by Mary Gentle
Rosamunda’s expression held a great deal of doubt on that point; I supposed mine might, also. And, to my surprise, Rekhmire’ looked as if he would have spoken, under other circumstances.
‘Ilario is my only living son or daughter.’ Honorius raised a brow, still with his gaze on Rosamunda. ‘In fact, both son and daughter—’
‘And like all men, you wanted an heir. A true son.’ Rosamunda looked dissatisfied.
‘Not all men,’ I said. ‘And you of all people should know that! Since you’re standing between two men who prove different to that.’
Rosamunda sighed.
For the first time, she looked at me without dislike; only with a tired melancholy that made me truly believe her a handful of years past forty.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t help. Two of you…It means nothing, not when everybody else is different. Ilario, don’t let them do this to me.’
I caught Rekhmire’’s glance. With an acknowledging look to my father and my stepfather, I touched Rekhmire’’s arm, and drew him closer to the fountain, where the noise of the falling water would obscure what we said if we spoke quietly.
‘It’s what every man wants,’ he said. ‘Your enemy, dependent on your actions. Ilario…don’t let it prove too intoxicating. And remember how very much people dislike being done a good turn.’
‘I remember helping you with your knee,’ I said acidly. ‘You still owe me for my patience, book-buyer.’
Rekhmire’ grinned at me.
I stopped smiling. ‘Be honest with me. What is it I’m not seeing? And–is there any alternative, for her? It must have happened before; she can’t be the only wife any man has ever been vulnerable through.’
‘My lord Videric moves in the same circles as royalty, now, since he’s as necessary to Taraconensis as people think he is. We’re not discussing a minor nobleman and Carthage wheedling out occasional secrets. If she can be adequately threatened, the Fourteenth Augusta and Third Leptis Parva sail for Gades, and come marching up the Via Augusta to Taraco. The King-Caliph’s talking of a reconquista, now; of taking Iberia back into the Carthaginian Empire…Taraconensis wouldn’t be their ideal foothold, but it would give Carthage a land-border with the Franks. Somewhere to mass their legions, before they send them against Europe. King-Caliph Ammianus and Hanno Anagastes will take advantage of anything to get them through that gate. They won’t kill Aldro Rosamunda–she’s too valuable as blackmail–but they will take her and hurt her, if they can find her. And then set her free to come back to Aldra Videric, with the knowledge that they’ll maim her worse the next time. It’s easier to think of someone dying than it is to think of caring for them when they come home with their eyes gouged out, or half their skin flayed away…’
The shimmering cold water of the fountain was all that held me from vomiting. Cold, clear, clean. The sick sweat left my forehead after a while. I rested the palms of my hands against the cold marble.
‘And we can’t guard her?’
‘You should know the answer to that, Ilario.’
Any guard that’s strong enough to keep her safe is strong enough to make a prisoner out of her. And even if she were in Rodrigo Sanguerra’s deepest dungeon, a servant or a slave would know where she was, and could be bribed into telling. Often for what would seem like a ridiculously small sum, if you’re not the slave or servant.
Faith is a better barrier. Faith will keep Sister Maria Regina shut off from the mundane world, in communities where bribery means nothing. Because anyone who will live willingly on Jethou doesn’t want anything the world can offer.
I stepped away from the arch.
Videric bent, cut her bands, and half-lifted his wife to her feet, urging her forward.
Rosamunda looked over her shoulder at me, on her way to the door.
‘You don’t understand.’ She spoke quietly, frowning; I felt for the first time that she was straining to make me understand, rather than justify herself. She said, ‘If no one buys you–if you’re a slave and you’re manumitted–then you’re free.’
I was confused. ‘Well, yes.’
She smiled. It was sad. ‘Odd, that you should have given birth to a child, and still think like a man. Ilario, you’re not legally a woman. Your father can’t marry you to a man against your will and desires.’ She glanced at Honorius. ‘For a good match, or because he thinks it would be better for you. And if you take a man as a lover, he can’t legally put you aside for not having babies as and when he wants them. I know you have none of the legal protections of being a man. You were made a slave as soon as that Valdamerca woman took you off the chapel steps. But if you’d been all girl, you would have been a slave as soon as you left my womb. Do you understand that?’
‘Not truly.’ I couldn’t do anything else but be honest. ‘Legally, I suppose I’m not a woman.’
‘No,’ Videric said. ‘According to the Kingdom’s best lawyers, you are, in fact, a eunuch.’
‘What—’ I began.
‘I know.’ Videric cut me off. ‘It’s the nearest definition they do have. Ilario…I know you don’t wish to hear advice from me. I can’t say I blame you. But the last thing you want is any legal taint of womanhood about you–trust me, Ilario.’
The look I gave him must have pierced even his hide. He appeared to wince. Or perhaps it was indigestion.
‘It would alter your relationship with your father.’ His nod at Honorius was civil, if not warm. His gaze travelled to Rekhmire’. ‘And your husband, should you marry a man. That knowledge that you have absolute legal power over your wife…it follows you everywhere, do you understand me? Everywhere. If she can’t say no, her yes is worth very little.’
Caught between sympathy and distaste–for both of them–I countered Videric with a stare very like his own. ‘I understand you. All I need do is imagine being a slave whom no man can free.’
‘Precisely.’ He nodded agreement, as if unaware of any ironies.
Rekhmire’ demanded coldly, ‘Why were you making such inquiries?’
Videric inclined his head to me.
‘You’re not female.’ He smiled. ‘I had the lawyers look into it…If I could have you declared female, you would–as my publicly acknowledged child–belong to me.’
Before I could get a word out, Honorius cut in, in a tone like a stonemason sawing marble. ‘Ilario is of my begetting, and would belong to me.’
Rekhmire’, as urbanely as ever, put one monumental hand up. ‘My claim pre-dates the court of Taraco–I bought and owned Ilario; Ilario would therefore be mine.’
The only true woman in the room, Rosamunda, looked up and caught my eye. ‘I gave birth to you, but there’s no way you’d belong to me!’
‘Christus and St Gaius and Kek and Keket…!’ I shook my head, even if it did make me feel cold inside. I eyed Videric warily. ‘When you say I would belong to you—’
‘Your money or property would be mine, if Master Honorius or any other client—’ He stressed the word. ‘—paid for a painting. It would go into my treasury; you couldn’t touch it. You would need my permission to travel, if you wished to study under another master. I could order you in what you wear, where you go, what you eat or drink, who you may speak to.’ He shrugged. ‘And beat you if you disobeyed, despite your being past the age of majority. It’s arguable that, as a woman, the male age of majority wouldn’t apply to you.’
The silence was one in which I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, deafening me.
Videric gave another shrug. ‘But they seem to feel that a membrum virile, however small, qualifies you as a male. There’s also the rumour that you fathered a child–that bastard that Carrasco acts as nursemaid to. I believe that carried weight with the justices.’
Fathered a child.
I didn’t blink.
My mother looked at me. At Rekhmire’. Back at me.
She smiled sadly.
‘There are men who don’t want the law to apply. But that really doesn’t matter,
does it? It’s the ones who do want it that matter, and then it’s there for them, in all their dusty old scrolls, and there’s no fighting it. Of the girls I went to school with, all but five are dead now. And ten of them died in childbed. The men are on their third wives.’
She studied me with finality.
‘I suppose that it doesn’t matter if you have the breasts to give suck, and the womb to carry a child–you have a penis. And no matter how small it may be, it may not make you a man, but it makes you not a woman.’
‘Sadly, that avenue is closed to us.’ Videric took Rosamunda’s arm. ‘And it remains to see what we may do, now.’
20
Rosamunda looked down intently at his hand, not moving forward as directed.
She spread the fingers of both her tethered hands, directing a searching glance at the skin there. Some thought tugged at the corner of her mouth. I could not tell what she felt.
‘When I was a girl…’ She made fists of her hands, regarding them as if their acts entirely surprised her. ‘…I used to keep a knife and cut my skin.’
She turned her head without raising it, and the light caught the surface of her eyes, obliterating iris and pupil, glimmering white in the sun. She was looking at me.
‘I always wanted to cut my face,’ Rosamunda said plainly. ‘Ever since a man put my hand on his belly when I was twelve, and showed me how it made his male organ stand up. But I saw that plain and ugly women had worse marriages, and worse lives. I thought I’d grow up to marry a rich man, and then take lovers as it pleased me.’
She made a kind of snort, as if of amusement, but there was something wrong in the note of it. ‘Then I did take a lover, and I found out what happened when a man’s potent. The birth nearly killed me. The pain…And I came so close to child-bed fever. I could have died at the age of twenty. There is a reason I never left with your father, Ilario, although it’s not the one he thinks. I realised that if I left and married Honorius, I could expect to conceive every year–perhaps only every two or three years, if I put the child to my own breast. The women’s court talk about ways to stop conceiving a child, but most of them become big-bellied all the same. And then it’s as dangerous to be rid of it as it is to carry and bear it. The brothers and sisters you never had, Ilario; they would have killed me…’
Her head came up: she addressed Videric without any pretence or seduction.
‘If I’d already been married to you for five years, and it had taken another man to get me pregnant, I thought I’d be safe with you–so I stayed. If Ilario had been an heir, that would have been perfect. You couldn’t have asked anything more of me. While there were no children…I wanted you to love me. There was nothing else to keep you from putting me aside. Then my father would have married me off to some other, much poorer, man; because he at least knows the bull is sometimes as much at fault as the cow. A garden can’t grow if the seed is rotten.’
Videric’s face was patched carmine and a colour like spoiled milk.
Rosamunda said quietly, ‘I never did take another lover, after Honorius, despite what the Court of Ladies may say. It isn’t difficult to flirt and seduce and then be uncomprehending at just the right time…And I had you, for the marriage bed, and I wasn’t afraid of starting a child, and so I…began to enjoy it. I liked my life. It was perfect. When I saw what my child had grown up to be, I knew I could never have raised 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 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 yo
u 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.
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.
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.