Ilario, the Stone Golem (72 page)

from the mundane world, in communities where bribery means nothing.

Because anyone who will live willingly on Jethou doesn’t want anything

the world can offer.

I stepped away from the arch.

Videric bent, cut her bands, and half-lifted his wife to her feet, urging

her forward.

Rosamunda looked over her shoulder at me, on her way to the door.

‘You don’t understand.’ She spoke quietly, frowning; I felt for the first

time that she was straining to make me understand, rather than justify

herself. She said, ‘If no one buys you – if you’re a slave and you’re

manumitted – then you’re free.’

I was confused. ‘Well, yes.’

She smiled. It was sad. ‘Odd, that you should have given birth to a

child, and still think like a man. Ilario, you’re not legally a woman. Your

father can’t marry you to a man against your will and desires.’ She

glanced at Honorius. ‘For a good match,
or
because he thinks it would be

better for you. And if you take a man as a lover, he can’t legally put you

aside for not having babies as and when he wants them. I know you have

none of the legal protections of being a man. You were made a slave as

soon as that Valdamerca woman took you off the chapel steps. But if

you’d been
all
girl, you would have been a slave as soon as you left my womb. Do you understand that?’

‘Not truly.’ I couldn’t do anything else but be honest. ‘Legally, I

suppose I’m not a woman.’

‘No,’ Videric said. ‘According to the Kingdom’s best lawyers, you are,

in fact, a eunuch.’

‘
What
—’ I began.

‘I know.’ Videric cut me off. ‘It’s the nearest definition they
do
have.

Ilario . . . I know you don’t wish to hear advice from me. I can’t say I blame you. But the last thing you want is any legal taint of womanhood

about you – trust me, Ilario.’

The look I gave him must have pierced even his hide. He appeared to

wince. Or perhaps it was indigestion.

‘It would alter your relationship with your father.’ His nod at Honorius

was civil, if not warm. His gaze travelled to Rekhmire’. ‘And your

husband, should you marry a man. That knowledge that you have

absolute legal power over your wife . . . it follows you everywhere, do you

understand me? Everywhere. If she can’t say no, her yes is worth very

little.’

Caught between sympathy and distaste – for both of them – I

countered Videric with a stare very like his own. ‘I understand you. All I

need do is imagine being a slave whom no man can free.’

‘Precisely.’ He nodded agreement, as if unaware of any ironies.

Rekhmire’ demanded coldly, ‘Why were you making such inquiries?’

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Videric inclined his head to me.

‘You’re not female.’ He smiled. ‘I had the lawyers look into it . . . If I

could have you declared female, you would – as my publicly acknow-

ledged child – belong to me.’

Before I could get a word out, Honorius cut in, in a tone like a

stonemason sawing marble. ‘Ilario is of
my
begetting, and would belong

to me.’

Rekhmire’, as urbanely as ever, put one monumental hand up. ‘My

claim pre-dates the court of Taraco – I bought and owned Ilario; Ilario

would therefore be mine.’

The only true woman in the room, Rosamunda, looked up and caught

my eye. ‘I gave birth to you, but there’s no way you’d belong to
me
!’

‘Christus and St Gaius and Kek and Keket . . . !’ I shook my head,

even if it did make me feel cold inside. I eyed Videric warily. ‘When you

say I would belong to you—’

‘Your money or property would be mine, if Master Honorius or any

other client—’ He stressed the word. ‘—paid for a painting. It would go

into my treasury; you couldn’t touch it. You would need my permission

to travel, if you wished to study under another master. I could order you

in what you wear, where you go, what you eat or drink, who you may

speak to.’ He shrugged. ‘And beat you if you disobeyed, despite your

being past the age of majority. It’s arguable that, as a woman, the male

age of majority wouldn’t apply to you.’

The silence was one in which I could hear my heartbeat in my ears,

deafening me.

Videric gave another shrug. ‘But they seem to feel that a
membrum

virile
, however small, qualifies you as a male. There’s also the rumour that you fathered a child – that bastard that Carrasco acts as nursemaid

to. I believe that carried weight with the justices.’

Fathered
a
child.

I didn’t blink.

My mother looked at me. At Rekhmire’. Back at me.

She smiled sadly.

‘There are men who don’t want the law to apply. But that really

doesn’t matter, does it? It’s the ones who
do
want it that matter, and then

it’s there for them, in all their dusty old scrolls, and there’s no fighting it.

Of the girls I went to school with, all but five are dead now. And ten of

them died in childbed. The men are on their third wives.’

She studied me with finality.

‘I suppose that it doesn’t matter if you have the breasts to give suck,

and the womb to carry a child – you have a penis. And no matter how

small it may be, it may not make you a man, but it makes you
not
a woman.’

‘Sadly, that avenue is closed to us.’ Videric took Rosamunda’s arm.

‘And it remains to see what we may do, now.’

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20

Rosamunda looked down intently at his hand, not moving forward as

directed.

She spread the fingers of both her tethered hands, directing a

searching glance at the skin there. Some thought tugged at the corner of

her mouth. I could not tell what she felt.

‘When I was a girl . . .’ She made fists of her hands, regarding them as

if their acts entirely surprised her. ‘. . . I used to keep a knife and cut my

skin.’

She turned her head without raising it, and the light caught the surface

of her eyes, obliterating iris and pupil, glimmering white in the sun. She

was looking at me.

‘I always wanted to cut my face,’ Rosamunda said plainly. ‘Ever since

a man put my hand on his belly when I was twelve, and showed me how

it made his male organ stand up. But I saw that plain and ugly women

had worse marriages, and worse lives. I thought I’d grow up to marry a

rich man, and then take lovers as it pleased me.’

She made a kind of snort, as if of amusement, but there was something

wrong in the note of it. ‘Then I
did
take a lover, and I found out what happened when a man’s potent. The birth nearly killed me. The pain . . .

And I came so close to child-bed fever. I could have died at the age of twenty. There is a reason I never left with your father, Ilario, although it’s

not the one he thinks. I realised that if I left and married Honorius, I could expect to conceive every year – perhaps only every two or three

years, if I put the child to my own breast. The women’s court
talk
about

ways to stop conceiving a child, but most of them become big-bellied all

the same. And then it’s as dangerous to be rid of it as it is to carry and

bear it. The brothers and sisters you never had, Ilario; they would have

killed me . . . ’

Her head came up: she addressed Videric without any pretence or

seduction.

‘If I’d already been married to you for five years, and it had taken

another man to get me pregnant, I thought I’d be safe with you – so I

stayed. If Ilario had been an heir, that would have been perfect. You

couldn’t have asked anything more of me. While there were no children

. . . I wanted you to love me. There was nothing else to keep you from

putting me aside. Then my father would have married me off to some

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other, much poorer, man; because
he
at least knows the bull is sometimes

as much at fault as the cow. A garden can’t grow if the seed is rotten.’

Videric’s face was patched carmine and a colour like spoiled milk.

Rosamunda said quietly, ‘I never did take another lover, after

Honorius, despite what the Court of Ladies may say. It isn’t difficult to

flirt and seduce and then be uncomprehending at just the right time . . .

And I had you, for the marriage bed, and I wasn’t afraid of starting a

child, and so I . . . began to enjoy it. I
liked
my life. It was perfect. When I saw what my child had grown up to be, I knew I could never have raised

Ilario. I did the right thing, staying with you, my lord. If you asked me to

do anything, I would have done it – but it’s so difficult, knowing he, she,

he was my own flesh . . . I
tried
.’

I thought of her voice, muffled among the green leaves whose water

supply could keep hundreds of poor men in Taraco from thirst. ‘
Run!
’

And she had let me run.

‘I tried,’ Rosamunda repeated. Her bound restless hands crept down,

pressing against her belly. ‘This last year or two, I’ve bribed the servants

to lie when they did the washing and say I still had my regular courses.

My mother, she was free of the moon’s curse early; she wasn’t forty. And

my grandmother too. But if you knew there was never a chance of a

child, now – I didn’t know how you’d act. If you’d change towards me.’

She didn’t look at me. Only at Videric.

‘It would have been easier to obey you and kill Ilario if I hadn’t known

I could never give birth again.’ She sighed. ‘It feels as if I’ve spent all of

my life avoiding pregnancy! But . . . I
did
have a child. Even grown to a

man . . . a woman . . . Ilario’s still mine. Even if I never fed her, him, at

my breast, he’s still my son, my daughter. But I . . . did try.’

Videric took in a deep breath through his nostrils. He looked at her,

merely looked at her, entirely in silence, until I felt the stone walls might

burst apart from the force of that silence.

He spoke, finally.

Gently, he said, ‘I wish you’d told me. We might have worked out

some other way it could be done. I assumed yours was the only hand I

could trust to it, but – it might have been arranged differently.’

‘How could I tell you? What man wants to be told he’s loved because

he’s barren?’

Videric nodded thoughtfully. ‘Still, we might have done it some other

way.’

The stillness broken, I cut in on his words, a cold shiver prickling the

hairs at the nape of my neck. ‘I don’t know what bothers me more – that

you can discuss it this calmly, or that you can discuss my
murder
in front

of
me
.’

Aldra Videric’s smile turned very ironic indeed. ‘We’re family, Ilario.

We need have no secrets from each other.’

Rosamunda ignored his macabre humour. Her gaze on me was

356

brilliant, and I wished I had my drawing-paper. It would take me a year

to uncover the emotions in how she looked at me.

Her mouth twisted. ‘At least you can
pass
as a man, Ilario. That’s your

escape. There’s no life for a woman here; it’s worse than being a slave.’

As cruelly as I could, I said, ‘You would blame it all on something else,

Aldro Rosamunda, wouldn’t you? It’s because you were born a woman;

it’s because women have no rights in law . . . If you felt that badly about

it, what was to stop you running away to Alexandria, say? You might

have been raped a couple of times on the way, but Alexandrine women

can enter their government and needn’t marry.’

I smiled at her, making sure she saw teeth.

‘But, thinking about it – this should please you, then: what’s to

happen. Everybody’s equal under the Mother Superior, in a convent-

house. And you’ll hardly be in danger of conceiving a child on Jethou.

It’s a shame you didn’t think of running away to the Church when you

were twelve . . . ’

Her complexion blanched. Instinct hadn’t led me wrong, I thought;

nine years in the court as Rodrigo’s Freak gives you an edge for

protecting yourself by attacking people in their keenest fears.

I saw that she had wanted to run, but hadn’t found the courage.

Or the court sparkled too brightly, and it drew her too strongly. But

somewhere in her heart, she still reproaches that girl who has first had

her courses, and then marked her arms with blood.