The Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

Out of respect, the man put back his hood. It left his sun-reddened face exposed to the courtiers, with the white strip of skin where he had covered his eyes with cloth.

  His tight expression suggested him aware of the comic tone of his appearance.

  The man’s features, which would otherwise have been handsome, tugged at my awareness.

  Rummaging in one sleeve, I pulled out a folded sheet of paper and a remnant of willow-twig charcoal. The palace laundry could be excused for complaining at me, I reflected, while I looked up and back, up and back, marking the values of the ambassador’s face on the paper.

  With the tones and shape broadly in place I studied the sketch, while the initial diplomatic niceties droned on. And dabbed at the charcoal, smoothing it to a paler grey where I had drawn his hair in its long single braid.

  With pale hair, that suddenly seemed like the white of old age, the face of Hanno Anagastes stared off the paper at me.

  Under the drawing, I scrawled, Younger son of House of Hanno???, beckoned a page, and sent the boy off with it to Rekhmire’. As I watched him thread his way through the press of bodies, the ambassador’s pleasantly resonant baritone rang through the throne room.

  ‘I have a question for the great Pharaoh-Queen. Why do you consort with that ship of demons?’

  Ty-ameny must love her ceremonial mask, I thought. No change was visible in her small figure, sitting with her gold sandals neatly together on a footstool set on the throne’s step. Without a view of her features, her body was impassive.

  The Carthaginian diplomat stirred a little in the silence that followed his words.

  Ty-ameny beckoned her herald and spoke briefly into his ear.

  The herald straightened and fixed the ambassador with a bland look. ‘The Divine Daughter of Ra says her Royal Mathematicians have not yet finished determining what the nature of the ship and its crew may be.’

  ‘It’s obvious what they are!’

  It was obvious to me that the man seized on the excuse of working himself up. He threw off the hand the taller man rested on his arm–which I was willing to bet they’d cooked up between them, back on the Carthaginian bireme.

  He wants to be able to shout at Ty-ameny.

  My body was suddenly and instantly cold, knowing the reason why he might need to do that.

  ‘Even followers of false gods must be able to recognise the presence of corruption in their midst—’

  The Pharaoh-Queen’s captain of the guard shifted his gaze, just barely, to catch her orders. She lifted one finger, where her hand lay on the arm of her throne. He stiffened, made no further move and issued no orders, but I saw his nostrils flare.

  The pale skin of Rekhmire’ caught my eye, in a chiaroscuro against the black robes of the palace guard. Idly, he clasped his hands behind him, leaning back on his stick, standing squarely between Ty-ameny’s throne and the stone golem.

  He rocked unevenly back and forth on heels and toes as if this were nothing more than another trade delegation, political approach, or other everyday order of government. The Carthaginian man of House Hanno shot him a glance.

  He won’t care if the golem goes straight through you to get to the Queen.

  If I’m wrong, I thought. If this stupid, stupid idea doesn’t work–oh, Judas, he does mean to kill her!

  The ambassador’s voice was rising to a peroration. Ty-ameny leaned one slender elbow on the arm of her throne, chin in hand, as if supremely bored. I obsessively repeated Masaccio’s ingredients and method for glue; wondering if a week in the creating and curing could make anything with a tensile strength greater than a spiderweb.

  I was on tiptoe, I found, and straining my eyes to stare at the golem. Not a quiver of movement.

  The joints glistened in reflected light from the piazza outside, but that could be the polished brass and bronze gears. The finished glue had poured like liquid glass in Milano’s factories; poured in and settled around every cog, every spring, every wheel, every plate, every part of the statue that moved.

  And that it did move had been confirmed by Ty-amenhotep’s orders to it, shouted from thirty yards off, so that it exposed all its limbs and joints to us to anoint.

  Alexandrine Constantinople–or the life of Ty-ameny, at least–depends on the tensile strength of glue, once set.

  I bit my lip until the sharp pain of bursting skin gave me the taste of blood.

  ‘—consorting against even the tenets of the heretic Frankish church—’

  Rekhmire’ turned his head as the page tugged on his sleeve. I saw him read the note; his lips moved, saying something to the boy. He returned his gaze to the ambassador, not looking over towards me.

  Too professional to seek me out. Too concerned that I may be a target. But I realised I would find it infinitely reassuring to meet his gaze.

  ‘—and it is treachery! Conspiring with slant-eyed demons against the civilised world! Treachery in the highest degree, without even the excuse of necessity of–Saint–Gaius–Judas!’

  He hit the saint’s Carthaginian and Frankish names heavily, with a hammer’s rhythm.

  That’s it! That’s the trigger for the golem’s orders—

  The son of the House of Hanno stared, white showing all around his eyes.

  A faint click sounded, below the discreet mutterings of the courtiers about the discourtesy of this diplomat, and speculations as to what Ty-ameny would do about him. The faintest possible abrasion of metal against metal.

  The surface of the stone quivered. Once, twice. And—

  Nothing.

  Nothing more.

  20

  The Carthaginian envoy stared at the stone golem.

  The stone golem stared sightlessly into the distance, as if the palace walls were transparent to it, and it could see all of the city, the sea, and the walls of Carthage that lay so many weeks of travel to the west.

  It still did not move.

  I frowned, squinting. Most of the crowd were looking at the ambassador or their Queen; I doubted more than half a dozen of us were looking at the golem.

  Nothing.

  Holding my breath made my mouth arid as the desert around Carthage, and dread made me feel as cold. Stare as I might, I could see no more vibration in the stone limbs and body.

  They meant it to kill her!

  Rage soared through me, bringing welcome heat. The golem’s response, minimal as it was, spoke of all the danger that Carthage’s gift would have brought here–a poisoned chalice that the Pharaoh-Queen could not diplomatically set aside; a trap that would have stood statue-like at her side, until the right words from an agent of Carthage sent it into convulsions of violence.

  For a moment I could smell an illusion of the carnage that this hall would have suffered; see the pale bodies marked with blood, and Ty-ameny’s limbs and head pulled from her body in grotesque parody of a child pulling apart an insect.

  ‘We are pleased to accept the new envoy of Carthage, Hanno Gaiseric.’ Ty-ameny spoke up, her tone with something savagely restrained under it. ‘And if the King-Caliph will accept a poor gift in recompense for this gift of his—’

  Here she gestured at the motionless stone golem.

  ‘—then I have drawings, documents, and divers other things concerning the foreign demons of Chin, which the King-Caliph’s scientist-magi may find of interest.’

  Hanno Gaiseric tore his gaze away from the golem with evident difficulty.

  ‘The King-Caliph accepts with—’ The word seemed to choke him: ‘—gratitude.’

  Forty-eight hours later, Hanno Gaiseric went aboard the bireme and unexpectedly left the grand harbour; Ty-ameny’s spies reported the ship heading unerringly and unstoppably back towards Carthage.

  An hour after that, the Pharaoh-Queen announced Carthage’s gift so valuable that it must be installed in the Royal Library. And Rekhmire’ came back up to our quarters dusting his hands together, having lent a hand at mortaring the stone blocks and iron bars that irrevocably closed up one of the Library�
�s lowest storage chambers, now buried well below ground-level.

  ‘“Safe”.’ Ty-ameny shook her head, her unbound hair rippling over her bare shoulders. ‘Yes. Yes, but–Carthage desired us to know we cannot engineer what they can. Very well, we have been lessoned…’

  Even in her private chambers, wearing only a linen wrap in the afternoon heat, she kept the presence of the Pharaoh-Queen. Hanno Gaiseric’s attempt at murder seemed only to have energised her. She smiled ferociously at Rekhmire’.

  ‘I think, therefore, it’s time to issue a lesson of our own.’

  As ever in a court, it may have seemed that we were alone, but as soon as Ty-ameny lifted her hand, slaves and servants came with wine, ivory cups, small crisp biscuits, and a number of leather map-cases. A shaven-headed slave ordered the placing of a low table in the room’s sunken-floor area, spread the maps with his own hands, and bowed to his queen as he left.

  Each chart was bordered at top and bottom with brass, to keep them from rolling back up; I found myself wondering if there was a use for that in drawing.

  Had I been able to pick them up to investigate, I would; in fact, my hands were occupied in sliding under Onorata to check she was still dry. The palace’s smallest tyrant having decided she would spend any part of the day out of my company in screaming, I had no option but to bring her with me, and sit as much out of the way as possible.

  ‘Here.’ Ty-ameny put her finger on a point on the larger map, glancing at Rekhmire’, and then to me.

  She beckoned me forward. ‘Let me hold the child.’

  Reluctantly I got up and moved forward. ‘If she wakes, she’ll scream, Great Name…’

  ‘She won’t.’

  The Pharaoh-Queen held out her hands, confident enough, I thought.

  Of course, I am a fool: she has had three daughters.

  I passed Onorata into the wiry, muscular arms, and watched Ty-ameny smile down at her. The venal thought of a monarch as god-parent to my child came into my mind. But courts are cut-throat: Onorata will be better out of them…

  ‘There.’ Ty-ameny pointed with her chin. Rekhmire’ spread out the largest map.

  The Middle Sea, I saw. Or a version of it. The headland on the African coast could only be Carthage, given how close it was to Malta–the furthest edge of the Penitence–and Sardinia and the Italies.

  Rekhmire’ lifted his head where he sat. After a moment, I realised I was hearing, with him, the creak of slave-wielded fans, loud in the silence. He looked questioningly at the Pharaoh-Queen. Ty-ameny gestured them away.

  There have been kings who would merely kill their slaves after, in case they had overheard what they should not.

  The last slave left. Heat grew in the palace room, despite the open windows. I could still taste, in the back of my throat, the smell of dead meat. Ty-ameny clucked at my child, and I seated myself beside Rekhmire’.

  I thought, not for the first time, If I had been bought by any other man…

  As King Rodrigo’s Freak, I was always spared the worst excesses of being owned. My time as Rekhmire’’s slave has been far more like Constantinople’s bureaucratic model than how life is outside of the courts of power. Compared to Ty-ameny’s palace slaves, I have barely been in slavery; compared to the world outside Alexandria–labour, prostitution, either way worked to death–I have been closest to free. I watched the Queen stroke Onorata’s bare ankle.

  My daughter will never be a slave, no matter what.

  ‘There,’ Ty-ameny said, her voice low and even.

  Rekhmire’, as if his hands were hers, indicated cities on the North African coast, and ports at Sicily, Crete, and Rhodes.

  ‘We’ll issue a warning,’ she said. ‘The golem-machina is their opening shot. House Barbas has put this weapon into the King-Caliph’s hand…I am told.’

  She gave a sudden smile, looking from under her kohl-blackened lashes at Rekhmire’. He returned his ‘only a book-buyer’ expression of innocence. I bit the inside of my lip so as not to laugh aloud. With an inexplicable lift of the heart, I thought, They are closer to brother and sister than cousins.

  ‘That being so,’ she continued, rocking Onorata gently, ‘King-Caliph Ammianus will continue to test us. Rekhmire’, how many golem have they?’

  ‘As much as I can now tell, no more than a dozen, we think. Ammianus keeps most, but his chief allies among the Lords-Amir have been given them as gifts.’

  Hanno Anagastes, I thought.

  I saw tears in his eyes when I gave him the funeral portrait of Hanno Tesha, although I’d had to put the lustrous brown eyes and sleek dark hair of cliché, since that was the only description of the child he could give me. Would he be capable of ordering a golem like the one in his house to kill men as Masaccio was killed?

  Given what men do in war, yes. No question.

  Rekhmire’ leaned back, his fingers absently kneading at the muscles above his knee though the linen kilt. ‘It’s possible the King-Caliph will gift one to the Turkish Sultan. And to at least one of the Frankish Kings. As far as we know, we’re first outside the Bursa-hill itself.’

  ‘A warning.’ The Pharaoh-Queen repeated it stubbornly. She darted a glance at me, keen and black, jolting me with the intensity of her attention. ‘And here, I think, is where our business intersects.’

  ‘Aldro.’ I waited as respectfully as I might, for impatience.

  Ty-ameny spoke while she watched my sleeping child. ‘Rekhmire’ has brought me knowledge of how Taraconensis appears to be unstable, and how your stepfather may be a solution to that.’

  There is nothing she has not been told.

  But I expected that.

  ‘You have your own reasons for wishing to see Lord Videric in his place at court again.’ The gleam in Ty-ameny’s black eyes was in part serious, in part amused, and wholly elated. ‘Chief among which, I imagine, is not continually anticipating murder.’

  I answered the question she had carefully not asked.

  ‘When I trusted Aldro Videric–when I thought he was my father, and a good man–I also thought he was King Rodrigo Sanguerra’s necessary right hand. He’s still that. Without being a good man.’

  I caught a scowl on Rekhmire’’s face, briefly wondered if I had spoken amiss, and found the Pharaoh-Queen nodding with approval.

  ‘I had counted on forty years,’ she observed, ‘and, if I must, will settle for twenty.’

  Before Alexandrine Constantinople falls.

  It hit me like a falling boulder: in twenty years, my daughter could be twenty. A woman. Those identical baby-features, that have only a suggestion of her grandfather and I in the bones behind the skin, and the colour of her hair, will give way to a face uniquely hers, a mind uniquely hers.

  Cold down my spine under the linen tunic, despite the heat of the room, I said, ‘I grew up during peace–it guarantees nothing. But I know what war guarantees.’

  Ty-ameny pressed her lips together, nodding. She looked like a girl cuddling a small sister.

  She sat up, both her arms cradling Onorata, and the change was as sudden and different as the crack of lightning falling from heaven to earth.

  ‘The King-Caliph Ammianus sees fit to send me a warning.’ Ty-ameny’s eyes glinted. ‘It is my intention now to send a warning back!’

  She lifted her arms, and I automatically stood and came to take Onorata from her. The Queen of Constantinople knelt down by the map-table, like a beggar-child playing at marbles in the street. I moved to watch over her shoulder.

  A little frown making a fold of skin between her brows, Ty-ameny said, ‘The Admiral Zheng He and I are debating an agreement. I will loan him a pilot, and charts, to help him regain the ocean sea, and find his fleet, if they’re not sunk. My captains suggest it will have been a storm around the West African islands; those are dangerous waters.’

  The thought of more war-junks, no matter how few more there might be, made me shudder. Jian thought nothing of his crew numbering five thousand Chin men, as I knew from
speaking to him. There are armies in the Frankish lands made up of fewer men than that. If they should decide to conquer a kingdom and stay here…

  A little too intuitively for my liking, Ty-ameny remarked, ‘I think the Admiral truly anxious to get back to his Emperor–this is not the first voyage they’ve made to foreign waters, and they’ve found only “barbarians” wherever they sail. Zheng He’s words.’

  The little smile curved her lip.

  ‘We rank as civilised, having a proper eunuch bureaucracy. Although he cares very little for having a woman and a heathen on the throne. However,’ she added briskly, ‘he will agree to visit the port of Carthage, on his voyage back to the ocean sea.’

  ‘Carthage?’

  She gestured irritably for me to sit down, a moment before I realised that she had no desire to crick her neck looking up. I set Onorata cautiously into her sling around my neck (for which she was almost too large, now) and sat beside Rekhmire’.

  ‘Zheng He will replenish his ship at Carthage,’ Ty-ameny said. ‘And while there, he will let it be thought that Alexandria has himself and his ship as an ally.’

  Rekhmire’ smiled: I supposed at my expression.

  ‘For this, the Queen is prepared to lend her best pilot,’ he observed cheerfully. ‘And Carthage is not to know a pilot is guiding the Admiral out of the Middle Sea. For all the King-Caliph knows, the war-junk will be roaming the sea on our behalf indefinitely.’

  He exchanged a smile with Ty-ameny.

  ‘A theoretical Zheng He may be a great deal more useful as an ally than a material one, given that he can never change his mind and seek other alliances!’

  The Pharaoh-Queen lifted her bare shoulders in a shrug, tracing routes on the blue-and gold-inked map. ‘I understand from Admiral Zheng He that his country has contact along the Silk Road with the Rus, the Turk, and the Persians; Carthage is not an important ally for them. He’s willing to show himself under our banner.’

  She sat back on her heels, glossy hair sliding away to show her face.

  ‘And then there is your home, Ilario.’

  Head tight with effort, I strained to keep up with her thought. ‘Aldro, you think Zheng He should sail to Taraconensis?’