by Mary Gentle
Ramiro Carrasco de Luis looked as thoroughly miserable as I have ever seen a man.
‘You’re right.’ He managed to achieve looking me directly in the eye. ‘Nothing honest can pass between a slave and a master. Anything I say, you’ll think I’m ingratiating myself through fear of punishment. I wouldn’t harm a child—’
Anger momentarily broke through, to be succeeded by despair.
‘—but you’ll think I say that for the same reason.’
I knew the secretary-assassin had not had particularly comfortable treatment in Venice; Honorius’s men, who would have treated a slave with some decency, set out to make the life of the man who had threatened their commander’s family a complete and total misery. The smallest things do it. A kick here, a spit in one’s dish there; an accidental knock into a canal, after telling tales of monster-or plague-infested waters. They might have done worse if Honorius had not had a quiet word with them. The old skills of slavehood led me to be in a place to overhear my father order that they should not maim or bugger or kill the man.
But that was all he ordered.
I studied the peeling red and callused finger that Onorata firmly gripped. No great wonder if the university-taught lawyer had sunk into himself; kept himself to menial duties with his eyes always cast down. But…
‘I saw you with Federico and Sunilda.’ I spoke quietly enough that I wouldn’t wake the baby. ‘I’d say you were an expert at ingratiating yourself with people.’
The frustration and despair on Ramiro Carrasco’s face was something I couldn’t sketch with my arms full of Onorata, and that was a shame.
How have I become so vindictive? I wondered.
Am I so jealous, if my child appears to love him better than she does me?
I wanted to claw at my chest through the thin linen; claw at the small breasts that–ache as they might–would give not even one drop of milk.
‘If I trusted you, I’d be a fool,’ I said.
‘So you would,’ a powerful tenor voice interrupted.
I looked up to see Rekhmire’ looming over Ramiro Carrasco. The Egyptian nodded to me. His gaze went to the finger that Onorata suckled on.
‘Get the rest of the baggage ready for disembarking,’ Rekhmire’ added.
The secretary-assassin removed his hand from Onorata with a gentleness that did speak of younger brothers and sisters. He instantly slid off through the crowd of sailors and soldiers without another word.
If he had his shirt and tunic off, I wondered, how many weals would I see on his back?
‘You can’t trust that man.’ Rekhmire’ gazed, not at me, but at the massive masonry walls of Constantinople harbour gliding past. They dwarfed the other ships anchored here in the Golden Horn.
His expression would have seemed impassive to someone who didn’t know him well.
Oddly enough, his overt bad temper reassured me. ‘You got out of the bunk the wrong side this morning…’
Rekhmire’ suddenly smiled at me. ‘It’s always a little nerve racking to see one’s superiors again. Who knows what I’ve failed to report back in the last half year or so?’
The idea of the large Egyptian being dressed down by his spymasters here in Constantinople…I smiled. ‘I’d like to hear that conversation.’
A sudden change came in the tone of talk around us. Rekhmire’ frowned. I glanced around. Attila and half the ship’s crew were looking over the port side of the boat—
No, every man looks in that direction.
Clasping Onorata, I elbowed my way back to Tottola’s side at the rail, the book-buyer in his familiar place beside me.
Ships lined the quays at the foot of Constantinople’s massive walls. The larger vessels anchored further out in the harbour. More of them moored here than there had been ships in Venice. Every kind of ship: cogs, dhows, bireme galleys. Warships.
At Venice, I missed the full-distance sight of the Sekhmet moored in St Mark’s basin. At Alexandria, now–I found it brought home to me that the Alexandrine navy consists of more than one trireme.
‘Six,’ I counted, and took unfair advantage of Tottola’s presence to tie Onorata’s sling firmly around his chest. I hauled prepared paper and silverpoint out of my linen purse, to sketch everything from the high sterncastle of the nearest trireme to its triangular prow sail.
Yes, it came from the same dockyard as the Sekhmet. But to see the ship all at once, whole…
Six–no, seven–of the narrow vessels rocked on the gentle swell in the harbour. Twenty-three paces from prow to stern, if they matched ours: better than a hundred and twenty feet. And a mere seventeen or eighteen feet wide. Narrow, knife-hulled vessels, with bronze nozzles pointing out of the dragon’s mouths at their prows. Oars spidering rhythmically into the sea…
Hand and eye moving between ships and paper, it took me a minute to notice that the smaller sails were set. On most of the triremes, a crew of oarsman was in evidence.
‘They’re not moored—’ I caught the line of one galley’s stern as she turned away from us: a heartbreaking beautiful swell up from the water, past the cabin ports, to the central stock of the rudder.
A few lines put in cargo cogs in the background, for the scale.
‘Do they patrol the harbour here?’
Rekhmire’ did not answer. I sketched the tracery of rope and sail against the sky, angry that I could not–because I did not know the use of each–draw it properly. If I had Mainz’s freedom about the ship, I would know every function.
I hatched horizontal lines for the hull’s reflection in the harbour and abandoned the page, turning to the next empty sheet, and the trireme that carried the lion-head of the Pharaoh-Queen on its mainsail. ‘That’s one big ship…’
At my ear, Rekhmire’’s voice sounded oddly.
‘No–no, it’s really not…’
I lifted my head from the page, and saw what he must be looking at. ‘That’s an interesting trick of perspective.’
Close at hand, a hull with a rack of masts rose up against the background of Constantinople’s walls as if it were a mountainside. A ship whose designation I didn’t know–not a galley, not a cargo-ship–but which some trick of distance and light made ten times the size of every other ship here.
Unimaginably huge…
I watched as one of the Alexandrine navy triremes rowed to pass far behind the evidently foreign craft.
Attila swore. ‘Christ Emperor!’
I leaned out, ship’s rail hard against my belly, healed wound forgotten. I stared into the light blazing up from the water.
Distantly I could hear the trireme’s drum beating the pace. The oars lifted, dipped, flashed drops of sea water—
And the trireme did not slide out of sight behind the close-at-hand ship.
It glided between us and it.
Not something that is small, close at hand, seeming large. Something large, far off, that is vast.
‘Not a trick.’ Rekhmire’ sounded stifled. His face showed blank shock.
As the ranked oars sent the trireme curving towards the stern of the foreign ship, I stared at the top of the trireme’s mainmast.
The very top of the mast did not reach as high as the foreign ship’s stern deck.
I judged a man standing in the crow’s-nest of the trireme would still find himself the height of a house below the foreign ship’s taffrail.
‘I–wait!’ I gripped Onorata almost too hard, finding myself with both arms wrapped protectively about her sling. ‘I remember—’
Memory came back with instant clarity. Cannon-metal grey skies. Storm-lightning and rain shining all but purple on the heaving Adriatic swell. And seen from the deck of the Iskander…
‘I’ve seen this before!’
Beating up against storm after storm in the Adriatic. And the sailors telling hushed rumours of…
‘Ghost ships.’ I breathed out. ‘That’s…’
‘Not a ghost,’ Rekhmire’ completed, his hand coming down warm on my shoulder
.
‘But it is a ship.’
My eyes no longer lied to me. The ghost ship was moored far out from the quays, almost in the centre of the harbour. Each of the Alexandrine navy galleys patrolled around it: around the great walls of wood that rose from the water. A blue-glass shadow echoed it, as deep again.
Now I saw it again as it was–and how I had seen it at sea. That vast assembly of bare wood, ranked stark as a winter forest against the sky, would hold lateen sails. Sails piled higher and higher, one row on top of another, each bellied out in a tight curve against the wind. I had seen rank upon rank of them, rising up against the storm.
In this clear morning light of Constantinople’s harbour, each spar showed the irregular edges that meant sails bundled and furled.
Below the masts was a great broad hull, with a flat prow. A hull that my eyes told me stood ten times longer, and five times higher, than any other ship in the harbour. The deck swarmed with men so tiny at this distance that I must believe the size of their ship.
As we inched past the ghost ship, I saw painted on the prow, in green and gold and red paint, a great spiked serpentine beast. Eyes were flat black-on-white discs, staring out across the Alexandrine waters and at us.
With shaking fingers, I made notes too rough to be of use. But copying the drawing of the serpent told me one thing.
Not in Iberia. Not in Carthage. Nor Rome. Nor Venice.
‘Not the Turks, either,’ I found myself murmuring aloud, thinking of the patterns woven into Bariş’s tunic. ‘I’ve seen much while searching out the New Art. That–that is nothing like any style of painting I’ve ever seen.’
9
Identical shock showed on each face. Honorius’s two men-at-arms, the ship’s sailors, Asru, Carrasco, Johannes Gutenberg. Rekhmire’.
Attila snorted out a protest. ‘They don’t build ships that big!’
Rekhmire’ frowned and muttered words which I finally distinguished as a list of shipyards. ‘Cyprus, Sidon, Tyre, Venice, Carthage, La Rochelle…’
He glanced up at the trireme’s captain, on the sterncastle. I could see the man shaking his head.
‘No. None of them.’ Rekhmire’ narrowed his eyes against the sun glittering off the water. ‘Menmet-Ra said nothing of this. It must have arrived recently, therefore. Within the last few weeks.’
‘Arrived here? You’re likely right—’ Onorata whined and mumbled. I stroked her cheek, hypnotised by the sight of the immense ship. ‘—but I think it’s been in the Middle Sea longer than that.’
My drawing had gone, destroyed by weather, but I could recognise what I had taken for delirium and trompe l’oeil, in the Adriatic sea.
Rekhmire’ tilted his head back. At this distance it was possible to pick out small figures of men on that impossibly high rail. Not possible to see any detail. He mused aloud, ‘It will be–interesting–to know how it came to be here.’
‘And if anybody can find out, you can!’
He gave me the same abrupt and undignified grin that he had sometimes gifted me with in Carthage.
It stayed quiet enough that I could hear ropes creaking overhead, and the sweeps groaning as the oars brought us steadily on towards our mooring place. The captain bellowed something obscene as our wake wavered, the rowers’ attention being all on the huge ship. I realised we were listing, every man who could lining the rail on this side of the ship.
I shaded my eyes with my free hand. ‘How many men would it take to crew something that size?’
‘It’s…remarkable.’ Lines creased Rekhmire’’s forehead; I could see them where his hand lifted his cloth veil as he tried to cut out the ambient light from sky and flashing wavelets. He looked back at me. ‘But, if I may say so–not our first concern. We have matters to take up with the Pharaoh-Queen. Although it might be useful, perhaps, to mention to her that you’ve seen this vessel months ago.’
Our ship drove on steadily towards the mountainous masonry of Constantinople. I realised I had the jumping frogs in my belly again.
The ghost ship. Yes. But…
Sooner or later, the Pharaoh-Queen will call me in to bear witness to what I saw in Rome.
When this city had been built by the Romans and Carthaginians, it was called Byzantium. The Franks called it ‘Constantinople’ after one of their emperors, and added monumental grandeur to the place. But it was the last of dynastic Egypt that had taken the city and changed it to New Alexandria, long centuries in the past, after the Turks overran the Egyptian homeland.
It looked nothing like the harbours of Frankish ports, or Iberia, or even Carthage. I stared out at the squares of the city, lined with great inscribed obelisks; temples with masses of clustered pillars under great roofs; and the bas-reliefs that ornamented buildings–painted bas-reliefs, bright as enamel—
I could do nothing but stare as we docked and were greeted. A bevy of bureaucrats stood by, awaiting the galley’s small boats. It occurred to me that if Menmet-Ra had sent messages indicating his success in finding the printer and the hermaphrodite, his messengers might have had better sailing than ours, and arrived here before us.
‘Come.’ Rekhmire’ touched my shoulder. ‘We’ll go up to the palace.’
The Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny, otherwise Ty-Amenhotep, Lord of the Two Lost Rivers and Ruler of the Five Great Names, stood around four foot six in her bare feet, and wore a beard.
She was barefoot, I saw; a pair of gilded sandals having been kicked off across the rush matting on the faïence-tiled floor, and she reached up and unhooked the false beard from her ears as the mute slaves showed us into her bedchamber. Sunlight streaming in through the linen-draped windows spot-lit the small, black-haired figure as she turned and beamed.
‘Rekhmire’! You’re back.’
‘Great Queen.’ Rekhmire’ lurched only slightly as he stepped forward, aided by his crutch. He bowed almost double, and put his free arm very gently around Ty-ameny, embracing her as one does a relative or close friend. ‘I’ve brought you Ilario, son-daughter of Licinus Honorius, who is lately Captain-General of the Frankish thrones of Leon and Castile.’
Ty-ameny nodded briefly, with a quick and bird-like movement. Her arms were thin but muscled, and showed ruddy under the half-sleeved white linen tunic she wore. A heap of brocade and cloth-of-gold on the bed, spilling down the sides of the dais, had the look of formal clothing–and the braided beard hit the top of the heap with some force.
‘I can do without one more formal audience!’ Ty-ameny dusted her hands, and put small fists on her hips. In a tunic that came down to her knees, and with matt-black hair cut in a curtain that fell below her waist, she looked something between the beggar children and fisher-girls down on the dock, and–because of the quality of the cloth–a great lady. She strode across the mats to where a sunken area of the floor was lined with marble benches, padded with silk cushions. She waved one arm at her slaves.
‘Good day to you, Freeborn Ilario.’ This in halting Iberian. ‘Please, sit. You should drink.’ She met my gaze with eyes that were black as sloes, and smiled. ‘Foreigners don’t drink enough in New Alexandria, and then we have to treat them for heat-stroke.’ Back in the Alexandrine Latin lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, she added, ‘Cousin Rekhmire’, Pamiu tells me you’ve had my witness with you for months.’
She used the familiar for ‘cousin’, rather than the formal. I raised an eyebrow at the Egyptian book-buyer, taking a seat on the low couch as I did so.
Rekhmire’ looked back at me, as innocently as any man might.
I wonder if Ty-ameny of the Five Great Names would mind if I kicked him on the ankle?
But I felt oddly cheered that he would tease me again, after the tension between us on the Sekhmet.
Slaves poured watered wine into golden cups, that were circled with cabochon-cut sapphires in the pattern called Horus-Eye. Rekhmire’ offered his hand to the Pharaoh-Queen, and with surprising grace led her to an individual small couch. She curled her bare feet up
under her as she sat down.
He shot me a glance as he thumped down onto the padded bench beside me, and smiled. ‘Fourth cousin; nine hundred and seventh in line to the throne of the Ptolemies. Were you wondering?’
Ty-ameny made a sound that, had she not been in her thirties and the ruler of a great city, I should have described as a snicker. ‘Has he been playing the humble scroll-purchaser again?’
‘Oh yes.’ I mentally rummaged through the rapid briefing he had dumped on me on the way up the Thousand Steps to the palace, while I was still more concerned with leaving my daughter yelling at Tottola. ‘Yes, Divine Daughter of Ra.’
She had all of her teeth still, and they showed white in the pale-vaulted room as she smiled. ‘What would it be in Iberia? “Aldra”–lord? “Altezza”–“Highness”? And every man in this room is higher than I am!’
Ty-ameny leaned forward, both her hands cupping one of the golden bowls, looking keenly interested.
‘A man-woman–what do you call yourself? Hermaphrodite? If you’d consent to it, there are natural philosophers here who would dearly like to speak to you, after this matter of Carthage’s gift is dealt with.’
Rekhmire’ spoke before I could get a word out.
‘No prodding!’
The Pharaoh-Queen’s kohl-lined brows shot up into her straight-cut fringe.
With an effort of will I kept I told you so out of my glare.
Ty-ameny loosed her cup with one hand, and slapped her knee. ‘Rekhmire’, what have you been telling her! Him. I’m sorry—’ She swivelled back to me. ‘Which do you prefer?’
‘Usually I go with what I’m dressed as, Altezza.’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘I suppose “he”; you’re most like our eunuchs, after all.’
Rekhmire’ said firmly, ‘No.’
‘No?’ Her brows went up again, and came down. There were a few minuscule golden spots on the reddish skin of her cheeks, I saw; like freckles. She bit at a thumbnail, and looked at me with a curiosity that was so frank I found it difficult to be offended. ‘I suppose not. You have both? And—’
