The Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

‘In fact,’ Ty-ameny added, with more gravitas than one might expect from a woman with the stature of a twelve-year-old, ‘if it would set your mind at ease to have her examined, the best of my Royal Mathematicians and physicians will do so.’

  I could manage only ‘Thank you’, but it must have been clear what I meant.

  The next several days had all my attention on my child, who bawled dispiritingly whenever an Alexandrine picked her up, and looked at me as if I were the Frankish version of Judas.

  All of them pronounced her normal, but let me know that the extent of their knowledge–‘Without dissection!’, Bakennefi Aa cheerily remarked–must be limited.

  Slaves continued to bring food to our quarters at regular intervals. I sunk myself into the enjoyment of palace living–since I did not know if I would ever live in a palace again–and on two days when it was too hot to go outside, or do more than lay down on the great bed on the dais in my chamber, I dozed beside Onorata’s cradle.

  I woke on the third day, bored.

  Zheng He, on land, would not have barbarians on his ship while he was not there.

  I had itchy fingers, and established myself under a striped awning on another of the palace balconies, with Onorata asleep in a hooded cradle, and a stack of old parchments and a stoppered flask of oak-gall ink.

  The striped awning reminded me of Taraco. I began a letter to Honorius, got as far as Honoured Father, and the ink dried on my quill while I tried to think of what I could say that would do no harm if someone opened the letter.

  ‘Father’ is not harmless.

  Nor was anything else I could come up with.

  I turned the parchment over, shaping the quill with an evilly sharp pen knife that I hadn’t been able to resist in Alexandria’s main market square, both for its Damascus steel and its beautiful walnut haft, and set about sketching the lines of the aqueduct that came into the palace here. Arches of yellow brick cast shadows across a square. People came and went around the statue of a griffin-like creature on a plinth. A white mongrel dog paused long enough to cock its leg.

  The sun arriving overhead, I took Onorata back to our chambers and our own balcony, and set about drawing the great harbour, and the mass of streets going down from here to the massive walls.

  It turned into a study of Zheng He’s distant warship, but the size of it made the perspective look wrong.

  I checked it as mathematically as Masaccio and Leon Battista had ever instructed me, found it correct, and wondered, What do I do when reality itself seems incredible, even by an accurate description?

  Chin on fist, I stared down absently into the harbour, looking for another subject. I might draw Onorata, if Rekhmire’ wasn’t already making smart remarks about how many drawings of the child he’s expected to make comment on…

  I began a listless study of another ship moored between Europa and Asia. Dwarfed by comparison with Zheng He’s it might be, but the lines interested me–not a war-ship, or a fat-bellied cargo-ship, or a dhow, but a fast light galley with canvas-shrouded arbalests on prow and stern for defence.

  My quill-point scritched at the treated surface of the parchment; I made a reasonable attempt at the sterncastle and rudder before I startled, and the pen blotted a great spurt of ink over all.

  I have drawn a ship like this before, and when I did–it was a Carthaginian bireme!

  ‘Agatha and Jude!’ It was safer to swear by Christian saints in this city, if you were a foreigner. I mopped at the ink with my sleeve, but the thin cotton only absorbed most of the liquid, leaving enough to shroud the carefully-drawn lines.

  ‘That will be the envoy,’ Rekhmire’ said, an arm’s length behind me.

  I started again, jerked my wrist, and sent a hooked line of ink through the harbour wall. ‘Caius Gaius Judas! Stop creeping up on me!’

  The tall Egyptian grinned, entirely unrepentant, and bent to stroke a fingertip over Onorata’s brow. She wriggled a little, and settled deeper into sleep. Rekhmire’ looked up and to the side.

  ‘Shadow will be off this balcony soon. You’ll need to take her in.’

  ‘You take her in,’ I muttered. ‘This is the Carthaginian envoy? The one you expected? Why’s he here?’

  ‘As far as I know, nothing but a previously-arranged diplomatic visit. Ty-ameny’s ministers are running around like drunken piglets,’ Rekhmire’ observed, in response to my querying look. ‘Now the jaws truly bite–Carthage’s envoy will expect to see their latest gift on display in the Pharaoh-Queen’s throne room. None of the Royal Mathematicians can yet promise it won’t do to her as it did to Masaccio. She has a choice of offending Carthage–which we can’t afford–or afford to have them find that out!–or else put herself in danger of murder by the golem.’

  The ink had dried on my nib. I scratched it against my thumb, wishing for treated wooden boards on which I could use encaustic wax, or Masaccio’s expensive pigments, and try out designs for Honorius’s altar-panels.

  ‘No.’ I looked up, blinking. ‘She doesn’t.’

  Rekhmire’’s brows, stark under his shaved head, dipped down, casting all his face into severe lines.

  ‘If we smash the golem’s limbs, or chain it, or immobilise it safely in some way, that would be no less offensive to Carthage—’

  I interrupted him before his rising tone could wake Onorata. It was difficult to keep my own voice sufficiently quiet.

  ‘No. They don’t have to break the damned thing to stop it hurting the Pharaoh-Queen. I know how we can do it. I know.’

  Rekhmire’’s sceptical look had hope badly suppressed under the surface. ‘You know?’

  I ignored his stress on the initial word.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Cheese glue.’

  18

  Cheese glue?’ the Pharaoh-Queen of Alexandria said.

  ‘Cheese glue.’

  ‘Cheese glue?’

  One of the Royal Mathematicians muttered, ‘Cheese glue?’, in an equally bemused tone.

  Rekhmire’ smoothly intervened. ‘Hear Ilario out, Great Name of Sekhmet; I think you should.’

  Ty-ameny’s sloe-black eyes darted to his face. Whatever she found there was sufficient to have her not throw me straight out of the Royal apartments.

  ‘Explain,’ she demanded grimly.

  ‘Cheese glue’s made with limestone and…cheese.’

  I shuffled a little where I sat, hearing the words as they must sound to her.

  ‘Yes, it sounds foolish, but I know this part of my trade! The best kind is cheese that’s gone bad. Great Queen, when I was in Rome, Mastro Masaccio had me crumbling cheese and limestone and mixing the glue. You use it to size boards for painting, especially if your board has to be made up of several smaller pieces. When it sets…’

  In memory I still hear Masaccio’s hammer.

  ‘I saw examples twice, in his workshop,’ I said, seeing the Alexandrines perk up at the sound of empirical evidence. ‘Once of a six-part panel put together before the plague came to Europa, that a man couldn’t break with all his strength. The other was more subtle, I think–an older board, that had a funeral portrait on it from Hannibal Barca’s time. The wax was gone, and the pigments too, and the wood broken in many places.’

  I held finger and thumb a half-inch apart.

  ‘But the glue that had held the wood together, that was still intact! Where the worms had eaten the wood all away, the cheese and lime glue stood up alone, rigid, like a framework.’

  I took a breath, realising the frown on the Royal Mathematician Bakennefi Aa’s face was calculation rather than scorn.

  ‘When it ages, it yellows, but initially it sets clear. Like glass. You would not ever know it was there.’ My mouth felt dry. I swallowed. Rekhmire’ remained silent where he sat beside me.

  Either he desires me to have all the credit for this–or all the blame!

  Ty-ameny’s frown was now of a different kind, I saw. She asked, ‘How would this help us?’

  She’s willing to consider it!


  ‘The golem’s limbs are articulated.’ The memory of stone fingers was one I pushed aside almost by habit now. ‘Each of the arms, knees, fingers, feet–they’re all jointed, by metal gears. If you were to pour prepared glue into the joint mechanisms and let it set…’

  Ty-ameny blinked as if dazed.

  ‘And no one could see this?’ Her black gaze snapped into focus. ‘At a distance, say, of–Ahhotep, over there, beside the window. If I am here, and he is there, will he see this has been done?’

  I considered it, heart racing, not wanting to seem too sure of myself.

  ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘Not even if he knew what he was looking for. The joints are brass, they shine. The extra coating will shine the same way.’

  The room of advisers was silent for the space of ten heartbeats; Ty-ameny put her chin in her hand. She gazed unseeing at Rekhmire’, silhouetted against the white afternoon heat.

  My voice creaked and dropped down into the lower male registers. ‘At the very worst, it would give you warning, when the joints move and the glue shatters. There would be time enough to move away. If the cheese glue’s allowed time to cure and set–the golem will pull itself to pieces before those joints will move.’

  ‘Bakennefi Aa.’ Ty-ameny gave the Royal Mathematician and his cohorts a look that indicated they should–as rapidly as possible–search out sources in the Library. As the three Bakennefi brothers bowed and left, she turned back to me.

  ‘You know how to mix this? The proportions of each; all the ingredients?’

  That amount of implied responsibility cut off my breath. My heart pounded in palpable thuds. I swallowed, I hoped imperceptibly, and nodded.

  ‘You mix a batch,’ the Pharaoh-Queen said. ‘My mathematicians will run tests. But, at the same time–the golem will be treated with your substance, too. Where it stands, beside the royal throne; undertake the treatment there.’

  She shot a glance at Rekhmire’.

  ‘Plausible ways can be found to delay the Carthaginian envoy’s formal audience for a few more days?’

  ‘He’s a diplomat, Great Queen, he’ll expect it.’

  The corner of her mouth tweaked up, although she nodded solemnly enough. Her gaze switched back to me.

  ‘Cheese glue!’ she muttered.

  19

  The envoy of the King-Caliph Ammianus of Carthage was received with the proper amount of ceremony, Pharaoh-Queen Ty-amenhotep giving the impression–as I note Alexandrines like to do–that she condescended to pay respect to a member of a younger and more barbaric civilisation.

  Rekhmire’, shielding me from the view of the envoy’s entourage, murmured, ‘If he does anything in public, he’s a fool.’

  The great audience hall had space enough to hide me, veiled and therefore female, among Ty-ameny’s advisers. I hoped that if the Carthaginian envoy had been briefed at all, he would be looking for Rekhmire’’s scribe, or at best the painter’s apprentice from Rome, and not the pregnant woman of Venice.

  Apprehension made my mouth dry.

  Onorata lay newly-fed and grumpy up in our apartments, with Ramiro Carrasco and the German brothers and a squad of Ty-ameny’s Royal Guard in attendance. I didn’t trust the Carthaginians not to attempt abduction of my baby. Nor, evidently, did the Pharaoh-Queen.

  Brass horns blared.

  The crowds at the doors shifted.

  I guessed the envoy’s party had begun their way up the Thousand Stairs to the Daughter of Ra’s palace. In the white heat of afternoon. Surely a calculated insult?

  ‘He may well think that,’ Rekhmire’ confirmed my suggestion. ‘But he’s from the Darkness. The sun in the middle of the day addles the brains of any local man fool enough to walk out in it. What it’ll do to a man used to twilight, and used to being out in all the hours of the day…’

  ‘Any advantage she can get?’ I speculated.

  The bald man’s lip quirked. ‘Regrettably the Pharaoh-Queen could not find time in her busy schedule until this hour.’

  Constantinople is worse than Taraco at midday. I’d made the mistake of going out drawing in the day’s heat once and only once. The lines of silver-point on the treated paper scrawled off into flicks and trailing half-circles; and I had had to be brought home by Carrasco, of all men, and put in a darkened room to be fed cool water in drips.

  By the time Carrasco found me, I had rolled under the edge of a cart at the side of the market square’s infinite hot expanse. The air shimmered, the heat hit like a hammer, and I had sought out the only tiny piece of visible shade.

  Ramiro Carrasco pulled me out by one foot and smugly carried me back to the palace over his shoulder. It might have left him scarlet-faced and gasping, but he evidently thought the moral ascendancy worth it. I felt too grateful to even resent that. If I had been fool enough to take Onorata out with me, she would be dead.

  Picturing the unknown envoy, I knew that he would be craving darkness, cool, shade; that his head will throb, and his eyes pain him.

  The crowd parted as the horns blasted out a flat raw sound.

  Men stood silhouetted against the white sky.

  The Carthaginian party moved inside, almost with unseemly haste. Perhaps a dozen men, most of them wearing Carthaginian plate armour–I winced in sympathy for the soldiers–and two in long white robes. The envoy and an aide, I guessed.

  They stood for a long moment in the entrance to the throne-hall, long enough for whispers to start.

  The taller of the robed men put his hand up to his face.

  I realised he was unknotting the length of white gauze cloth he wore tied about his head, over his eyes. His entourage also.

  Of course: they’re Carthaginians, they must know what countries outside the Penitence are like!

  His hawk-bearded face uncovered, the taller man bowed to his shorter companion, and signalled to the guards. They walked between impassive lines of the Pharaoh-Queen’s Royal Guard, ignoring the ceremonial sarissas that the men held.

  The Carthaginian soldiers had empty scabbards at their sides. I guessed there were halberds left at the palace gatehouse, too. They walked as stiffly as men in plate armour in high heat do, and I caught two of them exchanging a word and a grimace, exactly as Honorius’s men might have done.

  ‘You stay here,’ Rekhmire’ murmured. ‘I must be beside the Queen, but I want you out of danger.’

  I thought him angry that the Pharaoh’s ban on armed foreigners in the throne room should extend to Attila and Tottola. And that I had insisted on being present.

  ‘Rekhmire’, I’m not in danger—’

  ‘I can’t protect both of you!’

  He did not speak loudly, but the intensity of it stopped me dead.

  ‘If it comes to it,’ I said, as steadily as I could, ‘don’t throw yourself between anybody and a sword. I don’t want you to do that.’

  Rekhmire’’s mouth twisted. He gazed down at the short, stout staff with a silver handle, that he had substituted for his usual crutches. ‘You need not worry. It’s not likely I’ll be able to move fast enough to put myself between Ty-ameny and harm—’

  His whisper was grim and somewhat self-mocking; I interrupted it mercilessly. ‘Unless you’re right next to her. Don’t think I don’t know why you want to be at her elbow.’

  ‘I can’t be at hers and yours.’

  His expression was frighteningly raw for a usually composed man.

  He looks torn in two, as if he would literally divide himself up to defend both of us–and sell his soul to be the man of quick movement that he was before his injury.

  ‘I’ll be safe enough,’ I said, indicating my female dress.

  He desires to keep me as safe as his Pharaoh-Queen, I realised. As for what that means—

  I don’t know if he values my knowledge and political usefulness–or if he’s as fond of me as he plainly is of Ty-ameny of the Five Great Names, who he treats like a brat of a schoolgirl.

  Aiding him the only way I could think of, I
said, ‘Where am I safest, for you?’

  ‘This side of the throne.’ His eyes narrowed at the hulking apparent statue beside the tiny figure of Ty-ameny. ‘I don’t trust that thing not to come for you, Ilario. Far more likely Carthage intends it for her, but how do we know it doesn’t remember you?’

  ‘It doesn’t remember anything. It’s stone.’ I thought of it killing. Nothing with feelings could act that way without some emotion showing, if only satisfaction at an order obeyed. ‘It’s a set of orders, waiting to act on command.’

  Rekhmire’’s look had something I recognised, eventually, as respect. If he hadn’t seen the golem act in Rome, he trusted what I’d observed. That is a responsibility, too.

  His hand closed once on my shoulder, and he ambled off, deceptively relaxed, sliding into the group of advisers around Ty-ameny’s imperial purple throne.

  The Carthaginians would recognise his role, I thought, assuming any of them had been on diplomatic duty for more than a week. But the ability to deter an assassination is also valuable.

  Unless they’re sure an attack will succeed; so sure that it doesn’t matter how many men Ty-ameny has around herself, or how well armed they are, because hands of stone can bat swords aside without a second thought, and stone can smash iron, bone, arm, skull—

  ‘Welcome our visitors,’ Ty-ameny said aloud, her voice muffled by the gold mask and braided false beard she wore. Her herald stepped forward, rapped his serpent-staff on the marble steps, and began a lengthy greeting to the lords of Carthage and the representatives of his sublime greatness the King-Caliph of that nation…

  The herald stuttered a couple of times and looked annoyed with himself. He wanted to be nothing but imperturbable duty, a role rather than a man, I guessed, and not seem as on edge and apprehensive as the rest of us were.

  ‘…the Daughter of Sekhmet and the Regent of Ra graciously allows you to present yourself to her.’ The herald bowed and stepped back.

  The shorter of the two robed men stepped forward, as if they were engaged in a formal dance. Which I supposed, in fact, they were.