The Stone Golem

by Mary Gentle

  With any other woman, I would have guessed that she ignored me out of embarrassment, or even shame. Watching her gaze intent on Videric, I knew Rosamunda saw no one here except the man who she thought had power over her.

  Certainly I will never hear, I’m sorry I tried to kill you in Carthage.

  For her, that’s forgotten; gone.

  ‘You could shout as loudly as she,’ Videric observed. ‘This palace is infested with servants: someone would hear you and raise an alarm. So I see no reason not to disclose to you what I’m about to do. Then, if you wish to scream for your friends…’ He shrugged. ‘Captain.’

  The captain directing them, the men-at-arms went out through the archways; nominally out of earshot. If I concentrated, I could hear their boots shifting on the marble tiles.

  ‘He’s a trustworthy man,’ Videric said, a nod of his head to the departing captain’s back, deliberately not mentioning the man’s name. ‘Like Ramiro Carrasco. But I never like to give a man more information than he ought to hear.’

  Trustworthy for the same reason as Carrasco?

  I’d trust Orazi or any of Honorius’s men. But if I explain why to Videric, he’ll regard me as even more of a fool.

  ‘My mother,’ I said. ‘Your wife. She’s an Achilles’ heel to you. You can’t keep her at court. She won’t be safe back on your estates.’

  I would have touched Rosamunda’s hand to comfort her, if I didn’t know from her expression that she would jerk them away.

  ‘You won’t murder her.’ I brought the word out coolly, ashamed a moment later when Rosamunda’s eyes snapped open and she gazed about the hall, rumpled and clearly terrified.

  Where is Rekhmire’? Where is my father?

  I managed to say, ‘This doesn’t leave much, Aldra Videric.’ I wiped at my sweaty forehead. ‘In fact, I don’t see that it leaves anything. If you send her away to any branch of her family—’

  Like most of the nobles of the Iberian courts, she has relatives in Aragon, Castile, Granada, Catalonia, and the Frankish lands beyond.

  ‘—Carthage will track her down. So. Tell me what you have planned.’

  Videric nodded slowly. ‘Rodrigo is the only other man to know. I don’t suppose the King will be in the least surprised to hear that you’ve found your way into this.’

  His smile was oddly poised between sympathy and malice.

  ‘I’m half inclined to tell you all and let you decide, Ilario. Unfortunately, since it seems to need both Rodrigo Sanguerra and myself to keep the Carthaginian legions at home, I can’t do that.’

  ‘You’re not so necessary,’ I said coldly. ‘If you died, Rodrigo would have another man in your place, performing perfectly well, inside three days.’

  Videric smiled. ‘But as you, especially, will have discovered–it doesn’t matter what the truth is. It matters what people think the truth is. Because that’s what they act on. In fact, my death may well bring the legions marching up the Via Augusta. So I must hope to be as long-lived as my grandfather…’

  He got abruptly to his feet, pacing, gazing up at the arcing droplets of water. Stopping in front of both of us, he looked only at Rosamunda.

  ‘I couldn’t do anything to harm you. You’ve always known that.’

  She brought her head up with that artificial arch of the neck that allows a woman to look up at a man through her lashes. It was familiar enough that I suspected the court deportment tutor, Dolores, had taught both of us. Mother and…son-daughter.

  She fixed an intense gaze on him. ‘Don’t do this. Even when I was with Honorius, it was foolishness, infatuation—’

  She cut her gaze across to me.

  ‘—and I’ve been punished.’

  I didn’t hear what she said next; couldn’t decipher the low, intense conviction in her words. It may have been some effort to recall their sexual connection to his mind.

  ‘I’ve been punished.’ After all this, this is what I am to you?

  A piece on the board to be moved, to convince Videric how remorseful you are towards him.

  Why did I imagine anything else? I should know, by now.

  Videric’s voice interrupted my dazed state. ‘Hope dies last.’

  He might have been referring to himself, or to me. Or to us both, I thought.

  ‘Perhaps unfortunately,’ he added, looking down at Rosamunda, ‘this doesn’t depend on Honorius, or on Ilario’s parentage, or on your infidelity. If it did, I think I might eventually teach myself to hate you.’

  Her huge dark eyes brimmed.

  I could have told him, even at thirty or forty years younger than he, that hate is no different to love. Not in the intensity. Not in how much it occupies your mind, and wastes your time.

  Videric shook his head. ‘You’re a weapon, Rosamunda. I’ve been fool enough to show myself besotted with my wife. That makes you a sword at my throat. And whatever the story is here, in Carthage the Lords-Amir know that you attempted murder—’

  ‘Because you told me to!’

  I winced at the shrill note in Rosamunda’s voice. Shrill as when she claimed the same thing about my infant exposure: He made me.

  ‘No one ever made you do anything,’ I interrupted. ‘You just chose whichever was easiest at the time and didn’t think of what would happen after.’

  Her eye caught the light as she turned to me. She had the blank-eyed gaze of a marble medusa.

  ‘You be quiet, you monster! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened to me!’

  I drew as much of my hard-earned court composure about me as I could, and looked at her without shaking, or weeping. I found voice enough to say, ‘If I were in your position, I’d be trying to make an ally of both of us–Videric, me. But I don’t know if you’re too stupid to think of that, or if you just hate me too much.’

  She narrowed her eyes, so that the smudge of kohl at the corner of one bled out into the incipient wrinkles there. ‘All your fault!’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Videric said gently.

  Her face shifted; showed ingratiation and confusion.

  He went on: ‘You think I have the power here today, and you can sacrifice Ilario to that. But the truth is, I have no choice either. I did all I could in coming up with an alternative that Rodrigo preferred to your quiet and immediate execution.’

  Rosamunda’s eyes and mouth rounded.

  She seemed to fall into herself, staring around the hall as if she searched out any way she could run.

  ‘I doubt that’s wholly correct.’ I didn’t trust myself to do more than sit, my hands shook so hard. ‘If King Rodrigo knows she can be used to get at you, and knows that without you the legions sail for Taraco…He’d have killed Aldro Rosamunda long before now. Except for one thing.’

  Videric cocked his head invitingly. Odd, how I had always wished to have him take what I said seriously. Beware what you wish for.

  ‘It’s truly hard to make a death look like an accident if it isn’t,’ I said. ‘That only happens in bards’ tales. And if anybody kills Rosamunda under those circumstances, you’d know the King was responsible. And I don’t think you two could work together after that, not like you have done. So he loses you anyway.’

  I shook my head, trailing fingers in the cold green endlessly disturbed water.

  ‘As usual, you’ve got things so that you can do exactly as you want. Except…that I don’t see how you can have what you want. Even if you hide–her–away as well as you can, someone would follow you to her, eventually.’

  ‘I must personally congratulate Queen Ty-ameny, the next time I go on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople.’ Videric’s smile was wry, and genuine. ‘You appear to have had a considerable education in the last twelve months.’

  ‘Some of it in things I never wanted to know.’

  It was not something I imagined saying to this man, my father, my stepfather. I saw how he looked at me when he turned. He may even have been a little impressed. I wished I were still the Ilario who cou
ld appreciate that.

  I said, ‘Even if you formally put her aside, nullify the marriage to a barren wife, no one would believe it. Not after you gave up your position at court for her.’

  The position second only to the King’s.

  Not death, not divorce…what?

  Rosamunda, her chin lifting defiantly, snapped, ‘I am not barren! Remember the cathedral, lord husband? It may be a monster of a child, but I conceived and bore Ilario! And never anything from you, monster or not!’

  She must see how she’s affecting him—

  I stopped breathing for a second, and caught it again in a rush.

  Is it possible she’s behaving this way, angering him, so that he doesn’t feel so guilty over what it is he has to do? Is she sparing him anguish?

  I looked at the lines that anger was starting to pinch permanently into the corners of her mouth. Nothing visible except anger, resentment–and the resentment seemed to be that all this should happen to her.

  Hope dies last.

  She snorted under her breath. ‘If it’s your doting that’s the problem, then…I made you love me, Videric. I could make you stop loving me.’

  Her sneering grated on me. If I could have got words out at that moment, they would have been, I am ashamed to be your son-daughter! Christ the Emperor knows, Videric is a bad enough man, but Rosamunda came close to making me pity him.

  ‘Let me show myself at the Court of Ladies here tomorrow and take a lover,’ she said coolly. ‘Two or three, perhaps. Gossip will get around quickly enough. Carthage is ruled by men. They won’t believe you could love me and let me fornicate with soldiers and stable-hands.’

  She took my breath away.

  More, I thought: ‘soldiers and stable-hands’ fell too easily off her tongue.

  If she hasn’t already practised what she advises, she certainly has her eye on particular men she’d like to seduce.

  Videric stood with the arc of the fountains behind him, utterly motionless. In ten years I’d never seen him at a loss for words. He stared at Rosamunda in a dazed way, as if he looked into a bright light, and didn’t speak.

  My hatred for Videric is almost impersonal. What he’d tried to do to me, he would have done to anyone in my position; it didn’t matter to him that I was Ilario.

  It made it just that much easier to throw a rope to him, as I would have thrown a rope to a drowning enemy.

  ‘That wouldn’t succeed,’ I said quietly. ‘Rosamunda, look at him. I know he’s a courtier. But no one is going to believe he’s unaffected if you take a lover. Do you really think even he can hide that?’

  Over Videric’s mumbled protest, Rosamunda repeated with casual cruelty, ‘I can make him stop loving me.’

  ‘No.’ Videric’s burly shoulders were back, and his usually bland face tightened from the emotion in him. ‘No. You didn’t make me love you. You won’t make me stop. If it were possible for me to stop…I would have done so by now.’

  No sound but Videric’s sandals on the marble floor as he began to pace again; Rosamunda utterly silent as her head turned back and forth, following him.

  ‘Then tell me how you can make me safe.’

  I heard the echo of other demands in that one. Thirty years since he married his child-bride of fifteen; thirty years of Videric, make it right for me, and him finding his satisfaction in pleasing this woman.

  I should have thrown the portrait in the sea before I let Videric look at it. That, or only showed it to Rosamunda, so she’d know I understood her game. But no, I have to be so damn clever…

  Videric’s pale gaze met mine as if he could follow every thought and feeling in me.

  Fifty years of experience. He may as well read minds! What’s the difference? How did I ever imagine I was going to out-plan someone who’s been at court longer than I’ve been alive?

  ‘I’m not putting Rosamunda aside.’ Videric spoke to me, but his gaze continued to slide sideways to her. ‘The reverse, in fact. What will happen is that Rosamunda is going to apply to me, formally, to end the carnal part of our marriage—’

  A choked sound from her bore no resemblance to a word.

  ‘—and permit her to retire to a place of religious contemplation. To a nunnery, or a convent. So that she can purify her soul for the next world, and glorify the Emperor-Messiah with prayer.’

  Rosamunda stood, her fists clenched before her straining against her bands. ‘How long?’

  It is not unusual for widows, or wives who are known not to be able to bear their husband’s rapes and beatings, to apply to the King for permission to retire to a convent. Whether it’s an order of educated women, writing scrolls of theology, or whether it requires digging turnips to feed the other sisters and novices, evidently it seems preferable to what they can expect of life in the world.

  I asked Rodrigo Sanguerra myself, once; when I was worse than desperate to escape the humiliations of being Court Fool. He made a public theological debate of it, with bishops arguing whether I could be allowed to join a monastery–where I would contaminate the men with the parts of me that were sinful woman–or a nunnery. It collapsed in riot when one of the male courtiers offered the opinion that I would be far too popular in a convent as a nun with a prick.

  These days the thought makes me smile, if with an edge. Trust a man to think I would be popular for what so many of those women are escaping from.

  ‘How long?’ Rosamunda’s voice echoed back from the marble walls, over the noise of the fountains.

  Videric spoke as if he talked only to me. ‘The Aldro Rosamunda will stay at several different convents, to flush out and elude pursuit. These will all be nunneries used to taking court ladies. The civilised establishments where the Mother Superior is often a rich noblewoman in her own right, and music and literature is practised as well as the worship and glorification of God.’

  I found myself nodding as if entranced.

  ‘Truthfully,’ Videric said, ‘I expect the agents of Carthage to have found and investigated every rich convent of that nature within three months of the announcement being made. Before Yule, certainly. There aren’t more than twenty establishments that a woman of Rosamunda’s rank would find appropriate.’

  The water splashed in my palm where I intercepted a fountain-jet. If it smelled of metal pipes, it was nonetheless ice-cold. I dabbed it on my forehead, feeling it run down inside my tunic, over my small breasts, as it dried in my body’s heat.

  ‘However.’ Videric’s spine stiffened, seemingly without his volition. He didn’t look in Rosamunda’s direction. ‘There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary religious households in Taraco and Aragon and Granada. Small convents, closed to the world; poor nunneries that rely on local charity and the land to support ten or twenty praying Brides of Christ the Emperor. And a woman takes a new name when she enters religious life as a novice. Who’s to know one “Sister Maria Regina” in a thousand convents where there are hundreds of Maria Reginas every year?’

  Rosamunda repeated in the numb way that Brides tell their Green beads: ‘How. Long?’

  ‘They’ll search Taraconensis, and Aragon,’ Videric observed, ‘and likely the smaller kingdoms if they get desperate. But no matter how hard the King-Caliph drives them…’

  He blinked, as if he saw something far off.

  ‘…For all their Crusades, the Franks haven’t yet taken the Northern Islands from us. Jersey, Guernsey, Sark; they all have thriving Iberian populations and fishing ports. If you look at the royal maps, you’ll see them clearly marked as part of the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre.’

  He paused.

  ‘What you won’t see, because they’re too small, are the other islands of the archipelago. Some are mere rocks.’

  Videric finally turned his head to look at Rosamunda.

  ‘Midway between Sark and Guernsey, with twelve leagues of sea between them and the mainland, lies Herm. Herm is a mile and a half long, half a mile wide. It has a fort on it, and a small fishing village, and
enough grass to graze milch-cows…And a stone’s throw away from Herm, across a channel of sea, is the island of Jethou. Jethou is perhaps a third of a mile long; a little less across. It has grass, a few trees. It’s no more than a rock. But on Jethou–there is a convent-house. It is a silent order.’

  18

  I couldn’t have interpreted the look in Videric’s eyes to save my own life, never mind Rosamunda’s.

  He said, ‘In all honesty, I think Carthage will assume you’re dead long before they think to send agents to a sea-swept and forgotten nunnery on the island of Jethou.’

  You’ll give out publicly that’s she dead, I understood.

  Rosamunda’s blank expression told me she hadn’t thought that far. But it would be an obvious next step.

  I could paint her at work in the meagre fields, picking stones out of furrows with her bare hands; her nails broken, her skin cracked. Can paint the bare, plain building that will be the nunnery. A master’s brush could paint well enough to make you smell sour vegetables and sour bodies; rancid feelings not able to break out in gossip. Silence, isolation, labour. If Videric does ride out to Jethou in five years’ time, they will have pushed her well across the line from beauty to middle age.

  If Videric’s lucky, he’ll find he was in love with a clear complexion and lustrous black hair.

  And if Rosamunda’s lucky, she’ll find that, too; and he can declare her dead and marry again, while she returns to the material world under a different name, at least free of the nunnery.

  I tried very hard not to enjoy the thought of her future: to hope that Videric does continue to love her, and so she’ll stay there for as many years as it’s possible to see ahead. Part of me still scrabbled frantically for some way to save her.

  ‘I don’t know how long it will last.’ Videric’s voice was a whisper. ‘I think, for as long as Carthage is under King-Caliph Ammianus’s rule—’

  Rosamunda shouted, ‘No!’

  ‘Or until their conflicts with the Turks break into open war; that could be as soon as five years from now—’