Ilario, the Stone Golem (38 page)

enough. Her gaze switched back to me.

‘
Cheese
glue!’ she muttered.

186

19

The envoy of the King-Caliph Ammianus of Carthage was received

with the proper amount of ceremony, Pharaoh-Queen Ty-amenhotep

giving the impression – as I note Alexandrines like to do – that she

condescended to pay respect to a member of a younger and more

barbaric civilisation.

Rekhmire’, shielding me from the view of the envoy’s entourage,

murmured, ‘If he
does
anything in public, he’s a fool.’

The great audience hall had space enough to hide me, veiled and

therefore female, among Ty-ameny’s advisers. I hoped that if the

Carthaginian envoy had been briefed at all, he would be looking for

Rekhmire’’s scribe, or at best the painter’s apprentice from Rome, and

not the pregnant woman of Venice.

Apprehension made my mouth dry.

Onorata lay newly-fed and grumpy up in our apartments, with Ramiro

Carrasco and the German brothers and a squad of Ty-ameny’s Royal

Guard in attendance. I didn’t trust the Carthaginians not to attempt

abduction of my baby. Nor, evidently, did the Pharaoh-Queen.

Brass horns blared.

The crowds at the doors shifted.

I guessed the envoy’s party had begun their way up the Thousand

Stairs to the Daughter of Ra’s palace. In the white heat of afternoon.

Surely a calculated insult?

‘He may well think that,’ Rekhmire’ confirmed my suggestion. ‘But

he’s from the Darkness. The sun in the middle of the day addles the

brains of any local man fool enough to walk out in it. What it’ll do to a

man used to twilight, and used to being out in all the hours of the

day . . . ’

‘Any advantage she can get?’ I speculated.

The bald man’s lip quirked. ‘Regrettably the Pharaoh-Queen could

not find time in her busy schedule until this hour.’

Constantinople is worse than Taraco at midday. I’d made the mistake

of going out drawing in the day’s heat once and only once. The lines of

silver-point on the treated paper scrawled off into flicks and trailing half-

circles; and I had had to be brought home by Carrasco, of all men, and

put in a darkened room to be fed cool water in drips.

By the time Carrasco found me, I had rolled under the edge of a cart

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at the side of the market square’s infinite hot expanse. The air

shimmered, the heat hit like a hammer, and I had sought out the only

tiny piece of visible shade.

Ramiro Carrasco pulled me out by one foot and smugly carried me

back to the palace over his shoulder. It might have left him scarlet-faced

and gasping, but he evidently thought the moral ascendancy worth it. I

felt too grateful to even resent that. If I had been fool enough to take Onorata out with me, she would be dead.

Picturing the unknown envoy, I knew that he would be craving

darkness, cool, shade; that his head will throb, and his eyes pain him.

The crowd parted as the horns blasted out a flat raw sound.

Men stood silhouetted against the white sky.

The Carthaginian party moved inside, almost with unseemly haste.

Perhaps a dozen men, most of them wearing Carthaginian plate armour

– I winced in sympathy for the soldiers – and two in long white robes.

The envoy and an aide, I guessed.

They stood for a long moment in the entrance to the throne-hall, long

enough for whispers to start.

The taller of the robed men put his hand up to his face.

I realised he was unknotting the length of white gauze cloth he wore

tied about his head, over his eyes. His entourage also.

Of course: they’re Carthaginians, they must
know
what countries

outside the Penitence are like!

His hawk-bearded face uncovered, the taller man bowed to his shorter

companion, and signalled to the guards. They walked between impassive

lines of the Pharaoh-Queen’s Royal Guard, ignoring the ceremonial

sarissas that the men held.

The Carthaginian soldiers had empty scabbards at their sides. I

guessed there were halberds left at the palace gatehouse, too. They

walked as stiffly as men in plate armour in high heat do, and I caught two

of them exchanging a word and a grimace, exactly as Honorius’s men

might have done.

‘You stay here,’ Rekhmire’ murmured. ‘I must be beside the Queen,

but I want you out of danger.’

I thought him angry that the Pharaoh’s ban on armed foreigners in the

throne room should extend to Attila and Tottola. And that I had insisted

on being present.

‘Rekhmire’, I’m not
in
danger—’

‘I can’t protect both of you!’

He did not speak loudly, but the intensity of it stopped me dead.

‘If it comes to it,’ I said, as steadily as I could, ‘don’t throw yourself between anybody and a sword. I don’t want you to do that.’

Rekhmire’’s mouth twisted. He gazed down at the short, stout staff

with a silver handle, that he had substituted for his usual crutches. ‘You

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need not worry. It’s not likely I’ll be able to move fast enough to put myself between Ty-ameny and harm—’

His whisper was grim and somewhat self-mocking; I interrupted it

mercilessly. ‘
Unless
you’re right next to her. Don’t think I don’t know why you want to be at her elbow.’

‘I can’t be at hers
and
yours.’

His expression was frighteningly raw for a usually composed man.

He looks torn in two, as if he would literally divide himself up to

defend both of us – and sell his soul to be the man of quick movement

that he was before his injury.

‘I’ll be safe enough,’ I said, indicating my female dress.

He desires to keep me as safe as his Pharaoh-Queen, I realised. As for

what that means—

I don’t know if he values my knowledge and political usefulness – or if

he’s as fond of me as he plainly is of Ty-ameny of the Five Great Names,

who he treats like a brat of a schoolgirl.

Aiding him the only way I could think of, I said, ‘Where am I safest,

for you?’

‘This side of the throne.’ His eyes narrowed at the hulking apparent

statue beside the tiny figure of Ty-ameny. ‘I don’t trust that thing not to

come for you, Ilario. Far more likely Carthage intends it for her, but how

do we know it doesn’t remember you?’

‘It doesn’t remember anything. It’s stone.’ I thought of it killing.

Nothing with feelings could act that way without
some
emotion showing,

if only satisfaction at an order obeyed. ‘It’s a set of orders, waiting to act

on command.’

Rekhmire’’s look had something I recognised, eventually, as respect. If

he hadn’t seen the golem act in Rome, he trusted what I’d observed.

That is a responsibility, too.

His hand closed once on my shoulder, and he ambled off, deceptively

relaxed, sliding into the group of advisers around Ty-ameny’s imperial

purple throne.

The Carthaginians would recognise his role, I thought, assuming any

of them had been on diplomatic duty for more than a week. But the

ability to deter an assassination is also valuable.

Unless they’re sure an attack will succeed; so sure that it doesn’t

matter how many men Ty-ameny has around herself, or how well armed

they are, because hands of stone can bat swords aside without a second

thought, and stone can smash iron, bone, arm, skull—

‘Welcome our visitors,’ Ty-ameny said aloud, her voice muffled by the

gold mask and braided false beard she wore. Her herald stepped forward,

rapped his serpent-staff on the marble steps, and began a lengthy

greeting to the lords of Carthage and the representatives of his sublime

greatness the King-Caliph of that nation . . .

The herald stuttered a couple of times and looked annoyed with

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himself. He wanted to be nothing but imperturbable duty, a role rather

than a man, I guessed, and not seem as on edge and apprehensive as the

rest of us were.

‘ . . . the Daughter of Sekhmet and the Regent of Ra graciously allows

you to present yourself to her.’ The herald bowed and stepped back.

The shorter of the two robed men stepped forward, as if they were

engaged in a formal dance. Which I supposed, in fact, they were.

Out of respect, the man put back his hood. It left his sun-reddened

face exposed to the courtiers, with the white strip of skin where he had

covered his eyes with cloth.

His tight expression suggested him aware of the comic tone of his

appearance.

The man’s features, which would otherwise have been handsome,

tugged at my awareness.

Rummaging in one sleeve, I pulled out a folded sheet of paper and a

remnant of willow-twig charcoal. The palace laundry could be excused

for complaining at me, I reflected, while I looked up and back, up and

back, marking the values of the ambassador’s face on the paper.

With the tones and shape broadly in place I studied the sketch, while

the initial diplomatic niceties droned on. And dabbed at the charcoal,

smoothing it to a paler grey where I had drawn his hair in its long single

braid.

With pale hair, that suddenly seemed like the white of old age, the face

of Hanno Anagastes stared off the paper at me.

Under the drawing, I scrawled,
Younger
son
of
House
of
Hanno???
, beckoned a page, and sent the boy off with it to Rekhmire’. As I watched

him thread his way through the press of bodies, the ambassador’s

pleasantly resonant baritone rang through the throne room.

‘I have a question for the great Pharaoh-Queen. Why do you consort

with that ship of demons?’

Ty-ameny must love her ceremonial mask, I thought. No change was

visible in her small figure, sitting with her gold sandals neatly together on

a footstool set on the throne’s step. Without a view of her features, her

body was impassive.

The Carthaginian diplomat stirred a little in the silence that followed

his words.

Ty-ameny beckoned her herald and spoke briefly into his ear.

The herald straightened and fixed the ambassador with a bland look.

‘The Divine Daughter of Ra says her Royal Mathematicians have not yet

finished determining what the nature of the ship and its crew may be.’

‘It’s obvious what they are!’

It was obvious to
me
that the man seized on the excuse of working himself up. He threw off the hand the taller man rested on his arm –

which I was willing to bet they’d cooked up between them, back on the

Carthaginian bireme.

190

He wants to be able to shout at Ty-ameny.

My body was suddenly and instantly cold, knowing the reason why he

might need to do that.

‘Even followers of false gods must be able to recognise the presence of

corruption in their midst—’

The Pharaoh-Queen’s captain of the guard shifted his gaze, just

barely, to catch her orders. She lifted one finger, where her hand lay on

the arm of her throne. He stiffened, made no further move and issued no

orders, but I saw his nostrils flare.

The pale skin of Rekhmire’ caught my eye, in a chiaroscuro against the

black robes of the palace guard. Idly, he clasped his hands behind him,

leaning back on his stick, standing squarely between Ty-ameny’s throne

and the stone golem.

He rocked unevenly back and forth on heels and toes as if this were

nothing more than another trade delegation, political approach, or other

everyday order of government. The Carthaginian man of House Hanno

shot him a glance.

He
won’t
care
if
the
golem
goes
straight
through
you
to
get
to
the
Queen.

If I’m wrong, I thought. If this stupid, stupid idea doesn’t work – oh,

Judas, he does mean to kill her!

The ambassador’s voice was rising to a peroration. Ty-ameny leaned

one slender elbow on the arm of her throne, chin in hand, as if supremely

bored. I obsessively repeated Masaccio’s ingredients and method for

glue; wondering if a week in the creating and curing could make

anything with a tensile strength greater than a spiderweb.