The Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

  Her thin finger traced a course. ‘Taraconensis, before Carthage. I see it thus: it is imperative Carthage has no excuse to send legions into Taraconensis this year. War will begin if that happens, and it will draw all of us in. As the Franks cannot be allowed to think they can invade your northern frontier, so Carthage cannot be allowed to provoke them into an invasion, by putting a Carthaginian Governor into Taraco.’

  Her words were only my thoughts spoken aloud, and no more than a natural consequence of the discussion with Rekhmire’–but I felt it all suddenly made more real.

  Onorata stirred in her sling; I tried by force of will to quiet my pounding heartbeat.

  ‘Will the Admiral agree to this, Aldro?’

  ‘He sees the desirability of having an Alexandrine pilot.’ Her grin was almost brutal. ‘And he understands the necessity for trade. There must be some degree of trust–there’s little to prevent him from kidnapping my pilot and attempting to leave the Middle Sea on his own. But I think he desires to leave a good name with us, as a civilised man in a world of barbarians.’

  Worlds have turned on stranger things. I felt myself dizzy, not only from the humid heat.

  Ty-ameny made fists of her hands, like bunches of knucklebones, and stretched; breaking the position to reach out and touch Rekhmire’’s arm.

  ‘Admiral Zheng He will also be carrying a humble book-buyer, along with my pilot–which, naturally, will have nothing to do with what impression the Carthaginians gain of relations between Alexandria and Chin.’

  Naturally not. I would have answered in the same manner, but I couldn’t speak.

  ‘If you agree,’ Ty-ameny concluded, looking at me, ‘you will go to Taraco with them.’

  The unexpected constriction in my throat kept me silent for an embarrassing minute.

  I managed, finally, to croak, ‘My family owes you a debt.’

  Ty-ameny rose in one graceful movement, not putting her hand to the floor. ‘Pay me by doing what you would in any case do–have your King Rodrigo Sanguerra summon Pirro Videric back as his first minister.’

  The small woman looked at me, and at Rekhmire’, in turn.

  ‘This must happen. By any means possible.’

  Part Three

  Herm and Jethou

  1

  ‘“Cào nî zûxian shí bâ dai.”’. I pronounced the sounds as closely to Jian’s as I could manage, ignoring the plainly undisguised amusement on his face. Tracing ink deftly onto my paper, I continued in the haphazard mixture of bad North African Latin which Zheng He’s crew appeared to have picked up on the West African coast, and scattered words from Alexandrine Egyptian. ‘And this means…’

  ‘“I am honoured beyond measure to meet you.”’

  The small boat rocked, despite a calm that had been absolute enough to becalm the war-junk. I slitted my eyes against morning sunlight and the ship laying a hundred paces off. Easier to trace the marks Jian had made for me to copy.

  A dozen or more ink studies lay discarded on the thwarts of the dinghy, careless of sea-water; each a less successful attempt to capture the war-junk with her immensely tall thin sails spread to catch every fraction of breeze.

  So far, she did not travel so fast that Commander Jian’s men couldn’t row us back to her. In fact I thought she might not be moving at all.

  ‘Cào nî zûxian shí bâ dai…’ I thought I heard a noise from one or other of the Chin men on the rowers’ benches, but my suspicions were centred on Jian’s far too innocent expression.

  Twenty days have given me insight enough into him to read at least the broader emotions. And this game is called ‘get the foreign devil into amusing trouble’.

  ‘“Honoured to meet you,”’ I mused, and looked at him brightly. ‘So this is what I should say to the Admiral when we get back on board? Then I can ask him to reward you for teaching me so well.’

  Jian’s square frame went utterly still for a heartbeat.

  He lifted his hand, slapped it down on his thigh, and burst into high-pitched laughter.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the rowers slapping each other on the back and wiping their eyes, which I thought was just as well; they showed every sign of rupturing themselves if they’d had to keep quiet much longer.

  I smiled at Jian with deliberate innocence, and traced the lines that made up the drawn picture-words of Chin. ‘So what does this mean?’

  The Chin officer spluttered, waving his hand in plain refusal.

  I brandished the paper. ‘If I show this around the ship, someone will tell me…’

  Jian was in the habit of treating me as a court eunuch, but I knew the man smart enough to know it not entirely true. Yin yang ren! got whispered sometimes when I passed: an impolite version of ‘hermaphrodite’.

  I watched Jian tripping himself up on what might be expected behaviour towards a man, or towards a woman, and let him squirm for a minute or two before copying him with a thigh-slap and a laugh.

  The noise from our boat would frighten sea-birds away for miles, I thought. When every man aboard found himself permitted to laugh–and for once to laugh at his commanding officer–it was loud.

  Jian solved his disciplinary problem by pointing to the youngest of the rowers, and firing off a rapid rattle of words that I knew must translate as ‘You tell her!’

  If he’d been Iberian, the boy would have been blushing; he ducked his head and rattled off apologies non-stop.

  ‘Is it rude?’ I asked helpfully.

  ‘Yes, Lord Barbarian!’

  Ruder than ‘barbarian’? I wondered. But none of them seem to think that word is anything more than purely descriptive.

  ‘Is it very rude?’

  The rest of the crew assured me, over the boy’s squirming, that it was extremely rude, not meant for any man except the vilest of enemies, and that the great Lord Admiral would flay my skin off and tan it for a rug if I used it towards him, barbarian ignorance notwithstanding. I’d seen enough casual brutality aboard to not be completely convinced he was joking.

  Jian seized my paper, and–with the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth–drew three or four lines that, as I stared hard, resolved themselves into an image. This—

  I turned the page a quarter round, attempting to make out what I was seeing. ‘Are they doing what I think they’re doing?’

  ‘Is rude. It means—’ Jian’s hand gesture was fairly universal.

  ‘“Fuck”?’ I prompted, in several of the languages they might have heard in Constantinople’s harbour, and there was an outbreak of nodding and applause.

  ‘Means, “fuck eighteen generations of your ancestors”,’ Jian exclaimed, and gave me a smile that made a square and ugly face beautiful. ‘Not to say to the Admiral, no!’

  I smiled and agreed that no, that probably wasn’t wise, and the joke was repeated backwards and forwards in the boat until I got them to row me further south simply to put an end to it.

  They shipped oars, having turned us into what would have been the direction of the wind, had it not been dead calm. Jian gave an order, which was evidently to stand down. I smoothed a fresh sheet of paper on my drawing board, set it firmly on my knees, and went back to attempting to draw the war-junk well enough that I could paint her at some time in the future. Who could miss the chance to see this ship, from a distance, with nothing else around her?

  And somewhere on the ship, I thought, narrowing my eyes against the sunlight off the waves, Rekhmire’ is negotiating exactly how long Zheng He will anchor off the shore of Taraco.

  Because we can’t tell how long it will take to solve this–and I can’t blame Zheng He that he wants to be gone. Our wars aren’t his concern; he comes from too far away.

  And every man I spoke to seemed to take their ‘lost fleet’ for granted…

  The wide-bottomed boat rocked. Jian’s men ran up a slatted small sail without being ordered, steadying us where we stood, forty leagues out of sight of the North African coast.

>   There might be enough of a breeze to move our small boat; the war-junk, I saw–even with tier upon tier of slatted sails raised up on its seven main masts, and three smaller masts–remained stationary.

  Commander Jian leaned over my shoulder, just as the shift of the boat sent my chalk skidding across the paper. ‘That’s not very good.’

  ‘Cào nî zûxian shí bâ dai ’

  Even as it came out of my mouth, I was appalled. He’ll truly take offence—

  Jian burst into deep, choking laughter.

  His crew decided it was worth applause, too; banging their fists on the gunnels. I suspected they had not expected their commander to be told that. Or not by any man who’d get to keep his head afterwards.

  ‘Perhaps I’m not a very good artist,’ I said apologetically, and had the idea then of offering Jian paper and chalk of his own.

  We passed an hour or two exchanging what we could of technique, hampered by lack of language. Jian’s war-junk was mostly a matter of lines, but it was recognisably a war-junk; the fact that he put in islands we had passed above and below the ship, so that he seemed to be drawing everything on one long ribbon, I couldn’t talk him out of. Pulling a small version of Leon Battista’s perspective frame out of the snapsack, I attempted to show him how it related to what I was drawing on my paper–but I think neither of us understood my explanation.

  With the sun descending into my eyes, I settled for adding in a quick sketch of a European cog to give me the scale of the war-junk. There was not, in truth, so much difference between the high poop of a Frankish ship and the curves of the junk’s flat stern.

  Only in sheer size.

  As for how many ship-lengths the war-junk was long…

  ‘If it’s an inch less than four hundred feet, I’ll boil my sandals and eat them!’

  Jian looked bemused at my mutter. I was saved from explanation. A faint whooshing noise and a pop! was succeeded by a light falling down the sky–one of Zheng He’s signal rockets, barely bright enough to show in daylight, but clear enough that Jian gave a grunting sigh and ordered his rowers to their oars.

  I had seen much larger rockets in the war-junk’s hold. I guessed them launched from some of the arbalest-like machines and tubes on the foredecks. How effective they might be in a sea battle, Ty-ameny’s pilot Sebekhotep said he could have no professional opinion on.

  But I saw he took note of them all the same.

  Jian’s crew brought the boat towards what seemed a vast wooden wall, when we got up close, rather than the side of a sea-going ship. I spent time in several languages making it known that if a stupid barbarian used insulting words, it would only be out of ignorance, and no reflection on the officer in question. Jian finally gave me a slap on the shoulder and a sip at his flask of tepid sour wine, taught me the proper pronunciation of ‘foreign devil’ in his own language, and I thought matters settled reasonably well. It helped that he could be amused by my attempts to scale the ladder to the entry-port of the war-junk.

  The scent of salt and deep water faded, replaced by the spices and sandalwood of the junk, always underlying its permanent odour of sweat and cooking. I swung myself inboard.

  A hand caught my elbow, steadying me enough that I didn’t drop the leather sack of drawings.

  Rekhmire’, I found; looking up into his sun-flushed face. He glared down with unexpected disapproval.

  I thought it best to ask plain and direct. ‘What’s the matter?’

  The Egyptian snorted, with a sour look at the boat on its davits. ‘I saw you scrambling down into that, earlier…’

  Between the steps on the hull’s slope, and a rope and wood ladder, ‘scramble’ is not an inappropriate term, both down and back up.

  Rekhmire’’s sun-darkened finger indicated the main one of the seven masts, and the platform high in the cross-trees. ‘And you’ve climbed up there.’

  The crow’s-nest made me dizzy in a more than physical sense.

  Gripping hard enough that my nails dug into the wood, I had found myself surrounded at dawn by a vast and chilly circle of sea, green as Venetian glass, with the sun laying stripes across the waves of a crimson so startling I would not have dared to paint it so. The sea turned innocent milky-blue as the sun rose, and I had heard the lookout’s cry of a sail, and squinted into the light at the horizon.

  The sails of a dhow appeared, blistering white, but not the ship itself–I saw the tops of the lateen sails first, and then the mid parts, and only as it advanced to us up the slope of the world did the hull become visible.

  It was that knowledge that we stand all the time at the crest of an invisible hill that dizzied me. I welcomed the return to the deck, and the illusion that the world is flat.

  ‘Yes.’ I drew a sharp, deep breath. ‘I have. And?’

  ‘Are you trying to leave your child an orphan!’

  Silenced thoroughly, it was a moment before I could gather enough wit to say, ‘Her grandfather Honorius would care for her, likely better than I could–and she would at least grow up without being watched to see if she turns into a monster!’

  Rekhmire’’s complexion darkened and reddened. He turned his back on me, knuckles white, swinging his crutch to shift himself down the deck towards the stern cabins.

  I am a fool.

  Sails towered above me as I ran to catch him up on the tar-spotted deck. Sails themselves taller than palace walls, creaking and swaying, but picking up no breeze. I scrambled after his unexpectedly brisk passage, past mast after mast, slatted shadows falling across the wood underfoot. The deck was hot despite my sandals.

  ‘Rekhmire’–I know you’d climb if you could: you don’t desire me to stop because of that?’

  He glared at me. ‘Of course not.’

  Make that ‘tactless fool’.

  Heat-melted tar dropped from the rigging in hot black roundels. Rekhmire’ strode on down the deck without being touched. I dodged one–only to catch another, streaking down the front of my linen tunic with a sharp sting.

  Grins came at me from crewmen hauling on ropes or descending from the three main crow’s-nests. I did not need to translate their remarks as I followed Rekhmire’ into the welcome shade of the cabin.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I blurted.

  ‘“Stupid barbarian”!’ Rekhmire’ shot a smile over his shoulder, lifted one pointing finger to indicate the crew outside, and assumed an innocence as of one merely translating the words of others.

  I stripped the tar-marked tunic off. Grinning in relief, I muttered, ‘Fuck eighteen generations of your ancestors, book-buyer!’

  I was careful enough to practise my Chin out of earshot of the crew, however much the tar stung.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I added. ‘Where are we? Other than becalmed in Hell?’

  Rekhmire’ gave me an amused look. ‘What have you got against the last eighteen generations of my ancestors in particular? And, becalmed in the Gulf of Sirte, Sebekhotep tells me.’

  Passing into the first of the airy and spacious inner cabins we had been allocated–and certainly I had never known of such a thing on a European ship of any kind–I threw myself flat on the low bed, letting the snapsack fall where it might, and rubbed at the reddened mark the tar left. ‘You’re not joking, are you? You do know the last eighteen generations of your family!’

  ‘I share my ancestors with Queen Ty-ameny. That helps.’ The large Egyptian smiled a little. ‘I can trace my ancestors back to the first Cleopatra.’

  ‘I can trace mine back to my father…’

  He held his hand out: I realised it held an impossibly translucent porcelain cup. I beamed, took it, and drank. The herbal drink was bearable, cold, in this hot weather.

  Trace my ancestry back to my father–and to my mother.

  My smile died, the thought of Rosamunda still enough to make me cold in my belly.

  A further door opened and shut, and cut off the sound of a crying baby.

  ‘Carrasco…’I lifted my head. ‘How long?’

/>   He shrugged. ‘Not very long.’

  I scrambled up, moving through the open door into the next room, and dropped into a crouch by Onorata’s cradle. Fed an hour ago, not wet–I checked–and Carrasco had evidently been sitting by the fan that cooled her. I straightened up.

  ‘She’s bored,’ I guessed. ‘Take her to see the goats again.’

  We travelled accompanied by two nanny-goats from the Sekhmet, their offspring, and a sire, in case we should need more. Onorata appeared to thrive on the warm fresh milk that I fed her, along with Carrasco’s gruel. She was, I thought, passably fond of the goats, or at least she pushed herself up on her front with her round arms when I laid her in the straw, and laughed in what sounded like delight, staring at Carrasco or I milking them.

  I went back through, to search out a clean tunic, and found Carrasco with his head down and shoulders hunched, as if he could avoid Rekhmire’ looking at him. The book-buyer had sat on the wide ledge of the cabin window.

  ‘Carrasco—’ I pulled the new tunic on, and realised only in retrospect that I had not been in the least self-conscious exposing my small breasts.

  I coloured, despite them now being covered.

  ‘When you were spying,’ I said bluntly. ‘Did you send word back telling Videric—’ Rosamunda! ‘—about being a grandparent?’

  ‘That you were with child, yes.’

  He did not say, After she was born, I was in jail, but I could read it in the flush that reddened his neck.

  Rekhmire’ swallowed his own cup of liquid, and spoke as if Carrasco did not exist. ‘I’ve been looking at charts with Sebekhotep.’

  Sebekhotep, with the face of a Pharaoh, a lean and wolfish body, and an appetite that could feed four men, had served on Queen Ty-ameny’s naval fire-ships as well as commercial cargo ships; I suspected he might not actually need the many portolans and charts he’d come aboard with, to find his way around the Middle Sea. But he behaved as if he did, and I might have, in his place–too spectacularly good a navigator, and Zheng He might just decide he needed to keep this particular barbarian.