by Mary Gentle
For the first time, I saw them look at each other. Stare, as if each could read secrets in the other’s so-familiar face.
A little desperately, Videric protested, ‘I’ll try to visit. To see you, when it’s safe. When I can be sure I won’t be followed—’
‘No! ’ It was no more than a wheeze of breath.
Videric shrugged hopelessly. ‘Five years from now is not so long. But even then, your face can’t be seen at court again, it would be too dangerous—’
Rosamunda’s body shook; I held her up.
Videric took a step forward, eyes all but glowing with his intensity.
‘—but you’ll be safe. Who’d look for the Queen of the Court of Ladies among poor sisters digging their own turnips, and milking goats? Who could recognise you in homespun black, when every other woman is in the same robes? You won’t look the same–you’ll have a different name–if no one from this court contacts you, Carthage will never stumble across you; you’re too far out of the way—’
She stood–and fell forward off the fountain’s marble rim, out of my support, her tied ankles tripping her. Her bound hands reached out, seizing Videric’s robes.
The striped linen’s stitching broke under her weight, and he caught her by the wrists, dragging her upright. She leaned her body against his from belly to chest and brought her mouth up for a kiss.
I saw it as clearly as if I had it at my brush’s end: Videric looking into her face.
And if he could have seen anything in her kiss but desperation, neither King nor Carthage could make him send her away.
He didn’t slump, but he withdrew into himself, his hand gently easing her cheek away from contact with his chest. He seated her implacably back on the fountain’s marble surround.
She glared and twisted around, facing me.
‘You bitch, you monster, you–eunuch! This is all your fault!’
I didn’t know I would do it until it was done. My hand cracked across her face and my palm was stinging.
She lurched back where she sat, Videric catching her elbow. I forget that I hit so much harder than most women; almost as hard as the man I’m dressed as.
The mark was carmine on her cheek, turning the blue of sloe-berries already, over the bone.
I noticed coldly that I was shaking, as if I stood out in a damp winter gale.
‘Tell me again you should have suffocated me at birth!’
‘I should have! I tried!’
She flung out the last words like a child throwing any lie out, in the hopes that it will hurt.
‘You’re the child!’ The irony would have made me laugh, under other circumstances.
I see it a lot in the Court of Ladies–women never allowed to deal with money, or property, or the decisions of who they’ll marry and be with child by. Without experience, and with only rivalries, friendships, cliques, and lovers to occupy themselves, it’s no wonder many of them are still twelve years old at the age of forty-five.
And if I were a man, I wouldn’t know what goes on in the Ladies’ Court, and if I were a woman, I wouldn’t have any different experiences to make the comparisons.
This is what I knew, when I carried Onorata and it tried to make me something I’m not–that I may not be a man, but I have no idea how to be a woman.
She lifted her hands and Videric casually took hold of her bound wrist. It was evident she couldn’t free herself, from the silk ropes or her husband.
‘You were my punishment, Ilario.’ The last word was a painful grunt. She momentarily caught her bottom lip between her teeth. ‘I’ve suffered enough, haven’t I? You can’t take any more away from me!’
Paint would put two catch-lights in her eye, at the edge of the pupil and in the body of the white, to show how lustrous and large her eyes are. Paint could make every fold of her silk dress into rich soft fabric, so fine a rough edge of skin could snag it…
And if I painted, I thought, I could paint her life on Jethou, too. No longer Queen of the Court of Ladies. Men say all faces look alike in a Bride’s wimple and hood. And even though that’s not true–Rosamunda will always have the stunning bones that support her flesh and delicate skin–working outdoors on an island, summer and winter, will bring freckles, broken capillaries, the dryness and paper skin that comes with cold.
Rosamunda stared at me as if she had no consciousness that twelve months ago she tried to stab me in the stomach. Which is a slow and painful death, but she knew too little to know that. She struck at the body because, like most not trained as knights, she couldn’t bear to strike at the face.
I saw recognition in her, as if the thought passed from my mind directly to hers.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said, all the attention of those dark eyes fixed on me. ‘You know that. I told you to run. Ilario…Videric’s not your father; don’t side with him. I’m your mother.’
Turning away, I scooped up a double handful of cool water and doused my face. The dazzles left my vision.
‘How will you leave Gades?’
I had a sudden absurd vision of Aldra Videric sneaking out through the kitchen in his finest gown, and every servant staring at him.
‘As we came.’ Videric’s eyes looked weary. ‘This is a seaport, Ilario, as you told me. My wife will go aboard a ship for Jethou this evening. And tomorrow, I and my men, and one of the waiting-women in Rosamunda’s clothing, will ride out of Gades on the Via Augusta for Taraco. As far as any man here is concerned, Aldro Rosamunda visited Gades and returned with me.’
Who would I tell, to prevent this?
Do I desire to prevent this?
Before I could say anything, I heard raised voices outside; Videric stepped to the archway–and stepped back again, as Rekhmire’ strode through.
19
Rekhmire’, striding in, took it all in an instant; I could see him do it. Lord Videric, armed men, the Lady Rosamunda with her wrists and ankles tied. And I, who was not apparently restrained in any way, nor had any weapons pointed at me.
A sweep of his glance at Videric and I saw he had it. Carthage. Other enemies of the kingdom. And the danger that Rosamunda will be. He looked as if he wanted to smack himself in the forehead.
‘Tell me,’ I said steadily. ‘I will have missed something. Videric will have fooled me somehow, or told me half-truths that don’t look like lies. Tell me this doesn’t have to happen this way.’
Strain carved lines from Rekhmire’’s nose to the corners of his mouth. With his bald head illuminated by the sun from the lattice roof, he looked even more like one of the statues shining in the Alexandrine palaces at Constantinople, for all he had a linen gown swathing him to the ankles to keep off what he referred to as ‘this northern cold’.
‘I should have seen this!’ he murmured, looking from me to Videric.
He stood a head taller than my stepfather, was broader across the chest, and it wasn’t until I saw them standing together that I realised Videric was bordering on late middle age.
But he was a decade older than Rosamunda when he married her for her dowry and for love…
‘I didn’t imagine you would involve Ilario in this.’ Rekhmire’ sounded almost uninterested, his expression bland. ‘Is this wise?’
For a moment even I thought, He knew this was going to happen! And then read him well enough to see how he picked up cues from the people present, and how we were placed.
Videric wiped his hand over his forehead, taking away the beads of sweat that glistened in the sun. ‘I didn’t “involve” Ilario. Ilario, as you probably know very well by now, has a gift for finding out where he shouldn’t be–and then she goes there!’
The last thing I wanted was a sympathetic look between these two men, even if it had been in Rekhmire’’s mind to do it.
‘He’s–exiling her,’ I cut in, choosing the best word I could find in that instant.
Rekhmire’ looked down at Rosamunda, and gave her a polite nod.
She appeared to have no ability to concea
l her emotion in the slightest. She scowled, recovered the poise that the Queen of the Court of Ladies should have, and looked at him with slit-eyed hatred. ‘I should have had my husband’s men see to you in Carthage.’
I interrupted. ‘Did Ramaz’s arm heal up?’
Videric’s twisted smile was as much an appreciation of that, in his own way, as the straight look of dislike that Rosamunda gave me. Videric waved a hand at the captain of his men-at-arms.
‘Well enough,’ the captain said grudgingly. He retained a strong western accent; it confirmed my thought that Videric hadn’t brought the man to court before now. These will be all recently promoted men, still with everything to show about their devotion to their liege-lord.
I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when the commander did no more than answer Videric’s implied question; although the man looked at me with a wary respect, combined with that fear of the unnatural, that I tend to get in skirts when men learn I’ve done man’s work. And an Alexandrine tunic is close enough to a women’s robe–as Rekhmire’ had been kindly informed by the fisher-children running about in the lower town…
‘This is no business of Alexandria’s,’ Videric said. His glance made insinuations between Rekhmire’ and myself. ‘Nor any business of yours, Master Rekhmire’. I shall have to ask you to leave, now.’
A clatter of footsteps sounded outside the stone archways; I glimpsed mail and the flash of light from sword-pommels, and Videric’s men-at-arms stepped back inside the hall, looking to their captain.
Perhaps twenty other men in mail and breastplates crowded in after them. I recognised Orazi first–Rekhmire’ signalled an acknowledgement to him–and then another man pushed his way through.
Honorius.
Like his men, he didn’t have his sword drawn. The fountain-jets reflected in the mirror of his breastplate. Nothing marked him out from his men, off-duty as they were, bar the lion’s head badge on his left sleeve. He scratched slowly through his cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
‘You’re her husband,’ he said, voice harsh in the echoing hall.
Videric’s soldiers were red-faced at being so outnumbered and so easily, but I saw one elbow the other, and I guessed the story of their lord and their lord’s wife had gone the rounds after last year in Carthage. Although in what detail, and how accurately, I couldn’t guess.
You couldn’t tell from Orazi’s face, or the others, that anything out of the ordinary was taking place. I thought, They all know. But they won’t embarrass the Lion of Castile.
Rekhmire’ stood as impassive as any carved sandstone, and I thought him thinking furiously.
The lean, soldierly man my father squinted at Rosamunda as if he squinted into a desert wind, abrasive with particles of sand. She didn’t take her eyes off him.
I recognised the split-second hesitation, and that look Honorius wore.
This is something I would have two or three times a week, when I was Rodrigo Sanguerra’s Freak. The look that at first goes straight through you, not recognising you at all. And a moment later seems to ask, Why does that person seem to know me?, and No, surely, it can’t be; before they greet me with a rush of relief at the recognition–‘Ilario! I didn’t know you, dressed as a—’ man or woman, whichever the case might be.
Honorius’s hesitation lasted barely longer than it took to draw breath.
With a rush of relief, he exclaimed, ‘Rosamunda!’
She went as red as if she’d been slapped.
Queen of the Court of Ladies, yes. Beautiful, poised, glorious: yes.
But forty-five isn’t twenty.
Is so different from twenty, it seems, that an old lover might not recognise that Rosamunda in this woman standing before him.
And two of us knew her well enough to know it had cut her like knives.
Slowly, Honorius said, ‘I wouldn’t have known you.’
Rosamunda made a little noise, and attempted to hide her bound hands in the silk folds of her skirt. Her fingers were shaking.
‘I’m no different,’ she whispered.
Honorius made a face, half-smile and half-grimace. ‘That might be true.’
She turned her head and looked at Videric.
Not as a wife looks at the husband she’s wronged; not as a sophisticated woman of the court looks at her husband in the socially embarrassing presence of an ex-lover. But plainly and simply for reassurance.
Videric stepped up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Too quietly to be heard but by her and me, he said, ‘You look the same as the day you turned twenty. Don’t expect anything but malice from this man.’
She half-turned her head, in a gesture that was triply graceful because unstudied, and rested her forehead against the lower part of Videric’s chest.
He looked down at her in the same way that a man looks at a wild animal that, for whatever reason, and for however long, trusts him far enough to touch her.
‘I ought to horsewhip you,’ Honorius ignored my stepfather and growled, taking a step forward. His only attention was for Rosamunda. ‘You tried to kill that baby—’
I stepped forward, interposing myself between them, just as Rosamunda cried out in outrage behind me:
‘You left me with the child!’
‘I would have taken you. I would have taken Ilario.’ His pain was bewildering to him, you could see it. After so long, he didn’t expect to hurt like this.
And if this wasn’t the first time in twenty-five years, perhaps he wouldn’t.
Honorius shook his head. ‘I remember your eyes as brown. They’re…not.’
‘It doesn’t matter how many brown-eyed wenches you tumbled,’ she snapped. ‘You’d never be the one with a big belly!’
My father looked frankly bewildered, and a little cross. ‘Women have been having babies since the world was made. You can manage as well as the others, can’t you?’
I raised my voice.
‘Father, you didn’t call me a whore for having got Onorata. I suppose I’m the only one here who can lay down as a man, and then get up with a child in my belly.’
That stopped the shouting.
What am I doing defending Rosamunda?
I saw how it defused something of the tension between them. There were still lines of force in the hall of the fountains, where desperate looks pinned people together: Honorius staring at Rosamunda, Rosamunda pressing her bound hands against Videric’s thigh, Rekhmire’ crossing the tiled floor and putting his hand on my shoulder.
His flesh was warm, heavy; and at once greeting and warning.
‘I never thought I’d see my mother and father together in the same room,’ I said.
Rosamunda stirred, a swathe of black hair coiled across her forehead and cheek where it fell down from her crown of braids. Her eyes flicked quickly from side to side. ‘Saints and Sacred Beasts! I was right. You have only to stand in the same room together, you two. My lord—’
The sudden appeal, turning her head and looking up at Videric, brought home to me as nothing else could that these two have worked together to plot their rise at court.
That for all the people see Videric as necessary to Rodrigo Sanguerra, Rosamunda has performed Christ knows how much of the unattributed work and support. And now we’re sending her away.
Rekhmire’ was my best choice. I touched his arm, drawing his attention. His skin was hot and a little sweaty. I said, ‘Find me a way that she doesn’t have to go into exile.’
All three of them looked at me: Honorius, Videric, and my mother. Honorius with the long-suffering bad temper that he evidently only just controlled, not leaping in to say, She birthed you, but that’s all; you owe her nothing! Rosamunda with the same puzzled bad temper with which she’d regarded me in Hanno Anagastes’ court.
Only Videric worried me. What he hid under that bland exterior was enough experience to guess more than I could about my impulse not to let my sometime-mother be imprisoned on Jethou.
‘Why am I to find an answer?’ Rekhmire’
sounded disgruntled, as well as still out of breath. ‘If you’re saying what I think, it seems a perfectly reasonable solution. It’s not as if an innocent woman is being condemned to captivity.’
Rosamunda interrupted without appearing to notice that the Egyptian spoke. Her eyes were fixed on Honorius. ‘You married, didn’t you?’
I caught Videric’s stifled surprise. I wondered if he was thinking what I was: I didn’t know she’d kept track of Licinus Honorius…
‘Who told you that?’ Honorius sounded more interested than annoyed.
‘After you came back and started to renovate the estate. There was a lot of gossip in the women’s court. One of my friends has a cousin who was married to–well, it doesn’t matter. But with the property, and their suspicion that you must have brought money back from Castile with you, there were enough of them with available daughters that they needed to know.’
She blinked, as if what took place in the women’s court had happened centuries ago, although it couldn’t have been more than twelve months.
‘Licinus, what did she die of?’
It sounded odd to me to hear him called that. Shifting uncomfortably on the hard floor, I thought, Why did he never invite me to call him by his personal name? Or did he think I was more comfortable with ‘Honorius’?
Honorius spoke with the reserve I associated with the man. You would not have known he and Rosamunda had been lovers–but then, I doubted they had, in more than the carnal sense.
‘Her name was Ximena. You’ve obviously heard,’ he added. ‘She died bearing our second child. Our first had died before it could be baptised. This one…’
‘Took her with it,’ Rosamunda completed. She lifted her tied wrists, smoothing her hair out of her pale face with the backs of her hands. ‘That would have been me. If I’d left with you. They say you had another wife before this Ximena. Did you kill her too?’
As dryly as a desert wind, Licinus Honorius observed, ‘You are well informed. I used to know better than to underestimate the Ladies’ Tower in any castle…No, Sandrine died of low-land sickness. She never carried a child long enough for it to distress her when it passed.’