by Mary Gentle
There was a silence, in which I heard Carrasco’s movements in the inner cabins, and the wind blew one of the shutters open. Standing and crossing the deck to latch it shut, I caught a face full of the wind off the land.
Instantly, the scents brought back the colonnades of Rodrigo’s court. As if I stood there, in the palace that has been home to me from the age of fifteen.
But now I have travelled.
My fingers fumbled the latch; I swore and finally got the shutter fastened.
‘Bear this in mind,’ I warned. ‘It’s as likely to be an assassin looking for Carrasco, as one looking for me. We need Carrasco alive.’
In the shadows, I could not see if Attila disapproved, but he nodded obedience.
‘Let’s not forget the most important weapon in any soldier’s arsenal, sir–ma’am.’
It seemed unfair to deprive him of something he’d evidently practised with company after company of armed men. ‘And what would that be?’
‘Dumb luck!’
I snorted. Even Rekhmire’ smiled.
‘So. The first move.’ I sent a prompting look at the Egyptian.
‘Our first move,’ Rekhmire’ said ponderously, ‘is that you do not go ashore.’
I opened my mouth and Rekhmire’ snatched two porcelain bowls and a cup off the low table close to me.
I stared at him.
Wine and pickle splashed his fingers.
‘Just making sure.’ There wasn’t a smile on his face, but his eyes were bright.
I glared at the Egyptian–and nearly cracked when Attila, large and impressive as he was, looked frankly bewildered.
‘Let’s discuss this—’ I reached over and recovered my cup from Rekhmire’’s hand. ‘—like sensible and responsible adults.’
He lifted his own bowl, looking at me over the rim.
Catching a deep warmth in his gaze, I could not do otherwise than smile back at him.
‘You can distract me as much as you like.’ I leaned back on cushions embroidered with Sekhmet’s sigils. ‘But you need me ashore. King Rodrigo must speak to me. With all possible respect—’
‘With complete disrespect,’ Rekhmire’ echoed in a muttered aside that made Attila’s grin flash out of the shadows.
‘—the King won’t trust an Alexandrine spy as far as he could throw you. I don’t think you can play the humble book-buyer this time.’
Rekhmire’ reached into his robes and pulled out a leather scroll-case. He held it out. I put my bowl down, uncapped the case, unrolled the scroll, and found myself looking at the seal of the Pharaoh-Queen.
‘I can play the diplomatic envoy of Ty-ameny of the Five Great Names.’ Rekhmire’’s brows lifted towards his shaved scalp. ‘I thought you’d assume something of the sort.’
The ancient pictorial script of Alexandria might have declared him envoy from the Moon, but there was a Latin copy also in the scroll case.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I may have been gone from Taraco some time. But I know how much the east isn’t trusted. Unless you outright plan to tell King Rodrigo that your Queen is using Admiral Zheng He to scare the shite out of Carthage—’
‘That would be one option.’ Rekhmire’ took the scroll-case back. ‘I do admit, the first approach might be better made by one of King Rodrigo’s own subjects. But, Ilario, you’re in too much danger. What use is all of this if a hired gang of thugs kills you at Taraco docks?’
‘Unless you plan on locking me up with Ramiro, I’m going ashore. I want to see Honorius!’
The Egyptian slowly nodded. ‘I understand. Again, it would be safer if the Admiral made an exception, and permitted the Captain-General to come here.’
I wavered. Onorata is in the next cabin. And I cannot take her ashore with me. ‘Would Zheng He allow that?’
We talked, after one of Jian’s officers took a message. I stood at the port for a time, and then paced. Ramiro Carrasco answered Onorata’s sleepy cries, and I let him feed her again. I watched candle-light shift and change on men’s faces; stretched my spine, and caught a glimmer of grey out in the open air.
‘Attila, if I can borrow one of your mail-shirts,’ I suggested–Attila being slightly less large around his chest than his brother. ‘And wear a helmet. If I carry a sword as the Alexandrine’s escort, no one will look at me; you know that. No man looks in obvious places.’
Rekhmire’ opened his mouth to protest.
And clearly thought better of it.
‘Then we must hope there’s a way to get a message to Lord Honorius, once we’re ashore.’
The cabin door opened. Commander Jian himself came in, meeting my gaze and nodding his head sharply.
‘No man to come here,’ he managed, in Mediterranean Latin. ‘You go ashore now?’
A glimmer of white showed at the oared boat’s prow.
Sebekhotep’s robes.
The Egyptian pilot must be there for reassurance or curiosity’s sake. From what I recall, a six-year-old child could steer a boat to the quay at Taraco.
We docked, and the ground was painfully hard beneath my boots.
How could I have forgotten the air and the light!
Even before dawn, with the east bright but unscarred by the sun, every dew-wet breeze brings the scent and reality of home to me. No brush will capture this.
I raised my head and looked around the quay as Rekhmire’ disembarked with appropriate dignity. I might wish to be a guard in more than my clothing, but I was overwhelmed, as if I had not seen the city since childhood. And, at the same time, the ghost-white buildings, and the feather-silhouettes of the fronds of the trees, were as familiar to me as my own skin.
Dawn turned the sea-spray yellow, peach, scarlet; the Alexandrine banner unrolled in yards of blue silk down the offshore wind. I smelled salt, the old Roman drains of Taraco, and the scent of outdoor food-booths already beginning to cook for early workers. Fruit-sellers’ cries echoed down the dusty streets.
I turned my head, looking thirty yards in the other direction.
There, where a coastal ship is tied up to the bollard, first catch of fish already unloaded–that’s where I walked up the gang-plank of a galley sailing south down the coast to Carthage. Two hours beforehand, my mother attempted to stick a dagger into my stomach.
I thought of the blade, black with poison.
Most poisons that you can daub on metal do less harm than rust. There’s always talk in court of such weapons; of poisoned cups, of scent that can poison a pair of gloves…In all honesty, more men die of the fever turning their guts out. And more women in childbed.
Tottola’s elbow caught me ungently in the kidney.
I shouldered the pennant of Alexandria, becoming an anonymous soldier and banner-bearer. Tottola and Attila were in blue doublets of one shade or another, and scarlet hose. They had not yet replaced their household badges.
If we meet Aldra Videric at the top of this hill with a gang of hired criminals, I thought–or Rodrigo and the royal guard out to arrest us–these men could die around me now.
In which case, I’ll step out in front of them, because in either case it’s me they want. And wasting a life because of that would be stupid.
I resolved not to mention it to Rekhmire’. The Egyptian will expect something more sensible from me.
The same feeling of familiarity and strangeness suffused me on the winding road to the palace. Mountains shone on the horizon, blue glass; but would be yellow rough scrub under the noon sun. Every peak and trough, I remember. Plodding under the shade of palm-feathered branches, bare-footed children shinning up the trunks out of our way; a pavement shoe-maker looking up from his last as we passed him. And the dark eyes of men stopping their work at tavern or shop or household, momentarily and silently taking in the sight of soldiers as we trudged up the steep slope.
The intricacies of the Sanguerra fortress-palace begin with a crenellated gate-house at the bend of the road.
It had been dark when we left the ship. By the time
we passed men at guard-house, courtyards, outer and inner baileys, and were allowed into the palace proper, the sun had risen over the sea high enough to make me sweat.
‘How much more of this!’ Tottola fingered under the unfamiliar woollen collar of his winter doublet. (Neither man-at-arms had summer gear with them.) Attila echoed his muttering.
‘It’s an old palace—’
‘Rabbit warren!’ Tottola interrupted me, under his breath.
‘—and you wouldn’t begrudge the King a chance to impress us, would you?’
The tall armoured brothers grinned, instantly, and as instantly looked as unimpressed as it is possible for a man to be.
The King’s guards were leading us towards one of the eastern courtyards, I realised. This older part of the palace has Carthaginian influence, from ancient days before they were driven out to Africa. Two altars burned at the foot of a wide flight of steps, servants keeping the flames high, although invisible as the sun reached down to them. Above the steps, a wall of niches and crumbling urns enclosed an open square.
Beyond the wall, poplar trees screened masonry pyramids. My hand recalled painting the desert beyond Carthage. I shivered.
That chill, and the dusty green feathers of the poplars, took me suddenly to Venice’s lazaretto islands; I turned my head to look at the walls as we were marched past them–Before this was a courtyard…it was a necropolis.
I have not ever noticed this before.
Would I notice, if I had not travelled?
Around the crumbled end of the wall, the character changed. We walked over cracked sandstone slabs, with ahead of us the walls of the castle’s east wing–a million featureless pale bricks running up to corbels, and battlements, and the terracotta tiles roofing the machicolations. Guards’ heads showed as small as grape-pips. The walls towered high enough to block out most of the sky: certainly enough to humble petitioners to a king.
King Rodrigo Sanguerra had his chair of state outdoors, under a striped awning, beside a flight of palace steps with stylised faces carved on their balustrades.
I could not see the King himself over the heads of the surrounding crowd. Most were guards or servants–only a few courtiers would attend an audience beginning this early; Rodrigo held it for common tradesmen and workers, so they might not lose too much of the working day. The guards shepherded us under the far end of the awning. Somewhat shaded by the sun, I lowered the Alexandrine banner so it would not catch on the billows of cloth, and shifted up on my toes, to see if I might see King Rodrigo.
Rekhmire’ caught my eye. ‘We shall doubtless wait the usual long time; no need to waste it…’
I nodded, and set myself to watching inferior courtiers as they came and went, and men and women from the kitchens, in case there might be a face I knew.
Heat bounced back off the stone, and the balustrade’s ancient faces changelessly stared.
There!
‘Hold this!’ I hissed, and shoved my banner into Attila’s hand. He caught it, much startled.
I stepped to intercept the path of a man whose broad face had often sat across from me in the royal scriptorium, on those occasions when Rodrigo Sanguerra had employed me for my actual talents.
‘Galindus!’ Seizing his upper arm, I shifted us into the partial concealment of the flight of steps, where the wall cast a shadow.
I smiled. He frowned, briefly. I saw him abruptly recognise me–more by voice than clothes, as many do.
‘Ilario! You’re back!’
‘Yes and no.’ I kept the smile with an effort, threw everything of our acquaintance into my expression, and got my demand out. ‘You still hear all the gossip, don’t you? Listen, Galindus, tell me this. Lord Licinus Honorius–is he here?’
‘What?’
‘Licinus Honorius. Il leone di Castiglia. Is he at court!’
Seconds dripped past like cold honey. Galindus shot an unmistakably prurient look at the crowd around Rodrigo’s chair of state.
‘Well…’ His voice held the avidity of a man with a piece of choice gossip. My heart thudded until I thought it would tear.
Galindus spoke.
‘Well, yes. He’s here. Licinus Honorius.’
Honorius is alive.
I had not known how much I feared otherwise, until warmth entered into every frozen blood-vessel in my body.
‘Honorius is at court? In the palace?’
Galindus looked left and right, his long dark hair whipping with the jerky movement. He glanced above us, at the steps, for secrecy’s sake.
‘He’s here,’ Galindus whispered. ‘He’s in prison.’
4
Attila gripped me about the elbow, hauled me two steps back without so much as an acknowledgement to Galindus, and shoved the pennant’s pole into my hands.
‘What—’
‘Quiet! ’
One of the court officers, whose face I didn’t know, scowled at the both of us, regarding us as men-at-arms who do not know a courtly discipline.
The officer rapped his ivory staff on the stone of the courtyard.
I stepped briskly in beside Rekhmire’ as he moved forward, just catching the end of the herald’s full-voiced cry:
‘—of the city of New Alexandria, known commonly as Constantinople!’
A flutter of women-in-waiting and courtiers stepped back as we approached. Lesser men, according to some: mayors of distant hill-towns, and the captains of Rodrigo Sanguerra’s frontier towers. Certainly leaner men. I could see none of the kingdom’s more influential and powerful lords.
Is the King hiding us by making us seem unimportant?
A flare of hope seemed almost distant. Numb, I could only think, But–Honorius!
Rekhmire’ paused before the rank of guards to either side, and for all the chair of state was on a stone dais, he looked down at my King.
With immense dignity, Rekhmire’ began to kneel.
I saw the spasm of pain he suppressed.
Immediately I knelt, still clasping the banner pole. That put my shoulder where he could reach it. Large fingers bit deep into my muscles, hard enough that I thought he would still lose balance and sprawl.
The Egyptian thumped down on one knee beside me.
‘Rekhmire’!’ I bowed my head low enough that no man would see my mouth. ‘My father! He’s alive!’
Rekhmire’ shot me a startled look–at why I sounded angry, I realised–and had time to do no more than raise his head as King Rodrigo, fifth of that name, looked up from his gilded chair, and leaned forward to speak graciously.
Blood thundering in my ears cut off the formalities.
Have you put my father in prison? Who else could be responsible!
The linen of the awning softened the sun’s light. More white than dark showed now in Rodrigo’s wiry short-cut beard. His eyes, under thick brows, might be bloodshot in the corners, but I could still feel the force of his personality, blazing from them.
It occurred to me, belatedly. The King will be frighteningly angry that no man apparently trusts him to hold his kingdom without Aldra Videric at his side.
But even King Rodrigo Sanguerra knows there’s no fighting men’s opinions. Whether they’re right or wrong.
Rekhmire’ rose, with equal effort, his weight almost pushing me down onto the sandstone paving.
King Rodrigo signalled his guards to step back, and his servants to pour wine; let his gaze imperceptibly stray while he continued to speak with the representative of New Alexandria, and stopped midway through a sentence.
‘Master Envoy…’
Rekhmire’ bowed his head. ‘Ah. We thought this safer, Exalted One.’
Rodrigo Sanguerra Coverrubias stared at me.
A year ago, I thought, I could not have held your gaze so long.
‘I freed you, hermaphrodite.’
I passed Rekhmire’’s banner to Tottola and knelt down as one does before kings. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘And then you repay me as you did. Not well.’
Biting down on rage allowed me to control my voice. ‘Is it well, Majesty, to have put the Lion of Castile into your prison?’
At my elbow, Rekhmire’ twitched.
He would have advised me against that, I thought, and momentarily regretted my anger.
No more than a moment. The world is still carmine about me.
Rodrigo Sanguerra leaned back in his gilt chair, steepling his fingers. He gave the impression of choosing his words very carefully.
‘Tell me, Ilario, what I should have done with Licinus Honorius?’
He did not say ‘your father’. I had not the slightest doubt he knew.
Before I could stop choking and get out an answer, King Rodrigo lifted the full force of his gaze to me.
‘Here is a lord of my kingdom,’ he said, measuredly, ‘Aldra Licinus Honorius, whose presence I require at court. I send to inform him. He does not come. I send to order him. He delays, says he will come…but does not. Meantime, all my other lords–less rich than Licinus Honorius, perhaps, and not “the Lion of Castile”, but still noble lords–watch this behaviour…and judge how weak I’ve grown.’
No proper words of objection would form in my dry mouth.
‘Therefore,’ Rodrigo concluded, leaning back, ‘when Aldra Honorius finally does deign to obey his King’s summons, what do I do? Thank him kindly for his arrival? Ask him how I should have worded my summons, to be better obeyed?’
‘Your Majesty—’
‘Yes! ’ His hand slapped loudly down on the carved chair’s arm. ‘“Majesty.” “King.” But only so long as men call me so! Licinus Honorius is a subject of mine. He defied me. He is therefore now serving me–by being an object lesson to any man who might think of doing likewise!’
Rekhmire’ stirred, beside me.
It was the pain of his leg, I saw. Nothing in the Egyptian’s expression signified dissent.
‘It’s not justice to put him in prison, Majesty!’ I spoke fiercely. ‘It’s my fault he didn’t come. He was helping me. If you put anybody in the dungeon, it should be me.’
Rodrigo Sanguerra briefly smiled.
‘I know.’ He rested his chin on his fist. The hooded lids of his eyes dipped down–in a way that had always, in the past, signalled covert amusement. ‘But my hermaphrodite Fool in prison is hardly an object lesson to the men who covet my throne. Of which there are always some.’
