by Mary Gentle
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 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 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 the 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 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.
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.
‘Bes
ides,’ 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 wraparound 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.
‘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 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 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. ‘May be 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 momentarily 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 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 gleamed dully in the sunlight. ‘Like I said, I’m the next-to-eldest in my family. I used to have to look after the young ones a lot, before the priest took me off to teach me my letters.’
Anger stung me. I have not paid enough attention to this before–or, I have, but the necessity of having more than one set of hands to look after Onorata made me wilfully ignore it. ‘How long do you think I’m going to have an assassin near my baby?’
Ramiro Carrasco de Luis blushed like the schoolboy he would have been when his local priest singled him out as worth teaching his letters.
‘You can kill me. Torture me.’ He looked down at his dirty bare feet. ‘Without needing to think whether anyone will ask why. They won’t. Under these circumstances, do you think I’d take a step out of line?’
I thought him a long way from the sharply-dressed secretary who’d waited on Aldra Federico and Sunilda. The sun had bleached his doublet, and the foot-less Frankish hose. He went bare-headed as slaves do, his hair growing out short and shaggy. The labour the captain had also co-opted him into on the Sekhmet had hardened his muscles, as well as his palms and the soles of his feet.
I waited until he looked up, rubbing my thumb in small circles on O
norata’s chest since she seemed to like the rhythm. ‘I’ve known slaves who decided they had nothing to lose. Who felt it didn’t matter if they were tortured to death, so long as they had that one strike back at the master they hated. You might wait your moment, and drop my baby over the side of the ship. Or just pinch her nostrils together. After all, it isn’t a season yet since you tried to kill me.’
Shame made me hot even as I spoke.
This is gratuitous cruelty. Since I am ashamed of having not been sufficient for my child. Ashamed of trusting Carrasco out of sheer convenience.
Onorata stirred, whimpered at tension she must feel through my arms and chest. She reached out with one wavering starfish-hand.
With the automatic reaction that meant this must have happened a hundred times before, Ramiro Carrasco absently reached down and put his forefinger close to the baby now cradled in another’s arms.
Onorata’s hand closed around his finger, lifted her head a little as she pulled it to her mouth, and lay back mumbling his nail as she subsided into dreamless squirming.
‘She’s advanced,’ Ramiro murmured absently, ‘for three months. She holds her head up well—’
He glanced up.
Tethered by the infant’s grip, wide-eyed, the Iberian assassin gave me a look of slave’s terror.
‘I didn’t mean anything…Mistress!’ Carrasco added rapidly. His gaze skidded up and down me, like a water-insect on a canal. ‘Master!’
He grew used enough to seeing me in gowns in Venice to think of me as female. The eastern robe and kilt, which is male clothing in Alexandria, is enough like Frankish women’s gowns to confuse him further. His eyes widened enough to show white at top and bottom.
I frowned, in sudden realisation. ‘Have the ship’s other slaves been telling you stories?’
He nodded.
That will go a long way to explain why he looks more ready to soil himself than Onorata does.
‘It’s not all lies,’ I said. ‘But Alexandrine slavery’s different. I’ve been trying to follow Rekhmire’’s model. It was the one I preferred to live under when he bought me.’