The Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

  8

  Winter has not ever been my favourite season–at Federico’s old estate, it meant feet continually numb in freezing mud; at Rodrigo’s court, if fires burned in great brick hearths big enough to stable a horse, and I had boots, still, there was more venomous gossip around the Yule fireside than at any of her time.

  Now I watched for spring’s signs with terror.

  If they come for me, and this family I have here, who will look after my child?

  Even if she survives, she’ll become a foundling in turn.

  Trees, such as they are in Venezia, remained reassuringly bare of branch. But close inspection showed buds on every twig of the hazel beside S. Barnaba, thick and swelling, even if with no green at the tips yet. Travellers crossing the S. Marco square wore the clothes of Greece, Turkish Tyre and Sidon, Malta, and every other port from which further ships daily arrived. The Merceria was piled high with goods of all kinds, the scarcities and excuses of past weeks forgotten as if unspoken. People walked with heads up, their backs not stooped over into biting winds, although the sea-cold still drove into our bones.

  Rekhmire’ was out every day, rowed up and down this canal and that, trying for news on whether seas to Constantinople were traversible yet. Or whether any man had seen a Herr Mainz, late of the Germanies. Attila taught him a phrase or two to speak to the few northern men in Venice. Travelling by gondola or other boat kept Rekhmire’ from putting his weight on his injured knee. He still came back to the embassy swearing–although whether physical pain occasioned this, or frustration, I couldn’t say with certainty.

  ‘Just when I could do with Neferet’s salons,’ he grumbled, one day without cloud, when I noted it stayed light into the early evening. ‘Your father can provide me with an introduction to Captain Carmagnola, but outside of the military world…I have never known a man so uninterested in politics!’

  That was frustration. I grinned. ‘Can I draft a reference from you? Rodrigo would like to know his throne’s safe, I’m sure.’

  ‘Safe from your father!’ Rekhmire’ grunted, and dug the tips of his fingers hard into the misshapen muscle about his right knee. He still wore Turkish trousers, on the excuse of cold; I had come to the conclusion that it was he who didn’t wish to see his healing injury. The Egyptian added, ‘He may be distracted from that–it’s conceivable that King Rodrigo Sanguerra may have foreign troops on the Via Augusta before July…’

  Even when I set foot in Carthage first, under the hissing naphtha lights, I was obscurely comforted by the thought that Taraconensis lay behind me in all its familiarity. I might desire not to be in that kingdom, but it was reassuring to know my past lay untouched behind me. The thought that it might change–all of it–and the men of Carthage march north and take control…

  ‘Nothing may happen until next year,’ Rekhmire’ murmured. I knew he saw me concerned.

  ‘Assuming we see next year.’ I shrugged. ‘There’s no arguing against geography–it will be possible to take a ship from Taraconensis to Italy before it’s safe to sail from Italy to Constantinople. If Videric sends another Carrasco, or more men like those on Torcello island…how long before they can get here?’

  Rekhmire’ frowned, recognising the rhetorical question. ‘You could persuade nothing out of Lord Federico before he departed?’

  Two of Honorius’s more disreputable-looking men-at-arms had followed Federico and Valdamerca and my foster-sisters to the mainland, undetected as far as it was possible to judge. Whether Federico was indeed planning to head over the Alpine passes when they opened, or whether he would go elsewhere, he was not seen to take any road that led in the direction of Iberia.

  ‘I think he was telling the truth–he is done with this.’ I looked about for my roll of cloth with charcoal wrapped in it. ‘I wish I might say the same.’

  My fingers desired to draw. There was a thought in my mind, but I could not see the shape of it. I went for my sketchbook, to study Onorata again while she was blessedly asleep in her cot beside the fire, and see if my mind would work while my fingers were occupied. Rekhmire’ talked while I looked into the tiny face, transferring the shadows to paper

  It could be twelve or thirteen years before I know. Before we know. Whether she gets her menses, or not. Whether she changes, and becomes like me–although I was always both. But fear hangs over her, nonetheless, with me for an inheritance. What is she?

  I reached down, adjusting her woollen blanket, and pictured Neferet and Leon sailing to the mainland. The long road they would have to travel. And at the end of it, there are Masaccio’s friends: Brunelleschi, Donatello, other names he often mentioned while I sat as St Gaius and listened to him detail their work in sculpture and architecture.

  I carefully drew the line of my child’s lip–and by the end of it, an idea appeared full-blown in my head.

  Refusing Honorius’s company in a way that he would accept was not easy. Likewise that of Rekhmire’, despite his difficulty walking. On the excuse of shopping for a better quality of chalks, I managed to get their agreement that I would go accompanied by the two largest men of the guard: Attila and Tottola, of course.

  Honorius reminded me, in their hearing, as I walked down with him to the gondola at the landing stage. ‘That weasel-eyed bastard Federico may still change his mind and come back! He may think his quickest way to favour is to travel back to Taraco with your pickled corpse in a barrel.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I blinked. ‘A charming image!’

  Attila lumbered down into the blue-painted wide gondola, gripping each side in hands the size of hams. His brother paused–and offered me a helping hand down onto the stern bench.

  I waved, eyes tearing up in the cold wind, and the gondola crept out of the Dorsodura quarter, and into the busyness of the Grand Canal.

  9

  With Tottola and Attila at my shoulder, I followed the guard down into the lower rooms and dungeons of the ducal palace.

  It was clear why the Doge Foscari wanted to rebuild the palace. The lower we went down, the more the stone steps glistened with water and the walls with white nitrous deposits. A damp cold crept into my bones. I pulled my fur-lined cloak more securely around my shoulders.

  There was a reason why I was wearing silk and brocade and was evidently warm–Honorius’s soldiers might think it a desire to aspire above my social station, but it was not.

  ‘Here,’ the jailer said, unlooking a tiny iron-barred wooden door, with a squeal of ungreased metal. I put coins into his hand, and ducked low to enter. Attila muttered something at my back–he had not liked their swords being kept at the guardhouse before we were allowed into the dungeons.

  ‘You’re lucky this one’s still here,’ the jailer added. He was a plump man, with laughter-lines about his eyes; I could imagine him patiently playing with grandchildren, or explaining duties to a slow apprentice. The complete blank failure to register the men chained to the walls, I suppose one develops as a consequence of such work.

  ‘Lucky,’ he repeated, thumbing the small coins in his palm, and holding the door to with his other hand. ‘When he come in, his head was all swole up; then he had a fever.’

  Head swollen.

  The sounds came back to me with hallucinatory clarity: Honorius’s men striking him in righteous anger, dragging him down the stairs.

  I am not the only one to have struck him on the skull, and that jug was heavy enough to crack bone.

  I do not feel guilty.

  The jailer stressed, ‘Hot as anything, he was. If I hadn’t taken pity and brought him water…That’s why he’s still here, see? No man wants to move him when he’s got jail-fever, it’s the risk they might get it.’

  I stepped forward, towards the door. Another ducat made its way from my fingers to the middle-aged man’s hand.

  More cheerfully, he said, ‘Tough little bugger, though! He was dizzy and falling over and raving for a week; it would have killed another man. Here.’

  The jailer swung the oak door open,
and I saw it as thick through as a man’s hand is wide.

  Muttering, the jailor felt in his pockets for flint and tinder-box, and set about lighting the torches in the cell. A curve emerged from the darkness: became a man’s back, where the man slumped on straw on the floor. For several minutes I watched.

  Ramiro Carrasco de Luis did not raise his head.

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ I said.

  He turned over, at last. I saw comprehension on his face.

  Hoarsely, he said, ‘Ilaria…You were a slave. You know what it’s like to be chained up like a dog.’

  ‘And now you know, too.’

  The torchlight showed me his face clearly enough. His bruises were mostly healed. Fading scabs still covered the cuts; the swelling had finished going down over his right eye. Under his prison-filthy clothes, I suspected there would be other injuries; a cracked or broken rib or two, now probably healed.

  Ramiro Carrasco rasped, ‘Not so pretty to draw, now?’

  ‘You’d be more interesting to draw now,’ I said truthfully.

  He flinched as I stepped near to him.

  I wondered: Have you begun to learn what can happen to a man in a prison?

  ‘…Although I don’t know if I could use you for the beaten Christus Imperator in the same panel as St Gaius.’

  Another flicker of expression that was almost a flinch. Painfully, slowly, he got to his feet. As he straightened up, I thought he might be doing it simply to stand taller than I was, and not be intimidated.

  He blinked at me. I saw him realise that we were much of a height.

  ‘I thought you’d come for a look.’ He attempted a glare of moral superiority. ‘Poke a stick through the bars.’

  He spoke with his gaze on me, ignoring the jailer and Attila and Tottola as if they were not present. I admired that attempt at dignity.

  ‘You think I’m petty enough to want to see the man who tried to kill me chained up in his own filth?’

  That wasn’t quite accurate: the cell had basic facilities of straw and a chamber-pot. But Ramiro Carrasco coloured up all the same; I saw that clearly in the torchlight. To paint a blush in that light would require skill.

  ‘I would.’ Carrasco shrugged. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t. I’m as petty as the next…woman,’ I specified, remembering the jailer behind me. ‘You put a pillow over my face. I was terrified. I don’t much mind seeing you here, terrified yourself.’

  ‘I’m not afraid!’

  He might be speaking the truth. What I saw, if I looked as close as an artist can, was not necessarily fear. It was very like the desperation I had seen in his eyes as he pushed me back against the bed. But mixed with hopelessness, now.

  ‘Why did you want to kill me?’

  He scrubbed his fingers through his curly hair, each as filthy as the other. ‘I didn’t want to!’

  And that is the truth.

  The realisation surprised me. I caught Ramiro Carrasco’s eye, and the half-sardonic and half-frightened look there.

  A smugness, at having told me a truth he thinks I will dismiss out of hand.

  And something that isn’t fear of execution, or exile, or dying in jail.

  ‘Why did you try?’ I ticked it off on upraised fingers just protruding from the fur of the cloak, wrapped warm around me in this freezing prison cell. ‘Near to the Riva degli Schiavona. In the gondola. Across the lagoon, on Torcello. You tried, certainly.’

  Temper slashed in his tone. ‘I’ve been convicted! What more do you want?’

  ‘I want to know why.’

  I turned away for a moment, guiding the jailer aside, speaking quietly enough that I knew Carrasco couldn’t hear me. The man nodded and left.

  Turning back, I found Ramiro Carrasco with a face that stress and helplessness made white and drawn.

  I held his gaze.

  ‘Are you a man who can kill because he’s promised money? I talk to my father about that. When he has peasant levies to train…it takes time to make a man kill another man. You have to brutalise him. Convince him that the man he’s killing isn’t human. You can make professional soldiers out of some men. Most of them still vomit their stomachs empty, after a battle. But…some men have no knowledge here,’ I put my palm against my abdomen, ‘that any other man is real. So they can kill without thinking about it. Sometimes they look like kind grandfathers.’

  I didn’t look to see if the jailer had returned. And was quietly glad that Onorata’s grandfather has never become inured enough to the sight of a battlefield that he doesn’t, even now, spend some nights not daring to go back to sleep.

  Ramiro Carrasco stared away from me, into the darker corners of the cell. I reached out and turned his head towards me. He appeared surprised at the force I could exert.

  I said, ‘You haven’t that capacity. Which, for an assassin, is perhaps unfortunate.’

  He only shivered. I thought he might protest against ‘assassin’, but he merely gave me a look as full of hot hate and rage as any I’ve seen. Behind me, Tottola stretched himself in unsubtle warning.

  I asked, ‘Why did you do what Videric told you?’

  At the name of my father–my mother’s husband–he first flinched and then laughed.

  ‘Get out of here.’ His voice had a harsh undertone in its whisper. ‘You’ll get nothing out of me.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I know Videric wants me dead. I know why. I know it was Videric who sent you with Federico so that you could get close to me. I know there was more than one man with you, and I know they didn’t get further than Genoa. I know Videric will send other men, now you’re out of it, because he really does need me dead. No, I don’t need you to tell me any of that.’

  Ramiro Carrasco de Luis blinked in the light of the torches. He wiped his wrist across his mouth. Sweat, smeared away, left whiter skin displayed. A waft of unwashed body smell came to me when he lifted his arm.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He was careful not to phrase anything as agreement with me. ‘If you don’t want to know anything, why are you asking me? What are you asking me?’

  ‘Why you’d try to do it. Try to kill me. Why you feel you have to.’

  I saw decision on his face.

  He spoke again, in a dialect common in the hill close to the Pyrenees, which was unlikely to be understood much outside of Taraconensis, and his bright eyes watched me to see that I comprehended:

  ‘It was a choice between you and my family.’

  The simplicity of his statement was at odds with the ferocious contained emotion behind his eyes.

  ‘I’m the first of my family to go to university.’ He spread his hands, mocking himself. ‘I have a lawyer’s degree! My mother and father, my brothers, my cousins and their parents, they’ll all serfs, still. Tied to the land. Owned by the man who owns the estates.’

  No need to ask his name.

  ‘You will think it very little of an excuse.’ Ramiro Carrasco spoke sardonically. ‘Nor would I, in your place–what are twenty people you don’t know, compared to your own life? But I know. I know my mother Acibella de Luis Gatonez; Berig Carrasco Pelayo, my father; my brothers Aoric and Gaton, and my sister Muniadomna…my uncle Thorismund…my grandmother Sancha…And I don’t know you. Why should I care about some freak?’

  He spat the last word. I looked at him.

  The hatred comes from helplessness. From being arrested, charged, imprisoned; locked away from being able to kill one Ilario Honorius. And knowing that, because of that…

  ‘Blackmail’s very like being a slave,’ I said, into the cold silence of the dungeon. ‘They can kill your parent or your child, or sell them away from where you are. There are never as many slave revolts as you’d think there would be. That’s one of the reasons why. Do you know how long he’ll wait without hearing from you?’

  The question caught him by surprise. Carrasco shook his head before he realised. ‘It’s not–there’s not—!’

  I ignor
ed the stuttered denials of something it was too late to deny.

  The same odd feeling of fellowship came back to me. It is no wonder I could never hate this man. I nodded, absently, thinking, Perhaps this will not be so unpleasant to you–or perhaps you will find it unbearable.

  I heard the jailer returning, grunting as he carried a weight down the passage. The torch showed him with tools in his hand, and a small block of steel-topped wood under his arm.

  I took a leather bag of coins out of my cloak’s inner pocket and passed them over.

  ‘Do it here,’ I said.

  The jailer looked a little uncertain. I signalled to Attila and Tottola. Having spoken to them on the way, they knew what I wanted. Of all of us in the cell, I saw an expression of surprise only on the face of Ramiro Carrasco.

  The two soldiers picked up Carrasco and held him down, bent over the anvil. Hands in Carrasco’s hair held him stretched rigid. The jailer slid a slave’s collar around Ramiro Carrasco’s neck and cold-hammered a rivet home.

  ‘This isn’t legal!’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ I watched, arms folded, the cloak warmly wrapped about me. ‘But Venice has always been able to put prisoners and captives of war into her galleys as slaves. It’s legal to buy a prisoner as a slave in Venice. Provided you don’t stay on Frankish territory. Perhaps they didn’t mention that when you studied law? It’s true all the same.’

  He couldn’t struggle in the two men’s grip, but it didn’t stop him trying. ‘Why do you want me enslaved? What use am I as a slave?’

  He hasn’t realised what has happened to him, even though the collar is now around his neck.

  Some don’t. I have seen men whipped until the blood runs before they realise that their freedom has gone. That they’re property. I wondered what it would take to make it clear to Ramiro Carrasco de Luis.