Ilario, the Stone Golem (26 page)

holds her head up well—’

127

He glanced up.

Tethered by the infant’s grip, wide-eyed, the Iberian assassin gave me

a look of slave’s terror.

‘I didn’t mean anything . . . Mistress!’ Carrasco added rapidly. His

gaze skidded up and down me, like a water-insect on a canal. ‘Master!’

He grew used enough to seeing me in gowns in Venice to think of me

as female. The eastern robe and kilt, which is male clothing in

Alexandria, is enough like Frankish women’s gowns to confuse him

further. His eyes widened enough to show white at top and bottom.

I frowned, in sudden realisation. ‘Have the ship’s other slaves been

telling you stories?’

He nodded.

That
will
go
a
long
way
to
explain
why
he
looks
more
ready
to
soil
himself
than
Onorata
does
.

‘It’s not all lies,’ I said. ‘But Alexandrine slavery’s different. I’ve been

trying to follow Rekhmire’’s model. It was the one I preferred to live

under when he bought me.’

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis looked as thoroughly miserable as I have

ever seen a man.

‘You’re right.’ He managed to achieve looking me directly in the eye.

‘Nothing honest can pass between a slave and a master. Anything I say,

you’ll think I’m ingratiating myself through fear of punishment. I

wouldn’t harm a child—’

Anger momentarily broke through, to be succeeded by despair.

‘—but you’ll think I say that for the same reason.’

I knew the secretary-assassin had not had particularly comfortable

treatment in Venice; Honorius’s men, who would have treated a slave

with some decency, set out to make the life of the man who had

threatened their commander’s family a complete and total misery. The

smallest things do it. A kick here, a spit in one’s dish there; an accidental

knock into a canal, after telling tales of monster- or plague-infested

waters. They might have done worse if Honorius had not had a quiet

word with them. The old skills of slavehood led me to be in a place to overhear my father order that they should not maim or bugger or kill the

man.

But that was all he ordered.

I studied the peeling red and callused finger that Onorata firmly

gripped. No great wonder if the university-taught lawyer had sunk into

himself; kept himself to menial duties with his eyes always cast down.

But . . .

‘I saw you with Federico and Sunilda.’ I spoke quietly enough that I

wouldn’t wake the baby. ‘I’d say you were an expert at ingratiating

yourself with people.’

The frustration and despair on Ramiro Carrasco’s face was something

I couldn’t sketch with my arms full of Onorata, and that was a shame.

128

How
have
I
become
so
vindictive?
I wondered.

Am I so jealous, if my child appears to love him better than she does

me?

I wanted to claw at my chest through the thin linen; claw at the small

breasts that – ache as they might – would give not even one drop of milk.

‘If I trusted you, I’d be a fool,’ I said.

‘So you would,’ a powerful tenor voice interrupted.

I looked up to see Rekhmire’ looming over Ramiro Carrasco. The

Egyptian nodded to me. His gaze went to the finger that Onorata suckled

on.

‘Get the rest of the baggage ready for disembarking,’ Rekhmire’

added.

The secretary-assassin removed his hand from Onorata with a

gentleness that did speak of younger brothers and sisters. He instantly

slid off through the crowd of sailors and soldiers without another word.

If he had his shirt and tunic off, I wondered, how many weals would I

see on his back?

‘You can’t trust that man.’ Rekhmire’ gazed, not at me, but at the

massive masonry walls of Constantinople harbour gliding past. They

dwarfed the other ships anchored here in the Golden Horn.

His expression would have seemed impassive to someone who didn’t

know him well.

Oddly enough, his overt bad temper reassured me. ‘You got out of the

bunk the wrong side this morning . . . ’

Rekhmire’ suddenly smiled at me. ‘It’s always a little nerve racking to

see one’s superiors again. Who knows what I’ve failed to report back in

the last half year or so?’

The idea of the large Egyptian being dressed down by his spymasters

here in Constantinople . . . I smiled. ‘I’d like to hear
that
conversation.’

A sudden change came in the tone of talk around us. Rekhmire’

frowned. I glanced around. Attila and half the ship’s crew were looking

over the port side of the boat—

No,
every
man
looks
in
that
direction.

Clasping Onorata, I elbowed my way back to Tottola’s side at the rail,

the book-buyer in his familiar place beside me.

Ships lined the quays at the foot of Constantinople’s massive walls.

The larger vessels anchored further out in the harbour. More of them

moored here than there had been ships in Venice. Every kind of ship:

cogs, dhows, bireme galleys. Warships.

At Venice, I missed the full-distance sight of the
Sekhmet
moored in St

Mark’s basin. At Alexandria, now – I found it brought home to me that

the Alexandrine navy consists of more than one trireme.

‘Six,’ I counted, and took unfair advantage of Tottola’s presence to tie

Onorata’s sling firmly around his chest. I hauled prepared paper and

129

silverpoint out of my linen purse, to sketch everything from the high

sterncastle of the nearest trireme to its triangular prow sail.

Yes, it came from the same dockyard as the
Sekhmet
. But to see the ship all at once, whole . . .

Six – no, seven – of the narrow vessels rocked on the gentle swell in the

harbour. Twenty-three paces from prow to stern, if they matched ours:

better than a hundred and twenty feet. And a mere seventeen or eighteen

feet wide. Narrow, knife-hulled vessels, with bronze nozzles pointing out

of the dragon’s mouths at their prows. Oars spidering rhythmically into

the sea . . .

Hand and eye moving between ships and paper, it took me a minute to

notice that the smaller sails were set. On most of the triremes, a crew of

oarsman was in evidence.

‘They’re not moored—’ I caught the line of one galley’s stern as she

turned away from us: a heartbreaking beautiful swell up from the water,

past the cabin ports, to the central stock of the rudder.

A few lines put in cargo cogs in the background, for the scale.

‘Do they patrol the harbour here?’

Rekhmire’ did not answer. I sketched the tracery of rope and sail

against the sky, angry that I could not – because I did not know the use

of each – draw it properly. If I had Mainz’s freedom about the ship, I

would know every function.

I hatched horizontal lines for the hull’s reflection in the harbour and

abandoned the page, turning to the next empty sheet, and the trireme

that carried the lion-head of the Pharaoh-Queen on its mainsail. ‘That’s

one
big
ship . . . ’

At my ear, Rekhmire’’s voice sounded oddly.

‘No – no, it’s really not . . . ’

I lifted my head from the page, and saw what he must be looking at.

‘That’s an interesting trick of perspective.’

Close at hand, a hull with a rack of masts rose up against the

background of Constantinople’s walls as if it were a mountainside. A

ship whose designation I didn’t know – not a galley, not a cargo-ship –

but which some trick of distance and light made ten times the size of

every other ship here.

Unimaginably huge . . .

I watched as one of the Alexandrine navy triremes rowed to pass far

behind the evidently foreign craft.

Attila swore. ‘
Christ
Emperor!
’

I leaned out, ship’s rail hard against my belly, healed wound forgotten.

I stared into the light blazing up from the water.

Distantly I could hear the trireme’s drum beating the pace. The oars

lifted, dipped, flashed drops of sea water—

And the trireme did not slide out of sight behind the close-at-hand

ship.

130

It glided
between
us and it.

Not something that is small, close at hand, seeming large. Something

large, far off, that is vast.

‘Not a trick.’ Rekhmire’ sounded stifled. His face showed blank shock.

As the ranked oars sent the trireme curving towards the stern of the

foreign ship, I stared at the top of the trireme’s mainmast.

The very top of the mast did not reach as high as the foreign ship’s

stern deck.

I judged a man standing in the crow’s-nest of the trireme would still

find himself the height of a house below the foreign ship’s taffrail.

‘I – wait!’ I gripped Onorata almost too hard, finding myself with both

arms wrapped protectively about her sling. ‘I
remember
—’

Memory came back with instant clarity. Cannon-metal grey skies.

Storm-lightning and rain shining all but purple on the heaving Adriatic

swell. And seen from the deck of the
Iskander
. . .

‘I’ve seen this before!’

Beating up against storm after storm in the Adriatic. And the sailors

telling hushed rumours of . . .

‘Ghost ships.’ I breathed out. ‘That’s . . . ’

‘Not a ghost,’ Rekhmire’ completed, his hand coming down warm on

my shoulder.

‘But it is a ship.’

My eyes no longer lied to me. The ghost ship was moored far out from

the quays, almost in the centre of the harbour. Each of the Alexandrine

navy galleys patrolled around it: around the great walls of wood that rose

from the water. A blue-glass shadow echoed it, as deep again.

Now I saw it again as it was – and how I had seen it at sea. That vast

assembly of bare wood, ranked stark as a winter forest against the sky,

would hold lateen sails. Sails piled higher and higher, one row on top of

another, each bellied out in a tight curve against the wind. I had seen

rank upon rank of them, rising up against the storm.

In this clear morning light of Constantinople’s harbour, each spar

showed the irregular edges that meant sails bundled and furled.

Below the masts was a great broad hull, with a flat prow. A hull that

my eyes told me stood ten times longer, and five times higher, than any

other ship in the harbour. The deck swarmed with men so tiny at this

distance that I must believe the size of their ship.

As we inched past the ghost ship, I saw painted on the prow, in green

and gold and red paint, a great spiked serpentine beast. Eyes were flat

black-on-white discs, staring out across the Alexandrine waters and at us.

With shaking fingers, I made notes too rough to be of use. But copying

the drawing of the serpent told me one thing.

Not in Iberia. Not in Carthage. Nor Rome. Nor Venice.

‘Not the Turks, either,’ I found myself murmuring aloud, thinking of

the patterns woven into Baris¸’s tunic. ‘I’ve seen much while searching

131

out the New Art. That – that is nothing like any style of painting I’ve ever

seen.’

132

9

Identical shock showed on each face. Honorius’s two men-at-arms, the

ship’s sailors, Asru, Carrasco, Johannes Gutenberg. Rekhmire’.

Attila snorted out a protest. ‘They don’t
build
ships that big!’

Rekhmire’ frowned and muttered words which I finally distinguished

as a list of shipyards. ‘Cyprus, Sidon, Tyre, Venice, Carthage, La

Rochelle . . . ’

He glanced up at the trireme’s captain, on the sterncastle. I could see

the man shaking his head.

‘No. None of them.’ Rekhmire’ narrowed his eyes against the sun

glittering off the water. ‘Menmet-Ra said nothing of this. It must have

arrived recently, therefore. Within the last few weeks.’

‘Arrived here? You’re likely right—’ Onorata whined and mumbled. I

stroked her cheek, hypnotised by the sight of the immense ship. ‘—but I

think it’s been in the Middle Sea longer than that.’

My drawing had gone, destroyed by weather, but I could recognise