Ilario, the Stone Golem (30 page)

paint him!’

With perfect aplomb, Rekhmire’ remarked, ‘Shut up, Ilario,’ and

bowed deeply in the Turkish fashion to the man evidently in command

of this vast vessel.

The squarish man who had greeted us rattled off something, nodding

at me, and the tall captain held out his hand.

Looking at the square-set officer for confirmation, I put the leather

snapsack into the captain’s hand.

He upended it on his desk, turning over sized parchment and tinted

146

paper. Before I could warn him, he opened a stoppered ink-horn and

spilled oak-gall ink over his fingers. He prodded messily and suspiciously

at the sharp point of a stylus, until I warily showed him how it sketched

palest grey lines on a paper prepared with fine-ground bone dust. I had

no idea if he gained any idea of the connection between that and the

older silverpoint lines in my sketchbook that had turned brown.

He flicked through the sewn-together pad of sketch paper with

nothing I could read in his expression. It was not a new book, I realised,

embarrassed, as he stopped momentarily at a few lines that held

something of Onorata’s sleeping face.

‘Eh.’ He beckoned, took my sleeve, and led me round the immense

map table.

There were papers and brushes neatly spread out on his desk, and

shallow white dishes. He tipped water onto a flat slate and took up a

black stick, grinding one end on the surface as if he ground pigments.

The brush he used to take up the wet blackness was not of familiar

animal hair. I bent close, observing how he divided his pigment among

pots with great or little amounts of water.

The scent was unfamiliar but distinctive.

He felt my sketchbook with his thumb, shook his head, and drew up a

sheet of his own very fine, light paper. With a look of intense

concentration, he dipped his brush first in water, and then less deeply in

liquid pigment, and less deeply still in the deepest black. The curve of his

wrist was very quick with that last: I just caught that he touched not the

whole of his brush, but either side, in turn, very lightly.

Two, three, four strokes. No more than six at most, black, the brush

held at different angles—

A shape glistened on the paper. Differential pigment made it

miraculous: pale and dark lines drawn with the same swirl of a brush.

Graduating from ink-black through pale grey to grey pearl.

Recognition snapped into my mind.

‘Horse!’ My voice squeaked embarrassingly.

As solid as if it lived, the mane and tail of a galloping horse shaped the

wind. All its hooves raised off the earth, except for one – and that one, I

saw as I peered closely, was not on the ground, but on the back of a

flying bird.

It was as if he painted darkness and used it to carve light out of the page. A horse in such living movement that I almost felt it.

Rekhmire’, his clerks, and this captain’s officer all watched me.

There were other sketchbooks tumbled out of my snapsack; I fumbled

one up, and thumbed through until I found what I wanted.

‘There! Horse!’

Done months ago in Rome: carts setting off with Honorius’s luggage.

Here, a cart-horse with every muscle bunched and clenched as it began

to shift the dead weight of the vehicle . . . Done in red chalk, or at least

147

half-done; unfinished, but the study of the forequarters had some virtue

to it, so I had not thrown it away.

The captain exclaimed loudly.

I suspected I’d learned the word
horse
, when I could get my ear around

it.

He beamed down at me. I realised I was grinning back at him like an

idiot.

Behind me, Rekhmire’ respectfully spoke in the Turkish dialect, and

the large foreign captain frowned thoughtfully. After a moment he jerked

his head; I wasn’t sure whether it was assent or negation.

‘Cheng Ho.’ He leaned down, looking into my face intensely. He

spoke again: this time I might have represented it as ‘Zheng He.’

Guessing, I copied Rekhmire’’s bow. ‘Ilario Honorius.’

He couldn’t fit his tongue around the words. He planted one large

hand flat on the page of my sketchbook. More exchange of words in a

number of different languages took place between him and Rekhmire’,

while Zheng He – if that was a name, and not a rank – paged through my

book of drawings.

Rekhmire’ finally said smoothly, in Iberian, ‘Zheng He, the Admiral of

the Ocean Seas, desires you to show him what you draw before you leave

the ship. I suspect he’ll destroy anything that he doesn’t want known

about.’

A trickle of cold permeated my belly. ‘Don’t let him get any ideas

about putting out the artist’s eyes, along with the preliminary sketches.’

Rekhmire’ muttered something. For a second I saw him look genuinely

appalled, before a diplomatic blandness reasserted itself.

In that Iberian dialect which it was unlikely his clerks spoke, never

mind these foreigners, he asked, ‘Is that what you were threatened with

in Taraco?’

‘And it could have been done. Easily. Could you tell him I’m not a

slave? Make sure you tell him that!’

Rekhmire’ reverted to Turkish, in which I could pick out the word for

slave and not much else. Then Carthaginian Latin, in an odd accent.

After two or three exchanges with the large foreigner, Rekhmire’ bowed,

looked momentarily puzzled, and gestured for me to take back my book.

‘The Admiral Zheng says every man is a slave. He himself is the

humble slave of Emperor – “Zhu Di”, I think. Zhu Di of the Chin. Or
of

Chin. He, ah . . . ’

Rekhmire’’s brows rose as the foreign admiral added something.

‘He says, this is the first civilised country he’s found in two years of sailing. Because the bureaucrats sent to meet him are slaves and eunuchs,

as they should be.’

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11

If we hadn’t been in a foreign ship’s cabin, surrounded by clerks and

Zheng He’s armed sailors, I thought Rekhmire’ would have howled with

laughter. When something hits his sense of humour, it affects him

strongly.

‘You can tell the Pharaoh-Queen she did something right, then.’ I

barely managed not to grin myself. ‘Should I go draw things before he

realises I’m – not exactly what he thinks?’

‘That might be wise.’ Rekhmire’ bowed to the Admiral, and mur-

mured, aside, ‘Do try not to get killed while we’re aboard.’

‘This ship has more arbalests on its deck than your entire navy; if these

people didn’t
want
something, they’d be using them!’

His brow rose again. Why he would think – with Honorius for a father;

with King Rodrigo’s training – that I wouldn’t take automatic notice of

armaments?

The Admiral rattled off something in the oddly-toned language. He

wiped his fingers on a cloth, surveyed his desk, swept up a small box and

tipped the contents into his hand. Small gold-marked sticks, oval in

cross-section, black and red – belatedly I recognised his ink-sticks. He let

them slide and click back into the box, and thrust it into my hand.

He
wants
me
to
draw!
I all but shouted aloud.

He spoke urgently again, and finished by pointing at the squarely-built

officer, and then at me.

‘
Dong
ma?
’

That was
do
you
understand?
as plainly as I had ever heard it. I bowed.

‘Thank you, Admiral Zheng He.’

I went out in the company of my minder.

An hour later, I had the smart idea of sending in to Rekhmire’’s scribes

to borrow more of their paper, since I’d run out.

I persuaded Jian (my guess at the pronunciation of the squarely-built

officer’s name) that this would do no harm. Talking to each other, each

in our own languages, I’d added what I thought were ‘yes’ –
shı`de
or
haô

de
– and an all-purpose apology,
duı`bùqıˆ
, ‘sorry’, to my vocabulary. If I hadn’t found the word for ‘no’, that was because I found he didn’t often

like to use it. Jian would distract me, or misunderstand me, or carefully

not hear me, if anything requiring a refusal arose. I wondered if that was

him, or the Chin in general.

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There was also
huńdàn
, but I suspected I hadn’t been intended to hear

that one. Certainly Jian hustled me away from the lower deck tiers where

one of the anonymous oarsmen threw it after me. I stored it away for a

useful insult, when I could find out whether it was on the order of

friendly abuse, or something certain to start a fight to the death. It pays

to find that out beforehand.

I smiled, thinking of Honorius; he’d appreciate another foreign oath.

The ship was a marvel.

What I took to be other officers muttered, seeing me draw the outlines

of sails and hull, and broke out into outright complaint when I sketched

the swivel-based arbalests they had mounted on the decks, and the exact

number of masts and cross-trees.

Jian screeched at them, highly-pitched as a hawk.

What he said, I didn’t know: I suspect it was
Our
captain
sees
no
sense
in
hiding
what
any
man
in
this
city
can
see
if
they
sail
a
dhow
past
our
moorings!
Although that was not true of the interior cabins, with their great Turkish-style pillows on the mats instead of Frankish or North

African furniture; or of the interminable storerooms and holds, that

carried food and water enough to allow Ty-ameny’s generals to make a

guess at what crew the ship carried.

If it’s under five thousand men, I’ll eat my chalk, I reflected, and

yelped and shot up into the air as a hand went up my linen tunic from

the rear.

Whoever it was behind went over with a scream. The old reflexes of

slavehood either keep one perfectly still under assault, because it may be

a master, or lash out, because it may be another slave. My reflexes

evidently didn’t think I had a master on this ship.

I swung around to face a gang of twenty or thirty of the foreigners, as

well as the one writhing on the deck and clutching his knee.

Before I could speak, the officer Jian beat his way through the crowd

with the use of a short wooden stick. Thankfully, I saw he had a clutch of

paper in his other fist. I stepped forward to take the sheets from him,

and, as he yelled at me, to mime what had happened.

The deck around us sounded like a mews when the falcons have been

disturbed; all high screeches that set the nerves and blood on edge. I slid

my hand into my satchel, putting my hand on my pen knife – a blade less

than an inch long, but made of such quality metal, and taking such an

edge, that it would go through any man’s jugular if I merely brushed his

throat.

Jian thwacked two of the nearer sailors with his staff, kicked the man

on the deck, and over his loud screaming, evidently ordered the others to

drag him away. Whether to punishment or medical treatment was

unclear. Jian swung on his heel, exclaimed ‘
Duı`bùqıˆ!
’ as clearly as he evidently could, and scratched at his tied-back hair, plainly puzzled at

how to get through to me.

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With as much of what I could remember of Turkish, Carthaginian

Latin, and the Venetian trade patois, I attempted to describe the assault.

Jian finally beamed, and nodded. He tried several languages, before a

combination allowed him to make himself almost understood. ‘You are

not a masterless slave?’

I opened my mouth to try every word for ‘freeman’ I could remember,

thought of Rekhmire’ repeating
we
are
all
eunuch
slaves
here
, and settled for pointing at the main cabin. ‘Master Rekhmire’.’

The Egyptian name puzzled him until I mimed someone taller,

broader, and – with a chop of the edge of my hand, down at kilt-level –

eunuch. Jian grinned.

I pointed at the steps leading up to the rear poop deck, gestured for

Jian to sit, and tapped my chalk against the new paper.

I was still sitting there, drawing yet another of the surrounding crowd

of sailors, when Rekhmire’ came out to find me.