by Mary Gentle
Neferet, visiting me after Rekhmire’’s funeral, announced herself an importer of books–products of the Royal Library’s machina, which she sold the length of Italy and France.
When she asked how I would live without Rekhmire’, I inquired as to how long it was since she had seen that cardinal’s secretary and man of letters, Leon Battista, and we parted with a quarrel that more than twenty years had made familiar.
In the same year, Ramiro Carrasco and I travelled back to Iberia, reaching Taraco a few weeks before Licinus Honorius died falling from an untrained stallion, at the age of seventy-five. He lived long enough to require me to escort Onorata to Italy, and to look at me with boundless love.
Onorata apprenticed herself to a painter in the Empty Chair, and introduced me to men as her brother. I dressed as a male, as I had done with Rekhmire’, for one kind of freedom–though dressing as a female gave me the right to kiss Rekhmire’ publicly.
Six months after a rumour followed us from Taraco, it became known that I was a hermaphrodite, and Onorata took the Italian name of Rodiani, and asked me not to contact her for a time. I had no need to worry: her friendship with Honorius’s soldiers had lasted all through her own childhood–which was at least hermaphrodite in its education and training–so I might always ask Orazi for news of her.
Ramiro Carrasco sought her out before we left the Empty Chair, and never told me what he said, but Onorata came out to say farewell in the public street, and gave me the kiss of kinship within the sight of all men.
North, south, hill, valley: I could wander where I liked, and draw what I might, but the absence of Rekhmire’ was an unbearable pain to me.
Carrasco, having studied me for six weeks, chose to remark that eunuchs lived no great long lifetimes, like as not–certainly not while they were employed as book-buyers–and it was possible hermaphrodites need not live too long either, based on that principle.
It should not have eased pain, to hear Carrasco suggest it; it did, however. He knew me, also, after so many years.
‘We might go to Carthage again,’ he said, one day, out of a sky containing no warning cloud.
I declined. Instead we went north, to Jethou.
I found Rosamunda a keenly sharp abbess, hair white with age, but all six establishments of the Order of St Gaius under her skilled control. She did not manage men–or women, in this case–with the ease of one born to it, but what she had learned with pains and study, she had learned well.
I met her in a cold room, the casement window open to the grey sea, and her black Bride’s clothing covered in addition with a fur-lined cloak, where she stood gazing at the implacable, endless sea.
‘How did you manage,’ I asked, ‘when Videric was assassinated, and I answered none of your letters?’
If I hope to see pain made less raw by time, I did not see it on her austere face.
‘Find yourself an occupation,’ she said harshly.
I found the truth of it as I spoke. ‘There is nothing left to do.’
‘Then do what you will.’ Rosamunda shrugged, under the heavy wool and wolf’s fur. ‘And remember.’
When I reached Carthage, to speak to Marcomir (Donata long since buried in the Fields of Baal and Tanitta), I found Onorata had been there before me, and I was not welcome.
I ended as I had begun, in Burgundy, in Bruges, in the house in which Rekhmire’ had cursed the cold of all northern lands, suffered a week of coughing and wheezing, turned surprised eyes on me as he woke one morning, and died.
‘Go back to your family,’ I instructed Carrasco.
‘Give me my collar again,’ he grumbled, ‘if you don’t believe I’m already with my family, here.’
We slept back to back, for comfort in the northern cold, since I did not believe Rekhmire’ would begrudge it.
When spring came, I walked the length of Burgundy to Dijon, in the south, and we lived within sight of the Good Philip’s castle, and worked on painting panels by open windows, to the thundering of Dijon’s water-mills.
And in the Duke’s library, while my sight remained keen enough, I ornamented frontispieces for those books of his that were translations of the flood of knowledge to come to Europa after Alexandria fell, while the effect of those printed volumes began to change the world.
About the Author
MARY GENTLE published her first novel at the age of eighteen, and has a master’s degree in Seventeenth Century Studies and another in War Studies. The author of several novels, including A Sundial in a Grave: 1610, she lives in Stevenage, England, with her partner Dean Wayland.
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Also by Mary Gentle
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye
A Sundial in a Grave: 1610
The Wild Machines
Lost Burgundy
A Secret History
Carthage Ascendant
Golden Witchbreed
Credits
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover illustration by Cliff Nielsen
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ILARIO: THE STONE GOLEM. Copyright © 2002, 2006 by Mary Gentle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JULY © 2007 ISBN: 9780061859915
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