1

We are so often a disappointment to the parents who abandon us.

A male voice interrupted my thoughts, speaking the language of Carthage. 'Papers, freeman--'

The man broke off as I turned to face him, as people sporadically do.

For a moment he stood staring at me in the flaring naphtha lights of the harbour hall.

'--freewoman?' he speculated.

People shoved past us, shouting at other harbour guards; keen to be free of the docks and away into the city of Carthage beyond. I had yet to become accustomed to the hissing chemical lights in this red and ivory stone hall, bright at what would be midday anywhere else but here. I blinked at the guard.

'Your documents, freeman,' he finished, more definitely.

The clothes decided him, I thought. Doublet and hose make the man.

The guard himself-one of many customs officers-wore a belted robe of undyed wool. It clung to him in a way that I could have used in painting, to show a lean, muscular body beneath. He gave me a smile that was at least embarrassed. His teeth were white, and he had all of them still. I thought him not more than twenty-five: a year or so older than I.

If I could get into Carthage without showing documents of passage, I would not give my true name. But having chosen to come here, I have no further choice about that.

The Carthaginian customs officer examined the grubby, wax-sealed document that I reluctantly handed over. '"Painter", Freeman...Ilario?'

King Rodrigo Sanguerra had not been angry enough to refuse me travelling papers, now he had freed me, but he left me to fill in my own profession-furious that I would not consent to the one he wanted. But I am done with being the King's Freak. Nor will I be the King's engineer for machines of war.

'My name is Ilario, yes. Painter. Statues; funeral portraits,' I said, and added, 'by the encaustic technique.'

Show me a statue and I'll give the skin the colour of life, the stone draperies the shadows and highlights of bright silks; ask me for a funeral portrait, and I'll paint you a formal icon with every distinguishing symbol of grief. I thought it likely that people in Carthage would want their statues coloured and their bereavements commemorated, as they do elsewhere.

'It's a good trade.' The man nodded absently, running his wide thumb over the seal of King Rodrigo of Taraconensis. 'We get a lot of you people over from Iberia. Not surprising. You shouldn't have any trouble getting Carthaginian citizenship--'

'I'm not here to apply for citizenship.'

He stared at me as if I had taken a live mouse out of my mouth. 'But you're immigrating.'

'I'm not immigrating.'

The Visigoth Lords of Carthage tend to assume that every man and woman would be one of them if they could. Evidently the assumption extends to their bureaucracy.

'I'm visiting here. On my way to Rome,' I said, using the Iberian term for that city that the Europeans call 'the Empty Chair', since St Peter's Seat has stood unoccupied these many generations. 'There are new things happening--'

They are putting aside painting the iconic meaning of a thing, and merely painting the thing itself: a face, or a piece of countryside, a sit would appear to any man's naked eye. Which is appalling, shameful, fascinating.

'--and I intend to apprentice myself under a master painter there. I've come here, first'...I pointed...'to paint that.'

This hall is the sole available route between the Foreigners' Dock and Carthage itself. Through the great arched doorway in front of me, the black city stood stark under a black sky, streets outlined by naphtha lamps. Stars blazed in the lower parts of the heavens, as clearly as I have ever seen them above the infertile hills behind Taraco city.

Stars should not be visible at noon!

In the high arch of the sky, there hung that great wing of copper-shadowed blackness that men call the Penitence-and where there should have been the sun, I could see only darkness.

I glanced back towards the Maltese ship from which I'd disembarked. Beyond it and the harbour, on the horizon, the last edge of the sun's light feathered the sea. Green, gold, ochre, and a shimmering unnatural blue that made me itch to blend ultramarine and glair, or gum arabic, and try to reproduce it...

And yet it is midday.

Even when the ship first encountered a deeper colour in the waves, I had not truly believed we'd come to the edge of the Darkness that has shrouded Carthage and the African coast around it for time out of mind. Did not believe, shivering in fear and wonder, that no man has seen sunlight on this land in centuries. But it is so.

It alters everything. The unseasonal constellations above; the naphtha light on ships' furled sails at the quayside; the tincture of men's skin. If I had my bronze palette box heated, now, and the colours melted-how I could paint!

'You're a painter.' The man stared, bemused. '...And you've come here where it's dark.'

A sudden clear smile lit up his face.

'Have you got a place to stay? I'm Marcomir. My mother runs a rooming-house. She's cheap!'

My mother is a noblewoman of Taraconensis.

And she will attempt to kill me again, if she ever finds me.

Marcomir looked down at me (by a couple of inches), slightly satisfied with himself. I thought there was a puzzled frown not far behind his smile. This short, slight man-he is thinking-this man Ilario, with the soft black hair past his shoulders; is he a woman in disguise, or a man of a particular kind?

The latter will be more welcome to this Marcomir, I realised.

The brilliance of his dark eyes would be difficult but not impossible to capture in pigments. And the city of Taraco, while only across the tideless sea, beyond the Balearic Islands, seems very far away.

'Yes,' I said, automatically using the deeper tones in my voice.

There'll be trouble, accepting such an invitation, since I'm not what he thinks I am, but that kind of trouble is inevitable with me.

I shouldered my baggage and followed him away from the harbour, into narrow streets between tall and completely windowless houses. And steep! The road was cut into steps, more often than not; we climbed high above the harbour; and it had me-I, who have hunted the high hills inland of Taraco, and habitually joust in day-long tourneys-breathing hard.

'Here.' Marcomir pointed.

I halted outside a heavy iron door set into a granite wall. 'You do know I'm...not like most men?'

Marcomir's eyes gleamed bright as his smile when he flashed them at me. 'Was sure of that, soon as I looked at you. You got that look. Wiry. Tough guy. But...elegant, you know?'

I know. It's one of the two ways that men look at me.

He used my name without the honorific. 'Come inside, Ilario.'

He hastened me past his mother, Donata, a white-haired elderly woman with the hawk-face that would be Marcomir's too, some day, and I didn't protest the brief introduction. The walls inside the cool house were swathed in baked clay, the light of oil-lamps turning them Samian red, and our shadows moved ink-black on the wall behind Marcomir's wooden-framed truckle bed.

'You ought to know this, at least.' I sighed, having undone the ties of my hose; reaching to strip off doublet and shirt together.

Marcomir's response was lost in the rush of cloth past my ears.

I have, occasionally, concealed what I am, under circumstances like these. I have no desire to attempt it again. I wriggled the knit cloth of the hose down my thighs and off my feet, and stood naked, with the faint chill of the room prickling my skin.

'Not what you were expecting?' I said wryly.

The Carthaginian Visigoth sat down on the edge of the bed. 'You're...'

His gaze went from my rounded breasts-not quite large enough to dimple the front of an Iberian doublet-down to the phallus already standing up with desire.

Standing no taller than my clenched fist. God was not generous when He made me.

I watched for either a sneer or amusement on this man's face.

'Are you--' Marcomir stood, and stepped close.

He touched a finger to my chin, feeling the soft, ephemeral scatter of hairs which I had let grow for travelling. His wide, capable hands slid down my side, feeling the curve of my hips. The tension of his not touching my penis made me shiver. And-as ever-my penis curved over as my stiffness grew, pointing somewhat downwards.

I searched his expression for something-something-I didn't know what.

He put his hands between my thighs, fingers going up into the wet cleft of my female parts.

'You're a man-woman.' His voice sounded ragged.

An hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. I didn't bother Marcomir with that.

I said, 'You don't need to have any part of me that you don't like.'

There is little else I can say, and it took me all the years between fifteen and twenty to devise that particular remark.

His face altered. I steadied myself. I have been put out onto the street before now. I guessed him not the kind of man who uses violence in an uncontrolled manner. But I can be wrong. There was a knife close to my hand, in my discarded clothes.

The height of him hid the lamp's flame. The close warmth of his body made every hair on my skin stand up.

His frown emerged. 'I thought you were a man like me. Not a ladyboy.'

'Marcomir...' I sighed, reaching for my shirt.

His skin was shadowed ochre-and soot-coloured as he stood with his back to the lamp. Despite the keen sensation of my body, satisfaction is not always worth what one must go through to gain it.

Marcomir sounded uncertain. 'Do you want this? Are you sure?'

'Being a slave,' I said, 'I have not, until recently, been able to take decisions for myself. And now that I can...I intend to take every decision I can get!'

He lifted his hand, closing it on my right breast so tightly that a pang of desire shot from there to my groin.

He took my down-curving phallus in his hand.

I could dimly feel that he fingered for balls. There is a lump in the lips of my flesh, there, that sometimes deceives men into thinking I have them. The desire to spend came over me with such force that I barely noticed his investigations.

'Come here!' He urged me at the bed. Not expecting it, I stumbled; fell on my knees on the padded-cloth mattress and wool bedding.

His hands arranged me firmly, belly down on the bed so my breasts couldn't be seen; head to one side, so that we might look at each other in the face. His weight came down on the bed with me a she knelt between my thighs, pushing them together, urging me up onto my knees so that he could get at my buttocks. I felt the position absurd; it still made my heart thump, and my penis become harder.

His hand rubbed flat against my spine, sliding over the breadth of my shoulders. As his palm cupped my hip again, the heat and weight making me shiver, he abruptly took it away. 'I'm rider, not horse. And I don't fuck women.'

I could barely catch my breath. 'Then don't!'

He leaned forward and stroked my wispy stubble. For the first time, I allowed myself to hold his gaze. His pupils were wide and black.

With a rush of relief, I realised, He wants me.

Just-not all of me.

Passion fires passion like nothing else. Face-down on the rough wool of his bedding, I spent into it with my male parts before he was fairly in the saddle.

Towards the middle of what I could not keep in mind was the dark afternoon, when he had slept for a short time, Marcomir took me between sleeping and waking as a man takes a woman. I spent as a woman does. He sank asleep again. He won't recall this, later, I thought, as my body shed his seed.

The relaxation of flesh after sexual congress is an infrequent joy for me. I dressed myself, looking down at him stretched out naked and sleeping.

Can it be possible-might I stay all my time in Carthage here?

I didn't dare hope.

Will this man Marcomir be willing to look me in the face when he wakes? Can we do this more than the once?

I have learned, from others unlike this man, that afterwards is always the more dangerous time. I went downstairs. Even if he comes to regret what we did, he is less likely to hit me in front of his mother, I think.

In the warm, fire-lit kitchen, Donata got up from the floor-carpets as I entered. She crossed to the hob, and took the lid off a pot.

'You'll be hungry.' She said it so plainly that either there was no innuendo, or she was used to her son bringing home men for the occupation we had been about. 'Here.'

I seated myself on the cushions beside the hearth. In Taraco, we would be sitting around a wooden table, on wooden benches; here...even the house-door had been iron, and not iron-studded oak, I reflected.

Because nothing grows here, under the Penitence. It must all be shipped in. Corn for bread, olive oil for lamps, charcoal for fires, timber for construction. Brought by sail and caravan from Iberia and Egypt, to this great city, so rich...

'I can make you meals of an evening, as well as hire you a room.' Donata handed over a full pottery bowl, and sat down as limberly as a woman half her age. I decided there was a glimmer of amusement in her bird-of-prey gaze. Some indulgence of her favoured son?

'I don't know how long I'll stay.' The crushed grain porridge tasted unfamiliar, but was pleasantly filling-And I haven't eaten since the ship! I thought.

And since then, I've had...physical exercise.

That made me smile. Shovelling up the thick porridge, I scraped the bowl empty within minutes. The old woman Donata gave an amused snort, and went to a capped well in the corner of the room to draw up water.

I realised I was more tired than I thought: the room swayed about me.

My body thinks, because it's dark, I should be asleep.

I miss the light.

'A drink will be welcome-is the water safe, here?'

'Safe as anything else.' The old woman scooped water from the metal pail with something that flashed silver; I couldn't see what it was. A cup, a ladle?

The walls swooped up. I felt sick and dizzy.

The carpeted floor filled my vision as I floated down among the cushions. I felt the thud of my body falling as if muffled by more than eiderdown. A wave of heat and dizziness mounted up into my head.

In Taraco, the court once thought it amusing to give the King's Freak opium.

And this is how I felt then--!

Marcomir's feet came into my field of view, bare on the dusty floor.

He rumbled something to his mother. Not surprise. Not a complaint. My baggage appeared in my field of vision; he must have carried it down from 'my' room.

I wondered muzzily, Will they cut my throat when they've finished going through it?

The last conscious thought I had was How many strangers have they done this to? and How could I fall for it!

2

'Who's "Rosamunda"?'

I ignored the voice at my ear and fumbled at my face. What I touched was smoother skin than I am used to, unless I use depilatories, or pluck out hairs painfully as the ancient Romans used to. It stung.

'Oi! Girl! Shut up about Rosamunda, whoever she is!'

My throat felt sore. There were cold, cracked tiles under my hands. I pushed myself up into a sitting position.

The man squatting in front of me said something over his shoulder. I didn't catch it. He stood and walked away, his robe's hem flicking me painfully in the eye. The same style robe as The same style robe as Marcomir's.

I am in Carthage, still?- Or at least in lands of the Carthaginian Empire--?

I heard him say, 'Probably shrieking for her mother. Shut her up if she does it again.'

She?

Nausea rolled through me. My sight focused.

Along the granite wall beside me, men and women sat with heavy leather collars around their necks. Chains ran from the collars to ring-bolts. The stink of old sweat and piss haunted the air. Beyond a grille, a few yards off, men walked up and down. Naphtha lights hissed.

I am in a slaver's hall.

And Marcomir and his Hell-damned mother have shaved me, because I won't sell as a skinny man with no strength for manual labour.

The urge to shut my eyes and shut out the world was strong. I didn't follow it- my opium dreams are detailed, precise, and lengthy, and I had indeed been calling for the mother who bore me: Rosamunda.

Calling for her not to stab me.

My fingers felt fine skin at my jaw-line. The next man along from me dropped his gaze, leaning away. The man on his far side muttered; I heard '--woman built like a stonemason!'

Oblivious of their cynical laughter, I blurted, 'I can't be a slave again!'

Once, when I was sixteen, King Rodrigo and his court thought it amusing to hold mock-marriage ceremonies for me, to a woman the first night, and to a man the second night. After that, my bride and my husband got to tell the assembled nobles the particulars of the 'wedding night'.

That gained me two things. Firstly, the friendship and sympathy of Father Felix, a priest of the Green Christ who disapproved of such blasphemies. And secondly, the irrevocable knowledge that when my foster father and foster mother gave me to the King, they gave me soul and body with the legal deed of sale.

I glimpsed, down the hall and outside a stone archway, the identifiable skyline of Carthage.

A sweat of relief soaked my robe.

'Where's my papers?' I staggered up onto my feet. Bare feet on cold tile. 'I have King Rodrigo's writ of manumission; I'm a free--'

A moment of split-second decision.

'--woman; I can prove it! If you try to sell me, I'll appeal to the King-Caliph!'

The man who had shaken me awake put a hand on the whip at his belt. The chiaroscuro of his face gave him one gleaming eye and one empty socket.

He stepped towards me, and the shadows shifted. I saw he did indeed have but the one eye.

'You think the King-Caliph here's going to care about some poxy little Spaniard king over in the border states?' He chuckled. 'You might have been free then. And you might be free in the future. You're not free now. So shut up while I get a good price for you-although Christ-Emperor Himself alone knows, I couldn't sell you to a halfway decent whorehouse! Look at you! Damned cart-horse of a woman, you are.'

My hands touched wool. I looked down. I wore a much-darned robe, almost long enough to be women's skirts in Taraconensis; a belt pulled it in to show the shape of my breasts beneath.

The shock felt like cold water.

Not to see my baggage here-well, Marcomir and his mother are thieves, yes. Not to have concealing clothing; to know they must have undressed and dressed me again while I lay drugged...

And King Rodrigo's papers will have gone in their fire.

'Was anything brought in to be sold with me?' I asked the one-eyed man. He was not particularly tall; I stood on a level with him.

'What?'

'My tools, my equipment.'

He stared at me.

'I'm literate.' It was no more than the truth. 'I'm apprenticed to a master painter's workshop--' The truth, stretched. '--and I shouldn't be sold as unskilled labour! You can get four times the price for what I can do.'

He gave a thoughtful nod.

Part of his thought, I knew, would be the realisation that I had not always been free, since I knew so much.

But then, that's not uncommon: even in the kingdoms of Iberia, there's many a general, or chancellor, or powerful merchant, who either began life in a slave's collar, or wore it at some time in their career. They tell me it's different with the Franks in Europe; that even serfdom is gone a millennium, there.

Another reason for going to Rome.

Sell me; I'll be gone within the hour.

One-Eye could likely guess that too. I found I didn't care. That Marcomir and Donata must have a habit of drugging and selling unwary travellers-that didn't rouse my fury like the thought of my pigments and Punic wax, my scapulas and heating-irons, tossed on the trash somewhere, or sold off piecemeal for a tenth their value.

For all that Federico and Valdamerca (I wasn't invited to call them 'foster father' and 'foster mother' to their faces) picked me up as a foundling, I have all the skills of a noble soldier of Taraconensis. I was taught well, so as to be their gift for the King. Taught the arts of embroidery and the harp, and singing, as a woman; taught to joust with the lance, and fight with the sword, as a man.

Marcomir isn't worthy of a sword. A wooden cudgel will do for him, once I'm free.

'There were some old metal boxes and knives in a sack.' One-Eye gave me a shrewd look. 'They dumped them with you. I'm not letting you have anything sharp. Now shut up, before I have to mark you and make you worth even less.'

Abruptly, I found my gaze drawn by something-someone-over his shoulder.

Drawn by stillness, I realised. The man had been standing, an uncounted shadow in the background, for a little time. He stepped forward to the grille as I made eye-contact with him.

'You are literate, you claim?' He spoke directly to me, across One-Eye as the slaver turned around. 'More than merely to write your name?'

'I'm a painter; I can both draw and write.' Possibly I sounded stubborn. 'My name is Ilario. Give me parchment and a pen, and I'll show you how literate I am!'

Once out of the shadow, the newcomer was a large man, with a shaven head and naked broad shoulders. In the naphtha light, his reddish-tan skin shone very smooth. A woven reed and cloth headband kept sweat from running off his shaved skull into his eyes.

I noticed that his hands, crossed at his chest, were too large to be proportionate. Also his feet, I thought, as I glanced down at his sandals. The white cloth kilt that wrapped his waist was not wool, but some weave of flax; and not a Carthaginian garment, either.

To be sold to a foreigner...who may take me anywhere...

'She's special, is Ilario.' One-Eye picked my name out of the air without a stumble. 'And not cheap, because of that. Now--'

I folded my arms and stood watching them. Something about the stranger's body made me want to sketch him, to see where those odd proportions of hands and feet would lead me. He carried his head high, almost daintily; I wondered if he had made the same error that Marcomir had, and took me for an effeminate man.

'No more than one hundred,' he said mildly, his large, lustrous eyes turning towards me. His voice was resonant, because of his depth of chest, but I thought he would sing tenor if he sang. Possibly higher.

I was so lost in speculation about where his people might live that I didn't pay attention to the negotiations. A clatter of metal startled me into alertness as a bag landed at my feet.

'Don't drop that!' I instantly knew, by the sound; and fell to my knees to yank open the hessian sack.

The pigments had gone, being saleable. Likewise the small sculpted heads, and the acacia and lime-wood boards I'd prepared with size for painting icons. No surprise. As for my battered tools...

One-Eye caught me with hands full of rush-stalk calami and reeds, spatulas and scrapers; bent close over my bronze box and cestrum and cauterium-iron, scrutinising them for damage. Before I realised, he had unlocked the chain from the ring-bolt, and put it in the stranger's hand.

'My name is Rekhmire'.' The foreign man spoke to me gravely, in barely-accented Iberian-as, indeed, he had spoken barely-accented Carthaginian to the slave-owner. He had a rounded aspect to his chin and nose that should have made him appear soft, but only added to his gravitas, given how tall and broad he stood. 'I have need of a literate slave, here. I don't need one that will run away. You,' to One-Eye, 'will therefore fix a name-collar around this one's neck, large enough to be visible in public.'

'You--' can't!, I bit off.

So much for being sold to a fool and a quick escape.

Rekhmire' said, 'The other alternative is a brand. You would prefer your face not spoiled, I suppose?'

Dumb, I nodded.

I stood dumb as the slave-owner and his handlers took the leather collar off me, and knelt dumbly beside the anvil as one of them deafeningly riveted an engraved iron collar closed beside my ear.

I have not often worn a slave's collar, but I was a royal slave from fifteen to twenty-four; I have no illusions that there is any difference.

'Let me have my sack,' I said as I stood up.

Rekhmire' said, 'You won't need--'

I took the risk of interrupting him.

'What am I, your slave all twelve hours of the day and all twelve hours of the night? I came to Carthage to paint. When I'm not working, I will paint.'

He met my gaze, calmly staring down at me. The bones of his brows were pronounced, under the roundness. The set of his mouth was strong. He held an authority all the more effective because he seemed to be at pains to hide it.

Behind me, One-Eye chuckled nervously. 'I should have charged you double for her; she's feisty.'

'Provided she can read and copy, she may be as "feisty" as she wishes.'

I wondered, seeing the gaze that went between them, whether the slave-owner had himself been in a collar once, and likewise this foreign man.

Rekhmire' gave a nod towards the sack of my belongings. I picked them up, careful not to pull against the chain.

I can paint; the rest is a problem to be solved.

With my leash in his hand, he walked towards the exit, and I hurriedly followed, the bronze box in the sack banging against my shin.

'"Ilario". An Iberian name?'

I grunted assent, matching my pace through the hallway to his with a little difficulty, being shorter. 'Where's "Rekhmire'" a name from?'

I did not call him 'master'.

He gave a light sigh.

'Alexandria-in-Exile.' He gazed down at me. 'You would call the city "Constantinople", I expect. I come from all there is now of Egypt, under the reign of Pharaoh-Queen Ti-ameny; I am,' he said, 'a royal book-buyer, for the Library. And when I cannot persuade a man to let me buy his scrolls, I can sometimes persuade him to lease me the right to copy them. Hence what you will be doing, Ilario.'

Constantinople: that great city of the east, that has stood as the last remnant of the Egyptian empire for more than a millennium, while Carthage and the Turks debate with war their old lands around the Nile. That great city, that stands as a bulwark against the Turks, with its Queen, and its bureaucracy that-that--

I stopped as we came out between iron-grille doors into a dark street. The chain yanked my neck painfully, but I only stared at him. 'You're a eunuch!'

Rekhmire' halted, giving a gracious, if cynical, bow. 'And you, too, are something of the sort, and not a woman.'

I ignored that. 'I thought eunuchs were fat! I thought eunuchs all spoke in high voices.'

'They do, if gelded as children. I was an adult man before I applied.'

His tone gave me to understand that more trespass would be rudeness, but still he did not speak as a man does to a slave.

Astonished-appalled-I said, 'You had yourself castrated deliberately?'

His narrow, plucked black brows came down. 'And you did not? No...No, I am wrong. You are no gelded boy. What are you? Is this--'

He made a gesture that took me in from head to heels.

'--this the reason why you left the Iberian kingdoms?'

The shock of waking as a slave again, and the shuddering kinship I felt for this mutilated man, moved me to speak honestly.

'I left because my mother tried to kill me with a poisoned dagger. And...she plans to follow me, and try again. But-yes. It is because of what I am. Everything is because of what I am.'

3

Above the roof-garden of Rekhmire''s hired house, the North African constellations shone clear.

By night, I saw, the correct season's stars shone visible; evidently not shrouded by whatever hides the sun by day. On the western horizon, a tinge of brown and gold marked the last of the unseen sun's setting. Above my head, veils of aurora-light rippled in the black sky: blue and green and gold.

Past sunset now. It gave me a sudden ache. I haven't seen the sun since we entered Carthaginian waters.

The Egyptian Rekhmire' rested his head on his hand, and his elbow on the couch, watching me as we ate. 'You are too ready to be a slave to be someone who has been free long. You say your King Rodrigo manumitted you?'

I looked up from the carpet on the tiles, where he had told me to sit.

'On the feast of St Tanitta, this year. For "long service". Truthfully...'It hurt to say it. 'I think he was bored. Pension the freak off-after a decade at court, its tricks are all well-known.'

The small smoked fish were a delicacy not to be found in rooming-houses. I crunched them, bones and all, while my stomach settled from the poppy-drug.

'And besides, some other nobleman had given him a married pair of Frankish dwarfs. Cheaper for the King if I have to support myself. He pensioned some of the others off, too; and half his menagerie.'

Rekhmire' gave me a glance that made me feel a dangerous willingness to confide further in him.

Shock, I thought. And the disorientation of opium.

He said, 'And you are a danger to someone at the court of Taraconensis? Or was your mother acting for private reasons?'

That made me blink. I drank water from a silver bowl, to give myself time to consider-and waited while the house-slave refilled it. There is rank among slaves, as in everything else.

The castrated man Rekhmire' said, 'What are you, Ilario?'

'Why don't you just order me to pull my skirts up!'

It is not a tone for a slave to take to his or her master. But this man...

'How could you do it?' I burst out, before he could speak again. 'How could you be born perfect and ruin it!'

His shaped strong brows went up. '"Perfect"?'

His voice, when not speaking to the Carthaginians inside the complex of rooms below, sounded lighter to my ear. Not like mine-which is too husky for a woman and too feminine for a man-but still different from the normal run of men.

'Manhood is hardly perfect. I find it a relief to be castrati.' He also drank from a silver bowl, I saw. 'Not to be always thinking of women, when I should be thinking of books. Not to be--' Here he gave me a swift smile, almost a grin. '--seeking relief by my own hand, twice or thrice a day, or more. I was a brawler, as a young man. I find myself very serene now.'

He looked not more than a few years past thirty, to my eye. I wondered when he'd gone under the knife. The thought made me shudder.

'...And besides, it is often a condition of employment in the Pharaoh's bureaucracy.'

'You needed to cut your balls off so that you can go wandering around, searching for books for Queen Ty-ameny's library.'

He smiled equably. 'It does sound a little ridiculous, when you put it like that.'

There was nothing keeping him from beating me, or putting heated irons to the soles of my feet, except what looked like a certain natural decency. As well as it being prudent to tell him what he wanted to know, I thought I should repay that.

I said, 'All of it comes from this-I'm a freak. A true man-woman. I bleed. Oh, not often; two or three times a year. And I shed seed, though not as much of it as a true man does. I've never got a maid with child. I've not birthed one, either.'

Rekhmire' met my gaze. 'If what I've read is true, you should take care not to. It is either the operation which birthed great Caesar from the womb, or the man-mother dies in childbed.'

My stomach felt as if it had a sudden lump of ice in it. I thought of the feel of Marcomir's seed.

Mouth dry, I added, 'I was a foundling. Until I was thirteen, I thought I would never know my true mother or father. Hardly surprising, is it, to expose a baby such as I was? I was taken in by a family who, although impoverished, nonetheless had a claim to nobility; they trained me to be a suitable present for King Rodrigo, and Queen Cixila, who was alive then. By the time they brought me to court, there was only Rodrigo. He was...amiable to me. I was his favourite freak for a time.'

Rekhmire' swung his legs down from the couch. I saw the ever-burning street-lights of Carthage on the Bursa-hill behind him. For a long moment he sat staring at me.

I shifted uncomfortably. 'What?'

The house-slaves re-lit burned-out torches, in the warm evening. His long lashes shaded his eyes, and I thought I saw a smudge of soot-black at the corners, accenting them as the Alexandrine Egyptians do. His shaven head accentuated all his clean-cut facial features.

His lips pressed together in a thin line. 'There is no anger in your voice. That you should be trained like an animal--'

'It wasn't so bad. 'Nilda and 'Nalda were good to me-Sunilda and Reinalda, Federico's youngest daughters.' I smiled. 'I think they liked having a baby they could dress up as girl or boy. And Matasuntha was married before I grew old enough to get under her feet. With three dowries to find...I can understand why Federico acted as he did.'

'And this Rosamunda, this mother the slaver said you speak of; she is Federico's wife?'

'No,' I said reluctantly. 'Federico's married to Valdamerca, my foster mother.'

Rekhmire' stood, and shook out the folds of his linen kilt. He lifted an eyebrow at me.

I rose to my feet, as much to give myself time to think as to seem polite.

'Federico and Valdamerca raised me. It was Valdamerca who found me on the stone outside the Green Chapel. They acted as my foster parents...'

Whether it was the shock of slavery, or opium, or this man's unjudgmental face-or Rosamunda's actions the last time I had stood in her company-I found myself speaking of things I had never intended:

'My mother, the woman who gave birth to me, is called Rosamunda. My father is Videric, her husband.'

'And they are?'

'The Aldra...the "Elder"--' I stumbled for the word. 'The "Lord" Videric is King Rodrigo's closest councillor. Chancellor, you might say. And Aldro-"Lady"-Rosamunda is his wife, his hostess; the cynosure of the Court of Ladies. You begin to understand,' I said bitterly, 'why they would expose a baby born a freak?'

He nodded, but I went on:

'It's not just that a hermaphrodite couldn't inherit their estate, any more than a cripple or a feeble-witted heir can. It's the scandal of Aldra Videric having fathered such a thing! Aldro Rosamunda having given birth to it!'

Rekhmire' absently rested his oddly-large hand on my shoulder. 'I see, I think-this Lady Rosamunda has just discovered who Ilario truly is. And to avoid the scandal if it was realised that their unacknowledged child lives at court, the butt of their noble friends' jokes, scorn, contempt...'

The Egyptian spoke clinically, evidently familiar with kings' menageries and jesters. I felt my face heat.

'...No,' he corrected himself. 'That can't be right! How long has Aldro Rosamunda known you were her child?'

'I came to court at fifteen. Since then.' I shrugged. 'How many other hermaphrodite children of my age would have been abandoned? It was obvious to her, who I must be.'

Rekhmire''s gaze sharpened. 'And her husband, a powerful man at court; he can easily have traced back your upbringing, found in what part of the country you were abandoned-yes, I see it. But...this same danger will have been in existence a long time: ever since you came to court. You are dangerous to Aldro Rosamunda now? Why now?'

'I've never been a danger to her! I've never wanted to bring scandal down on her; why would I? She's my mother!'

His hand dropped from my shoulder and he snapped his large fingers. 'You said-the King freed you! They might think you couldn't raise a scandal as a slave, but once freed--'

'I would never have hurt her.'

The Egyptian looked down at me. I begrudged him the height that lent him an illicit moral authority.

I said, 'She first came to me when I'd been at court half a year. We've spoken together, I don't know, six or seven times after that? Over the years. I knew what a scandal there'd be if gossip got hold of the story that she'd given birth to a freak. I would never tell that secret. She knows I won't say anything.'

'Clearly, not. Or she would not have attempted to kill you.'

I've watched stonemasons work; how with one tap of a hammer, and the correct wedge, they can sheer off a great slab of stone. I felt tears well up in my eyes, and I had to grit my teeth to keep my breathing even.

This Egyptian bureaucrat knows far too much about the right wedges to split people apart.

'She's afraid.' I managed to keep my voice steady, although I heard it croak like a half-grown boy's. 'She's mistaken. Since I couldn't make her understand that, I left Taraco.'

'Kek and Keket!' he muttered, as if it were some oath.

'And,' I added with a shrug, it being so much less painful than other matters, 'I'm hardly likely to be in favour enough with King Rodrigo to gossip with him. He wanted me to go north, to crusade against the Franks around Poitiers, as his siege engineer. A builder of trebuchets is more valuable than a painter of statues. I would have had to leave the court in any case.'

Rekhmire' looked me up and down. For all the wool of the robe covering my chest, I felt as if my breasts were exposed. He brought a finger up and stroked my hair back from my cheek.

'By the Company of the Eight!' he said softly. 'What a mess. And a puzzle. I don't understand it all...'

The fear that rushed through me-at having trusted; having told things I should never have told-made me curt. 'You don't need to. All you need to do is let me paint, in the hours when I'm not doing copy-work for you. I'll earn enough money to buy my freedom, and you can buy another slave when you get to the next city you're going to!'

In a tone that robbed the comment of offensiveness, Rekhmire' said, 'You're remarkably attractive, too. I didn't buy you as a bed-slave, but I'm open to amending the contract, if you're willing?'

Evidently slavery is different in Alexandria.

Startled, I embarrassed myself by saying aloud, 'Can you-I mean...Can you?'

'It may take me a little concentration to begin,' Rekhmire' said-mildly, for a man who must have been asked too many times before. 'But the only thing I can't do is procreate.'

His smile shone; I thought him honestly amused.

'The Sublime Porte's eunuch guards, let's say, would hardly be so popular among his thousand wives if they couldn't adequately entertain them. Believe me more than capable of making this offer to you. But answer me as you wish.'

Meeting his gaze, I saw such a lack of coercion that I was not, at first, inclined to believe it.

A slave's word is worth less than the wind that stirs the torch-flames, of course. And this man might be cruel enough to sell me, if rejected; worst of all, sell me to Aldro Rosamunda, if he could get word to Taraconensis.

But I am tired of being the whore I was sometimes made to be, as the King's Freak. And this...would be two freaks in sexual congress.

'I'm not willing.'

He gave an acknowledging nod. 'I'll show you some of the scrolls I have here, indoors, that need copying. And tomorrow we must go to one of the Lords-Amir's houses, to copy a parchment he won't let me take out of his library.'

Will this man forget rejection-and scandal-so easily? No. I should not have spoken...

At the moment, even this early in the evening, the black sky and the sickness of my body insisted that what I needed more than thought was sleep.

The tall Egyptian bent to pick up the bowl I had been drinking from, and absently placed it with his own on the rim of the roof, where it would be easier for the house-slaves to clear it away.

'I could make a few inquiries,' Rekhmire' said, glancing back. 'I meet a number of people in this city, while I'm buying books; I could tactfully find out if they know of any Iberian noblewomen travelling in this area.'

It may have been the mixture of diffidence and confidence in his bearing, or his subtle interrogation of me-or simply the realisation that an Egyptian civil servant travelling for the Royal Library will visit many places...

I blurted out, 'You're not a spy, are you?'

Rekhmire' grinned. It made him look unlined and twenty, instead of the thirty I suspected him to be.

'I get a lot of that. No. I'm not a spy. Go and make them find you a bed, Ilario. Amun and Amunet! You're falling asleep on your feet!'

I slept. But sleeping or waking, what stayed in my mind was my mother.

4

The next day, I bettered my acquaintance with Carthage-or at least, the part of it that lies indoors, in the rich closed mansions of the Bursa-hill district.

'That,' the Alexandrine Egyptian's voice said beside me, 'will be your rough copy, one assumes?'

I frowned. Naphtha gas-lamps hissed and sputtered in this scriptorium belonging to one of Carthage's 'philosopher-lords', or 'Lords-Amir', as they call themselves. A close stare at my papyrus showed me perfectly adequate lettering, by that harsh light, even if the subject itself was capable of boring the most pedantic scholar. I opened my mouth to protest-and shut it again.

Three separate oak-gall ink drawings adorned the margin. Two were approximations of diagrams in the original manuscript. The third...

...Was half-a-dozen sketched lines that caused me to lift my head and look at the Lord-Amir's cat, asleep on the window-ledge overlooking the courtyard, one front leg hanging bonelessly down against the inner wall.

My hand has a mind of its own in absent moments.

'You have to admit,' I looked back from the dark window at my doodle, 'it's not bad.'

'It's a cat.'

The Egyptian might or might not have been suppressing a smile.

'At least you can recognise it! This is my rough copy,' I agreed hastily, knowing that meant extra work by lamp-light, or naphtha gas-lamps. Nothing by daylight here.

And yet I'll draw without complaint, until my eyes feel like sand.

Rekhmire' murmured, 'How far have you got?'

The Carthaginians do their writing at a high desk at which the copyist stands, the manuscript held open in a frame. The tall Egyptian bent his head to read over my shoulder.

'"Hasdrubal lies between life and death, tended by his brother-in-law Hannibal",' I read. 'There's a page of Hasdrubal recovering from his wound after a local tribesman attacks him, then, "Hasdrubal, after much speech, persuades Hannibal to abandon his childhood oath of vengeance on Rome; they sign the Treaty of Seguntum with Scipio"...Then it's all diplomacy between Rome and Carthage until Hannibal and Scipio-different Scipio-lead the Roman-Punic Alliance to wipe out the Persians at the battle of Zama...'

I thumbed several pages ahead. History bores me. I'd hoped to be copying something like Hero of Alexandria's Pneumatics -which, if it is Greek, at least has drawings of his steam-driven aeolipile, and a couple of books on engines of war and ballistics that King Rodrigo had me read in translation in Taraco.

'...Aaaand...Much later, there's the Visigoths defeating the Carthaginians in Iberia. No Roman help; the Great Alliance is breaking down by then. And the great re-invasion of Iberia from Carthage, starting in the year Anno Domini seven hundred and eleven. Are you sure you want all this? I've seen a far better history of the Classical era in the royal library at Taraco--'

My hand clenched, splaying the split tip of my quill against the papyrus. Christus Imperator! Can't I keep my mouth shut?

The Egyptian Rekhmire' nodded, and made the reply I might have expected from a book-buyer. 'It may be necessary to travel to Taraco, in that case.'

'I will have bought myself free before you do.'

It came out, not speculative, but as a flat statement. I will not go back to Taraco.

The cat landed on the sanded wooden floorboards with a soft, plump sound, and strolled over to wind between Rekhmire''s ankles. My hand sketched the hoop of the cat's back as it arched up against the eunuch's shin. The Egyptian's brows lifted.

'Why must cats always approach those who can't endure their presence?' He sniffled, watery-eyed, edging it away with his sandal. 'Go, daughter of Bast.'

I added two small relevant curves.

'"Son of Bast", I think. Master,' I added, with the look that slave-owners commonly identify as 'dumb insolence'.

To my surprise, Rekhmire' gave me a look he might have given any freeman or freewoman.

'Balls aren't everything, Ilario.'

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Or for which of us. 'No, indeed...'

'Theologically speaking, all Bast's children are daughters, female or male--'

An elderly white-bearded Lord-Amir bustled in at that point, to converse with the Egyptian. I took out my pen knife-sharp enough to shave the hairs from my arm, or slice through a slave-owner's throat-and re-cut the quill's nib.

Forget Rosamunda, this Alexandrine Egyptian, these Carthaginian Lords!, I thought doggedly, with a glance out at the roiling waves of light that edged the Penitence today in green and gold. I came here to paint. Everything else is behind me now: forgotten and gone.

5

The tophet in Carthage is a place of child-sacrifice.

I walked there to paint, towards the end of the first week or ten days after I entered Rekhmire''s household.

Shake the nightmares out of my head, I thought. Even if what I put in place of them is true horror.

Every man knows rumours of Carthage's 'tophet'. That is not a Carthaginian word. I managed to find the place, after much wandering about the hill of the Bursa and down into the suburbs, by asking for directions to the 'child-garden'.

That made me shudder.

The light...remained the light Under the Penitence, and I began to wonder how Carthage's citizens bore it.

I wondered, too, what Messer Tommaso Cassai-nicknamed in Rome 'Mastro Masaccio'-might after all make of an apprentice who offered him not the formal faces of saints and the dead, nor statues with ivory-rose cheeks and brown eyes, but only the mundane landscape of the world. Even if it is the world under Carthage's constant darkness.

Must it not say something about a painter, if they can paint this unique light? He'll have to accept me!

The way to the tophet was up a street steep enough to make me regret the wooden easel under my arm, and the metal box of tools with me. I carried also a small iron brazier, to heat the hot coals inside the bronze palette. Unlikely I could paint here unless I could heat my instruments.

The naphtha gas-lamps that lit the street became more widely spaced, and stopped as I reached the crest of the hill. Stepping past the last tall building, I could see, beyond a vast rampart, the great five-fingered harbour below me. The shape of the circular ship-construction docks stood out clearly, outlined by lanterns.

A step or two along the rampart-wall brought me to stunted juniper trees, and I stepped down in among them, onto shed twigs, and into impenetrable blackness. I stopped, for my eyes to adjust.

Low, crabbed junipers. Trees I've seen grow in the desert rock behind Taraco, that thrive without rain. Now Carthage's only surviving trees. For all their small size, junipers grow slow enough that these must have rooted here centuries ago, before the Penitence fell on the city.

My eyes accustomed themselves rapidly to the shadow. Perhaps, I thought wryly, more used to Carthage now than I am.

I picked a way over roots, between gnarled low branches. The empty space that opened ahead of me had the smell of sacrifice on the air. That's recognisable wherever one goes, from prayers to Saint Tanitta in some goat-herds' village in the Taraconian hills, to the spilling of the Bull's blood in the Mass of the Green Christ.

But this will be infants' blood, if the stories speak right.

I was in the tophet before I properly knew it.

Squared-off short pillars of stone jutted up from the earth, and I had to step back sharply from the grave-monuments before I barked my knees.

Allowing the afternoon's starlight to guide me, I put my gear down and used flint and steel to light a torch. Far away, across the tophet, I thought I saw a cave-entrance-an associated sanctuary?-but its torches were too distant to help.

My flickering light spread out, there being little enough wind to make it flare, and let me see the carvings on the truncated oblong pillars.

Not saints' faces, these.

I let my fingers trace the mask-faces on the stone. The up-curved mouths were carved deep enough in the bas-relief that my fingers couldn't find the back of the hole. So, also, the down-turned curves of the hollow eyes. Their expressions were grinning mockery.

All the ages, under the names on the stones, were between birth and three years of age.

I puzzled out the unfamiliar inscriptions: 'here is...sacred and dedicated to...' My torch drizzled smoke across the masks' hollowed gazes. I straightened up again.

Rumour spoke of fire: I could smell no smoke or burnt meat. What do they call their god? The one that swallows the children whose bones are buried under these stones...? Travellers' tales speak only of 'Baal'-'God'.

Rekhmire' would know, he being a man who picks up information like an ant carrying away a leaf. I didn't want to ask him.

The carved god's-heads were as bald as Rekhmire''s. I could see an ironic similarity in their prominent stone ears, too.

I lifted my head and looked at the juniper trees silhouetted against the sky. The tophet moved me to shudder and smile wryly, both.

And now we come to the problem of how we shall paint in the dark.

Even if I can use flint and tinder on my brazier...

Carthage's darkness was not homogeneous. I realised that, now-I had thought it a freak of the weather, sailing in. But the Penitence swelled into sooty blackness at times, and at other times shrank up the dome of the sky so that all the horizon quivered and swayed with curtains of light. Unlike statues or icons in the workshop, to paint here, to attempt a sample of the colours, I needed to wait.

Tommaso Cassai was rumoured to paint the ordinary countryside around the city of Rome. So he might have his own experiences of waiting for weather to clear. If not weather like this.

The wood under the brazier's coals began to take fire from the tinder, glowing red and orange. I scented burning on the air. At this rate it would take a long time for my bronze palette box to warm enough to melt the colours.

Every coin the Egyptian had so far given me, I spent on pigments, wax, willow-twig charcoal (since no man was selling the better-quality vine-twig, under the Penitence), and the materials for size, and different grounds. So this is not a time to waste them. If I took out a prepared, properly-sized sheet of parchment and a metal stylus, I might sketch in silver-point-But colour-the eternal problem is mixing raw pigments to match the colour of reality...

Memory washed over me while I knelt, wondering, in that unnoticed corner of the tophet. There was no connection. Indeed, it felt as if the lack of connection was itself the reason: I have spent a month and more putting this out of my mind, and as soon as I relax--

I had been relaxed in Taraco, if slightly concerned about Rosamunda. I take after my mother more than I do after my father, but-understandably, with a freak offspring-there's little physical resemblance even between she and I. Left to myself, it would have been a long time before I knew Aldro Rosamunda for the woman who bore me.

Five weeks ago to the day, now.

And, as on the very first occasion when she and I spoke at court, it was the Aldra Videric who brought me to her.

As he led me past arches that opened onto fountain-courtyards, sunlight burnt white into the corridor, and cast the shadows of fretwork-cut alabaster back on the flagstones. The fragmentary light picked out the few white hairs in his neatly-trimmed yellow beard, and the blue of his eyes in his sun-burned face as he turned his head to speak to me-Frankish ancestry, somewhere in the bloodline.

'She's upset.' Videric sounded embarrassed. 'She wants to speak to you. I don't know why, Ilario. Be kind to her.'

At the doorway, he held back the linen curtain as if to a lady of King Rodrigo's court, although I was today in men's clothes. He would often joke awkwardly with me about women, or discuss duelling skills. My father, this burly, richly-dressed man; who does not know what to make of his son-daughter-except to know what a scandal it would be if the freak Ilario's parentage were attached to the great Aldra who is King Rodrigo's confidant and long-time First Adviser.

'She's there. Be kind,' Videric repeated.

He turned and walked quickly back down the corridor. The wide blue and white stripes on his linen gown-made with hangings leeves, as the Franks do, but in light material for our hot weather-billowed up as he walked; I glimpsed his silk hose, and his war-sandals. His hand, where it swung at his side, clenched into a fist.

I entered the room, and let the linen drapes fall closed behind me.

Silver flashed in the air.

The fountains of Taraco are a permanent pleasure, in this arid land that is the first and oldest of the Visigoth sub-kingdoms of Iberia. Warriors coming from the north, after crusade, relax with a welcoming sigh when they see the arcs of water in the sun. The ladies of the court sit in the shade of ferns that grow only in those great stone basins.

Of course, the fountains often smell sour, as I noted this one did; and they take hundreds of servants and slaves to maintain. As King's Freak, I was unlikely ever to be put to cleaning out clogged pipes or pumping water through drains, but that doesn't mean I'm not aware of such things.

'Ilario!' Rosamunda turned her head, looking up from the ripples on the fountain-pool's surface. She smiled-nervously, with a quick stretch of her lips.

'The lord Videric said you wished to see me?' Even in privacy, I do not call her mother: it's wise to be discreet. 'Are you well, lady?'

Her eyes flicked back and forwards, under half-lowered lids, and she didn't turn, continuing to look at me over her shoulder.

What has she to tell me? I wondered, suddenly.

The times that we had met before, with the awkwardness of her abandoning me as an infant between us, it seemed to me that she wanted to reach out to me. A year might go by, between such meetings. We had drawn close. Now...

'What is it?' I said.

Rosamunda glanced down; I saw her in profile. I suppose her forty-five or so. There is no grey in her black hair, and her brows are clean sweeping lines, without needing to be plucked. I would have painted her portrait, if not that I thought the love between us would show in it for all to see.

'I wanted to tell you...' Her mouth has a perfect fullness to the lower lip. She lifted her dark eyes to me, and I forgot to look at her; could see only the pain in her gaze. 'How it was, when you were born. Your father-Aldra Videric gave me a choice. When he saw you, what you were. I could leave, taking you with me. Or I could...give you up, and stay. I had nothing of my own. Nothing. How would we have lived? We would have starved!'

Gently, moving forward, I said, 'You hinted as much, before. You don't think I blame you?'

'Don't you?'

I am the taller, and I wanted to kneel down, in that pale alabaster room, and hide my head in her skirts, just as a child would do.

She muttered: I realised she had said, 'I left you where I knew you would be found--'

The swirl of green silk, that ran in a sweep from her deep bodice to the wide hem, flew out as she spun around; the golden girdle around her hips clinked as her Aldro's keys-of-the-house jingled.

'Ahh!' she cried out, but not loudly. As if stifled.

Silver flashed in the air.

I acted without thought. It was instinct to step back, and slap her knife out of her hand--

Her knife.

The dagger clattered to the flagstones--

The woman who is my mother stared at me, frozen; translucent flax-linen veil floating across, draping over her mouth. Both her empty hands extended forward, the fingers closing into claws.

The dagger on the tiles was a foot long, the blade triangular, all three edges sharp. Something blackened the steel, and the point itself was all black. Poison.

'What...' I stared.

Her eyes, wide and frantic, stared back at me. The noise of the falling knife echoed in my mind--

Will have echoed down the palace corridors. Far off, I heard a sound of sandals slapping against stone floors. Coming closer?

If Videric is still near...He will have heard!

Rosamunda caught her lower lip between her teeth.

My mind replayed her action. The dagger as she had been holding it, point-down, clenched in her hand. Flat against her belly, as she turned. Her quick, panicky movement.

'You tried to stab me.'

My words did not dent the silence.

A voice shouted urgently from the corridor. I heard a clatter of feet. My mother's gaze still locked with mine.

'You stabbed--'

Rosamunda whispered, 'Run.'

'--RUN!'

Jolted out of memory, I stumbled up onto my feet; ducking as something flew past my face.

A man's voice shouted again, in thick Carthaginian Latin; I couldn't understand him. Did he shout that word? Is it just my memory?

He ran towards me, from the rock-face where torches shimmered; halted at the edge of the stone pillars, screamed in fury--

I had easel and box scrabbled up under my arm in a second, as his robe flapped white in the darkness and he ran to and fro, not coming within the stones.

He'll be a priest, a priest of Baal; I'll be executed for coming in here, a foreigner!

I kicked the torch over and stamped it out. Sparks stung my ankle above my sandal. I ignored that, and snatched at the brazier; jerked my hand back from burning-hot iron.

'You! ' The priest's ferocity cut through the pitch-black afternoon.

I sucked at my blistered hand for a moment, caught in indecision-and ran, box and wooden stand clasped to me, abandoning the brazier and the coals.

I can earn another iron brazier-more days copying histories--

The Baal-priest's shouts died down behind me.

By the time I found Rekhmire''s hired house again and staggered in, the skirts of my robe blackened with dirt to the knee, I was in no mood to be spoken to. Only the knowledge of how expensive they would be to replace kept me from dropping my box of instruments and kicking them across the floor.

I placed them, very carefully, at the foot of the mattress that served me as a bed; slammed my fists against the clay-plastered walls of the tiny cubicle room, and swore out loud.

Rekhmire''s voice, amused and blasphemous, came from the doorway. 'I must teach you better gods to appeal to.'

I wiped earthy hands down my woollen gown as I turned and glared at him.

He added, 'You may swear by the Hermopolitan Ogdoad. They permit unbelievers to worship.'

'The which-what-how?'

'The Company of Eight.'

I was baptised Christian in the faith of Christ the Emperor; but that doesn't mean enough for me to feel inclined to argue with this lunatic Egyptian pagan. God has never helped me, why should I champion God?

Rekhmire''s smooth, monumental face changed to seriousness. 'I've been awaiting your return. I...have heard a rumour, from one of the secretaries of a Lord-Amir whose scrolls I'm paying an exorbitant price for, and I went down to check it at the docks--'

'What?' I snapped.

He scratched a hand over his shining head, where a faint fine stubble began to rasp at the end of every other day.

'There is news of an Iberian noblewoman having arrived here. Which means nothing in itself. But this woman is searching--'

'For her--' I stopped, helpless with hope. '--"Daughter"? "Son"?'

'For a young man...And a young woman.' Rekhmire' rested his broad hand on my shoulder. 'For her twin male and female slaves.'

6

'Twins! '

'You could be dressed as man or woman, now. How else could she look for you and not give away what it is she's searching for?'

'Who', not 'what'!

I bit my tongue to keep from yelling it at him.

He had taken me up to the roof garden again, and had the slaves serve wine where we sat in the chilling air. I didn't drink. Anger was too pure in me to muddy it with that.

'Slaves! Twins!'

I asked Father Felix, once, whether he thought it was possible to be born with two souls within one body. That might explain me, I thought. I bleed like a woman, I spend seed like a man; is that because there's a male soul and a female soul in me?

Father Felix explained gently enough that there could not be.

'God has afflicted you. Either you are a woman, afflicted grievously with the ambitions of a man as well as the curse of Eve, or else you are a man forced for some sin to bear the shameful signs of a woman.' He had shaken his tonsured head, in the shadow of his green robe's hood. 'Not your sin, Ilario. What have you done, after all? It's the sin of your unknown father and mother, I would judge.'

Rosamunda's here, I thought, stunned.

Is Aldra Videric? He must know what she did--

'She won't find you.' Rekhmire''s voice broke the comparative silence of Carthage in the evening. Men's voices called to each other down in the street below; greased cart-wheels screeched. I heard the yelp of an urban hyena come in from the desert to scavenge.

The Egyptian, my master, looked at me speculatively over the top of a glass goblet made in La Serenissima. 'There's no reason you two should meet. I'll keep you busy enough copying books. You will not be addressed by the name "Ilario". But...I'm concerned. If this Iberian noblewoman should happen to speak with the man who sold you to me--'

'You will this, you won't that!' All common sense left me. I glared at Rekhmire' as if he were not my legal owner. 'I get no say in the matter?'

'You say she's tried to kill you once already.'

'Run!' Rosamunda's voice whispered in my memory.

Her expression, if I could have caught it in pigments, would have made my fortune. Torn between fear for herself and ruin, fear for her daughter-son.

But not so much fear for me that she didn't try to hurt me.

'Where is she?' I demanded.

'Ilario...' The Egyptian put his glass down beside him on the green ceramic roof-tiles. Their colour echoed the curtains of light flickering inland, where the desert creeps close to the city.

His glance at me was sharp.

'Ilario, she's travelling alone, with very few servants, but those that she does have are armed soldiers.'

I put a finger between the slave collar and the flesh of my neck, lifting up the iron. 'You can chain me up all day and all night from now on, or you can tell me where she is.'

He shook his head. 'Nun and Naunet and the sun-god's egg!, but you're stubborn!'

'If you're a foreigner and you can go around asking questions, I'm a foreigner and so can I! I'll find her!'

The iron felt cold, now the evening fell. I let the collar slip down again. If I missed the sun, I missed the changeable light of the moon fully as much, and that would not be new for several days yet.

Under the stars and aurora-curtain of Carthage's Darkness, I couldn't read Rekhmire''s expression clearly.

'You write a neat hand. You cost me an appropriate sum.' His eyes caught the shifting green and gold light as he glanced at me. 'And, sooner or later, your mother will think to send one of her men around the slavers' halls. If you must hear it...She's not with the King-Caliph's court; she came in off the Christus Viridianus out of Mallorca, and hired rooms anonymously, overlooking the dockyard--'

I scrambled up, interrupting; gathering my skirts around me. I gave him a sudden queasy look. 'I'm sorry-I'll have to hear it in a moment!'

I saw him glance at the edge of the roof, off which it would have been most natural for a man to void his guts were he ill. His expression altered. Thinking of my woman's modesty in such matters.

He gave a curt nod of dismissal.

I stumbled down the inner stairs, into the house-and on, through the intricately tiled hallway, and out of the slaves' door into the street.

7

It wasn't difficult-if she was not with King-Caliph Ammianus's Carthaginian nobility up at the palace, even a necessity to travel discreetly wouldn't put Aldro Rosamunda, wife of Aldra Videric, in a poor rooming-house of the kind Donata kept.

There were only two establishments rich enough in that particular district; I watched until I saw a man wearing a mail hauberk and cloth-wrapped steel helm, whose face I recognised even if he was not wearing Videric's livery at the moment...Amalaric? Agustin? Names tugged at my memory.

I followed the soldier in through the crowded eating-area, catching up an unattended jar and carrying it on my shoulder. With the belt of my robe yanked in tight, and my hair loose about my shoulders...nobody notices a woman carrying water.

At the top of the stairs I put down the jar, and called her name past him.

'Rosamunda!'

The guard spun around, grabbing at me; I saw, past him, my mother standing in the room's doorway--

I snapped, 'She wants to speak to me, you idiot!'

The bearded soldier glared, his hands biting into my shoulders. I could see him register my robe and think a woman, therefore harmless, even though I was sure I'd fought him a time or two in the training-halls.

Her voice said, 'I do. I want to speak to...Ilario. Amalaric, you may go.'

The grip of his hands loosed. He stood back. There was no sound for a long moment but his war-sandals scraping the stone floor, departing.

The striped cloak she wore with the hood back-she had been on the point of going out, evidently-was blue and white silk: Videric's colours, if not the family livery. The richness of the self-lined fabric made her face look the more ill. There were pinch-lines around her mouth. Her skin was crepe-like; more white than white lead could account for.

I saw nothing but women's gear in the rooms beyond her.

She lifted a gloved hand and beckoned me inside, not taking her eyes off me-flinching as the metal door thumped home into the expensive wood-padded door frame.

'Ilario...'

There was a window, a striped stone arch looking down into the rooming-house's inner courtyard. Metal-grille shutters had been flung open, flat back against the wall.

A slave drew water at the well in the courtyard. It looked to be a good fifteen feet below the sill of the arch to the flagstones.

No windows at all in the outer wall, where the narrow streets are. This is Carthage.

I said, 'Why did you try to kill me?'

A perceptible, almost-comic trembling made her jaw quiver. I saw the bone-hinge clench, under her skin, hollowing her cheeks for a moment.

'Yes.' Her voice sounded thin. Harsh. No hesitation in that admission, I saw-seeing, also, the strength of this woman who is my mother. 'Yes, I did do that...'

'Why?'

'Scandal. Ruin. No one must know. The King would be forced to send us away.'

The chill that went through me, I felt mostly in my hands. With my fingers this stiff and cold, I could never paint.

Her gaze dropped to my throat. 'You're a slave. Again.'

She seemed unconcerned. I shrugged that minor hurt off.

'So King Rodrigo would have sent you back to your estates.' I know the Aldra Videric's rich lands. Anger began to break the crust of the chill in me. 'And that-would be a hardship.'

Men say the faces of the shocked or fearful turn white. To paint them, green and saffron would need to be subtly suggested. Staring at her, I thought, No wonder we paint icons for sorrow and worship. Men's true faces are too complex.

'There'd be scandal!' Her hand clenched. 'Don't you understand? People would see. People would know. My child: the King's Freak! My child: born-what you are. My baby, abandoned--'

'You need not have abandoned me,' I said, feeling distant enough that I sounded numbly polite. 'It was your choice.'

'Videric made me!'

I realised only then how badly I had wanted not to hear her say that.

'And yet, you didn't kill me.' I sighed and walked further across the room, staring aimlessly down at the courtyard. The slave had gone. 'Why did you tell me to run?'

'Because you're my child.'

I turned about, facing her. There is no one close enough below the window to hear us; the door is solid enough to block all sound. I looked into her eyes, that are green flecked with ochre, and are the same eyes that look at me out of mirrors.

Speaking hastily, Rosamunda protested, 'I couldn't kill you when you were born. Anyone else would have done.'

On the last words, her tone came close to a whine.

I blinked. My fingers were cold enough that I wrapped them in the loose volume of my wool robe. They didn't warm. 'So why are you here now? If you haven't come to kill me.'

'I have to take you home.'

Now that you see the collar, why not buy me?-but, no, that will mean disclosing her presence here. Proof of a foreigner's identity is needed for the legal contract.

The wind from the city sifted in through the window, past me. The flames of the oil-lamps wavered. I needed to see her closely. I stepped forward.

She flinched.

Her chin lifted, almost instantly. You could see how little the flesh blurred there, despite her age; she is still the most beautiful of the Court of Ladies. 'I have to take you back to Taraco! Videric told me to.'

If I could see regret on her face, I'd weep. Seeing only desperation, fury, resentment, panic--

Nothing existed to give me proof. But, looking down at her expression, a wash of horror went through me-a sudden picture, in my mind's eye, of how far down it is off deck and dock, how dark and impenetrable to the eye the sea-water down there is. I stopped breathing, for a moment: felt how lungs burn and burst, when the heavy water closes a man in.

'Why are you still going to kill me?'

Rosamunda looked at me.

With shame, I thought. Her expression shows shame.

She can at least feel that.

If I were to go with her...some way between here and the Balearic Islands, her soldiers-or she herself-will drown me.

Turning, tugging at the gauntlet-cuffs of her gloves, Rosamunda spoke without looking at me. 'Blame Videric. He says I have to do this. Ilario, he's always thought that something would happen.'

Her head lifted from the tiny stitching on the gloves. Her gaze flicked briefly towards me.

'When you came to court as a young...' Her lashes blinked down. 'It was his idea I should speak to you. Talk with you. Befriend you. Then, if the need came, I would be-close to you. Close enough to do what was necessary.'

I would be close to you.

This-thing-has been planned since I was fifteen.

My legs felt as if they were the lead weights which fishermen tie to their nets. I couldn't walk out of the room; I could barely stand.

This face, of which I know every line-of which, in all honesty, I have sketches which I have never shown any man. My mother's face. Looking at me with...impatience?

Murder. And all she feels is impatient?

My mouth dry, I managed to say calmly, 'Why does my father want to kill me?'

Rosamunda switched her head from side to side, as a horse does, troubled with flies. Her gaze avoided me. 'He's not your father. But you must see the power and riches we'll lose, if King Rodrigo sends him away!'

'Not my father.'

Her tumbling sentences stopped. She looked at me with tired, frank eyes. I thought she seemed relieved, if only by her own honesty.

'Ilario...Videric is only my husband. He's no relation to you.'

Foundlings are bastards, slaves' children, or both. Since fifteen, I have treasured the idea that I am neither. Now...

I moved before I intended it, crossing the room, flinging open the iron door.

I found myself staring at Amalaric's solid, mail-covered back.

The soldier stood facing down the corridor towards the steps, hands clasped before him, sword in its scabbard at his side.

Behind me, Rosamunda said, 'Ilario--'

I wrenched the iron door inwards, slammed it towards the room's wall, and it crashed hard against the metal door-stop.

Amalaric, beginning to turn, flinched. I ducked past him as he startled and grabbed.

'No! No disturbance!' Rosamunda's voice whispered, shrill. 'We can't steal a slave in public!'

Her footsteps; his; all sounded behind me in the corridor. A door opened behind me; I heard another man in war-gear clatter out; didn't spare a look back.

'Ramaz!' she hissed. 'Ilario!'

I raised my voice as I clattered down the steps, not able to avoid the obvious, ironic, bitter thought. 'Oh, you must feel very much at home here-in this city of child-killers!'

'Ilario!'

The rooming-house eatery was a blur, an unfocused gallery of faces; I registered nothing as I strode through and out.

8

The two men and one woman dogged my footsteps, as a group; I deliberately pushed them from my mind. I walked the crowded naphtha-lamp-lit streets, arms huddled about myself, hands tucked into my armpits. The windowless houses rose up in four or five-storey tenements to either side.

Videric...He...Not my father?

How many lies have I been told?

'Ilario!' Rosamunda's steps speeded up. I felt her try to put her silk cloak around my shoulders.

I shrugged it off into the dirt.

The two soldiers stayed back from me at her gesture. As if escorted, as if I led the way, I strode between the blank dark walls, my mother gasping at my heels:

'You'll come with us-we can go to the docks-I've a ship-I can send a slave, get the luggage sent on--'

I ignored her.

The desire to get away ate up ground. I know neither how far I walked, nor for how long. I did know, shortly, in which direction my feet naturally turned.

It was perhaps a quarter-hour, by the city's horns, before I found myself treading on earth and the discarded twigs of juniper trees.

Rosamunda's sudden voice in the dark startled me. 'Where is this?'

'Don't you know? I'd thought you'd know.'

A glance back showed me the black silhouettes of the soldiers, against the stars.

I said, 'This is the tophet. It's where they kill their children. As sacrifices.'

If the light had been better, I could have seen her reaction. The faint torches over at the sanctuary hardly cast illumination here.

I turned my back on her, walking to the sanctuary entrance. Torches stood in cressets at the mouth of the cave. Without looking back, I went in.

All three of them followed me over the dry, tamped-down earth.

Many footsteps are needed to make earth this rock-hard.

I saw no priests as I entered. I was no longer sure what I expected to find, beyond this cave-mouth I had only glimpsed before. Rows of round-bellied urns stood silent on shelves carved out of the rock wall. Above them were rows of expensive beeswax candles. And at the cave's far end, a great mask was carved: the stone mouth of the bald laughing god Baal. The lip had been cut so that anything placed on it would slide down, into the darkness.

Towards fire?

Staring, I stopped. I didn't look at my mother.

'Videric...Lord Videric's not my father.'

I could believe, now. Or in some way begin to.

Her tone was nominally apologetic. 'Perhaps I shouldn't have told you. But you'd find out.'

'If he's not-who is?'

Rosamunda walked up beside me, moving cautiously. Not because of the smooth earth, or the jars that must contain the bones of children. The movements of her body spoke both of fear and threat.

I don't doubt she intends to kill me, or have me killed. But I am no child, now; I am a man-woman grown.

'Honorius.'

Her voice was barely a sigh. She stood beside me, staring at the hairless, mocking stone face that stood taller than she.

'His name was Honorius. He was a soldier. Videric...gave me the chance to go with him, after you were born. Videric's a good man-he was willing to keep you, bring you up with his name. You would have been Ilario Videric Valdevieso...'

She pronounced it mellifluously, almost absent-minded, that binding of patronymic and matronymic that I have so often, so privately, longed to have as mine.

'Until you were born. And that became impossible.'

She made a gesture, as if that movement could explain everything.

Perhaps it could: she pointed at me.

'Honorius was poor. I told you: you would have had nothing. We would have had nothing!' I saw her glance back-checking that the soldiers were not within hearing distance.

They did not hang back far. Absently, I acknowledged that good practice: for all they knew, this cave had other exits.

I could see none.

'Honorius.' I tried the name. 'My father.'

She shot me a glance. 'He went north, afterwards, to the Crusades.'

'And you exposed your baby, at the wolf's hour, in late winter.'

One of the first things Rosamunda told me, when we secretly met, was the day and hour of my birth. Valdamerca had only ever been able to say that I had been a good size. And cold enough to the touch that she was unsure I was alive.

Rosamunda's voice echoed in the shrine. 'Videric sent soldiers with me. I couldn't do anything else!'

A thought briefly crossed my mind: to wonder if the midwife had been paid off richly, or lay buried in some grave scraped in the snow-hardened earth. Nearly twenty-five years, those bones might have lain hidden there.

It numbed me. 'And the man I've privately called "father"...Videric has been preparing for-nearly ten years? To kill me?'

To make a second attempt. After my birth.

Rosamunda's voice came quietly. 'I couldn't refuse to speak with you when you came to court. Not once I saw you; not once I knew who you were! You were my child. I made him permit me. He's always done what I've asked him, until...I thought it would never happen, never be necessary; he'd never say to me that you...'

Beneath the numbness, I felt myself flooding with disgust and pity.

Disgust for this long betrayal. But pity because, do what she might for the best, this woman has still found herself caught in the position where she must harm what she loves.

'Blame your father!' she spat, shrilly. 'If Honorius hadn't come back, now-you're as like him as a painted image! You and he, you've only once to stand in the same room together, and all's lost! He's visibly your father. And you and he may both point to me as your mother!'

The sense of it only came to me slowly. 'This soldier, this Honorius, he's alive?' Twenty-five years on from my birth. 'And...come back from the Crusades?'

'Oh, he's back! Alive.' She stepped in front of me, her face pinched and spiteful. 'He has new lands near his damned goat-hut of an ancestral estate. I rode out there with your fa--with Videric. To look. No, Honorius hasn't come to court in Taraco yet, but that's only a matter of time!'

Realisation crept slowly in. It is not merely King Rodrigo manumitting me as a freedman, a freedwoman, that has panicked Lord Videric and Rosamunda, but the visible proof of what I am to them--

I caught the movement of her hand.

A signal.

Shock held me still for a heartbeat.

Armoured up, there was little visible difference between the two soldiers. Amalaric, taller, and with scuffs on his sandals and the chape of his scabbard, looked awkwardly at my mother, and then at the other guard.

The man Ramaz, speaking for the first time, said, 'All right then. Come on.'

His glance also touched on Rosamunda.

Videric has told them he wants her to do this.

The two men stepped forward. Amalaric's sword flew out of its scabbard with the soft hiss of steel against wood-veneer; Ramaz's followed.

Torches and candles don't light themselves.

The flaring torches in cressets, outside these caves, will be thrown away when they burn down to charcoal stubs. The beeswax candles in holders, on the other hand, above those high shelves of urns-those will be extinguished when the shrine needs to be in darkness, and afterwards re-lit, because they're too expensive to waste.

In Taraconensis, only the bell-end of a candle-snuffer would be made of metal. It would be mounted on a wooden pole. Here, leaning casually up against the wall, a black iron pole had a snuffer welded to one end. A pole long enough to reach the high candle-holders.

Amalaric carried his naked sword stupidly loose in his hand. Because he is only arresting a woman.

'Come on, now--' He reached out with the evident intention of putting his other hand on my shoulder.

They've decided Rosamunda won't do this.

Videric will have told them: If she won't, you must.

I caught up the six-foot length of iron pole in a quarterstaff grip; shifted my hands on the shaft; slammed the butt of it forward into Amalaric's stomach, full force.

Mail stops edge and point. Blunt impact, now--

Amalaric dropped to his knees as if I were a priest he knelt before. His mouth opened; his chest not able to get in air.

Two swift changes of hand-grip on the iron staff, the weight of it swinging it around. I held it by a quartered grip and one end. What I hold travels in a short arc-and the free end comes around with correspondingly greater speed.

The iron vibrated through my hands on impact.

Ramaz staggered into my mother, knocking her sideways, his sword-arm either bruised or broken, his sword clattering off among the grave-urns.

Rosamunda stumbled up against the rock shelves, sending a jar rocking. She clung, staring at me.

Folk-wisdom speaks of men's jaws dropping open in shock. The little sudden opening of her mouth, followed by no words, let me see Rosamunda come the closest I have ever seen anyone come.

I am man and woman both: is it so easy to forget to remind them I've been trained as a soldier?

Evidently.

I wiped sweaty hair back out of my eyes. 'I'm not going to claim you as mother. Or him-Videric-as father--'

The iron candle-snuffer, as I rested it down on the beaten earth of the shrine's floor, became a suddenly-welcome support.

'--as-stepfather. I never was! This is all unnecessary.'

The two men knelt, crouching, groaning.

She put her hand up to her complexly-braided hair, as if her fingers touching her veil and pearls reassured her. 'How can we believe that? And now you're a slave again, you'll tell, just to be freed! You'll claim Honorius, to be judged freeborn! You will!'

Amalaric choked and heaved in a gulp of air; Ramaz began to scrabble in an uncoordinated way in the dust among the urns.

Rosamunda is a courtier's wife, Aldra Videric not being best fond of the battlefield. Will she see how easily I can kill these two men?

And how quickly I will have to decide, and act, before they recover?

'Tell them to disarm!'

'You have to be silenced!' Her shrill tone echoed through the sanctuary-cave.

I swung the wrought-iron pole, bringing it up into a guard position. In the seconds while they remain stunned, I can kill both of them, provided the brittle iron doesn't shatter. But--

I looked Rosamunda in the face. Wanting to see relief. Belief that this need not happen. The flickering candle-flames illuminated only frustration, and greater fear.

'I'd never harm you!' I shouted. 'You have to believe me!'

A sudden rush of footsteps thudded on the earth at the cave entrance.

Candle-light caught mail aventails, white surcoats, pointed helms; sword-edges, bearded faces-ten, twelve or more armed men running; pouring into the sanctuary--

'In the name of the Lord-Amir Hanno Anagastes, every man and woman here is under arrest!' a better-dressed soldier called out, curtly.

Past his shoulder, in linen kilt and hooded cloak against the night air, I saw Rekhmire'.

9

'You can't do this!' I snarled.

Rekhmire' snorted. 'Of course I can. I own you!'

My grip on the cold iron pole would not loosen.

The soldier Ramaz straightened up, swearing. He shot a glance at Aldro Rosamunda-and at the Carthaginian troops, since her face remained white and stark.

At a nod from the commander, Ramaz left his sword, limped across the cave, and picked up Amalaric with his uninjured hand under the other man's arm. Stronger than he looks.

The Carthaginian guard commander marched up to Rekhmire' and nodded casually in my direction. 'This your ladyboy slave?'

Rosamunda's face coloured a stained red that I could see even by this light. She glared at the Egyptian. 'How could you tell him that?'

'I have no reason to be afraid of disclosing the description.' Rekhmire''s smile was small but complex. 'It is, merely, a description.'

'Enough of this here, sir.' The commander raised his voice from the respect with which he spoke to Rekhmire', giving orders to his men. 'Back to the house. Keep it tight. You and you-bring the slave!'

Not thinking, not feeling, I let one of the Carthaginian soldiers take the iron candle-snuffer from my hand. He had to unwrap my fingers to do it. He was not harsh.

It was not until I found myself walking Carthage's dark, unidentifiable streets among the squad of soldiers, the Egyptian pacing beside my guards, that I began to grab at one solid thing, an anchor in my shock.

I spoke to Rekhmire', across one guard. 'How could you bring these men? You didn't know where I was!'

His expression remained mild in the starlight. 'I thought that I did.'

'You did?'

Rekhmire' gave me an oddly companionable smile. 'I realised you'd just heard where the Lady Rosamunda was. I thought I had only to call out the Lord-Amir's guards and make my way there. And if not the rooming-houses, then you'd have left there and be on your way to the docks.'

'I wasn't.'

'No.'

The paved steps of the street took me by surprise, catching my sandals against the lips of stone. I was not just disorientated-I realised I hadn't been in this part of the city before. And if not for these soldiers, I would be gone.

'So how?'

'I guessed.' Rekhmire''s voice came out of the shadows. 'By two means. The first being that a Lord-Amir's guards have remarkable powers of interrogation-I think there's no man, woman, nor slave they didn't round up and question at the rooming-house. And, second-I remembered where you had been to paint, and one man recalled overhearing a foreign slave shout "child-killers".'

His tone had a shrug in it.

'...It's the kind of slur they remember.'

The soldiers' sandals thudded on stone. Taller walls rose up about us. The basalt and steel doors we passed had naphtha lights above them, painfully brilliant to a dark-adjusted eye.

We are among the rich of the city here.

'Of course,' Rekhmire' murmured, with that mildness that I suspected hid humour, 'I had envisaged myself arriving in time to save you from a dog's death. Instead of which, I arrive too late and find you've saved yourself.'

I ignored his irony. 'I'll never "save myself". She'll come after me again. I know that, now. She won't give up. And I do not-do not -want to be forced into killing her. Even in self-defence--'

'Is it that way? Yes, I feared--'

The commander's voice overrode Rekhmire''s: the squad turned and marched down a long tunnel that led through the solid walls of a building, sandals clashing on rock, and emerged into more bright naphtha-light and the inner courtyard of a mansion.

The light confused me. I stumbled with the group, guided here and there by a shove. The house was a blur of naphtha-lit corridors, and deep burgundy paint on plastered walls, and slaves peering around archways as we passed. I saw rich oak furniture. The more-than-life-size statue of a man carved in yellow marble, with his joints outlined in brass or gold...

We entered a room, and each man went down on his knees like a wind going over corn, except for Aldro Rosamunda, and Rekhmire'.

An elderly small man in a maroon-and-ivory striped robe entered from a different archway, easing himself across the flagstones with the help of a stick. He gestured as he walked; the soldiers rose; and he sank down into a wooden chair with a grunt of effort and satisfaction.

A few servants entered and stood behind him. The room seemed empty enough, apart from the chair, that it must be an audience chamber or justice hall.

I noted the man to have the features of Visigoth Carthaginians. Pale skin. Blue-grey eyes in a wrinkled face; his hair an equal mixture of yellow and silver.

His beard was clipped short and neat. My hand went automatically to my chin, and the soft down that was beginning to re-grow.

Rekhmire' bowed. 'Lord Anagastes; may the eight-fold gods protect the House of Hanno!'

'One will be quite sufficient,' the Carthaginian Lord-Amir said dryly. 'Well, Freeman Egyptian-this is what you disturb my dinner for?'

Rekhmire' bowed again, with no appearance of undue respect. 'This woman is attempting to kill my slave. I paid good money for Ilario; I see no reason why Carthage would allow a poor man to be robbed of his scribe. I therefore appeal to Carthaginian justice.'

The Lord Hanno Anagastes grumbled something to the effect that no man had ever seen a poor Alexandrine yet, and that he, Rekhmire', might have waited until the morrow, and that local magistrates got no rest.

Their tone was one I have often heard between patron and client in the court of Taraco, when not too much obligation separates the social ranks.

Does this house also have a library in which I would have found myself copying scrolls?

'Lord Rekhmire'!' I called sharply. 'May I speak to you?'

Rekhmire' glanced at Hanno Anagastes, received a nod, and crossed the room to loom close over me. In an undertone, he said, 'Unless you wish to be running from your murderous parent for ever--'

'Why should Carthage care if a Lady of Taraconensis wants to kill her--' I broke off. '--her offspring?'

Rekhmire's luminous dark eyes met mine. 'You're a slave. Carthage's justice can be invoked purely because killing another man's property is illegal. And because Lord Hanno Anagastes here is a fellow collector of scrolls. Do you want to spend your life looking for hired murderers at every corner? Because the pot will eventually be carried too often to the well!'

Stunned, I could only mutter, 'You're trying to rescue me? But-you don't know what--'

'I know more than I did before I questioned your mother's servants,' Rekhmire' remarked, expression bland. 'Trust slaves and soldiers for gossip.'

'But-wait!' I protested.

One of the Lord-Amir's servants called out in Carthaginian.

Rekhmire' turned his back on me, crossing the room and bowing in front of Hanno Anagastes again.

The Lord-Amir nodded. 'Command the Iberian noblewoman to come forward.'

She is my mother. Whatever Videric may have tried to force her into, she is my mother.

Videric, who, I think, I must accept is not my father. Because there is truth in her when she speaks of that.

Twelve or fifteen armed men in a room are a powerful inducement. I could see, between their surcoats and mailed shoulders, how very little Rosamunda wanted to come forward. She reluctantly allowed herself to be led by the guard commander into the clear space before the Lord-Amir's chair.

I took a step forward; one of the guards looped his fingers into my iron collar.

Air hissed in my throat as I choked. I could neither move properly, nor speak; the collar allowing the exercise of such control.

Hanno Anagastes demanded, in an exasperated tone, 'Why did your husband not offer Freeman Rekhmire' money for his slave?'

Husband. Oh that will please her! Aldro Rosamunda, from a country where noblewomen handle at least some of their own business affairs.

'My husband's not here.' She flushed. 'Lord-Amir-I had no idea who owned this slave. If I let it go, how would I have found it again? If my men had disarmed Ilario, then I would have been able to find this Rekhmire', and...' She paused. '...ask my husband to pay him money.'

I caught the Carthaginian Amir flick a glance to his guard commander. The commander shook his head.

Hanno Anagastes' thin voice filled the chamber. 'Carthage is a city composed of one hundred thousand people, and four times that many slaves. Skilled as this "Ilario" may be, I find it hard to think you could not have found another who would be as good a scribe. And you are a noblewoman, are you not, at your home in-Zaragoza? Taraco? And therefore not poor.'

Rosamunda flinched. 'My lord...'

Rekhmire' spoke up. 'She is Aldro Rosamunda Valdevieso Sandino de Videric. Wife of that Aldra Pirro Videric Galindo who is chief councillor to King Rodrigo Sanguerra of Taraconensis.'

That his poking into my business should have led him to get even their matronymic names correct...I twisted against the hand on my collar; could not get air to speak. I saw Rosamunda's tight face. There can be no hiding this-Hanno Anagastes would need only to send word to some diplomat up at the King-Caliph's palace for the same information. But she doesn't want it said.

Rosamunda carried her chin up, and her spine straight; she did not look at me. 'Is it not permissible, here, to kill a slave who is treacherous, or otherwise dangerous?'

'I'm neither treacherous nor dangerous!' The guard's sharp yank on the iron collar cut me off. I reached to get both my hands under the metal and release the choking pressure; the soldier next to him grabbed my wrists.

It was as if I hadn't spoken.

I am a slave. If slaves are questioned, it's under torture, because it's taken for granted we'll lie.

Hanno Anagastes frowned at Rosamunda, indicating me with his liver-spotted hand. 'This is just a slave: why should a noble lady desire to kill her?' He peered back at me. 'Or "him", is it?'

Rosamunda went utterly still.

Rekhmire's voice broke the silence. 'My lord, it is both.'

'"Both"?'

'Both male and female. The noble lady Rosamunda knows this. Four-and-twenty years ago, Ilario was born her child.'

'Shut your mouth!' I strained to throw myself forward as much as I could; reach the Egyptian.

The guard commander nodded: three of his men seized me under the arms; the flagstones bruised my feet as I tried to jam my toes into crevices, so as not to be forced bodily from the room.

The wall of the corridor hit my shoulder, hip, thigh; caught the side of my head.

The impact was enough that I slid down to sit on the flagstones among the soldiers' sandals. Half a dozen yards away, murmurous voices came from the justice-room.

'Let me go back in! I have to speak!'

The Carthaginian guard nearest to me drew his foot back; I dodged, and caught the well-practised swipe to the head from his companion.

I sagged against the plaster wall, its intricate geometric patterns blurring in my sight, and put my head in my hands. Pain throbbed. I saw Rosamunda's face in my mind's eye.

What else is the Egyptian saying?

Sick in my stomach, I realised I was feeling a cauterising pleasure in hearing these things said aloud. Or it might only be relief--

How could I keep such secrets? Nine years, ten years; how could I go without saying a word of the truth of it?

No, not relief. Nor pleasure. I can keep secrets: could do it longer, if she will only trust me! If my blood-father so closely resembles me that it's a scandal-let him go back to the wars in Castile and Aragon!

I suppose that it lasted no longer than a quarter or third of an hour; it seemed to go on all night. Rekhmire''s soft voice recounting, inaudible. My mother's tones rising in protest.

'There's the signal,' one of the guards said.

'Come on.' The nearer soldier reached down and hauled me up, hand under my arm; his fingers closing briefly over the side of my breast.

I glanced up at his impassive face, caught his hand as he moved it, and pressed it to the front of my robe, at my groin.

His stunned reaction let me walk back into the Lord-Amir's chamber without being held.

I looked forward, over the shoulders of the guards in front of me. Rosamunda's expression gave nothing away; Rekhmire' looked urbane. The Lord-Amir Hanno Anagastes didn't cast a glance in my direction.

'Here's my verdict.' Hanno leaned back in his chair, sparing no glance for me, his tone that of a man who has come to his decision.

'Aldro Rosamunda. You are a woman, and not responsible. It is, therefore, your husband, Lord Videric, who is responsible for this attempted theft and killing. And although it is only a slave, we take the sanctity of property seriously, here in Carthage. Therefore, I will tomorrow petition the King-Caliph to send a diplomatic envoy to the court of your King...Rodrigo, is it? To give a formal rebuke, that will bid him keep his noble councillor Videric under better control.'

'No!' Rosamunda's voice came softer than a whisper. If I hadn't had an agonised gaze on her, I would not have known that she spoke.

Hanno Anagastes stood up from the justice chair, and laughed at some remark of Rekhmire''s.

The soldiers relaxed, talking with each other as if I were not there.

I wiped my hands down the front of my gown, and realised that I was leaving sweat-marks on the white wool. The subtle difference in colour filled my vision.

A voice said, 'May I speak to you?'

I raised my head and looked at Rosamunda.

10

'Think about it before you do this,' Rekhmire''s voice unexpectedly interrupted.

A glance across the room showed me the Lord-Amir speaking to his guard commander, ignoring the fact that Rekhmire' had left his side. Soldiers still surrounded me. I echoed: '"Think about it"?'

Rosamunda glared up at Rekhmire'. The soldiers might have been furniture for all the attention she paid them. 'What business is this of yours?'

He spoke not to her, but to me. 'Ilario-think, for once!'

'Why do you speak to a slave that way?' Rosamunda's lips pursed together. She slitted her eyes, looking up at him. 'Fellow-feeling, is it?'

Rekhmire''s voice took on an urbane, slightly higher-pitched quality. The voice he used back at the house-and at home in Constantinople, I guessed, where there was no need to hide his being a eunuch. Where it's a signifier of high status.

'Ilario is an excellent scribe. Perhaps a painter, too-if Ilario ever stops thinking of your scorpion's nest of a family before all else!'

I opened my mouth to protest-and thought: He's noticed enough to make judgements about my family?

I hesitated; he spoke again before I could.

'And, yes...perhaps.' Rekhmire' sounded embarrassed. 'Fellow-feeling. Friendship.'

I couldn't listen to that. I looked at Rosamunda, small beside him. She made me notice not just the breadth of his shoulders and chest, but his height-the cloak he wore, with the hood pushed back, would have been ankle-length on another man; it fell in one clean line on him, barely to his calves.

All her clothing-the wispy veil pinned to her piled braids, the long gown with hanging sleeves-seemed fussy. No clean lines anywhere.

'What would you know?' she snapped at him. 'You're not a real man.'

It hurt, even if I knew she only spoke carelessly aloud what most people think.

Nor am I a real man. Nor a real woman either.

Rekhmire' turned to me. 'Think before you do this!'

I looked at him, helplessly searching for a response and not finding one.

'How long did you wait after hearing that she might be in Carthage, before you went chasing off after her?' he demanded.

Is cowled.

Rekhmire''s shaped brows came down. 'How long was it after she tried to stab you, that you got on a ship out of Taraco? How long?'

'I don't know.' I shrugged. 'A few hours. Perhaps. There was a ship.'

'Ilario--'

'She's my mother.'

I took a breath, to steady myself. It might have occurred to me that I needed to speak as slave does to a master, but with Rekhmire' that thought didn't come.

'It was Videric, he was making her, influencing her-and now I find he's not even my father--'

I broke off. Thinking of Videric, showing me into the room of fountains, claiming Rosamunda wanted to speak to me...but he didn't know why. Lying. Lying, and with a perfect imitation of true feeling. Aldra Videric, the politician.

I let myself look at Rosamunda.

Pain broke something in me.

'Why did you never stop him? Why did you let him make you do these things? Try to stab me? Expose me when I was born? Are you that afraid of him?'

An unwelcome pang of sympathy defused my anger.

'Were you so much afraid of him that you couldn't go with this Honorius-my father?'

She gave a sardonic snort, much more the Aldro Rosamunda of the Taraconian court than the humble petitioner to a Carthaginian Lord-Amir.

'Why would I go with Honorius? He gave me a deformed baby!' She made an apologetic movement with her mouth. 'Ilario, I'm sorry. It was hard enough giving you up. The thought of such a birth happening again...And he had nothing. One of those ancient family titles that goes back to the Visigoth invasion of Iberia, with a tiny hunting lodge in the hills, and rents from a pair of goat-farms. I couldn't have stayed at court.'

She extended a hand to me, the glove off, her fingers pink and free of calluses.

'You would have had nothing.'

'I had Federico and Valdamerca and no "hunting lodge".' The words came out flatly; I could hardly believe I said them. 'I had winters where I went barefoot, because the shoe-money went to Matasuntha-she had to be married before 'Nalda and 'Nilda could. This Honorius-You said "nothing". I thought you meant he was just a soldier, like...'

I nodded across the burgundy room at Ramaz, who was wincing every time Amalaric leaned heavily on his shoulder, even if it was the other shoulder from his broken arm.

'A nobleman? That's not "nothing"!'

'A poor nobleman. I couldn't have stayed at court! ' Her breasts rose and fell rapidly, under the laced top of her gown. She glared at me. 'I would have had to go north, to the border, to the Crusade. There would have been nothing for me but mud and Franks screaming down out of the hills and--'

'--no influence.' Rekhmire' cut in. He added, into her silence, 'No influence with a king, albeit through a husband. No playing the game of courtiers. "Nothing."'

Rosamunda's head moved fractionally. A nod of agreement, or a shudder of apprehension; it could be taken for either.

'You could have told me! ' A few of the soldiers were evidently listening; I could take no notice of that, other than to attempt to speak lower, and I could not tell whether or not I succeeded: 'Told me that Videric's not my father! About this Honorius who could stand beside me and be visibly my father-point to you as my mother--'

I shook my head, feeling hot and cold under my skin at the same time.

'Videric could have told me. Or-no, that doesn't matter, does it? If you're my mother, and his wife, it'll be assumed I'm his.'

I blinked.

'Either way...I see it. It doesn't matter which way the scandal goes. If I'm said not to be his child-then you conceived a bastard by some man, and therefore Videric's been cuckolded, and looks a public fool. Or if Videric is thought to be my father, then he fathered a hermaphrodite. And in the public eye, that makes him a monster as well as a fool.'

If I had been chilled, speaking to Rosamunda in the room of the fountains, now I was boiling hot. I felt as if I might dissolve in it. Everything I am, melting away.

'Why did you tell me to run? Not because I was yours. Not because you didn't want me dead.' As a blow in combat can crush with numbness, before it hurts, saying these things out loud numbed me. 'Because...you wanted me to leave Taraco? No matter what?'

She looked at me with no appearance of shame.

I repeated what I had thought was only spite, on my part. 'Child-killer.'

'Evidently not. Here you are, alive.'

'I thought he forced you. Videric. You said he made you do it.'

'I never said I didn't agree with him-that it was necessary.' Her face altered. 'And I was right! See what's happened. If there's a diplomatic rebuke from the King-Caliph, it will all come out! King Rodrigo will know! The envoy...He will say that I'm your mother. Videric will be sent away from court. I--You have to stop this happening!'

Nine years at court has taught me politics enough. The King-Caliph will send his envoy to slap King Rodrigo's wrist. That in itself wouldn't be enough to put Videric out of favour. But if what comes out in public is the parentage of the recently freed King's Freak...

If no man knows, yet, about the adultery of my mother, then Videric will be thought the father of a freak hermaphrodite child-whom he has allowed to grow up as a slave in the King's court. Without a word of acknowledgement.

And sent his wife to kill.

Because Taraco is sometimes no more capable than Carthage of thinking a woman responsible for her own actions.

'Videric may have to put you aside. Divorce you. Disassociate himself--' Dizzyingly, my mind swung around. 'You lied. You would have killed me when I was born. Valdamerca found me by pure accident. How could you expect anyone to find a foundling, in the dark and the snow?'

This is obvious, now; how can it not have been obvious before?

'I thought you'd been forced into a position where you had to hurt what you loved.' The boiling liquidity of rage threatened to drown me. 'But that's not true.'

'I was! I did...need to see you.' She locked gazes with me. 'I did need to speak to you. You were mine. I couldn't...'

'You could.'

'You have to stop this happening, Ilario!'

Rage almost choked me. 'Even if I wanted to, there's nothing I can do!'

Rekhmire', his voice lowered so that the guards should not hear more than they had, said, 'Oh, there is a way.'

I looked at him.

'This is a court case over property.' He gently put his too-large hand on my shoulder. 'Tell me that you want it, and I'll free you. Formally. Manumit you here and now. And then it's merely a squabble between two freewomen of Taraconensis, and no business of a Carthaginian magistrate. This all becomes mere hearsay. The Lord-Amir will drop the case, I think, rather than bother King-Caliph Ammianus with a witness who can't be tortured into confessing the necessary truth.'

Rosamunda's face, filled with everything from fury to love, anguish to regret, stared at me.

With a wisp of what I thought of as Rekhmire''s own humour, I said to the Egyptian, 'You had to tell me this?'

'You would have thought of it yourself, afterwards, and asked me why I didn't.'

I glanced to one side. The soldiers still talked among themselves. I realised we'd fallen into an Iberian dialect of Visigothic-even Rekhmire'. This must seem a local squabble, natives; nothing to concern Carthaginians...

The Lord-Amir signalled to one of his slaves, turning away from us.

Through the arches of the mansion, I could glimpse other slaves. There would be couches in another room, where Hanno Anagastes' food waited for him.

A bare second, to decide. To speak.

Rosamunda's voice creaked, 'You must want to be freed...'

I looked at her.

'I'm done with protecting you. And with protecting him.' I turned towards Rekhmire'. 'I'll earn the money to pay you for my freedom, like I said. Bit by bit. Don't free me now.'

11

A month or more after Rosamunda left the city, I sat in the tophet, my wooden resting-frame in front of me; hot wax and pigments steaming in the cool air.

She has no real compassion or love, but I am not free of her yet.

It's been less than a season: why would I expect it, in that short time?

The sky above me was a black that defied words, containing, as it seemed to, an orange reflection that did not brighten the dark. The shadows of the junipers held a metallic green like the carapaces of beetles.

The desire for sunlight-for the yellow glow of sunlight on old stone-was a gnawing desire. A craving. I want blue skies, deep and shining, with the band of milk-blue haze at the horizon...

Instantaneously with my looking up at the viridian line of the sea, a man's voice remarked, 'The weather changes remarkably little, under the Penitence. I dare say high summer is no hotter than the spring you get in Iberia.'

A priest? A man bringing a sacrifice?

Neither.

'Lord-Amir.' I put my irons down and stood, avoiding kicking over my bronze palette box by a minute margin.

Hanno Anagastes leaned on his stick. 'Your master gave me leave to speak to you. He tells me he allows you to paint.'

The little wizened Carthaginian wore white silk, over layers of robes; the two men behind him were less noticeable in the dark, and maroon livery. He took no notice of his armed guards' presence. He leaned forward, peering at the lime-wood board I had been painting on.

'Not an icon,' he said, at last. 'You paint no face except Lord Baal's, and the picture is not focused on him.'

The wax would cool in my palette box soon, if I didn't add more coals. I squatted down by my brazier, picking up tongs, and replenished it, all the while feeling the Carthaginian's displeasure.

'It's all background.' His pepper-and-salt brows dipped down. 'All decoration and no subject!'

Straightening, I spared a glance at the painting. The truncated stone pillars that bore Baal's face were not the focus, no. I would not expect such a man as Hanno Anagastes to notice. The outline of the junipers beyond, and the two-thirds of the flat board that was sky-and from which I had scraped off the wax twice, completely, this morning-might seem background, to an eye not educated to new things.

Tempted to say How I waste my pigments is my own affair! I gave him a brief court bow. Not a time to show disrespect, with his soldiers there ready for disciplining a slave.

But, I thought, again, I might be immune from normal treatment. He wouldn't come here and speak unless he wanted something.

I shrugged. 'I thought I would paint it to show people what it's like.'

'Paint it.'

'As Messer Tommaso paints the hills of Rome, now he paints Rome, not generic hills that symbolise the city of the Empty Chair.'

'Freeman Rekhmire' said you were mad.' The Lord-Amir Hanno Anagastes spoke as if he had no concept that he could be either rude, or contradicted. 'Can you paint funeral portraits?'

I can charge him fifteen; twenty, perhaps. More money for me to save towards freedom. Or perhaps buy one of those poplar-and acacia-wood boards I saw in the market, priced as high as bronze.

'Yes,' I said.

'Good. Freeman Rekhmire' said you have a neat hand.' He stared at the painting again, shook his head, and visibly dismissed it. 'I want a funeral icon for my granddaughter.'

The thought is always sobering. I bowed again, Taraco-fashion. 'How old was she, lord?'

'She would have been three, in the autumn...' He lifted the tip of his stick from the hard-packed earth, and gestured away towards the sanctuary entrance. 'She's there. Her name was--'

'There?'

Surprise all but choked it back; I blurted it out, nonetheless:

'Do you expect me to paint a formal funeral portrait for a child you sacrificed?'

His stick hit the earth sharply. 'Don't blaspheme!'

For a long moment we stared, each at the other, under the shifting light of Carthage's Penitence.

Finally, I spoke. 'Lord-Amir, at home, many say the Penitence is a penalty for your child-sacrifice. Although indeed some say not-instead, that the people of Carthage killed some prophet, or sold him to his enemies and they killed him, and the Dark came here...But most say it is the dead children.'

'Ah. Ah, that story.'

He did not condescend to sound as if he explained, but Hanno Anagastes spoke while he stared away towards the sanctuary of Baal.

'When a child dies at birth, or soon after, we give them back to God. They haven't been alive long enough to have forgotten His presence, or truly left it...so they come here, to His sanctuary. Stillbirths, early miscarriages, children whose spirits die in the night for no cause.'

His pale eyes moved as he looked at me.

'Hanno Tesha is there. You will paint her.'

'I thought--' Saying the words aloud would cause him pain. I thought those were the bones of children that you people killed!

Stunned, I muttered, 'There are animals' bones in there too.'

Because sometimes you try to cheat the god; sacrifice a goat instead of a child--

'Children have pets.' Hanno's shoulders, under his layers of robes, were thin; so much became visible when he put great weight on his walking stick. 'Tesha's little marmoset will come here when it dies. I dare say she misses it.'

'They're all...?'

He seemed to catch himself, as if becoming newly aware that he spoke to a slave. 'I desire it done within the week. A portrait for my grandchild. You may inform Freeman Rekhmire' I have given you this commission.'

'It's a graveyard?'

'Do you think we're savages?' His shrewd eyes fixed on me. 'I don't care what you do up in your Taraconian hills, goat-boy. Goat-girl. Bury your still-births outside consecrated ground, like as not! This is the children's garden. Think yourself lucky your master allows you this trade. I would have your head on the Palace gate, otherwise.'

Dumb, I bowed. I thought him momentarily on the verge of giving up his desire for a funeral icon, or his desire for one from me; ordering his soldiers to beat me, breaking fingers and wrist-bones.

Fury. I had seen no priests here since the day that one chased me. And it occurred to me, now: perhaps he was no priest, but only a parent.

The anger transmuted in Hanno Anagastes. He shook his head.

'They do say we gave the Prophet Gundobad over to be killed.' He spoke as if we stood in an academy of formal debate, and not a crematorium of the unborn. 'Centuries ago. Who knows? Who knows how long the darkness has covered us, or if this Penitence was even imposed for that, if we did? You will not be a slave for ever, I think.'

That startled me into looking into his face.

'If I were to buy you,' Hanno Anagastes observed, 'I should certainly manumit you in my will, and I am old and cannot expect to live long. An artist's talent should be used. You are wasted as a slave scribe. Shall I ask your master to sell you to me?'

This man wants to buy me?

I bowed my head with a sudden show of respect. That let me hide my face before he saw shock on it-where he would expect joy.

'I'll...ask him to speak to you, Aldra Hanno; thank you.'

He didn't move for a moment. His stick finally tapped the shadowed earth.

As if I had made a quite different statement, he said reluctantly, 'Very well.'

He knows I won't ask Rekhmire'.

I think he knows I find this offer suspicious.

Hanno Anagastes looked around at the graveyard. He said quietly, 'You should remember that punishments do not need a reason.'

It might have been philosophy; it might have been threat. I could tell nothing from his tone. He turned without farewell, and walked away between his soldiers, into the darkness.

I found my palette box cold, the waxes congealed; I dropped brushes and a smoothing-spoon, from sheer clumsiness.

This place should feel less bloody, less savage, less sad, if it is a graveyard-and it does, but I find it no less disturbing.

Disturbing, too, that a man wishes to buy a slave he doesn't want. Apart from one or two pieces of indifferent quality, I'd seen no paintings in the House of Anagastes. Certainly nothing of the New School.

This morning I'd let the house-slaves know (as I must) that I might paint at one of two places; an urge woke in me to move to the other. The hollow eyes of Baal's face would need to be repainted...No, cannot be, I thought, looking at the half-finished board.

To paint them with knowledge I'll need to paint them again, from the beginning.

It took me a while to cool my instruments, and pack all away; and a while longer than that to make my way down past the Bursa, to where guides shadow the rich merchants' houses, and offer to show their foreign guests the sights of Carthage.

A small sum to a man whose name Rekhmire' had given me as trustworthy would provide both a guide, and assistance in not being knocked over the head and robbed when I was lost in laying the wax and blending the colours.

'We can walk,' the man Sarus said, shouldering my easel. 'The first of the pyramids are close to the city.'

He was correct. We walked for no more than twenty minutes outside the walls before we came up from a gully, and I felt the dry tingle of the desert wind. My hair stood up on that part of my neck which in dogs is the scruff.

The daytime darkness of the Penitence shivered in the sky, veils of crimson and blue twisting away on the southern horizon.

A mile away, the first of the tombs of the King-Caliphs stood. And I will need to be this far from it, to paint, I realised. Or else how can I get the size of it in?

The pagan ancestors of Carthage built pyramids of brick, covering the sides with plaster facing. Great masses of colour shrouded the sloping walls, hues distorted by the auroral light-a hundred thousand men had been set to painting images so huge as to be properly visible only from a distance. Even under the Penitence, the pyramid facing me clearly showed a rearing lioness, the crescent moon visible on her brow: the image itself taller than Carthage's walls.

I found I couldn't paint.

Sometimes it's so. This new form of painting isn't a mechanical skill. With the panorama of light and darkness in front of me, I sat cross-legged on the rock; tinkering with the cera Punica, and letting colours impinge on my mind as I fruitlessly mixed them. Rubica, sinopis, orpiment, caeruleum: red, brown, yellow, blue. Nothing I can match to the real colours in front of my eye. The chill wind, and Sarus's sandals kicking up sand as he trod the immediate area, faded from my perception.

To paint an icon to represent the city of Carthage will be easy. Crenellated walls, blue-tiled towers, men in robes and pointed helms. And in a corner, indicating distance and heraldic importance, a tiny triangular shape.

To make Carthage resemble its unique self...to make that corner into the foreground...

I ate Carthage's fish-biscuit (which the poor eat); shifted a corner of my cloak under myself on the chill rock; and found I was thinking not of Taraco, but about Marcomir.

I'd walked down to the docks once to look at Donata's rooming-house-still open for business-and caught sight of Marcomir on his way to work at the customs hall. It would be no great hardship to wait between the windowless walls of some alley and hit him with a cudgel, and kick him until I ceased to feel pain.

The turn of his head, as I saw it, reminded me of the attraction of bodies. Which had been genuine, and mutual.

Gazing now at the plain prepared board on the easel-calcium sulphate and egg-white; tinted with blue to add darkness to the Penitence's colours-I wondered whether it would be revenge if I beat him. Or merely the prejudice of the normal man against the man who is effeminate?

But then, I am the last to think of myself as normal.

And I would have to know whether it was the woman-part of me that desired Marcomir, or the man-soul, or both.

The idea of leaving Donata and Marcomir to prey on travellers felt distasteful. Rekhmire' might be persuaded to speak unofficially to someone in his wide circle of acquaintances in Carthage, I thought. It could be hinted to Marcomir that his customs job depended on his mother's rooming-house sticking to legal ways of fleecing foreigners...

I doubt there'll be more penalty-it's not Carthaginian citizens they've been robbing, after all.

Focusing again, I realised that the veils of light picked out two men in the sweep of land, coming up by a roundabout way from the city. Trudging figures made minuscule by the pyramids.

I hitched my cloak up around my shoulders, aware that Sarus squinted into the dim distance with me.

The men forged closer, across rock and sand.

'It's the Egyptian.' The lines of Sarus's shoulders loosened. 'He don't look worried by the man with him.'

I suspected Sarus, with his worn sandals and habit of standing with his hands relaxed at his sides, had seen service in one of Carthage's many legions. Certainly he thought easily in terms of hostility and acquiescence.

The man with Rekhmire', as he came close enough to be seen by the torches I had put up to help me paint, I thought also to be a soldier.

And not a Carthaginian soldier: he wore a Frankish brigandine, and hose.

The sight of clothing potentially from home brought me up onto my feet. My cloak fell down behind, onto the rock.

'Ilario!' Rekhmire' raised a large hand in greeting, and finished with an authoritative gesture that sent Sarus off to patrol a perimeter out of earshot.

The walk had daubed the Egyptian with dust to the knee. Rekhmire' swatted sand from his linen kilt, and glanced at me from the sides of his eyes. 'I've brought someone to see you. This is Honorius.'

I managed the single word. 'Honorius.'

The man with Rekhmire' looked me in the eye.

'Honorius, your father. Hello, Ilario.'