by Mary Gentle
Hearing a very little of the hollowness of that image in her tone, a shiver went down my spine. I thought of Alexandrine Constantinople’s thick walls reduced to rubble and dust–but their inheritance, a river of knowledge, flowing out first to all the quarters of the earth.
Ty-ameny beamed at the German.
‘We’ll need many of these machinae. I think I can persuade my council to give you whatever funds you need. How long will it take you to train apprentices?’
‘Herr Mainz’ was reduced to a burbling, beaming mess in the next few minutes. I moved to stand aside with Ahhotep by the vast masonry windows, and smiled. It’s pleasing to see someone get their heart’s desire.
‘Master Ilario.’ Ahhotep had his elbows on the window-ledge, the dawn’s brightness falling on his soft skin.
I followed his gaze. In that direction, I saw there was indeed an open square of sorts; a public plaza. Great wide steps led down to the city below–which made me conclude the squat black building that we faced, now, was that throne room of Ty-ameny’s where the golem stood.
‘Suppose,’ the tall eunuch muttered, ‘he has no time to set up printing machinae, because the stone monster has turned on the Pharaoh-Queen and killed her?’
I need not turn to look at Ty-amenhotep to remember how small she is, barely coming up to my breast.
All of us are that small in front of the stone golem.
‘Would Carthage dare kill your queen? Other kingdoms would condemn them—’
Ahhotep shrugged. ‘Evidently, if they can do it, they may do it.’
I protested, ‘And you won’t dispose of it, you won’t chain it up—’
Ahhotep indicated the direction of the harbour with one long clean finger. ‘Show ourselves afraid, and you’d see the Carthaginian fleet in the Bosphorus in a month!’
Frustration boiled up in me. I waved a hand at the library complex about us. ‘Old Egypt was always supposed to be the heart of occult knowledge. Don’t you have–I don’t know–ancient Egyptian magic! Can’t you bind the golem with invisible chains?’
Ahhotep looked at me as if I were a child. ‘“Magic”?’
Somewhat defensively, I muttered, ‘My child was born by Caesarean in Venice; there was a priest there who swore that was magic—’
‘Miracle,’ Ahhotep interrupted. ‘If I know Green priests. Miracle, not magic. Yes. The Franks do show a distressing capacity, on occasion, for circumventing what is possible.’
The eunuch stared thoughtfully at my lower abdomen, in the manner of a man pondering autopsies.
‘I suppose,’ he said diffidently, ‘you would not be willing to let me see your scar?’
Once here, with Rekhmire’’s favour keeping a roof over my head–and faced with a plain curiosity from Ahhotep that I must recognise from the mirror–matters seemed different.
‘Prod away,’ I offered, resignedly reaching for the fastening of my linen robe.
Ahhotep took me into one of the side-chambers of the gallery, making copious notes and little cries of excitement. I listened to Ty-amenhotep and Master Gutenberg, outside, discussing which manuscripts might best be set in type first.
I continued to worry obsessively at the matter of the stone golem.
14
I woke, finally, to Attila pacing the length of the immense chamber, soothing Onorata, singing some obscene song that he and his brother had concocted about ‘Admiral Black-Eyes’.
I can only pray for her to remember none of this when she grows up!
He supported my baby’s head well, but he walked up and down more roughly than I would have done. Every so often he stopped to show her bas-reliefs, and cartouches painted in red and blue on the walls. I was unsure she could see so far yet.
‘I’ll feed her,’ I offered, staggering up and seizing a robe.
Her body was warmly solid in my arms; it was no hardship to sit on a couch by the wide windows, with a towel thrown over me, and let her coo and slurp over the sloppy gruel that Carrasco thought should be her introduction to anything other than goat’s milk. Had we been going by the clock, it would have been an early evening meal.
The familiar drag and click of Rekhmire’’s crutches let me know he had come into the room. He paused beside me to brush his fingers over Onorata’s forehead.
Her translucent eyelids closed, hiding the blue of her eyes. They had begun to remind me of Honorius’s eyes, though not as pale and wind-washed as the man who had sat around far too many military camp-fires.
‘Ty-ameny would like you aboard the Admiral’s ship at least once more.’ He wiped his sticky hand on my towel, and smiled down at me. ‘If you’ll draw for her.’
‘Oh, I’ll draw.’
Rekhmire’ thudded down onto the marble bench edging the room, and unexpectedly held out his arms for Onorata. I put her into his lap, and began to clean up myself and my surroundings, while he sat among embroidered cushions telling her stories of Lion-Headed Sekhmet (who apparently punishes evil-doers), and Ra Son-of-the-Sun, and the steersman on the Boat of the Dead.
‘You don’t need to draw,’ he remarked. ‘The Queen would consider any request about Taraconensis from you on its own merits.’
‘I hope the brat pees on you,’ I observed. ‘And do you really think I don’t want to go back on Zheng He’s ship?’
‘I was unsure.’ He beamed up at me. ‘But at least, while I’m holding your child, you can neither hit me nor throw things at me!’
I considered the bowl holding remnants of Onorata’s food, narrowly dismissed the temptation, and by way of pointing out certain errors in the book-buyer’s reasoning, threw a cushion that missed my baby and caught him neatly on the ear.
Anyone who lives at court–King’s Freak, or merely in attendance on the ruling powers–knows the necessity for every least adviser to have his say. I watched Ty-ameny recede into a crowd of Constantinople’s eunuch bureaucrats over the next few days, on occasion taking Rekhmire’ with her. I confined myself to drawing on board Admiral Zheng He’s ‘war-junk’, as I understood him to call it, and left others to study the sketches.
I spent considerable time, when it was not too hot, on the city walls, and at the gates leading down onto the quays. Drawing gate-guards while I talked with them, and merchants; children playing complicated games with pebbles, musicians crouching in corners and playing for coins, sailors coming and going from the moored vessels. Onorata, under her cradle’s sail-cloth awning, seemed to take notice of the movement, I thought.
Neither Attila nor Tottola seemed adverse to duties involving sitting down. On occasion, both the German men-at-arms would accompany me. Attila sloped off to see the Alexandrine slave from the Sekhmet, Asru. Tottola, on his off-hours, seemed to be working his way through the palace kitchens.
Something over a week later, we walked back to the palace in time to sleep through the scarifyingly hot hours between one and five in the afternoon, and I found Rekhmire’ usefully present for conversation. He fell in beside me in the corridor, not having been out to Zheng He’s ship for two days, and consequently rested enough that he used a silver-handled stout stick instead of crutches.
‘Those twelve ships.’ I nodded in what would have been the direction of the harbour, if cartouche-strewn corridors and bright paintings of Ra and Horus and Sekhmet hadn’t got me turned around. ‘The Greek-fire ships. That’s all the Alexandrine navy, isn’t it?’
The Egyptian opened our chambers’ doors for me, and looked on while I put Onorata down to sleep. ‘I believe there are two the other side of the Bosphorus, patrolling Turkish shores.’
I crossed the room almost on tiptoe, so she would not wake and grizzle. Sprawling down onto the sunken bench beside Rekhmire’, I showed him a page of my sketchbook.
‘Some of your old cannon on the city walls are bound with leather.’
When barrels are cast, not poured, they soak leather and wrap it around the muzzle-loading brass cannon-barrels, so that they won’t burst with the first shot. I’d seen more than a few
at old fortresses in the Taraconensis hills.
I hated to think what Honorius would say if anyone expected him to fight without iron cannon.
‘You do realise?’ Rekhmire’ reached for the jug and glass standing beside him on the sunken seat. ‘That most visitors aren’t allowed to go where you go?’
‘I realise that either Ty-ameny implicitly trusts your opinion of me, or someone is going to put my eyes out with hot irons before I leave. In case I should draw images again, once I’m far from Alexandrine Constantinople.’
‘Ilario—’ He halted, Venetian glass of watered wine halfway to his lips. ‘She trusts my opinion.’
‘And now you can tell me why.’
‘I have long been loyal—’
‘No.’
On such occasions, mere reassurance in words won’t do; I saw him read that in me.
‘I won’t risk judicial mutilation just because you think your Queen trusts you, and by extension me. Why does she trust you?’
Rekhmire’ put his glass down. He reached for his stick, pushing himself up onto his feet. Before I could complain at his leaving, he laid the stick back down on the bench, and tugged at the belt holding up his linen kilt. He folded the cloth down before I could speak.
Against his ruddy skin, I saw an ancient white scar, as wide as three fingers, just above his hip.
‘Come here.’ He beckoned, and reached around to his back.
Half-turned away from me, he looked over his shoulder, and eased down the pale cotton.
I saw he had a corresponding scar on his back, a little larger and more jagged. Frighteningly close to his kidney.
‘I was big at fourteen.’ He didn’t readjust his linen wrap around his hips yet. ‘And Ty-ameny had just reached the size she is now, though we are the same age. She trusts me because the sword only went through me far enough to give her a purely decorative scar.’
Cold sweat dampened my tunic between my shoulders and under my arms.
‘You put yourself between her and a sword.’ A wide enough blade, by the injury. He would need an Egyptian physician to survive that! ‘It went through you…’
Rekhmire’ turned back around, facing me, and traced the white irregularity in his skin. ‘Some lord had very carefully chosen a number of the Royal Egyptian Guard who could be persuaded to revolt against their young Queen. I passed that information on, but didn’t trust the minister who said it would be dealt with. Ty-ameny…’
‘Decided you needed a career as a book-buyer?’
‘Something very like that.’
‘Well.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose my eyes are safe enough, then.’
The cold sweat didn’t go from my spine. Even jokes don’t make that thought easier.
I looked up at the large Egyptian. ‘I can see why Ty-ameny trusts you as she does.’
Rekhmire’ smiled sardonically. ‘I tell her it’s foolish. Just because a man takes a wound for you once, you can’t trust him the rest of his life! But she refuses to listen. I am…therefore careful about who I tell her I trust.’
That made me feel unaccountably warm.
Onorata interrupted from her cradle with a cough. I listened until I heard her even breathing resume.
‘She could die.’ I gave Rekhmire’ my hand to clasp, so he could sit down again with more ease. ‘That’s what wakes me up sweating at nights. Fever. Cold. Anything. Nothing.’
‘True enough. But she can also live.’ Rekhmire’ nodded towards the bench on the opposite side of the sunken area, at the failed egg tempera painting of Zheng He’s porcelain cup and those other drawings that littered the area–and would do until more of Ty-ameny’s bureaucrats came to remove them for study. ‘Remember your family is building up a debt. The Queen owes you much.’
I may have looked irritated.
Rekhmire’ sounded faintly apologetic. ‘You were in King Rodrigo Sanguerra’s court: I need not tell you any of this. When the moment comes, then you ask.’
‘What do I ask for? “Would Constantinople like to step in and sort out the court of Taraco?” No! Would King Rodrigo like that? Frankly—’ I bit my lip as Onorata grumbled in her sleep, and added, much more quietly, ‘Frankly, no! And it would be a direct provocation to Carthage.’
Rekhmire’ nodded, and ground the heel of one large hand against his eye and socket.
He surveyed the resulting smudge of kohl on his skin with disapprobation.
‘First things first. You may come to the next council,’ he added, not very much as though it were a suggestion.
‘How long before Queen Ty-ameny deals with the Admiral and his ship?’
I did not add, And can listen to pleas for help from book-buyers’ assistants? since the renewed accord between Rekhmire’ and I seemed to make that redundant.
‘A week or so. Certainly before the end of this lunar month.’
15
The smell hung heavy in the air, rich in the back of my throat where I couldn’t choke it away.
It was a hot climate, for all the stone walls about us. Necessity put us on the Library’s upper floors, to get the natural light. But that made this hotter than the earth-insulated cellars.
‘Shall I turn that over for you?’ The philosopher Bakennefi nodded down.
It is hardly the first dead body I’ve seen.
Not even the first body cut to pieces. I once managed to attend a public dissection in the university at Barcelona, along with two hundred other students, in the hopes of discovering what those lumps and bumps one sees while drawing the human body actually are, under the skin–and what they look like when there is no such surface.
Perhaps, I thought, it’s that this small old man was obviously a slave.
Masaccio said that in the same way one can’t draw robes without knowledge of the body underneath, it’s not possible to draw skin without knowledge of muscle, tendon, ligament, bones.
‘Yes: turn him.’ I managed to get the words out without bringing up the bile at the back of my throat.
Bakennefi carefully turned over the dead man’s skinned hand.
I set about drawing the uncovered tendons and muscles of the palm.
This Bakennefi was Bakennefi Aa, ‘eldest’, out of the three brother Royal Mathematicians who ran this department, along with Bakennefi Hery-ib (‘he who is in the middle’) and Bakennefi Nedjes (‘small’). He had a watercolour of the autopsy in progress on the vast stone slab beside him. He painted it as delicately as if the dead body were a book opened for his enjoyment. There seemed to me to be little connection between the carefully-labelled bright organs and the slithery mass in the opened belly. But that may have been because I deliberately avoided looking closely.
I swatted at one of the ever-present flies.
The hum of the swarm was loud enough that a man had actually to raise his voice to be heard, despite the twenty or so slaves with fans waving the air above the stone slab clear.
Bakennefi Aa gave a last prod at the opened palm with his iron-hafted pen. ‘Do you know, I think this one’s done with? He’s a little more past his time than I imagined.’
Sheer cowardice made me turn away and set about putting brushes, reeds, scrapers and paints away with my chalk in the leather snapsack. If I had to hear the sounds of the cloth being wrapped around the dissection body, and smell the sudden wash of stink as slaves lifted it, at least I need not look.
And the worst thing is that these drawings will be invaluable to me.
‘You are good.’ Queen Ty-ameny’s light voice spoke behind me. I startled hard enough to drop a brush.
‘I wonder you don’t ask me for a commission,’ she added.
Scrabbling hurriedly on the Library’s marble floor, I stood up again, clutching the brush, flushed. Ty-ameny was standing on her toes looking at my painting. She glanced at me for an answer to her implied question.
‘Why not?’ She wore a simple linen tunic edged with purple, and her black eyes looked brightly at me. ‘Why wouldn’t you ask? I might agre
e.’
I stuttered, ‘I grew up in a court, Aldro.’
No matter how small and provincial it might have been.
‘There are always factions in a court,’ I added, packing the brush away in its wooden box, and slipping that into my bag. ‘Aldro Ty-amenhotep, I’ve been used to being next to a King, most of my adult life. Not that I had any power in Taraco. But even a Fool who has the King’s ear gets courted.’
‘Perhaps even more so.’ Ty-ameny grinned, and tilted her head up, watching me. As if it were a familiar story, she murmured, ‘Pay attention to any one man, and before you know it, you’re on one side, and there are other sides, all of whom have reason to hate you. And whoever you listened to first, they don’t trust you. I wondered,’ she added, ‘why you’ve stood so much in my cousin’s shadow while you were here.’
I couldn’t help a smile in response to hers. Rekhmire’ wasn’t liable to give his loyalty to a stupid ruler.
‘I’m too used to being a King’s—’ pet. I chose a better word. ‘—associate. Kings don’t awe me. That’s sometimes unfortunate. Other lords have found me disrespectful in the past, because of what I’m used to. And any court faction you like to mention thinks I can be bribed or threatened. I find it better to stay in the background, where I can’t give offence.’
The buzz of flies diminished, most of them giving up now and circling to find the open stone windows. Two slaves remained, waving fans made out of huge white feathers, and concealing the kind of relieved boredom that comes with not being ordered to any dirty or difficult task.
Ty-ameny walked over to the window, her thin arms folded across her chest. Gold bracelets flashed back points of light that left dots across my vision. She gazed out at the blue sky–at the sun she gravitated towards, I suddenly realised, at any moment she might.
‘Divine Father Ra!’ she muttered, either in prayer or exasperation. ‘Ilario…You’ve done good work for me with Zheng He. As one of my court painters, here, you could afford to keep your daughter.’
Having occasionally had an oak door slammed in my face, I recognise that feeling of shock. Even if this is from a door opening.
