unsuccessful rendering.
‘You can take these down.’ I indicated the ash-wood chests. It disquieted me how easy I found it to give plain orders.
Although some of that is the influence of men-at-arms, and not merely experience of slavery.
A faint fuzz of black hair showed under Carrasco’s coif, growing back in. A blue mark under his eye was a bruise, and new. No great wonder if he didn’t mourn the departure of my father’s company for Taraconensis.
‘I feel strange at leaving this room.’ I looked about me, touching the green velvet hangings of the bed, and continued without forethought: ‘After all, I gave birth to a child here.’
Ramiro Carrasco coloured from the skin at the neck of his shirt, clear up to his ears and scalp; a glowing scarlet translucency of the flesh that might as well have been a brand.
I refuse to be embarrassed that this man tried to kill me!
‘I’ll take these,’ he muttered, squatting to lift one chest. He did not add ‘master’ or ‘mistress’. I was willing to bet he owed his black eye to another such omission.
Shooting an apologetic glance, he added, ‘Will I come back and help with the child?’
Onorata’s blankets, clothing, and feeding gear still occupied the bed in sprawled heaps. She herself, in her lidless oaken chest, was beginning that restless shifting of her face that meant she would wake soon and be hungry.
‘Lord Christ Emperor on the Tree.’ I sat bonelessly and suddenly on the edge of the bed, hard enough to jolt my teeth, and found myself staring up at Carrasco as the only other adult present.
He put down the box, stepping forward. ‘Is she ill? Should I fetch a physician?’
‘What? No.’ My knuckles were white, where my hands made fists quite without my own volition. ‘I realised–I haven’t taken her out of the city before. A sea voyage! Suppose it kills her? She’s so small!’
Carrasco gave me a bright-eyed and unguarded smile, still a little russet from his previous embarrassment. ‘You put me in mind of my youngest sister and her first.’
At sister he blinked uncertainly, evidently registering that I had dressed in doublet and hose for travelling.
‘She’s a small one, but she’s thriving.’ Carrasco squatted down by the oak chest, not touching my child, but looking at her with unselfconscious approval.
‘How can you tell?’ The Turkish physician had been extensive in his description of stools, rashes, fontanels, birth-marks, crusts on her eyes, and illnesses in general–but seemed to think I must know what constituted good health.
Carrasco lifted his head and looked at me, amazed. On the bed and its dais, I sat considerably high
er than him; I felt it failed to give me any moral authority. He seemed momentarily entirely confident.
‘She’s growing. After the first couple of weeks, provided they grow and they don’t get sick, they’re all right.’
‘Certainly she eats enough!’ I might sound frustrated, I thought. ‘Eats, sleeps, shits–I swear you could set a monastery clock by her! Every Vespers, Matins, Lauds…She doesn’t do anything else. Do you think there’s something wrong with her?’
Seriously, Carrasco observed, ‘Your father should have hired you a nurse.’
He stood, and I saw him glance at the bed again, his flush reasserting itself.
‘If I remember, madonna, she’s two months old or a little less. She’ll do more when she’s older. They say she was early?’
Reckoning up weeks, it came to me that if she had gone full term, it would be now that she would have been born. Looking at her in that light, her minute hands and ears and eyes did not seem so undersized for a newborn.
I made to stand and found my knees still weak. ‘How in Christ-the-Emperor’s name will I manage when she starts moving about! Talking!’
If they were not my blood-kin, nevertheless, Honorius’s most trusted men-at-arms had filled the place of family these last months. But without her grandfather, and with all the responsibility falling to me…
I wondered if the attempt to hire another wet-nurse would be worth my child’s frantic roaring and screaming and obdurate refusal to feed.
My child.
‘I can make you a sling, for the babe.’ Carrasco shifted his weight from one foot to the other as I looked at him, and shrugged. ‘Madonna. My mother used to carry the little ones that way. Left her hands free.’
The blush was not quite gone from his skin. The involuntary colouring spoke of shame. And if ‘madonna’ is not ‘mistress’ or ‘master’, it is still a respectful form of address for the women of the Italies.
If I didn’t think Carrasco a man forced into violence by desperation–if I hadn’t thought him capable of feeling guilt for attempting to kill a new mother–he would not be under the same roof as Onorata.
I managed to unclench my hands. ‘Thank you. Yes. How warmly should I dress her, if I carry her in this sling?’
My erstwhile assassin stepped up onto the dais, sorting with quick efficiency through the piles of clothes, and laying out thin shawls, and a tiny fur-lined hood.
‘If there’s anything more odd than this day in my life—’ I caught Ramiro Carrasco’s gaze. ‘—I’m going to need to be better rested to meet it!’
He made a movement that was part shrug, part slave’s duck of the head, and all amazingly awkward. To my surprise, he followed that with a smile.
‘Shall I help you with her feed, madonna?’
‘I can do that. You carry the boxes: I can’t…’
He nodded, and took up the packed chests, and in the quietness of his departure, I began to ready the pottery vessel with a glazed spout that had proved the best thing for Onorata to suckle and feed from.
A scrape of wood on wood made me look up. Rekhmire’, crutch lodged securely under his arm, had evidently just stopped at the open doorway. He smiled and came in, awkwardly dumping the scrolls under his free arm onto the bed.
‘Are you ready?’ He peered intently at Onorata in my lap, as she suckled at the pottery spout, but directed the question at me.
‘Yes. No.’
Panic returned in a flood.
I did not let it alter my cradling of the tiny child.
‘How am I to feed her on the ship! We can’t be forever putting into ports to buy milk—’
Briskly, Rekhmire’ said, ‘It’s a galley, Ilario!’
At my bemused look, he added, ‘Built much on Venetian lines, I must admit, even if it is out of an Alexandrine dockyard. Three rowers to every oar, a full complement of marines, the captain and navigator and his officers, and I don’t doubt a passenger or two beside you and I and Herr Mainz! With a crew of two hundred men, we’ll be calling in at coastal ports for water and food every other day–the pilot’s knowledge of that, and the headlands, currents, and landmarks, is what will take us to each port on the way through the Aegean to Alexandria…’
‘Calling into a port every other day?’ I had thought only of the deep seas the Iskander survived, in the autumn storms, not this coastal hopping from harbour to harbour.
Rekhmire’ nodded. ‘And even if not–you’ll find, down towards the port side of the captain’s cabin, the enclosure where they pen up the animals for slaughter during the voyage. The galley carries several goats in kid, and three nursing nannies, for the milk, and your father has added several more to that contingent.’
A smile touched his solemn face.
‘I think Master Honorius would turn the galley into a livestock cargo ship, rather than think of the child going hungry.’
Evidently he would rather turn a joke than put into my mind the dangers of the whole ship sinking, should we encounter bad storms.
There are banker’s scrips in my purse.
‘I can’t support her on my own.’ The reality of that failure biting deep, I could hear an edge to my voice. ‘Lord Emperor Christ knows what I’d be doing if I hadn’t found you and Honorius this year!’
‘Children should be raised by the whole family.’ Rekhmire’ brushed his thumb over her forehead, and down to her flared lips, that had latched onto the pottery spout with no apparent indication of ever letting go.
I snorted. ‘Without all her soldier-uncles, I’ll be hard put enough to feed her properly all day and all night!’
Rekhmire’ turned his head, looking mildly at me. ‘Does being no man-at-arms disqualify me from assisting?’
My face was a little hot. I satisfied myself that Onorata had done with sucking, and sat her upright to burp her, wiping off the resulting gob of milk.
‘You have responsibilities…’
I detected something like pique in Rekhmire’’s expression, I thought.
Experimentally, I added, ‘But you know she falls asleep fastest when you read her old Aramaic…’
He put his ruddy-coloured finger to her palm, and her pale tiny hand clenched over his nail. ‘You know very well she’s working on a translation. Aren’t you, Little Wise One?’
A slave is ill-advised to roll their eyes or be sarcastic; I was under no such restriction. ‘Yes, master.’
A thought came into my mind on the heels of that.
‘Do you realise–if she’d been born in Rome, you’d have owned her too?’
‘Dear holy Eight!’ Rekhmire’ closed his eyes devoutly, and somewhat spoiled the effect by peeking out under his long eyelashes. ‘Two of you. It hardly bears thinking of.’
Onorata burped again.
That, and Rekhmire’’s expression, made me laugh, as he evidently desired. Taking my mind from the lives of slaves and their children when not free.
‘The Sekhmet leaves at dawn tomorrow,’ he added, retrieving his hand as Onorata abandoned interest in his finger. ‘Are you ready?’
‘No.’ As ever, I found it more than easy to give him the truth. ‘It terrifies me, to think of such a small baby on a long voyage across the sea. How can she ever survive it?’
If I expected baseless reassurance, I was mistaken. Rekhmire’ thoughtfully nodded agreement.
‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re as far from Taraco, here, as you are from Alexandria-in-exile. So it would be no better for her to travel to your home country. If you could stay here, that would be best–but Venice is full of fever in the hot weather, and in any case, I doubt you can stay here in safety from your enemies. This is not the best choice, but I can think of no better.’
He softened nothing, but he did not lie.
I held the tiny solid weight of Onorata, marvelling at her dark lashes and scant feather-light hair. Like Herr Mainz–Herr Gutenberg–I have a need for truth, no matter how little varnish men put on it.
6
The dawn was
not even grey in the east when the house hold stirred again for our departure.
Licinus Honorius I found in the makeshift Alexandrine bath room, when I came to tackle him on the final details of a military guard; two of his men-at-arms bringing in jugs of heated water to fill the porphyry tub.
Naked, he was thin and muscular, with white scars crossing every area of his body, in particular below the knees and elbows.
‘Shins and hands. Targets.’ He wiped himself down with a wash-cloth, as dignified as if he were clothed in more than soap-opaque water. ‘You need not nag. I’ll leave only two men with you–one as bodyguard for you, one for the child.’
In the last instance, when all else has failed, a bodyguard’s duty is to interpose their flesh between mine and a weapon. I thought I could have refused it for myself. Not for Onorata.
‘Who?’
‘Tottola and Attila.’ He stood, receiving the towel I handed him with equanimity. I wished I had ever thought to ask for a nude study of him: he would be ideal, I thought, for one of the more martial Prophets.
‘They have the advantage,’ he added, ‘of looking nothing in the least like Iberian soldiers. I’ve told them to take off my livery badges.’
‘You’ll take all the rest?’ I fixed Honorius with as beady a gaze as I might manage. Difficult to exert authority over a man older than I am, and besides my father. ‘And take the Via Augusta?’
The skies will be clear, the stars able to be seen for navigation at sea, but not yet as reliably as in the summer months.
‘Yes.’ His exasperation was more reassuring than promises. ‘Hand me my shirt. Besides, I have a surprise for you–you will appear to be travelling with me…’
The importance of secrecy regarding my whereabouts and destination was not lost on me; I could not, however, guess at his meaning. Honorius, dressed, grinned and led me through to the Alexandrine House’s warm kitchens.
‘No!’ the Ensign Saverico’s voice whined. ‘I won’t wear women’s dress; I’d sooner be flayed alive!’