1

'All of these paintings are rubbish!'

Master Masaccio swiped me a sharp tap across the back of my head.

'What's this?'

Slave reflexes stopped me hitting back.

'My head? Mastro?' I added, somewhat bewildered.

'Exactly. Your head. And how big is it?'

I could only stare, confused. Is he saying that I'm conceited?

'Eyes. Nose.' Masaccio pointed at my most-prized painting-done not face-on, as encaustic wax funeral portraits are, or profile as bas-reliefs are shown, but in a three-quarter profile: a woman sitting with her head turned as if to the life.

'Ear,' he continued, pointing. 'Mouth. Chin, even. Where's the head?'

He swatted the back of my head again. It stung.

'Do you even know how large the skull is, compared to the face? How much head there is above the eyes and behind the ears? No! None of you amateurs do! Because you think the face is important, and you don't paint what you see.'

I had chosen my study of Rekhmire''s cook, back in Carthage, to first show to Mastro Masaccio, because I was abominably proud of that portrait. I wondered why, given the stiff lines and lack of any proportion-her head now appeared to be cut off flat not far above her eyebrows, and there was no swell of skull behind her ears.

Why was this not apparent to me while I painted?

'Rubbish!' He flicked casually through my stacked boards. 'Complete rubbish!'

The voice of Tommaso Cassai, nicknamed 'Masaccio', sounded completely certain.

'Masaccio' in the Florentine tongue can mean 'clumsy, bad Thomas', 'Thomas the blunt', or 'Thomas who is rude'-but not 'Thomas who is a liar'.

'They can't be!' Shocked, I reached to grab the portrait, set out on his wooden easel-frame. My peripheral vision caught Rekhmire' holding out his hand-and pulling it back, evidently thinking better of assisting a collared slave in public.

The dizziness that went through me threatened to make me fall or puke.

Doing either will be bad.

I swallowed, hard.

Masaccio snorted. 'Complete trash.'

I could only stare.

'You have not even promise! See, here--' He rapped his knuckles against the heat-glazed wax of my painted acacia boards. I winced as the sound echoed around his high, cluttered workshop. 'This "city wall with tower". Straight out of a pattern book! And these figures. You've painted men on tiptoe!'

'Like every fresco I see in a church!'

The colours swam in front of my eyes. I ignored the doe-eyed faces and jewelled belts and robes and looked at these my images of men.

Flat, facing out at the viewer, lined around with black. The tips of their feet pointed down in front of them.

'How else?' I said, bewildered. 'The body and face painted as if a man faces them straight on. And the feet are painted as if seen looking down from above. Everybody understands that! How else is it to be done!'

The bearded Florentine painter shook his head, looking up at me. 'You are an untutored barbarian. Perspective. Perspective, boy!'

I bristled at that but couldn't bring myself to say I am no boy. I'd intend I am full-grown, adult, but it would bring the truth too forcibly to my mind-here in this city where I am determined, now, to pass for male.

'What about the light?' I demanded. 'The...'

Words deserted my mind. I pulled out and stuck at the front a treated lime-wood board. Colours shone, encased in wax. Behind the painted masonry walls, I'd coloured the skies of Carthage under the Penitence. I wasn't thinking of men, but of landscape--

I stared at the painted city walls.

It's true.

These might be the walls of any fortified town in Iberia. Pattern-book style: 'this icon signifies a city'. At best, the architecture is a little in the Visigothic style. But as for it being specific-being Carthage, that great city of the King-Caliphs, rather than Zaragoza in Aragon, or Taraco, or--

No. There's nothing.

Why haven't I seen this myself!

The skies outside the workshop's great clerestory windows showed autumn grey. Brighter by far than the Penitence, but I felt as if the cloud's weight settled into me. The colour washed out light, energy, hope.

'Well...this is not without some merit.' Mastro Masaccio held at arm's length a small board I had left half-done. 'This is what you saw, no?'

Above the desert, above the regular sides of a small triangular pyramid, veils of green light rippled. The aurora. I remembered standing with the scent of the heated bronze pallet and liquid wax in my nostrils, staring up, feeling as if the curtains of Heaven were about to be drawn back.

'But--' Masaccio pointed at the triangle. 'No! This is not what was in front of you!'

The walls of the pyramid outside Carthage had been too large and detailed to cram into that small area.

'But it's what I know is there. The tombs of the King-Caliphs--'

'But you could not see all of it. Not with all this sky!'

'How can I paint what I see, if I don't paint what it means?'

The small, dark man nodded, as if I had finally said something of note. 'And that is the question of the New Art. Come. See. Here.'

Ignoring my supposed 'master' Rekhmire', he led me past the work-benches where the pestles and porphyry slabs for grinding colours stood interrupted in their cleaning. It was a large workshop: it was, nonetheless, crowded to the oak-beam rafters with the gear of a painter-rods of thin silver, for drawings that would oxidise brown on prepared paper; stoppered bottles of pigment after pigment, colours so rich that I all but tasted them; a squirrel-hair brush in the process of careful construction; a hundred differently shaped brushes hanging from their hooks; pots of bone-dust, size, and every type of varnish you might imagine...

Ranks of stacked paintings stood against the room's far wall. He pulled one out-surprisingly, painted on gesso on canvas, I realised, rather than on wood.

'This is a study for a fresco. I've done many for chapels-sermons on walls...This one, this is in Pisa.'

I caught a glance from the side of his eye which didn't match his emphatic tone. As if waiting to be judged, even by a slave who's asking to be his apprentice.

The painting's background was a flat gold, like any church icon. Likewise the discs of haloes, behind the heads of saints and angels. But the Empress-Mother in her green robes, and Her Divine Child...

'You've painted statues!' I blurted out.

It was true enough: the painting's flesh had the look of glossy pearl-white stone. Round enough to be tangible.

'They're...' I realised I was making vague hand-gestures, as if I could capture the nature of the woman and naked child more easily that way than in words. 'They're...weighty.'

He frowned-but not from anger. Concentration, perhaps. 'I'm making mass out of value changes...Yes, it's too heavy here; flesh might indeed be marble. But once edge is abandoned, then depth or lightness of tone must take the place of outline...eh!'

He made hand-gestures of his own. It felt as if we both sought a vocabulary not yet created, or one being created, here in his workshop, and back in Florence; hammered out on the anvil of the New School's art.

The light and shadow of the Empress-Mother's face was as if I looked through the board at a real woman sitting on the other side of it. If this is done only by varying tone, hue, brilliance...

'I can't see how you do it!'

Masaccio grinned. 'Look, boy, I understand why you have come to Rome. I see you have the exact same ambition that I do: to be the best painter in the city of the Empty Chair, at the centre of the civilised world. But the difference is, I am Tommaso Cassai. And you are not.'

Rekhmire' raised an eloquent eyebrow, which I thought might query Masaccio's location of the civilised world's centre. I didn't allow the Egyptian the time to speak.

'If those--' I gestured briefly at my stacked boards, carried so carefully from Carthage to Rome. 'If those are trash, teach me otherwise.'

'No,' Masaccio returned instantly. 'You have not the talent. Look at you, how old?'

'Twenty-four.'

'Twenty-four, and what have you done?' He spoke arrogantly for a man who looked only three or four years my senior. 'These are mediocre. It would be better if you had done nothing. You've spoiled what little talent you had on mundane, trivial work. Do you even draw?'

The abrupt question startled me. 'Yes.'

'How long since? When did you start?'

I shrugged. 'I don't know. Always, I think. My foster-father used to hit me for wasting time drawing with a stone on the walls, when I was a small child.'

The sharp points of flints had been good for scoring lines into the crumbling plaster walls of Aldra Federico's villa; I could still feel the sensation in my fingertips.

'I drew the horses that the men unsaddled in the stables.' I added, 'It wasn't until I came to King Rodrigo's court that I learned the encaustic technique for pigments in wax.'

Masaccio grunted. I thought he sounded surprised, as if it was not what he expected to hear. Hope pierced clear through me; I felt my fingertips prickle and go cold with it.

'Still,' he said thoughtfully, as if holding a conversation with himself, 'you have all the old dross embedded in your technique. How could you unlearn that?'

'You did!' I burst out.

He stared at me.

'You must have unlearned the old school of painting,' I emphasised. My chest hurt with the tightness of my breathing, as well as the bandaging that flattened my small breasts under the Frankish fashion of thin, tight doublets. Holding the gaze of his black eyes, I added, 'If you can do it, so can I!'

'You're too old, now.' He turned aside, dismissively. 'You should have been drawing each day, every day, since you were ten.'

'I did-from before age ten--'

'I would have you spend six years grinding colours; then you would learn mixing, and it would be another ten years before you would be allowed to work on any painting to come from my workshop. No.'

Rekhmire' made a quiet interruption behind us. 'I've said that I can pay sufficiently for an apprenticeship. But is there no other work my slave might do here?'

His level tone made my temper flare. I clamped down on it. Masaccio turned back from the workshop tables. His eye had a look of interest in it-but not for me.

The planes of the tall Egyptian's face, and his disproportionate hands and feet, made him an automatic object of interest. His linen kilt looked not so out of place here as I'd imagined it would-and I realised why. Rekhmire' might be one of the Old Testament patriarchs scattered about the place in Masaccio's sketches. His size and height gave him the same gravity.

'You are a man of Egypt-in-exile. Castrato?' Masaccio hazarded.

Rekhmire' gave a social bow. 'We are not here to speak of me. In the matter of my slave here...might he begin as a servant?'

'I have all the servants I need.'

'Then, some other way in which he might aid you here, and meanwhile learn from what he sees--'

The Florentine interrupted with an over-loud laugh. 'I couldn't even use him as a model! His hips are wide enough for a woman!'

Another man wouldn't have noticed it. To the untutored eye, I look wiry: a man of medium height. I saw Mastro Masaccio looking at me in the way that a painter looks at the body and bones of men. His gaze lingered on my crotch, where the Frankish fashion for tight hose necessitated a cod-flap covering the bulge of my male genitalia. His gaze lifted to my chest.

He gave an absent nod. '...And the shoulders of a man.'

I found my hand going up to smooth the fine down of hair on my cheek, sparse as it still was after my unshaven travelling. I am a man, see: how could I be otherwise?

Rekhmire' caught my eye, his gaze disapproving. I set my mouth.

Masaccio shook his head at me. 'You could model for neither man nor woman. Or both!'

I stared at him. Frustration kept me rigid. No use to plead. Nor bluster-not with a slave's name-collar resting around my neck.

I need him to teach me how he paints.

I need him to teach me how he sees.

'Wait!' the Italian said.

He approached me where I stood between the work-benches and easels. He squinted with the practised gaze of one used to perception by north light. I fisted my hands to stop them shaking.

'You have a Spanish colouring,' he said.

I nodded, stiffly. 'I'm from Taraconensis, in Iberia.'

'That would be well. A touch swarthy. And the rest of you...'

His head rose and fell as he studied me. I sweated. Any moment now he'll see-because he is a man who sees-what I am: hermaphrodite passing as male. And then I'll be beaten, hunted through the streets; perhaps burned at the public bonfires the Franks love so much--

'Cardinal Valente has paid for a painting of the Betrayal in the Garden.' Masaccio's black eyes closed to slits; sprang open again. 'I have no model for Judas.'

He smiled up at me with white teeth.

'Until now. A man who looks neither a man nor a woman-or looks like both! What could be more monstrous? Or more fitting? Mastro Rekhmire', I'll take your slave on as a model for the Great Traitor. Is that a deal?'

2

Rekhmire' took a deep breath as we stepped into the narrow street outside the workshop. 'There is a man who deserves his name!'

The control Rekhmire' could exercise amazed me. My hands were vibrating. I took an equal breath, to see if it would calm me too. 'You were happy to stand there and have your slave insulted!'

His mouth twisted as I mentioned the subject of slavery. It might have been amusement, or some other thought in his mind.

Not able to hold back, I spat out, '"Judas!" The Franks think of Gaius Judas as a villain! It's adding insult to injury-I'm a bad painter and their Great Traitor!'

Rekhmire' laughed ruefully. He glanced down at me as he shook out his Frankish woollen cloak, and swung it around his bare shoulders. The garment sat oddly with his kilt and sandals, and the reed head-band around his brow.

'Ilario. He was testing you. To see what mettle you have.'

'I know.'

'Yes.' This time Rekhmire' inclined his shaven head as he put up his cloak-hood. An acknowledgement?

Stepping out into the fine rain, he added, 'I haven't seen you-restraining your impulses in that manner, before.'

I threw my own cloak across my shoulders and followed Rekhmire' between the heavy, high buildings. 'He wanted to see if he could drive me out.'

'I congratulate you for the realisation of that.'

In the chill air and the failing rain, I could feel my face burn. To assure myself, privately, that I need to be less impulsive is one thing. To hear it from another--!

Rekhmire' gave me a disarmingly friendly look. My temper subsided.

We walked back towards our lodgings. I glanced up at the narrow sky. In the twelve interminable days it had taken to get an interview with Master Masaccio, I'd slogged morning and evening around every column and temple and atrium, bath and forum and amphitheatre, of ruined Imperial Rome. My eyes dazzled at first with the proportions of thousand-year-old architecture. Now--

I miss Taraco's heat. And Rome is failing.

'Well.' I stretched my arms to the rain, feeling spine and tendons realign. 'It puts off considering how I would live here for the seven years of an apprenticeship, as things stand now.'

Rekhmire' answered my look with one of his own, that was particularly reassuring.

'Master Honorius has twenty-five years he wishes to make up for: he would pay your apprenticeship unhesitatingly.' The Egyptian shrugged. 'And I did not lie: I would pay to have a slave trained. Although the painter would treat a freedman better.'

'All of it leaves me indebted,' I remarked.

The upper floors of most Roman buildings have crumbled away. Leaves dropped past my face with the rain, falling from shrubs embedded high in the brickwork. There was not one high wall without a tracery of weeds, or tiny rooted saplings. My fingers ached to draw the rotted shutters showing the sky through empty window-frames. And reproduce the texture of skin-tight moss on fallen monuments. Or attempt to.

Neither of these men would regard it as a debt, but-and then there is Carthage--

The moment's inattention cost me my balance. The surface of the street was in no less disrepair than the buildings: cobblestones out of their holes like teeth out of an old man's jaw, and slippery in the wet. I stumbled out of the way of a two-wheeled cisia-cart, lurching into the Roman men and matrons crowding the narrow streets, and found myself shoved back against Rekhmire' with curses.

Rekhmire' steadied me, his sandalled feet padding between dips and puddles with a flawless certainty that in another mood would have made me grin.

'You may be certain,' the Egyptian remarked. 'The Mastro would not have given you a job of any kind if he had not seen something in you.'

'Ahh! ' I came to a dead halt in the street and slapped my hand against my forehead. The crowds parted, not amiably; and flowed around us.

Rekhmire' looked genuinely alarmed. 'What is it?'

'Sculpture! I should have told him! I paint statues! Instead of being a model, I could...'

Rekhmire' shrugged as he met my gaze. In that moment I saw it had both occurred to him as a choice and been dismissed.

'"Old art." Would it impress Master Masaccio, do you think, that you can practise that skill? Or would he think it merely something else on which your time is wasted?'

I grunted.

The Egyptian didn't press for an admission that he was correct.

Which would have been less irritating had I not realised quite how correct he was.

'This place is shabby,' I complained, as we began to walk again. '"Holy city." "Centre of the civilised world!" There's nothing here but-but-an empty chair. There's no centre of power here.'

The Egyptian looked silently down the several inches between our heights, and raised his eyebrow. He won a grin out of me.

'All right. I'm in Masaccio's workshop. Even if only as a model.'

I can watch. I can learn.

'Carthage's curse is darkness,' Rekhmire' murmured, slowing at the end of the street, next to the Tiber River. Looking for the entrance to the alley that led to our lodgings. 'Rome's curse is an empty Papal chair. History can lay a heavy hand on the present.'

'Yes, I know.'

He shot me a glance. I wondered what had come back to him, in that moment. I see Rosamunda's face: the face of my mother when I tell her that I know she planned to kill me when she abandoned me as a baby.

I have acknowledged that it happened. And now it has no influence over me. No, none.

'Messer Egyptian?' a voice called.

Rekhmire' turned with a smooth power in his movement. He didn't carry a sword, any more than I did; Frankish religious law not permitting it within the city walls. As a eunuch bureaucrat, I realised, he might not be trained in arms.

In a brawl, his tall, powerful body would go a long way to defending him. And I have been trained to be a man.

There seemed nothing to justify apprehension. No bandit or Carthaginian spy was visible. Only a small, elderly man in clerical robes, his hands tucked under his arms against the chill. He looked as though he had been waiting.

I moved my hand away from my dagger.

'A message from Cardinal Corradeo, Messer Egyptian,' the elderly man said in a squeak, wiping moisture from his nose. 'He will see you tomorrow, when it's convenient to you; an hour past noon, perhaps?'

Rekhmire' bowed with his hands crossed over his chest. 'My compliments to your master. I will attend on him at that time.'

His hands came down and out, and with that movement acquired something in them. I saw him palm a coin into the secretary's hand, and the little man bobbed his head and hurried off.

I cocked a brow at Rekhmire', in much the Egyptian's own fashion.

He smiled. 'There are forbidden books here, that the Franks themselves may not read. I hope to copy some for the Royal Library, at home. Being already a heathen, how can I be harmed by the sight of them?'

The look of innocence accompanying his last words made me grin.

'A Cardinal--' I stumbled over the unfamiliar church title. '--is truly prepared to let you into forbidden archives?'

The Egyptian began to pick his way down the street with the delicacy of a cat that dislikes getting its feet wet, incongruous in such a large man.

'On the one condition. That if I find anything relating to lifting the curse on St Peter's Chair, I turn it over to him. Corradeo is hoping I'll see something he won't, because he supposes I have knowledge from the Royal Library. I doubt that will happen.' Rekhmire''s expression under his shielding hood took on a faux innocence. 'Oh, and I must let him take the credit for whatever I find.'

That made me chuckle.

A thought wiped amusement out.

'Will you need me as a copyist?'

'No. I think it will take quite enough to persuade them to let one man in. I'll have to do my own copying.'

I was unsure whether that was generosity on his part, so that I might go to Masaccio's workshop, or useful truth; and while I frowned over it, he stopped, and pointed me towards our lodgings.

'You go on, Ilario. I realise I intended to pass by the Alexandrine house again, and see if there are letters for me.'

Which would make once every two days that he had gone to his embassy in this city, I calculated. Regular as a water-clock.

'You think your "colleague from Zaragoza" will have written to you yet? Or anyone else?'

'I have hopes.' Rekhmire' pulled his hood further down, against the rain and men seeing his face. 'I don't otherwise know whether to take this lack of news to be reassuring-or a silence before a storm.'

3

Outside the tenement lodgings, the scent of sweating beasts filled the rainy air. The horses of a carrucas snorted-the four-wheeled cart which men use to carry baggage and cargo to the sea-coast at Ostia Antica. Beyond them, similar muscles straining, men wrestling with roped boxes. I felt the shapes of the thick arched necks in my fingers.

One deep voice pierced the noise:

'That one first! Then these crates here. It shouldn't take you fifteen minutes!' Honorius's gaze shifted from the work-crew to me. He beamed. 'Ilario!'

The boxes had the marks of the small artisans' workshops, up behind the cathedral that housed the Empty Chair itself. Rosaries, for the most part: made in light materials like pearl-shell, attractive in Iberia for their foreignness, and usefully no different in structure whether one worships Christus Imperator or the Frankish heresy.

'You got everything packed up in time?'

'Yes. Get 'em taken down to the warehouses in Ostia and stored.' He spoke with satisfaction, stepping back to eye the cart with the vision of a man used to calculating bombard and baggage loads. 'Old mercenary company habit: trade light items...When the Egyptian gives me word it's safe, I can start exporting back to Taraconensis. All his letters from "book-buyers" in Iberia-if he's not a spy, he damn well should be!'

I gave my father the best innocent-slave look I could muster. 'He gets a lot of that, too...'

Honorius snorted, and turned back to settling payments with the carters, still laughing. I went into the house, hugging my secret news to me since I would not tell him in company; stumbling on the tiles in the inner rooms, blinking in the indoor twilight.

I set about igniting oil-lamps, the light blossoming up the plaster walls, and returned to some of the tasks I had left half-done before going out.

'Casserole?' Honorius remarked hopefully as he bustled through the low door, shaking rain from himself, and looking over my shoulder with ease. He frowned as I pressed the last of the clay seal around the edges of the pot.

'Not unless you plan on eating charcoal...'

'Spent my life in military camps, remember?'

Through a laugh, I explained, 'Charcoal for drawing,' and shifted the heavy pot over to the oven, where it could sit in the banked embers through the night. There were twelve of the small wired bundles in the pot; I thought that should last me my first month in Masaccio's workshop. 'By morning, I'll either have my own willow-twig charcoal, or...'

'Or--?'

'Or lots of crumbly little bits of wood.' I straightened up, one hand in the small of my back. 'Used to take a pot down to the baker's in the square at home, at the end of the day when he'd finished working. He'd always let me put it in his ovens overnight. That was vine charcoal, though. Better for drawing.'

About to leap from that to Masaccio, and my news, I saw my father looked distant. As if he remembered those few of the Taraconensis hills that will bear terraced vines, and the taste of the grape.

'I never know...' Honorius frowned. 'Whether I should expect to see you play the housewife and bake meats. Or whether you don't cook when you're dressed as a man. Or whether you don't cook at all. I don't know what your nature is. Are you determined to keep up this charade?'

He jerked his thumb at me.

At my clothing, rather.

Frankish doublet and hose, in the Italian style, and not the slave tunic of North Africa's climate, which is worn equally by male and female.

I couldn't keep asperity out of my tone. 'I would have thought you'd prefer a son. Don't men want that?'

Finding your long-unknown, long-lost son-daughter is one thing. Travelling together can be another. For some reason, while it didn't bother him who turned my head in the street, how I dressed was an abrasive matter between us.

Honorius spoke bluntly. 'I'm not ashamed to have a ladyboy as my heir. But you seem to be ashamed, here. Is that why you pass as something you're not?'

I sat down at the table, leaving him standing over me.

'I have to be man or woman. It's not safe to be both in Frankish lands.'

Or in most other lands, outside of specific roles such as Taraco's court.

I strained my neck looking up at my father. His blue eyes were pale enough to be grey indoors, even with the room's shutters still open. I would need a highlight on the cornea, and a catch-light in the white, to make his eyes stand out emphatically enough in a painting.

'As a woman, I wouldn't be permitted to paint. And to be a woman and a slave...Legally, that makes me an animal. So I keep part of me hidden and play all the man.'

Normally he would have sat down companionably with me; I knew by this how disturbed he felt. He scratched at his hair, leaving himself with the curled short tuft on the crown of his head that everything-removing his linen-lined helmet; standing at a wind-ridden ship's rail-appeared to give him.

'A woman...It's not that bad, their life.'

I couldn't help giving him a raised brow. 'You would know?'

'Ximena-my late wife--'

I said nothing more. No man-or no man like Honorius-desires to listen to anything that would make him think his wife unhappy. Less so when there's no mending it after death. She might have been happier than most women, but that was based on supposing him as good a husband as father.

'I try to think of you as a son and a daughter in the same body,' he said earnestly. 'Is that not what you'd have me do?'

I wanted to say You're doing well; what fell out of my mouth was, 'You don't need to try so hard!'

Nothing on his face showed him affronted, but I saw it in the lessening curve of his spine and the movement of his shoulders.

Biting off each syllable, he said, 'I have missed twenty-four years.'

And I. Bitterly frustrated by not finding the right words, I managed all that I could put into speech. 'I'm-very glad you answered Rekhmire''s message.'

The line of his shoulders released itself. He dropped down onto the opposite bench, smiling across the table. 'So am I.'

I had rested my hands on the table to feel the grain, where much scrubbing clean had raised it above the surrounding soft wood. I registered my fingers in peripheral vision, stained with wax and umber and red lead, and looked up to meet Honorius's eyes.

I couldn't help beaming. 'I didn't tell you yet-Masaccio accepted me into his workshop. Only as a model. But--'

'Ilario!' He slapped his open palm on his thigh. 'I didn't like to ask when you came in; I thought...But this is wonderful! A beginning--'

'Eightfold GODS!'

The street and inner doors slammed, so close on each other that it was one blast of sound and cold air. Rekhmire' ducked to miss the low beams of the tenement-house ceiling. He threw himself down on the wooden bench beside Honorius, hurling an armful of scroll cases to the table-top.

I caught two before they could skitter to the floor. 'Good news, then?'

Rekhmire' gave me a look that would have melted glass in a Murano workshop.

One of Honorius's fists banged a ceramic bowl down in front of him, and the other a bottle of wine.

The Egyptian inclined his head in a way that told me, at least, that he was both pleased and surprised.

'Finally, news,' he corrected, untying his cloak at the throat, and wiping his hand over his shaven head.

'From home?'

I should have stood to serve him, but found I couldn't.

'Some of it.' Rekhmire' poured himself a bowl of wine. 'Sahathor sends me every whisper, rumour, and gossip; but of hard facts--! Heh and Hehet of the infinite spaces! How much rubbish the man writes!'

His large hands twisted the tops from cases and swept scrolls open, anchoring them that way with ceramic pots and jugs. Honorius gave me a glance. I gathered my father to be much amused by the bureaucrat's unbureaucratic swearing.

And to be waiting with as much apprehension as I felt.

Rekhmire' sat back, resting his large hands on the heap of papers. He looked from my father to me.

'There has been no time to write to Alexandria and get a reply, but I have consulted with some colleagues in the embassy here. I have not told more there than I thought any man should know, nor mentioned your names. Simply put, it isn't in Alexandria's interests to have Taraconensis destabilised, and Carthage made stronger. I would be no man's favourite if I said my error in Hanno's court might lead to that.' He flicked a gaze to me. 'Including you, I know.'

Any resentment had gone, I found, startled. 'You did the best you could at the time, with the knowledge you had.'

Rekhmire' reached across the table. His hand closed briefly and surprisingly over mine before he leaned back again. 'In the event that the Pharaoh-Queen communicates personally with me through the embassy, I think that the message will scrape the ears off the side of my head...'

'Let me write back to her.' I couldn't help smiling at him. 'I'll tell her it wasn't your fault. And my marvellous cursive hand will win her over.'

Since I knew that monumental gravity well by now, I could see how much humour he hid.

'I can only hope the autumn weather prevents a too-speedy delivery of post...'

'So.' Honorius indicated the scrolls with a wave of his hand. 'Where do we stand?'

I reached out for the last crumbs of cheese on one plate, although I could barely swallow. If I could paint their faces, in this remarkable mix of day-lit oil-lamps and rain-light coming in through half-shuttered windows...My master, the bureaucrat; my father, the soldier; myself, the artist. Because I will be an artist, I reminded myself. No matter what word comes from home.

From outside I heard the shouts of the carrucas-drivers. And the spatter of rain.

'Videric is gone from office. It's confirmed from many sources.' Rekhmire' traced a line of hieroglyphs on one sheet. 'There are no public rumours about Aldro Rosamunda's attempt to kill you, Ilario. The Lord Videric is supposed caught with his hand in the treasury chest, or in some other way under the King's displeasure. The Carthaginian envoy has taken ship back to Carthage...'

Honorius grunted, picking up a heel of loaf and tearing shreds of crust off it. 'Putting some distance in, so that if the King's tree falls, they're not caught shaking the trunk.'

Rekhmire''s smile was a rictus twitch. His oval eyelids were stained blue, I realised; with a lack of sleep that I thought only I had suffered these last few weeks. He rubbed hard with his thumb along the ridge of his brow.

'Ilario...Like it or not, you're still the key to this. These, here, these are the stories that are being spread around by Lord Videric's supporters. You'll see they all say, one way or another, that he's retired to his estates because he's ill. Not thrown out of his position as First Minister, but in bad health. Why would he claim sickness?'

I shook my head.

'Because,' Honorius rumbled, scowling, 'a man recovers from sickness.'

The Egyptian gave a swift nod. 'Quicker than from scandal. Videric's men are evidently preparing the ground so that he can return, in the future, without his dismissal or resignation ever having to be acknowledged. Why would King Rodrigo be willing to have Aldra Videric back as his First Minister?'

Grudgingly, I admitted, 'Because he's good at what he does?'

'That, too. And also, other kings and princes believe Taraconensis stronger while Videric is Rodrigo Sanguerra's minister. But, no.' Rekhmire' picked up a knife and began doodling the point under certain of the written glyphs. 'No, I think what has happened...is that Aldra Videric has found it possible to promise King Rodrigo something.'

I knew I would not like what I next heard. 'What?'

'A word overheard here, a whisper there...One can make a supposition from them. Suppose,' Rekhmire' leaned forward, lowering his voice. 'Suppose that this difficulty went away? Suppose that Lord Videric was able to say, "It's all lies, my wife did nothing, I did nothing: look at where this story comes from? Carthage would make any ridiculous claim, if it enables them to weaken this kingdom." How many men in Taraconensis would believe it a scandal cooked up by the King-Caliph, to make the King distrust his most necessary minister?'

I shrugged. 'Knowing the court, and given that men believe what they want to believe-most of them.'

Honorius downed a mug of wine, and wiped his sleeve across his mouth with a rasp of stubble. 'But the problem with that is-oh.'

Rekhmire''s chiselled lips soundlessly and satirically mimicked the oh, but I thought his smile more self-mocking. 'Yes. The problem for Videric is that Carthage has a witness. He may or may not know that witness is not in Carthage, now. But...'

Rekhmire' put his hand down flat on one letter. The unrolled end of the scroll was in cipher, and not one of the basic ones that every scribe learns.

'But, for reasons contained in these letters, I think that what Videric has promised the King is the life of Ilario.'

His gaze moved to me.

'Or, more specifically, the death of Ilario. If Aldra Videric can make this problem go away, then in a few months he can come back and take over his position again, and blame it all on Carthaginian rumour. But for that to work...Ilario, I believe he needs your death very urgently, now. Because he sees in it his way back to power.'

4

There was a coldness in my stomach. A round wooden bowl nudged my hand: I looked up to see Honorius offering it to me, filled with red wine.

The taste was only superficially warming.

'What I can gather from Carthage, on the other hand...' Rekhmire' tapped his finger tips together, and I guessed that he changed direction to give me time to gain composure. '...From Carthage, we have little enough to fear as regards harming you, Ilario. They have reason to wish you alive and well and in their hands, so they can keep the scandal-pot boiling nicely; all you have to fear from them is abduction. That way they keep the muck-raking alive, keep Videric out of office, keep King Rodrigo off-balance, and begin to convince the Frankish kingdoms that Taraconensis is ripe for a crusade.'

Honorius nodded. I realised he would be used to this scope of discussion, from his life in the north.

He reached to top my wine-bowl up, and said gruffly, 'He's right. The worst they'd do is kidnap you.'

The surface of the wine rippled. I realised I shuddered. The shit and piss of the slaver's hall briefly real in my nostrils again.

As if he could read my mind, Rekhmire' said, 'You have men who would seek you out, now, and free you.'

If it had not been Rekhmire' standing in the shadows. If I had not been reckless enough to demand to be taken seriously as a scribe...

I stood up from the table, crossing to the window, leaning between the open shutters. The rain felt cool on my scalding face. Twilight comes early among these tall Roman tenements. The wetness brought out the stink of dung, ripe fruit, sour sweat, horses.

My urge to pull back from the reassurance of these men comes because a slave can never trust anybody, and far too many will pretend to be a friend in fair weather.

You trust them or you don't. And if you have not known your father more than two months, well, the Egyptian has proved himself to feel-what was it he said in Hanno's court?-fellow-feeling. Friendship.

I wiped rain off my face and turned back, groping my way to the table since the waning day blinded me to the lamp's softer light. Shadows leapt up as I sat down, banging table and bench, and I clearly saw both men watching me.

Rekhmire' interlinked his large fingers in front of him. 'There's nothing to say it's known where we are. Believe me, I've sought to be sure of that! Because whereas I could safely refuse to sell you in Carthage, as a cousin of Ty-ameny--'

Catching the question in Honorius's eye, he added:

'We in the bureaucratic service are customarily called "cousins of the Lioness Throne". And in Carthage, that carries influence. But if they should discover us in Rome...I think Ilario should not go out unaccompanied, if we ever have reason to think any man from Carthage has succeeded in finding us.'

Honorius jerked a thumb at the door to the side rooms, and looked questioningly at me. 'You want me to send the lads out with you?'

I could hear some of them at dinner; even recognise a few voices. I had sketched the small grizzled sergeant called 'Orazi' (none of the household guard being able to pronounce his proper Armenian name), and Attila and Tottola: twin hulking Germanic peasants become expert men-at-arms. Also a man named Berenguer, who stuck in my mind for how deeply he appeared to resent the company of an Alexandrine eunuch; one Saverico, an ensign who resembled one of the cathedral's boy-singers at home in Taraco, but must surely have more martial qualities somewhere about him; a handful of others...All making cheerful conversation in the room beyond, which they had adopted as their barracks, as if it did not concern them that their captain would drag them halfway across the Mediterranean on an apparent whim.

The majority of Honorius's thirty or so men were faces to me, whose names I tended to confuse. Coming to the Empty Chair, only one name had had my attention: Masaccio.

'I think Ilario would be better off without an escort.' Rekhmire' sounded bland. 'Wiser not to draw attention to ourselves if we can avoid it.'

Bland, I thought, and nothing at all like a man protesting, Mercenary Frankish soldiers, out from under their captain-general's thumb: I give it two days at best before all of them end in jail as drunken sots and Ilario with them!

I couldn't imitate Rekhmire''s smooth insincerity without a give-away grin. 'I can just see that lot masquerading as body-servants! And fellow-slaves. And scribes.'

'All right.' Honorius glared. He failed to conceal a smile, and shook his head. 'But, damn it, I'd feel safer if you had armed men in attendance to protect you.'

'Anonymity is a good defence.' Rekhmire' spoke with the sound of long experience.

'Bloody big sword's a better one!'

I couldn't restrain laughter. Apart from his being my father, Honorius is an easily likeable man.

Concern abruptly chilled me. 'Aldra Videric. If he finds out I'm in Rome. He might know you're here. You won't be his favourite, either.'

Honorius snorted an obscenity.

'The Lord General Honorius won't be in great danger.' Rekhmire' looked over at me as he emphasised my father's title. 'Even his word and facial resemblance mean nothing if you're dead, Ilario. It would be Lord Honorius's word against Lord Videric's. And I suspect your father counts as a foreigner after having been gone for so long. The story's hearsay. Ilario...you're the only living proof that Videric's wife attempted to kill a slave who is her own offspring.'

He shot an apologetic look at me, as if his chess-master weighing of the pieces might have offended.

'In a way, removing himself from court is a wise thing for Aldra Videric to do. Until the King of Taraconensis names a new First Minister-and none of my correspondents say he seems ready to do that-there's nothing to say that Videric doesn't still hold that position. But if, now, he were to go to his King and say that all can be blamed on Carthage-then King Rodrigo would refuse the idea, because Ilario can arrive at any time out of the blue, and prove Videric a liar.'

'I could talk with Videric.' The expectation of being in his presence again made my stomach twist, both with fear and rage. 'Tell him...'

Tell him what?

Rekhmire' spoke while Honorius was still visibly weighing his words.

'If things are as we see them, then Aldra Videric is in circumstances where he must desire your death, leaving aside any personal vindictiveness. When the dust settles, he can take up the reins as chancellor of Taraconensis-if there's no possibility of a witness to Aldro Rosamunda's actions. With no witnesses, men will believe him if he says it's all Carthaginian propaganda. Is there an Iberian who doesn't know that Carthage wants to re-conquer the Peninsula? But that relies on no witness ever appearing to prove Carthage's accusations. It's in Lord Videric's interests now for you to be dead, Ilario. For you to be dead, and as soon as possible.'

'Turds!'

Had there been anything inexpensive and breakable, it would have been very relieving to throw it. Since there was neither, I settled for fetching one of the empty benches a kick. The oak left a throbbing bruise on the ball of my foot.

'I just want to paint!'

I held up both hands, stopping dual interruptions.

'I know. I am aware of the circumstances! But King Rodrigo knows me. Videric knows me. God's burning Hellfire, Rosamunda knows me! All of them know I have no intention of being used as a tool, by Carthage or anyone else; I-just-want-to-paint.'

Rekhmire' and Honorius exchanged looks.

'They can't afford to think they know you.' Honorius shrugged. 'It's like that in battle. Doesn't matter if the enemy's a man you've known for years. To achieve your objective, you have to take all precautions. If the Egyptian here's right, Videric thinks it's necessary for you to be dead.' His forehead corrugated. 'I still can't credit that Rosamunda would try to kill you.'

'You knew her twenty-five years ago--'

I didn't remark that she had done her best to make sure I died then, too, albeit without actually killing me.

'--That doesn't mean you know what she's capable of now.'

Honorius broke his bread into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually chewing and swallowing one. There was silence in the room except for the tearing of the crust.

It was broken so suddenly by a rap on the outer door that all three of us visibly startled.

One of the men-at-arms exchanged inaudible words outside the house; the door opened, and a rain-soaked soldier entered, removing papers from the breast of his cloak and laying them down on the table beside Honorius. I thought they might be bills of lading from the carts, but Honorius frowned, and began immediately to unfold them.

Rekhmire' caught my gaze, and stood. I joined him at the window, affording my father privacy. I watched the torch-lighter failing to ignite the pitch-torches on the taverna wall opposite, as the last light faded from the drizzling sky.

The Egyptian murmured, 'Rome is likely safe for a few months. Perhaps longer. If you ever spoke of Mastro Masaccio to Lord Videric or Lady Rosamunda--'

I nodded, mutely, seeing the expectation in his expression. Is there any man or woman to whom I haven't extolled the New Art?

'--Then they'll expect you to be travelling to Florence. Although I suppose they'll eventually receive news that he's staying in Rome, now. I don't know how to manage your apprenticeship under these circumstances.'

'Dismissed.'

Honorius didn't raise his voice, behind me, but the intensity of it brought me swinging around, away from the window. The inner door closed behind his lieutenant's back, and the man-at-arms who had been lighting further oil-lamps scurried out after him.

The lean man was on his feet beside the table. A bundle of untied papers covered the planks before him. He cocked his head in my direction: a grey-feathered raven.

'Message for me,' he grunted. 'Just had my aide take my token to the bank for funds-this was there for me--'

He threw down a scroll, with its red wax seal cracked open.

'"Message"?' Rekhmire' scowled, shoving his way back to the table. 'You surely left no word of where you were travelling!'

I thought my father might hit him.

Hastily joining them, I as hastily interrupted:

'How could any man know to send you a letter in Rome?'

'Read it if you like--' Honorius gulped his wine messily, wiped his hand down his doublet, and jerked his chin in the direction of the scroll. 'Wasn't sent to me in Rome. Didn't write to me here. Seems there's a copy gone out to every major branch of the Fugger moneylenders. I would have found the letter wherever I went, whenever I next drew on my funds.'

The Egyptian choked off a laugh, his eyes bright. 'Clever!'

I demanded, 'Who's it from?'

Honorius scratched at his cropped hair as if lice troubled him, and snapped a glance at me. 'Ask yourself, who can afford to do a thing like that?'

Videric might think of it. But if it were Videric, Honorius would have said.

'The King!' I said, simultaneously with Rekhmire''s reading aloud of the superscription:

'His Grace, Rodrigo Sanguerra Covarrubias, Lord of Taraconensis.'

5

Rodrigo's wise to use bankers, I thought. Taraconensis maintains ambassadors living at foreign courts, rather than having embassies like the Alexandrines, and the King wouldn't want every ambassador knowing his business if it concerned Carthage.

'But...' I frowned. 'The King doesn't have any reason to connect you with me! Unless Videric's told him.'

'For once, it's not about you.'

Honorius gave me a grin that was both sardonic and reassuring. It melted away as he scowled down at the parchment scroll.

'It's about me. When I have the time, I'm cordially requested to come to court-and reading between the lines, he suggests I have the time right now.'

'To court? To Taraco?'

'Exactly. And why would King Rodrigo want to see me so badly?' Honorius turned his head, giving Rekhmire' a suspicious glare, clearly supposing him to have the answer, I think for no other reason than the book-buyer's general fluency with politics.

Rekhmire' sat down abruptly on his bench.

'I...imagine he thinks you're conspiring with the King-Caliph against his throne.'

'What! '

My father's indignation rang off the plaster walls. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I couldn't help smiling. His sharp glare made me drop the expression as rapidly as any of his new recruits.

Rekhmire' glanced up from the document, his lustrous eyes soot-dark in the lamp-light. 'I confess, I...well, at first, I had expected you to be a political rival of Aldra Videric, Lord General.'

'You gave me my son-daughter: enough of the "Lord General"!' Honorius's fist struck the flat of one of the oak beams above his head, loud enough to make a man-at-arms look around the inner door. Honorius gestured without looking and the soldier vanished. No man would argue with him in this mood.

'Why on God's earth would I rival Videric? It's been five-and-twenty years since I've seen Rosamunda--'

'Political rival,' Rekhmire' emphasised, his voice gentle. 'Why would it be so surprising? You've made yourself rich in foreign wars. You can expect to live to a fine old age. Why not come home to be-First Minister, even, in Aldra Videric's place?'

Honorius gave a startled bark that I recognised, after a second, as laughter.

'True enough,' Rekhmire' agreed, 'and I knew it within forty minutes of meeting you face to face. But King Rodrigo can't be expected to know that. Has he even seen you?'

Honorius slowly seated himself. 'As a young man, at court.'

'Then look at it from the King's position. Licinus Honorius. A rich man, with a considerable reputation--'

The Egyptian bowed his head respectfully; Honorius snorted.

'A considerable military reputation,' Rekhmire' emphasised. 'And a man who's been gone from his country for upwards of a generation. The King will only remember you as a young man, if at all. Say you sit on the throne of Taraconensis, you hear a man is coming home and buying land, and therefore means to stay in your kingdom; he has wealth, therefore can have influence, and his reputation will draw men to him. And having been-how many months had you been home?'

Honorius sounded reluctant. 'Three. Four, perhaps.'

'Having been a quarter of a year in Taraconensis, has not yet come to make his formal submission to his King--'

'I was buying an estate! And getting it in order! And sorting my men out; the ones who wanted to come back from the crusades and settle-parcelling land out to them, sorting out cattle and horses, arranging a monthly justice-meet for--' Honorius heaved a great sigh and slumped forward onto his elbows, on the table. 'I put it off. I don't like courts. Bunch of back-stabbing, lying, shit-eating toadies-it's why I preferred being on campaign to being in Alfonso's court. I kept thinking I could ride over to Taraco in the spring...'

Rekhmire' raised an eloquent eyebrow. 'And yet you sail to Carthage.'

'You know why I did that!'

'King Rodrigo Sanguerra doesn't!'

'I have never given my King any reason to doubt my loyalty!' Honorius thumped his fist down on the table, making every green-glazed jug and wooden spoon jump up. Over the clatter, he snarled, 'Ask the Kings of Aragon and Castile and Leon, ask His Royal Majesty Alfonso: I have never broken my word once given; why should I conspire against the lord of the kingdom in which I was born!'

I found myself wincing. Not as a slave does, from fear of a beating, but with the stunned appreciation with which one watches a mountain storm, or the great waves crashing on Taraco's shores in winter. Such primal loyalty is overwhelming.

'"Chancellor Honorius"!' Honorius snarled. 'Ha! '

Rekhmire' had warmth in his gaze, I saw: amusement, and affection, as if the older man were a protege of his, whom Rekhmire' was proud to see justify himself.

Christus Imperator! Rekhmire' found my father for me; I believe he feels a responsibility for Honorius being a good man.

There was something in that that spoke to friendship between the Egyptian and myself, but I put it aside to consider later, concentrating on Honorius where he sat and fumed:

'Who could imagine me wanting to be First Minister!'

'A lot of men want to.' I vividly recalled life at court. 'Most men, possibly. And I spent long enough in Taraco to know that no one's considered above suspicion.'

Honorius shot me a scorching glare from glass-grey eyes. 'I suppose you think I'm conspiring with the King-Caliph!'

It was possible. As a thing that some other man might do. I'm not fool enough to think I know all fifty years of Honorius after two months in his company. But having held Honorius's sallet while he puked over the ship's rail off Sardinia (which he assured me was commonly how bad weather took him), and having seen how he nonetheless cared for his household down to the youngest squire and kitchen-boy-and, more significantly, how little his mind ever turns from battle tactics to political power-I know this is not a possible thing for Licinus Honorius to do.

Honorius looked at me with a plain appeal on his face.

'I believe you!' I couldn't find words to explain what I knew he would see as cold rationality, and not faith in my father.

Rekhmire' came to my rescue. He tapped the paper. 'At worst, King Rodrigo Sanguerra suspects that, when the Carthaginian legions march up from Granada to offer their "protection" against crusading Franks, riding at their head will be Aldra Licinus Honorius-either as "adviser" to the King...or as a Carthaginian puppet-governor.'

'Rubbish!' Honorius sounded almost imploring. 'Ridiculous!'

'I've known you these past weeks; I suspect you have fewer political ambitions than any man alive--'

'Damn right! I just want to live in peace, on my estate, breeding my blood-line of horses.' He lifted his head, gazing intently at me. 'Looking after Ilario, if my son-daughter will let me.'

Rekhmire' upended the last of the Frankish wine into Honorius's bowl and pushed it at him. 'But you're not commanding the kingdom of Taraconensis. And if you were you'd look at it differently.'

Creases indented Honorius's forehead. The word commanding had been carefully chosen, I realised. Seeing the intent expression on my father's face, I realised that he knew it too.

'I've had my own problems with under-officers.' Honorius stared down into the reflections of his wine, and back at me before I had time to hide my expression. 'Surely a man who's been king as long as Rodrigo Sanguerra will know this is not what it seems?'

'No. He won't.' It was not news I wanted to give. 'His Majesty Rodrigo will tell you that endless suspicion is how any man stays king. Whether that's right or not, I don't know-it's certainly what he thinks.' I calculated the time that Honorius must have first arrived in Taraconensis. 'I think if I hadn't been busy with being kicked out as the King's Freak, and planning my voyage to Carthage, I would have heard rumours about this myself.'

Honorius looked torn between rage, anger at himself, and sorrow. Incised lines made his creased face seem older: a premonition of how we would both look at sixty.

'If I'd known you were there, Ilario, I would have come if I'd had to walk barefoot.'

'Well, that might have convinced Rodrigo you weren't rich and a problem.' I grinned. 'Except that, as my mother told me, you and I would have been seen together, and the gossips and rumour-mongers would have rung the cathedral bells in celebration!'

It cheered him a little, evidently. He set to prodding the letter with his forefinger, as if the royal seal would change into something less troublesome.

'My mind isn't made up.' He frowned. 'As to whether the bank will inform King Rodrigo Sanguerra where his letter was collected, because he's a king...or whether that makes it certain they'll refuse to say, because they bow their heads to no king. With the money they handle, they don't need to.'

The Egyptian moved his large hands as if they were the balance of a pair of scales. 'Could go either way.'

Honorius wiped his upper lip free of wine, where silver stubble already began to show after his shave.

'I think my way is clear, in any case.'

I didn't want to ask, but couldn't keep silent. 'What will you do?'

Honorius pushed his bench back as he rose, with a squeal of wood against floorboard. Circling the table, he sat beside me and rested his hand on my shoulder. 'I have to go back to Taraco and set the King straight on this.' 'I--'

Rekhmire' leaned towards us, cutting in as if he thought I would explode: 'He's his own best witness, Ilario.'

The Egyptian is a swift and good judge of character. I grimly reminded myself of that. Honorius's fingers dug into the fleshy part of my shoulder. As I have often done in court, I set a curb on my reactions.

'In that case-I'm going back to Taraco with you. As for Mastro Cassai...there'll be other Masters.'

'You are not!'

Rekhmire''s voice echoed simultaneously: '--not!'

Honorius's other hand closed on my arm. 'If the Egyptian here can make me see why Videric needs you dead, the argument has to be convincing to anybody. Even you, Ilario!'

Frustrated as I was, I had to smile at him. 'You're not as much of a blunt soldier as you make out.'

'I'm not a politician. However--' Honorius smiled somewhat grimly. 'I survived twenty-five years of the Frankish armies trying to kill me in Navarra and Leon. More to the point, I survived Castile's court! I'm not familiar with Rodrigo's courtiers after all this time, but I can take enough men to protect myself until I can see the King and clear up all this nonsense! But if you think I'm taking you back to Iberia, where Videric has every reason to need you dead--! And you can't even trust Rosamunda--'

I had shown Honorius my sketch-books on the voyage to Rome, pointing out my foster parents Federico and Valdamerca, and my stepsisters, and Father Felix. He wanted to know if he would recognise Rosamunda's face after so many years, but I could not show him. Every drawing I made of her, I burned in Carthage.

'No, I can't trust my mother. I can't trust Videric either. But I want to come with you.'

He gave me a small shake, as if he knew how much a slave gets used to being beaten, and would not wake such memories. 'Let me watch my back without having to look out for yours.'

He must have seen me look half-convinced.

'If you were killed, so soon after we've met, and the fault was mine--'

'All right!' I gave consent ungraciously, not able to help it. 'I'll feel the same. All of this is my fault.'

Rekhmire' had moved to rummage among boxes and baskets on the shelf beyond the hearth. His voice came clearly back. 'No.'

He straightened up with a differently shaped bottle. I recognised brandy. The Egyptian snagged wooden drinking bowls no smaller than we had used for wine, and rejoined us at the table.

'No,' he repeated, pouring the spirits. 'Aldra Videric's fault, in fact. Perhaps the Lady Rosamunda's, for her adultery. Just possibly, the Lord Commander Honorius here, for being a foolish young man in love, and helping her break her marriage vows. But everything that was done to cause this was done long before you were born, Ilario.'

I caught Honorius giving Rekhmire' a grateful look.

'I'll go back by land,' he muttered to me. 'Damned autumn storms are too much for my gullet. You stay here, study with Tommaso Cassai, and I'll leave some of my men with you--'

'Not unless you want to mark me as a target. Having a private army will draw unwanted attention and wrong conclusions.'

From his glare, I deduced we would have that argument again before his departure.

Before he could continue to wrangle, I said soberly, 'Unless you're planning to sell your estates and settle in another kingdom, you need to make peace with Rodrigo. I don't like it any better than you do, I don't suppose. As to Videric, I'm safe enough here at the moment. I...What else can I say? I wish you could stay? I don't know you well enough yet, after a lifetime apart?'

Honorius blinked fiercely. Of my three fathers-Federico and his commercial foster care; Videric, who, deep as he may be embedded in my life, is only a murderous step-father; and my blood-father Honorius-Honorius is the one I am least used to and feel I might understand best.

I wish I could say, Stay a while longer.

'But you're right,' I concluded, and said what I immediately realised he hadn't voiced, but had run in my reasoning in tandem. 'If the moneylenders do tell King Rodrigo where you picked up your letter, then Videric will hear about it. I don't care if he's on his estates, in Ethiopia with Prester John, or sailing the seas of the Moon-he'll hear the information. And he may, he just may, hear who's with you.'

Honorius was nodding as I spoke.

'Lectured by my own damned son-daughter! On politics!'

I opened my mouth to protest Father! and caught the glimmer of humour and aching sadness combined in his expression.

'Somebody evidently has to,' I remarked.

He closed with me, ruffled my hair into complete disarray, and embraced me as the Franks do, his lean muscles corded with strength. Unlike most, he touched my flesh as if there were no difference between it and anyone else's.

He stood back, grinning at how he'd dishevelled me. 'I don't plan to waste time. If it goes well, I'll be back by December.'

'Back?' I was suddenly and surprisingly light. 'You won't winter over in Taraco?'

'As far as that whoreson mule-fucker Videric is concerned--' Honorius spoke in a surprisingly even tone. '--I'll be travelling to my estates, to winter over, after I've visited the court and King Rodrigo. Fortunately, this lot of bone-headed layabouts who sponge off me are used to campaigning in bad weather, so we'll just take the Via Augusta straight back to Italy.'

He grinned like a soldier, relief under the surface. It took me a minute to realise that it must be because I looked pleased at the prospect.

'I don't seem to have lost the habit of travel, retired as I am. Of course, it's always easier without five thousand armed men along for the ride, not to mention a baggage train...'

In one of which I might have ridden as King Rodrigo's siege engineer, had my past decisions been different. Would I ever have stood in my father's presence and known him?

Honorius switched his gaze to Rekhmire'. 'If you're not here, leave word in that embassy of yours, and make sure they know who to pass it on to. I'll find you.'

Rekhmire' raised a hand, palm out, in a placating gesture. 'I swear, if I think there is the slightest danger, I will ask for asylum in the Alexandrine embassy.' He raised the drinking bowl of brandy in my direction. 'I may even take my slave with me...'

Honorius relaxed into a grin. I made a mental note to thank Rekhmire' for the diplomatic skills of a book-buyer.

'I may even go,' I observed. 'Assuming I'm not busy being Judas.'

'Judas-oh. A model.' Honorius rested his hip against the table and raised his brow at me, doubtless considering his son-daughter and heir ornamenting a chapel wall in fresco.

'I suppose if I'd had the raising of you,' he said wistfully, 'you'd do as you were told.'

He intercepted Rekhmire''s stare.

'Ah. Silly of me...'

Between them they raised my mood sufficiently that I could put Videric and Rosamunda to the back of my mind, treading firmly on any cold chill of fear that prodded my belly.

Honorius returned to the subject of Gaius Judas the following noon, when his men-at-arms-entirely unlike the layabouts he cheerfully called them to their faces-had four more carrucas-carts packed with their baggage, ready to leave Rome.

Rekhmire' made his own negotiations with a junior officer I recognised from his particularly wide-set eyes, and handed over a sealed scroll-case. Honorius drew me into the shadow of an awning on the far side of the street.

He rested his hand on my shoulder, the sun glinting off his articulated metal gauntlet. 'Convince this Bad Thomas he needs an apprentice, won't you? Think you'll do it before I get back?'

It's easy to take anything as rejection under such circumstances. Harshly attempting humour, I said, 'You mean you don't want me home for seven years?'

He cuffed my ear with the very tips of his fingers, so the gauntlet didn't catch me. 'Idiot! Nothing to say I can't stay in Rome a few years, is there? If-you'd want that?'

I nodded. After Rosamunda, Videric, Valdamerca, Rodrigo, silent assent was all I could manage.

'I want you with this Thomas Cassai, or some man as good.' Honorius absently rested his hand down on his sword-pommel as if it were part of him, his tone blunt. 'You need a trade. You tell me you don't want to be King Rodrigo's siege-engineer-I don't blame you. Battle's sickening enough. But I'd like to see you succeed at something. A man-woman needs a trade other than Court Freak, if they're to retain any self-respect.'

I blinked against the sunlight. Honesty, even without malice, is painful.

But not all pain is bad.

'That's what I like about you.' I smiled at my father. 'Your tact. December?'

Honorius hugged me as if I were a boy, and kissed me squarely on the brow as if I were a daughter.

'December!'

6

Mastro Masaccio burst out in a great guffaw.

I stepped away from his wooden painting-frame fast enough to lock one heel back against the other. I came to an abrupt halt.

Gasping, all but overbalancing, I shot a look from him to the drawing-Is it damaged? I was only--

'I didn't mean to touch it!' I protested. 'I was just brushing...away...brushing off...'

'Brushing off a fly.' His grin was wide and white, he having most of his teeth still. He walked briskly forward to stand beside me, gazing at the sketch of Judas, seated, in which the head and hands were now mostly complete.

Four fingers of space away from his rendition of my hair on my shoulder, the blow-fly sat motionless on the canvas.

I stared at it, more closely.

'It's...'

I looked back at him. Masaccio had the rough-skinned knuckles of his fist pushed into his mouth. He bit down, spluttered, dropped his hand away, and went off into peals of laughter.

'...smudged,' I said grimly.

While the Mastro finished his fit, I peered closely again. At such a small distance it was coal-dust and white pigment, and charcoal spotted in as the shadow the beast would cast.

And if I move here, then the shadow will be wrong...

But to a man standing before the easel, in the way that a man stands to view a picture, the illusion is absolute.

Wiping at his eyes, the Florentine said, 'The one great master, Giotto, played that trick eighty years ago. It still works. If a master plays it.'

Masaccio is an arse.

But-I understand his ambition. He's come to Rome to be the best. How can I not understand that?

More stiff and suspicious than I wished to sound, I said, 'It only works if you stand in the right place.'

'Ah.' His black eyes glinted. 'Ah, you see that, do you?'

I had no hope of him answering, but I scooped Judas's blood-red cloak up around me and asked, regardless. 'How do you do that?'

He glanced around the workshop-emptier at the moment than I'd seen it in two weeks, with his brother Giovanni gone back to Florence, and yet another assistant sacked-and stroked his hand over his tight curly beard.

'Go and sit for me again. I'm not done.'

'I am.' I bent down to catch my ankle as I lifted my foot, balancing like a heron, and stretched the muscles of my leg in tension against my arm. 'I have cramp, Mastro. You may as well tell me while I rest.'

'"Rest"? What are you doing but sitting?' He shook his head and snorted. 'And not half an hour by the clock at St Martin's, either. Every man and woman I ask to model is the same!'

I eyed him stubbornly.

He wants to tell me!

Fifteen days of being St Gaius Tradditore (as these Franks occasionally call their Judas), in twenty-odd positions. Masaccio's looking for a way to do this fresco in the style of the New Art, and he wants to tell another man who will understand him...

I attempted to look like just such a man.

Masaccio's finger stabbed out at the study on canvas. 'Tell me what's there.'

The air in the workshop was cool enough that sitting made my flesh freeze. I rubbed at my arms under the centurion's cloak while I moved around the sketch. The knowledge that I was being tested would have made me sweat on a less cold day.

When this is made into a fresco on a church wall, it will look more like a real man you'll see in the streets than any usual icon. Why?

'Here.' I pointed at the flurry of fine lines where he had drawn the figure of the Betrayer. 'It follows those, somehow...I don't know why.'

I got the confession out with difficulty, my fingertip close to the canvas, almost marking the canvas. There is nothing like those lines in nature: I wasn't sitting as Judas among converging wires in the air.

'But something about them,' I finished my thought, 'something means you can...distort things, so that they look more real. I don't understand! How can a distortion represent things more truly?'

Masaccio smiled, reaching past me; prodding with his fingertip at a central point that was perhaps one-third of the way up the canvas. 'Perspective.'

'It all...it...' I drew with my finger in the air, inwards. 'All...points.'

'Comes down to that one point. And ends. That is the vanishing point. Simple one-point perspective, here. You may know what's beyond it-the other side of that box, or the far side of Judas's arm-but you can't see it. So I don't paint it.'

'And the distortion--'

'You see the world distorted.' He waved his hands. 'Every man does! Foreshortened, shrunk, extended, compressed. Every man sees the world from his own perspective. Two ends of a building measure the same, but the one that's far off, you see small. And I, I don't paint what you know must be there, I paint what you see!'

'What you see.' Meeting his angry gaze, I shrugged. 'Don't you choose the point I'm looking from?'

'As much as I can.' He nodded. 'I know where my paintings will be seen from. I know when the light will be best. If I put the point in the right place, every man will see the painting correctly.'

Experimentally, I took a pace to the side; then back. 'What happens if I don't stand here?'

'Then it's incorrect. I can do only what I can.' He scowled and nodded, as if, I thought, he would happily have nailed men's feet to the floor if it meant he could control their gaze. He reminded me in that moment of Aldra Videric.

'But I don't see how you...' I leaned in. Where my sketched hands clasped together over the hilt of the Roman gladius, he had drawn only parts of my fingers and hands, and those parts curved and distorted.

This is a fingernail-although I can't see all of it. How is it that I know what it's intended to be?

'Go, walk!' Masaccio waved one hand extensively in circles above his head, which meant (judging by the last fortnight): walk around the workshop, don't knock over the bowls of ground bone-dust, or steeping parchment glue, or untreated canvas; don't step on the packing-crates, don't disturb the brushes in soak, do not spoil the expensive pigments.

He had taken my complaints of needing a break seriously since the third day, when cramp knocked me off the wooden box doing duty for the Tree, and spasmed me far enough along the floorboards to knock over his easel.

'Mastro--'

'Ach! Go, while I think!'

I caught the tip of my tongue between my teeth. The small pain reminded me: controlling my impatience got me here. Wait until he's willing to tell me more--

Cramp snagged a ball of muscle in my calf. 'Ah!'

I pressed the sole of my foot down against the floor, pushed at the knot of pain, and swore under my breath. Remembering to swear quietly, because swearing by the proper Christian saints will call attention in this heretic country--

Foreshortened, I thought, out of nowhere.

The nails on the hand are drawn foreshortened.

In the same way that if you look up at Rome's crumbling roofs, the wall and pillars of the building beside you are foreshortened. So, when a man looks at the hand from this one perspective, from the front, the nail appears distorted in that way.

And...that's what you do with feet. Not shown from above, so that you look down on the man's feet at the same time that you look face-on at his body. All parts, everything, shown from the artist's sole viewpoint. And so the feet are foreshortened, also seen from the front.

It's not merely perspective. Men often draw naturalistically-as the Egyptians do when they draw a torso seen full on, but a face in profile. It's perspective seen not from many places in the same painting, but consistently from one--

A glance across the benches showed me Masaccio bent over his steel engraving tools, talking under his breath.

Not a moment to interrupt. But I can tell him I understand; I understand at least the beginning of his principles!

I grinned wildly. I could have jumped and danced, if not for the cramp. Bending and rubbing at the muscle, I made my way to the back of the workshop, stamping on the wooden floorboards only when I was far enough off not to disturb the Florentine.

Digging my fingers into my locked flesh brought my head upside down, into odd positions. I gazed at objects-at boxes, at poles, at flat boards and canvases; at statues standing at the back of the workshop; at the slant of the half-open door to the courtyard.

Each one has its own distortion of its actual measurements and dimensions. Seen from each man's eyes.

Realisation filled up my vision. As if things rounded out before me, I saw how a man might draw lines converging to a single point, and place on them a simple regular object like a packing-case, or as complex an object as the statue of a man. They will appear larger or smaller, in themselves or in their parts, according to how close or distant they are!

I am no provincial amateur; I can see--

The cramp had been gone for some minutes by the time I stopped standing with my lowered head cocked sideways. I straightened up, feeling a heat in my cheeks not entirely due to bending over. If any man sees me, he'd think me mad!

Any man but one.

I turned, sweeping the rubbed velvet cloak around me, to look for Masaccio.

I had assumed that he would be anxiously waiting for me to get back into position. I was shocked to see him still bent close to the wooden frame, fractionally altering charcoal lines.

Perhaps he's nearly done with Judas?

Suppose this is the version he wants? Supposing it's right? Then he won't need me any more.

The chill of apprehension didn't paralyse me. Galvanised, instead, I moved forward to the middle of the workshop, waiting for Mastro Masaccio to notice me.

His head lifted.

I said, 'You have statues here.'

His oval lids blinked over his black eyes.

Masaccio remained blank-faced for all of a minute before his lines of concentration relaxed. His gaze swept the cluttered rear of the workshop, where indeed unpainted stone stood.

He gave me a very Florentine shrug.

'Oh, well, what will you? This is Rome; this is a new market for me. Some things I must do to bring immediate money in, for pigments and the rest--'

I knelt, with the Judas cloak sliding off my shoulders, and pulled at my leather travelling bag with half-numb fingers. I sprang up in time to interrupt him:

'I can paint them. Look. These are samples, that I did in Carthage. I could...if I painted the statues, you'd have the time to do the real painting!'

I felt the weight lift as he took one of the miniature busts from my outspread hands. It was the head and shoulders of a man of Carthage, carved in the local fashion. I had shaded the folds at the neck of his gown, and put tints of light into his curled hair and beard.

'Adequate.'

Masaccio nodded, as if his praise were nothing remarkable.

'All right. I have other work to do. Yes. Start tomorrow.'

'I-Mastro!'

He interrupted. 'Don't spoil the stonework. I'll take the cost of the pigments you use out of your wages.'

He gave me a level look as I was about to open my mouth and protest But you don't pay me!

The money will go to Rekhmire'. At least in the first instance. As will any losses.

That was a less welcome thought, but it couldn't sadden me at the moment.

'I'll need wax. Cera Punica. I can bring my own tools!' Suppressing the urge to dance on the spot, I said, 'Which statue shall I start on?'

'Any.' He shrugged carelessly. 'They're all overdue. But don't hurry so much you spoil the work.'

I thanked him, stumbling over the words, growing redder and hotter at the ears, hearing myself sound like a fool.

Am I in fact thanking this man for a chance to do what I'm weary of- old-style painting of monuments, graveyard statues, garden ornaments?

Yes. I am. Because it means I can stay on here!

Masaccio turned to his easel again. My heart hammering in my chest, I walked around to the back of the workshop.

The statues stood unpainted, although some had been treated with an undercoat of plaster and egg-white. Many were copies of Classical works. Sculptors mostly do not have the skill, now, to make them as fluid and lifelike as a millennium and a half ago-men and women stood flat-footed, carved face-on, stiff in the shoulders. I walked between them, reaching out. The unforgiving hardness of marble bruised my fingertips, and I had no care for it.

Side-stepping round a badly proportioned gladiator, I turned my head and found myself looking into the face of the most beautiful woman in the world.

'Oh...'

Someone is doing for stone what Masaccio is doing for paint!

She stood out for her workmanship from among the crowd of statues-saints, hermits, cardinals, and the occasional bust of Gaius Julius Caesar, Hannibal Barca, or Platon. I doubted the statue's model could be more than fifteen or sixteen years old. The Carrara marble was of such high quality, and the workmanship so good, that it had caught the heaviness in her oval eyelids without drowning out the sparkle of liveliness in her eye.

I ran my finger over the cold smoothness where the corner of her sculpted mouth turned up delicately, and her lips were just parted.

'That's a bride-piece.' Masaccio's voice came from behind me. He ignored how I jumped. Something showed in his expression; I couldn't put a name to it.

I stuttered, 'Should I start here? With this one? Or--'

'Why not? Yes.' He gave a curt nod and turned away.

Have I displeased him?

The thought faded away. I ran a finger along the icy stone of her rounded shoulder. She had been carved naked, as was common in the Antique past. The statue already had draped over it a long, light pleated tunic, which it would wear when displayed in public. Flimsy white linen, caught in around the stone waist with a knotted cord...

The hem had caught under the cord at one side. The rucked-up material left unclothed the curve of her lower thigh, and the soft, baby-fat contours of her knee, and her lower leg.

I crouched down, to gaze up at her. As Masaccio was inadvertently teaching me: look at what you are to paint from all angles.

If wax and paint could only make stone live! Look at her...

She gazed over her turned-back shoulder, as if to speak to someone behind her. I got up and walked around to her right side, to look her full in the face. Her eyes were stone-blind, as the eyes of unpainted statues are.

But wax and colours will give her the most exact copy of a young girl's eye, focusing on the world. If I have sufficient skill.

I must work on her first!

A striped linen cloak or mantle had been draped from one of her hands, so that it fell to pool and gather around her feet.

I stepped back, getting all of her in view.

The mantle she held didn't drape both her feet. It fell to the floor beside one foot.

Something about the proportions made me frown.

I don't know what I'm seeing. Is she not complete?

I knelt down.

The carving of her foot was not unfinished.

Down to her ankle, she was a young woman. But, from her ankle down, the sculptor had given her skin the texture of hair.

Smooth, silky-the pelt of an animal.

Beneath her ankle, she had no human foot. She had the carved hock, the beast's foot, and the split hoof that belongs to a goat.

7

If Rome was shabby, the Vatican palace was shabbiest of all. I made a habit of meeting Rekhmire' outside it in the late afternoons, after siesta, when the light became too bad for painting or reading or copying, and there was no hope of a messenger or letter arriving from Taraco that day. Although I knew it soon yet, even if my father Honorius had changed his mind and gone all the way from Ostia Antica by ship, rather than joining the land road.

The Egyptian's eyes showed red-rimmed as he lifted his hand in greeting. His clothes stank of lamp-oil. 'Ilario. How does your colouring of the bride-piece statue go?'

He habitually copies from so many libraries that he must be as much a scholar as bookseller. Having worked up courage enough with that thought, I asked him the question I badly needed answered:

'Master Rekhmire'-am I painting a demon?'

'The statue itself?' His brows shot up. 'I'd imagined that a Phoenician superstition, not an Iberian one--'

'No, not the statue itself!'

With the goat-foot explained, his large, lined face relaxed into a smile.

'No demon. A god, perhaps.' Rekhmire' shrugged at my expression. 'The temples at home are filled with animal-headed gods. A foot would not be unusual. And one of the Attic gods has a goat-foot, no?'

'Pan.'

'But, Attic work here...'

Rekhmire' pointed up, with a finger that showed ground-in ink to the second knuckle. Stumps of sculpture stood along the roof of this great cathedral, next to the Vatican. Rome's Classical gods shared a minimal presence with the many saints of the Green Christ.

The Egyptian snorted. 'They're not a people who love their Classical heritage. I'm finding scrolls by Homer and Sappho stuffed in damp corners, sole surviving copies eaten by rot-but the hagiographies of their Frankish saints are preserved under crystal, and copied and re-copied. A god's hoof on a statue would be...odd.'

I frowned. 'Then...could it be symbolism?'

He arched his plucked brow at me.

'Symbolising something physically monstrous,' I continued the thought. 'A club-foot, perhaps.'

'Being lame is hardly monstrous!'

'Not to you. Or in Iberia. The Franks are different. And if this statue is to advertise a bride...They wouldn't copy a physical deformity in stone. They might symbolise that something is there. As a warning.'

'A warning.' Rekhmire''s expression held distaste.

'Just as well they're not making one for me.' I didn't add: Or you.

He smiled sardonically. 'Does the work go well?'

I thought for a moment, and nodded.

'Good.'

Rekhmire' didn't say more, perhaps for fear of unnerving me, but I knew what was in his mind. Masaccio won't want anything coming out of his workshop to be done badly. His name will be on it. So he must trust me to do this. And-I must do it well. Do it better than I've done any work before now.

'This isn't difficult.' I could feel her icy marble texture in my fingers. 'She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I swear she tells me herself how she ought to be painted.'

'Despite the club-foot?'

'Despite the club-foot.'

Rekhmire' smiled. 'I should be careful if I were you, Ilario. None of the Classical stories of men in love with images end well.'

I blushed red.

He laughed out loud. 'My slave is infatuated!'

'My master can go fornicate with a three-legged donkey!'

Men of the Egyptian's mass and bulk shouldn't snicker; it leads to a perceptible loss of dignity on their part. Even if they do appear unmoved by that.

The following day I had a loss of nerve and ground up no pigments, merely taking up some of my old lime-wood boards and using the backs for drawing exercises-something I could be sure Masaccio would never reprove me for.

The Florentine merely grunted when he saw me. 'When you've finished there, you may as well do something useful.'

Matching size and angle and inclination of line can only be done for so long before the eye tires. At last I set down the boards and charcoal, and wandered over to Masaccio's other bench.

'You can do the cheese glue for the panel work,' he observed. 'You mix the cheese with powdered lime...'

He pushed a plate of decidedly rotten Roman pale cheese across the workbench.

'It works better if you crumble it with your fingers.'

'Cheese glue.'

I looked at him.

'If I were a younger apprentice--' I stifled choking and the urge to gag, as I fully smelled the cheese. '--I might be taken in by that one!'

I'd had enough in the scriptorium at Taraco, as the youngest apprentice, being sent down to the vellum store for a long stand and other traditional red herrings.

Masaccio hefted a piece of painted board up from where it was propped against the side of the bench. Covered in plaster dust, it had obviously been removed from some altar wall.

'Got this out of a chapel at Pavia...'

It was an ordinary altar painting of St Lawrence roasting on his griddle, done in the ancient style. There being few pieces of suitable flat wood large enough for such an altar panel, it was made of six separate boards glued together, and then covered over with linen as a ground for the pigment.

Masaccio rested the edge of the board on the lip of the workbench, holding it there as he stroked his beard with his free hand. 'Been up in the chapel three centuries, according to the monastery records-but who trusts them? A long time, certainly...'

He picked up a mallet, hefted it, and abruptly lifted his arm and smashed it down with all his strength.

The mallet-head sounded loud as a gun exploding. It landed squarely on a visible ridge in the painting that marked a join in the planks. I winced and stepped back from an anticipated fragmentation of splinters.

The wooden panel didn't break.

Masaccio stared down at it, rubbing his thumb over the small dent in the shiny surface. He scratched at it with his nail.

'Cheese glue,' he remarked. 'Once it's well set.'

Wordlessly, I reached for the plate and began crumbling the sticky wet cheese into the lime-dust, taking great care to get neither close to my eyes, and leaning back as the mess began to bubble and minutely sputter.

At the short afternoon's end, Masaccio invited me down to the taverna at the end of the street.

I accepted with no hesitation.

Technically, Master Tommaso Cassai's people are at war with mine. The Crusades still grind on, somewhere in the north of Iberia, on the Navarra-Castile border where Honorius fought: he had told me stories. But it still seems more than a world away, here in Masaccio's Roman workshop-which, Masaccio let slip, had taken only a bare month to become as cluttered as it was; he having come down from Florence just at the beginning of the autumn.

I finishing tidying and sweeping up and found him waiting impatiently at the door. But for all that, he was the first to open his purse at the tavern.

'You've got bad news for me.' I looked up from the bench where I sat, and then back at the leather jack of ale. 'You must have!'

His black eyes glinted. He drank, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and lowered his voice below the chatter from the packed tavern-room.

'On the contrary, Spaniard. I'm impressed with your work on stone.'

He didn't pause long enough to let me take that in.

Shooting a sharp glance my way, he said, 'That's why I'm going to include you on the work I'm doing now-it's suddenly become a rush job, and I need another set of hands. Think you can work at the Egyptian embassy?'

If I'd drunk any ale, I'd have choked.

The ridiculous thought came instantly into my mind: Rekhmire' has arranged this!

I couldn't help asking. 'It's nothing to do with my master, is it?'

Masaccio looked bewildered.

'Your...' His expression cleared. 'Oh, the Egyptian castrato-bureaucrat. No; this is a contract from before I met your master. They have a statue they need painted before it's shipped out; suddenly it must be shipped in three weeks' time...' He shrugged. 'That's patrons for you.'

I looked down. Drawn in ale, the wet lines of a man's face glistened on the grain of the wood-one of the soldiers sitting by the hearth in ragged jack and hose, half his jaw gone to a combat wound. I rubbed my hand across the absent work of my fingers. 'Mastro, my drawing exercises. Are they well, in your estimation?'

'You're progressing.'

'I...' A refusal wouldn't come out: my throat constricted too tightly. I breathed deep. 'I think I'm just beginning to learn perspective. Mastro, if you want me to do another statue--'

I couldn't hold it back.

'I don't want to be left doing nothing but stone-work! I want to learn more of the real art!'

In the dark curls of his beard, the white glint of a smile showed. 'This statue's different, Spaniard. You'll see.'

I took up the jack, drained it, and got to my feet, gazing down at Masaccio.

He gave a brief nod and led me out into the dark afternoon.

The streets of Rome aren't lit as Carthage's are; they don't have the use of naphtha. Nothing is so black as city streets between monumental buildings. I stumbled in Masaccio's wake, treading wetly in dung and less reputable rubbish. He walked as if it were clear daylight. But that was merely an excess of self-confidence.

Past one more bend in the Tiber, an island lay in the middle of the river. Mastro Masaccio spoke to the guards on the bridge, who let us across, and he strode on without looking back at me, up the steps of a Doric-pillared Roman mansion, and knocked without hesitation.

The hen-tracks and pictograms inscribed on one side of the door read (if I had it correctly from Rekhmire''s teaching), Embassy of Alexandria-in-exile. And on the other side, in Latin letters, the city's name from before the conquest: Embassy of Constantinople.

I wondered if I might see Rekhmire' at this outpost of Egypt-in-Europe. I must tell him I've been here.

Light blazed unexpectedly into my eyes as the doors opened. Inside, the mansion was full of brilliance. Masaccio talked, laughing, to ruddy-skinned men in linen kilts. I rubbed at my streaming eyes as we went inside.

Lamps and candle-stands stood every few feet along the corridor, and, in the room they took us to, stood side-by-side. The heat and sweet scent of beeswax stunned me into a faintly nauseous state.

'It's not natural light,' I protested, when Masaccio came back from ushering our guides out through the square-pilastered doorway. 'The colours won't be right!'

'Apparently, this is the light they're to be seen by in Constantinople.' He shrugged, walking towards a sheet-covered monolith standing among pots, brushes, and pallets. I was pleased to see a brazier-box and slabs of Punic wax. The sheet would no doubt come off to show the statue in question.

Masaccio grinned lopsidedly. 'Behold!'

The white cloth fell away. I found myself gazing up at a statue of a man seven or eight feet high, made of fine white marble-and of brass.

'I've--' seen one of these before, I stopped myself saying.

In Carthage.

Rekhmire' is prone to lecture me about tact. It was hardly tact that allowed Mastro Masaccio to present me with his 'surprise'; I stood stunned by more than the statue's presence. Remembering Hanno Anagastes' house, and a glimpse of a similar metal-jointed statue that stood head-and-shoulders taller than an average man. Although Hanno's had been of yellow sandstone, not marble; and unpainted, rather than decorated as this one would be.

If there are any men from Carthage here-if they know of Rekhmire'-of me--

Desperately desiring to speak to Rekhmire', I examined the stonework, stumbling to make suitable exclamations. The statue towered taller than me by four-and-twenty inches; stood carved naked, and with its arms posed hanging at its sides.

Masaccio pointed at the legs and lower torso. 'Much of the flesh, I've done.'

Ruddy Egyptian flesh colours made it seem as if the lower part of a man indeed stood there, rounded out into life from the white stone.

'It will take many hours of skilful work to complete it well.' He gave me an uncompromising look. 'And I will have it done well.'

The arms and head and upper chest remained not coloured as yet, and I found myself sizing up the job as he talked, and nodding agreement. The sculptor had carved every muscle, tendon-cord, and bone under the surface of the stone skin, and the brass-smith had chiselled the arm-and shoulder-and knee-joints with the same skill.

Masaccio broke what I realised had become a silence. He stroked his hand over his mouth, barely hiding a grin. 'They shipped it here to be painted by the world's best painter.'

Is that-can this be coincidence?

'Is it going back to Carthage, after?'

He shot me a look that suggested I ought not to hazard guesses about the origins of such statues.

'No. It's going on to Constantinople. A gift for the Pharaoh-Queen, Ty-ameny. With the name of my workshop on it, and the master's brush. So if you mess it up, Spaniard, I'll have your bollocks!'

I stifled a grin at what I knew in that last respect and he didn't.

And...If Carthage knew I'd come here, I would have walked into this embassy at Masaccio's heels and found Carthaginians ready to arrest me.

Not everything in the world concerning Carthage can revolve around Taraco. Or even me. They must have their business with powerful kingdoms such as New Alexandria...

Exhilarated, I squatted down by the boxes where my brushes and other tools were set out. Calami rush-stalks; the r habdion that is spatulate at one end and round at the other; large and small brushes; different heating-irons. I reached forward to rake up the brazier that was heating coals for the pallet box.

Squinting up, I saw how foreshortened my view of the statue in fact was; the thighs and hands enormous, the neck and chin tiny...

The Florentine painter said, 'And you must make certain to do the details under the arms perfectly.'

Mastro Masaccio smiled when I looked at him.

'What for?'

'Because it'll show!' His tone implied Obviously, you idiot!

I stood up and touched the immense, chill marble. I couldn't push my fingertips between the statue's torso and the inside of its arm.

'I don't think--'

'You can't reach there?' Masaccio gave a short nod, and then lifted his chin, looking up into the carved marble face of the statue. 'Golem, lift up your arm.'

The stone statue's arm noiselessly swivelled at the shoulder-joint and elbow-joint, and lifted up and forward from its body.

8

Masaccio's laughter peeled out loud enough that half the embassy bureaucrats came to peek round the door, before he ushered them away.

Obstruction blotting out the candle-light-a soundless, heavy motion passing my face--

I stood up from where I had ended, crouched against the room's far wall.

I dimly remembered muscles that flexed and sprang by instinct, putting me with my back to the masonry; and instinct and training also had a reed-cutting knife clenched in my hand.

Little enough good that would have done me.

I gazed up at the more than life-size statue, breathing heavily. 'So! It's a joke. I don't see ropes, or pulleys-is there a man inside?'

It looked solid marble, but it might be no thicker than a running-bird's eggshell; I have seen men who can carve stone or ivory to such thin perfection.

Masaccio rapped his knuckles against the polished smoothness of the statue's biceps. 'No one inside. You are a barbarian, boy! Have you never heard of Hero of Alexandria, who made a walking statue of a man? Now, evidently, someone has re-discovered that Classical science--'

'A walking statue?' Every muscle, as I relaxed it, shivered with cramp. I flexed my fingers. 'A walking statue?'

'--And re-discovered it in Carthage, by my best guess.' Masaccio frowned, concentrating, clearly not realising I'd interrupted. 'Although these Alexandrines are none too keen to talk about who shipped it from there; it might have been made elsewhere...What? Do you call me a liar? Look at it!'

I had not the slightest desire to approach the now-motionless carved shape of a man.

Except that I'll still be expected to lay colour onto the surface of that marble.

There being tools about the place, I picked up a mallet of soft wood as I approached, and-poised to spring away in an instant-rapped it against the statue's pectoral muscles.

The thunk of solid marble echoed through the low-roofed room.

The statue did not move.

Masaccio spoke loudly but calmly, as if to a deaf but only slightly dangerous animal. 'Golem, pour a drink of wine into the cup for me.'

Its joints moved.

Soundlessly, it lifted a knee, flexed at ankle and toe-with a flash of light from the yellow brass gears-and it was walking.

A soft grating of stone against tile became the only noise in the room while a man might count a hundred.

The golem-statue stalked to the niche where the wine jug stood, lifted it, and poured liquid from the jug into an alabaster cup.

Surely the strength of that hand will crush--

The statue swivelled about, stopped; then moved with the same unchanging pace to Mastro Masaccio, and halted with an arm stretched out.

He took the cup.

I saw Masaccio's fingers were not steady.

The carved features of the statue's over-large face did not move: neither stone brows, nor mouth, nor eyes.

'How does it see?' I breathed. And flushed, not thinking to have spoken aloud.

'How indeed? There is some secret science of the ancient peoples, here.' Masaccio suddenly dipped his head, and threw back all the wine at a gulp. He stared up into the stone man's face. 'Which you cannot tell us, friend, can you? It can't speak,' he added to me.

The Egyptians had gone some way to decorating this Roman mansion in their own style. The house of the Lord-Amir of Carthage Hanno Anagastes was not too unlike this one: striped stone at the door arches, and red-and-yellow friezes along the walls. I thanked Christ the Emperor for that slight familiarity, disoriented as I felt.

There again, if I'd been longer in the house of Hanno Anagastes-would I have seen his statue move?

'Am I expected to touch that?' My voice sounded high, womanish. I made an effort to force it low. 'Paint it?'

Masaccio's glance was impatient. 'Unless you wish me to hire another assistant?'

'No!'

What else can I say? No matter if it belongs to Carthage, and I should stay away from anything belonging to the King-Caliph's people-I can't miss this!

Masaccio said, 'It obeys a man's commands, if told to by the Alexandrines here. That means my voice will be heeded, but yours not. If you need to paint where you cannot reach, you must ask me.'

'And I should say nothing of this, outside the workshop?' I pre-empted his speech.

His brilliant dark eyes summed me up. 'You'll take the formal oath as my apprentice.'

All I could do was stare.

'Your master'll permit it,' Masaccio added. 'He was anxious enough to get you apprenticed. Are you Frankish Christian?'

This not being a time to lie, I admitted, 'I was brought up in the faith of Christ Emperor.'

He dismissed a thousand years of religious schism and warfare with a wave of his hand. 'Same thing.'

I put the flat of my hand up against his palm as he raised it, feeling the heat of his paint-marked skin.

'Swear by Jesus Christ and the Holy Mother to give me your fidelity as my apprentice.'

'I swear by Christus Imperator and the Wise Holy Mother to be your true apprentice.'

'Good. I'll have you on the executioner's block if you fail me.' Masaccio nodded. 'Are you ready to begin?'

The reality of judicial punishment made me startle; only then did I think, But I haven't asked Honorius. Not for the first time, I wished him present to advise me. And Rekhmire'. Cold with apprehension, I thought, Should I have taken this step without consulting them?

Masaccio brought me to see this: he had no intention of letting me escape without an oath.

My gaze fell from the statue's face-but to look at its shoulders was no more reassuring. Reckoning by eye, now, I made it seven feet and two hands high. Carved proportionate to a man, it was almost a giant.

'Three weeks,' I said.

'I likely could finish it myself.' Masaccio's brows dipped in concentration. 'But I want no part of it hurried. And they're not paying me enough to have all of it pel suo pennello: from the master's brush alone. You'll still sit for me as Judas in the meanwhile. Cardinal Valente won't wait while I finish this.'

That momentarily took my attention from the golem-statue. In most Frankish church icons they represent Judas as he was in his Hebrew robes, before he joined the army and gained Roman citizenship. Robes would have suited me. But this Cardinal had chosen a depiction much closer to our own: Judas, under his Roman legionary name of Gaius, debating with the priests of Mithras. And wearing his military cloak, lorica segmentata, and a centurion's 'skirt' of leather straps.

Modelling that made me uneasy. Even changing to baggier hose in defiance of fashion hadn't rid me of a feeling that my hips and belly must show broad as a woman's. And there are no women in Masaccio's workshop.

I shifted, casually now, to a stance that I thought more concealed my feminine arse.

Masaccio lifted his chin confrontationally. 'You won't mind working night and day, will you?'

I couldn't help but smile through my fright. Monstrous the golem might be, but such a challenge to an artist's skill--! 'Where do you want me to start?'

He had me begin with fingernails, oddly enough. No foreshortening. Merely the laying of ground-work colour, where he had prepared the surface: then shading and wash, onto a solid surface; highlights to be brushed on when dry.

I pushed dry-mouthed apprehensiveness away. The statue doesn't move, save at command.

After a day or two of touching it without harm, fear gave way to sheer exhilaration. Fascination-how can such things be?

I found myself working at all hours of the night. Since the golem-statue could be painted during the evenings, the shortening daylight hours of autumn could be spent on other remunerative work. Judas. And the statue of the goat-foot girl.

Masaccio had not yet approached Rekhmire' to countersign the apprentice's contract-I would have had the Egyptian shouting at me if he had. I desired urgently to talk to Rekhmire' about the stone golem, but I thought that he would also regard my verbal oath as binding. Which meant I could not.

I bit my tongue, and concluded at the end of two days that Rekhmire'-in and out of the embassy as he eternally was!-must by now have found out all there was to know about the stone golem. He said nothing. But that need only mean he respects my oath.

Carthage had passed the golem straight to the Alexandrine embassy, it appeared, with orders to get it painted and sent on to Constantinople. I had merely to be careful of meeting stray Carthaginians before the statue was shipped out. I thought one or two times that I might have been followed in the street, but nothing came of it-and hermaphrodites are sometimes followed for reasons unconnected with politics, even when disguised as men.

Or, I thought, it might be Rekhmire' keeping a watchful eye open.

My opportunity to speak came when we were both all but asleep in the pungent Roman night, and Rekhmire' got up to open a shutter, and stare for some minutes at the waxing moon.

'In Lord Hanno Anagastes' house,' I got up on one elbow, 'I saw a statue-a man, done larger than life-size. I meant to ask you. There were rumours among the other slaves, that it moved. Walked. Like a man, I mean.'

The moonlight showed me Rekhmire''s expression: the lift of his brows, and faint amusement.

'That's the Lord-Amirs of Carthage for you. The Royal Library has had Lords arrive in person, to study the scrolls of Hero of ancient Alexandria-that-was. If they could match his engineering feats, the Franks and the Turks would indeed have cause to fear Carthage's armies...'

'You think Lord Hanno's statue moves?'

'Single wonders of such a nature are...not unknown.' His face fell half into shadow. 'Although "not unknown" does not mean "not dangerous".'

I kept my satisfaction concealed. I have managed to say nothing that breaks my promise of secrecy.

'And on the subject of the Turks...' Rekhmire' turned back to gazing out of the window, changing the subject more clumsily than he customarily did. 'I have found a document in the Vatican library that I think has been lost-mis-filed-these two hundred years.'

Monochrome light reflected from the dome of his shaven head; the planes of his cheeks. I reached for the board beside my pallet and, for all my sleepiness, began to sketch him in that profile. 'Document?'

'A Turkish traveller's account. I presume, ignored because written by a foreigner. But, depending on whether it is a forgery or not...it is an eye-witness testimony of the Prophet Gundobad's death.' Rekhmire''s brows came down. 'And it contains the actual words of the curse that Gundobad spoke. Those were unknown until now. Whether the cardinals might at last begin to break the curse on the Papal Chair, if they knew...'

'Is it genuine?'

His massive shoulders shrugged. 'I am attempting to find other supporting evidence. So far, there's none. Then again, the Vatican has a library half the size of ours, and with no competent custodians whatsoever. It is a task of years!'

I lay back down. Rekhmire' continued to gaze from the unshuttered window, frustration plain on his large face.

After I had slumped asleep as Judas a time or two, Mastro Masaccio took to letting me doze on a couch at the back of the workshop. My eyes shut, often, gazing up at the face of the marble girl. I had the preparation of her body done, ready to paint, colour, shade and highlight. But for that rest--

'I need to ask you a favour,' I said that dawn, as Masaccio and I returned from the embassy; he holding up a flaring pitch torch to scare off street toughs. The shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and eye-sockets danced with the torch and wind.

'And that is?'

'I've prepared all the stonework for pigment, and sewn the bride-piece's clothing...' I had, to his sardonic amusement, also brought in a goat from a woman living in the next street, so that I could adequately paint the symbolic foot from life. '...But I can't go on with the painting yet.'

His chin came up combatively. 'Why? Aren't I paying your master enough?'

'I need to see her face.'

'I need you not to waste time on that piece of...'

When he said nothing more, I added cautiously, 'If it's a bride-piece, does it not need to look like her? So far, according to instruction, I know her fair-skinned and fair-haired--'

'Yellow.'

I stared as he unlocked the heavy wooden gates of the workshop. '"Yellow"?'

'Her hair is yellow as a marsh buttercup.'

His back spoke a volume or two as he stalked in ahead of me, but I hadn't the language to read it.

Direct, I demanded, 'Who is she?'

'A whore.'

That startled me. The sun was not yet risen: I'd picked up and lit a candle-stump, preparatory to lighting the shop's oil-lamps; I all but burned my hand as he spoke. 'A whore?'

Masaccio's expression was hidden by darkness. He spoke quietly.

'A woman who said she loved me-she got me the commission on the strength of it. After the bride-piece statue was painted, I was to go to her father and...But before it was even carved, she told me she'd changed her mind. No marriage for Tommaso Cassai. A painter wasn't rich enough for her. The whore! For her. And her family!'

If we had been outside in the street, he would have spat.

'Perhaps her family stopped her,' I said. 'Women have little enough choice, commonly.'

Masaccio's laugh, in the closed-up workshop, was harsh and ugly. 'Defending her, boy? You don't know her! Why-you're in love with her yourself!'

'No--'

'You're red, boy!'

'I'm not!'

'Just from her image!' He laughed the more at my denial. I stifled protest. 'Well.' He shrugged. 'All I want is the money for a job done. If you need to see the bitch's face for that, well, see her. It's nothing to me.'

From his tone, money was far from all that concerned him. And evidently he could see that thought in my face, bad light notwithstanding.

'Here!' He scrawled quickly in charcoal, on a splinter of lath. 'Here's the address; I've drawn you where she lives. But mind, I can't spare you more than an hour from Judas-and the Egyptian embassy.'

9

I ran all the way.

The Paziathe mansion stood solid, dark, and grim, for all the gilding the morning sun attempted to lay on its masonry. It looked startlingly well-built for such a shabby district. Iron bars were set into the stone, covering the lower and upper windows.

What have they to lock up? They don't look rich.

I smiled wryly at that. They're well enough off to hire a sculptor and a painter to advertise their daughter for sale.

Who'd be a woman, in the Empty Chair? Thank God-Rekhmire''s eight of Them!-that I can pass as a man.

A sleepless night had left me gritty-eyed. The sprint across Rome, past the Forum and the amazingly narrow Via Sacra, to this outlying district, woke me fully. The mansion stood near a park, if the oak trees ahead of me were any guide. Clean, chill air hissed in my lungs. I felt the palms of my hands hot and wet.

I am Mastro Tommaso Cassai's apprentice, I rehearsed in my head. Come to make colour sketches for your daughter's statue.

'Old Aranthur's more likely to let you in than me,' Masaccio had called after me as daylight cleared his head, temper making him scowl.

Rekhmire', when I diverted my way past our lodgings, was out; gone already to the Vatican library. It would have eased my mind to talk to him, although I could not say why.

An elderly servant came out of a side door of the mansion, pulling a cloak around his shoulders.

I let him walk off before I went to the same door and rapped, using their bronze door-hammer cast in the shape of a Sacred Boar.

The iron-studded door was made from thick enough wood that I heard no footsteps approaching. It swung suddenly open, startling me.

'What did you forget?' In the doorway, a girl put her hand up to her face, shading her eyes from the sun; hiding her features from me. 'Oh! I'm sorry! I thought you were Father, come back! I shouldn't have answered the door!'

Her voice sounded musical, textured, distressed.

I do not need to see her face.

I watched the curve of those fingers into her palm as she shaded her eyes. I have seen them beside me for days on end. And the fold of her elbow, the curl of her hair.

Masaccio had given me her name, unwillingly enough. My voice half-broke in a boyish squeak. 'Madonna Sulva Paziathe?'

She took a step back. The movement had all grace in it. Both her bodice and her skirts were dark enough brocade to look black in the house's shadow. A hood or veil covered all but the edges of her braided bright hair.

She glanced around, as if looking for her servants.

'Don't be afraid!' I stuttered it out. She might as well have said it to me.

'I'm not supposed to--'

'I'm a painter; I come from Masaccio-I mean, Master Tommaso--'

She lowered her hand and glared at me. 'Tommaso Cassai?'

Now I could see inside the taffeta-cloth veil that framed her face. Her hair had been pinned up beside her temples in a myriad small braids. Enough of it was left unbound to flow over her shoulders. An unmarried woman's style, I guessed, even among the Franks.

And it is not the colour of buttercups, but the exact colour of the outer part of a candle's flame.

Her face. I'd need to use every skill I possessed to make that cream-pale face glow, as it did in the eastern sun. Shadow the faintest violet under her eyes; touch the crisp line of her lip with pink--

'Tell Messer Cassai to leave me alone!'

'He will! It's...I'm painting your statue. I needed to...' A thunderstroke would have left me more articulate. 'To see you.'

Another woman might have blushed, pretending modesty. I was myself trained to behave that way, from time to time, at the court of King Rodrigo. She only opened her lips in a soundless oh of realisation.

'I'm Ilario,' I added, and hesitated too long over giving a family name for it to be natural. 'You don't have to be afraid. Mastro Cassai doesn't intend to come here. And I only need to make sketches.' I burbled. 'Match colours.'

She glanced back over her shoulder into the depths of the mansion. 'Father won't allow me to ask a stranger into the house.'

I was about to swear I would come back-any day; every day; whenever it would be convenient to see her-when she reached back into the darkness, and brought out a silk-fringed mantle to put around her narrow shoulders.

'We'll go into the garden.' A tiny curve of mischief lifted her lip, just as the sculptor had caught it. 'My maid can chaperone us. Hathli! Hathli!'

A dark-featured round woman with an incipient goitre came to the door with remarkable speed. She said nothing, only nodding at her mistress's commands, but her lips folded together, and I had no doubt what she was thinking.

'Madonna Sulva.' I followed them inside. 'I know Frankish women are more free in their behaviour than my people, but--'

'You're not Frankish?' Her eyes widened. 'That's exciting. I never travel. Tell me! Tell me what it's like where you're from.'

I told her of King Rodrigo's court as the maid accompanied us through corridors-to which my eyes were night-blind-and out into a central courtyard. Frail sun gleamed. Bay and basil grew in pots. A walled pool held the glint and flicker of carp. The girl gazed up at me from under her hood.

I let the leather sack of my tools fall at my feet, on the flagstones. How can I ever reproduce you in pigments!

'Messer...Ilario?'

'Ilario Honorius,' I finally managed. I will not use Valdevieso.

Sulva Paziathe had that heavy curve of flesh under her lower eyelids that was the plumpness of girlhood vanishing. It ought to have been ugly. All of her face should be ugly: her brows are too heavy, her lids too wide and oval; the philtrum under her nose too long, so that she doesn't show her teeth when she smiles.

But all these things together in her are...beautiful. She's rich as cream.

'This way,' Sulva Paziathe said. 'Here.'

She walked on, out across the courtyard. The woman Hathli hooked her arm under Sulva's, as if it were a thing of common use and no moment.

The girl is limping. Lame.

Sulva Paziathe pointed to the stone surround of the pond, and a marble bench beside it. 'We'll sit down. Hathli, you can walk over that way for a while.'

They exchanged a look. I guessed at history between them. There would be other servants about here, I could surmise that much. Men-servants. Men-at-arms, if the house still hid wealth under its shabbiness.

The older woman shrugged her own mantle about her swollen neck, toga-like. Her skirts swept ochre and umber leaves as she crossed the courtyard to be out of ear-shot.

'Now.' Sulva's eyes as she looked up had a mischievous gleam that it would defeat me to put into marble. 'You can tell me the things I shouldn't hear! What's it like, to travel from Iberia? And from-Carthage, was it? North Africa?'

She named it as if she named the Moon.

Numbed, I did as court usage had taught me; held out my hand to the young woman, so that she could steady herself as she sat down on the stone bench. Her flesh felt warm enough to be almost hot. At the touch of smooth skin, I felt as if that heat went through me in needles-and, simultaneously, as if I couldn't bear not to have the contact of her hand. Marcomir had been planes and angles and male sweat: this girl was tactile beauty.

She stumbled, sat awkwardly down, and lifted up her head to gaze at me; her fingers still resting on mine. The brocade of her dress was woven with bronze thread, and oyster-shell black, and deep blue. Her skirts were rucked up where she had sat clumsily.

I couldn't help but look. And blushed bright red. She'll think I'm looking to see her lame foot. She'll be embarrassed by her deformity--

On her right foot, her silk slipper was strapped into a wooden patten, three or four inches high, to keep her out of mud or damp.

Her left foot had neither slipper nor patten; they could not have fitted. Only a sock-like silk cloth wrapped round it.

The fabric could not conceal the underlying shape from me; not now that I'm used to drawing the skin, muscle, tendon and bone that lies under men's clothes. Her foot was a twisted ball of clubbed flesh. It had folded back on itself, into a stump. I guessed she had either no toes at all, or else only vestigial ones. Her ankle was knobbled, under the concealing silk.

I looked up, meeting her gaze.

With a heartbreaking gentleness, she said, 'I'm...not allowed to go out into the city. People would...Tell me what it's like, far away?'

For all her brave words, she stared at me, terrified; as if my silence judged her. And as if one word of judgement could shatter her.

How alone, how isolated, she must feel, to invite a stranger in. To risk scandal, insult, mirth, disrespect.

Regardless of the wet leaves on the flagstones, I went down on one knee beside her, gripping her chilled hand tightly.

'Sulva...' I watched her expression. 'Let me tell you how it's been for you. There is no more than one of you in the world. You are unique. Men think you something monstrous, but you're not; you're a soul like any other. All your life, you've been alone, finding no other like you. No one has ever spoken to you normally, as men speak to one another.' I took a breath. 'You are--As you are, you're more beautiful than anything I've ever seen. But they keep you here. Hide you away, for fear.'

Sulva put her free hand up to her face, gazing at me over the tips of her fingers. I saw her biting at her full lower lip as she hid it.

I said, 'Your father thought it right to commission a bride-piece. If you will have me, I'll speak to your father. If you will have me, I'll marry you.'

10

On my way back to Masaccio's workshop I stepped aside to our lodgings, hoping to bring the news to my Egyptian master.

'You've done what?'

Looking up at Rekhmire''s aghast face, I spoke doggedly.

'I've told Madonna Sulva Paziathe that I'll marry her. And she's agreed.'

He opened and shut his mouth soundlessly. Under other circumstances-when it didn't incise a sudden line of fire through my belly-I would have found it comic.

Rekhmire' caught his breath. 'And did you tell her that you're not a man!'

Now is not the moment to explain why Sulva Paziathe so desperately needs to be rescued.

I slammed the lodging-house door behind me as I left.

The door to Masaccio's workshop opened a quarter-hour after I'd got back, and let Rekhmire' in.

Masaccio didn't look up, being fixated by how the light fell on Judas's hands, where the Betrayer held the Spanish sword that drew no blood.

Rekhmire''s voice echoed up to the rafters. 'And have you told her family that you're a slave?'

Masaccio looked up, startled. He grinned in the anticipation of scandal.

'I need a rest-break!' Hurriedly, I dropped the prop-sword, draped the velvet cloak in folds over the box, and strode across the room to herd the Egyptian back out.

I closed the workshop door on the painter's outraged complaints.

'Have you?' Rekhmire' demanded, voice echoing across the cobbled street.

'No!'

I was breathless with striding after him through Roman alleys.

Twenty feet below, the Tiber sluggishly flowed. I stared down off the bridge. Hadrian's fortress-crowned burial mound reflected here and there in the water, wherever the currents beneath let it appear still enough on the surface.

'As your owner--' Rekhmire' came to a sudden halt. '--I can easily refuse permission for you to get married!'

'I was hoping you'd come to the wedding.'

Rekhmire''s fist thumped down on the sandstone coping of the bridge parapet. 'Are you mad?'

Now is not the time to tell him that I'll tell her, when the time's right.

Leaning on the coping-stones with my chest heaving, I managed an equable reply. 'Her father finds my proposal acceptable.'

Silence.

'It seems he thinks a fine upstanding young painter-apprentice to a painter-is completely suitable for his daughter.'

I shrugged.

'Of course, if she wasn't deformed, he wouldn't accept it. He's probably been wondering since she was born how the Hell he's going to get her married off.'

Aranthur Paziathe's face came back to me. My fingers ached to sketch the deep lines at the corners of his mouth, and those etched across his forehead. Small, dark, contained: I had no idea how such a fair acorn could drop from that oak.

'Her father may wonder, too,' I said aloud. And, at Rekhmire''s bemused look, explained, 'Whether her mother played him false...'

'Ilario--'

'I can let her stay locked up in that, that prison, crippled, until she grows old. Or I can get her out of there.' I watched emotion shift in Rekhmire''s dark eyes. 'And you know what? The club-foot isn't ugly. It's the thing that makes her beautiful.'

'You are mad.' He muttered something under his breath: a string of Alexandrine god-names. He began to pace, on the dusty surface of the bridge, turning with a sharp twist every three or four steps.

He stopped, facing me. 'You haven't thought about this.'

'Yes. This time I have.'

'If nothing else, your father's permission--'

'No need; I've long been of age. And Honorius isn't here. Besides...' I remembered Honorius's creased face, seeing me for the first time. The joy in his eyes uncontaminated by disgust. 'I think he'd approve.'

'And back at the court of Taraco--!' He gestured with his large hands, as if he presented every incident between Carthage and Taraconensis, and my part in it, for my inspection. 'A wife is a hostage to fortune!'

'So are you! So is Honorius! So is any friend I might make, or my Mastro!'

I know well enough that, once out of Rome, my company might be dangerous.

'You're--' Rekhmire' cut off whatever he had been about to say. 'And her father, he'll be happy to have you marry her by the Arian Christian rite, will he?'

That made me frown. 'I don't suppose they are worshippers of Christ-the-Emperor, here. No...That doesn't matter. I can marry her by the Frankish rite.'

'Amun and Amunet! How can you marry her when you're half a woman yourself! You're--'

'--A freak? And what's she, Rekhmire'? What's she!' I hauled in breath. 'She's the same as I am--'

'You're property. My property. You're a slave!'

'You think you're going to stop me doing this? Have me arrested! Because you're going to have to put chains on me to stop me helping her!'

Rekhmire' threw up his hands. In the purest dialect of Rome, audible to every man within fifty feet, he exclaimed, 'You stupid bitch--!'

I brought my bags, the rest of my tools for the encaustic wax technique, and my bedroll, and put them on the couch at the back of the workshop.

Masaccio raised no eyebrow; he only harried me harder with modelling for the Franks' Great Betrayer, and painting the Alexandrine's miraculous moving golem-statue. He asked no questions about the Paziathe family.

It was twelve long hours, well into the evening, before I could get away to meet Sulva again-and then it was her father I found myself speaking with, not her.

That didn't come until the following morning.

'You haven't changed your mind?' I hardly dared look down into her face, that held the round newness of youth and too much knowledge of suffering.

Sulva gripped my arm for support as we walked. She lifted her head, pretending a wicked glint in her smile. 'No-not if you promise to take me travelling after we're married!'

Not only is Rekhmire' legally paid my wages for working in Masaccio's shop, not only will those wages be the only way to pay passage on a ship, but by law his permission is needed for me to travel anywhere.

We'll reconcile him to the idea, I thought, grimly determined, and smiled down at Sulva Paziathe. 'You can travel wherever you like. As far as Constantinople! As far as the lapis lazuli mine in Persia!'

She stifled her laughter with her fingers, for all we were outdoors.

A walled park lay behind their mansion. Grassed paths wound among ancient oak trees. Aranthur Paziathe and one of his middle-aged sons walked twenty yards ahead of us; Hathli and another maid dogged our footsteps, half that distance behind. The only respectable way in which a betrothed couple may meet and talk.

I am not under the illusion that she sees in me anything but escape from her prison of a mansion. How can she? But does that matter? Once she has her marriage lines, she's free; a woman can have greater freedom posing as a respectable widow than she can as wife or daughter.

She can make her choices, then. And if she does decide she'll stay with me...

I pushed muddy oak-leaves aside with my foot, hotly aware of the pressure of her hand on my sleeve. All the wealth of the household went into her brocade bodice and skirts. I had been excusably mistaken when I thought her father a servant: he dressed the part, at least. The family was not rich.

Sulva broke the silence. 'Which is your local church, here?'

'My local--?'

'For reading the banns.'

In the cathedral of Taraco, the King's Freak prayed by the King's side. Now, I pray less often than a man ought. I didn't desire to explain why.

I said, 'I haven't been in Rome long enough to have a local parish. Won't your father speak to your family priest?'

'No.' Sulva looked up. I suppose my face showed surprise. She spoke hesitantly. 'Father said I had to tell you. I hope you won't...We're not followers of the Christ of the Frankish people. You and I will have a private ceremony later, and be married as my family custom is.'

I glanced ahead, at Aranthur's rigid spine. 'Later?'

'First, we should be married properly, in public.' Her eyes were serious and sad. 'So no gossip gets about. Believe me, it's best.'

My suspicion became a sudden certainty.

'You don't worship the Green Christ at all, do you? Not as Christ-the-Emperor, or Christus Viridianus, or any other way?'

She glanced ahead and behind, as if looking for help from Aranthur or Hathli.

'I don't care who a man prays to,' I added.

I caught the tiny movement of her head. Assent.

'We're Etruscan,' she whispered. 'We were here long before the Romans! We have our own gods. People don't...It isn't good to be a heretic here. But it's worse to be a heathen. Outside the city, we have a place to celebrate ceremonies: the villa in the trees...You look relieved,' she exclaimed.

I let out an explosive breath. 'It explains why your father's willing to let you marry me. I suppose local families know you are-what you are.'

Her face hid expression no better than glass hides sunlight. I watched wonder and realisation and desperate hope go across her features. If I could take her to Masaccio's shop, now; work on the statue--

No. Not with how he still speaks of her as a whore, because she didn't return his desire.

'Heresy doesn't worry me.' I shrugged. 'Let men pray to what they will. And if your people are, what is it, "Etruscan"?'

'Yes. The Rasenna. I did pray to the Frankish Christ, once! For a small miracle. For a healing.' She looked down at her foot as she walked.

'That doesn't worry me either,' I said. 'But-wasn't your father willing to let you marry Tommaso Cassai?'

Into her silence, I added, 'I know how poor I am. I suppose I do look...respectable.'

The word almost choked me with irony.

'But so is Masaccio,' I completed. 'And more so. He has the reputation of being a fine painter, a friend to the architects and painters of Florence-Brunelleschi, Donatello. A man with an abbot for a patron. Wasn't he a better prospect for your father to approve?'

Sulva's lips pressed together at the centre, and turned up at the corners, giving her exactly the smile of her statue. 'My father thought Tommaso Cassai a respectable man. But...after I knew him better...Mas accio!'

She emphasised the sounds of his nickname: the pejorative-accio ending. Bad Thomas.

'He was rough, and rude, and spiteful sometimes, and I told my father I wouldn't marry him!' Sulva watched me, her expression anxious. 'You think badly of me, now?'

'I was just thinking...' I let her wait. 'Of how we can find a priest here who'll let us into his church to marry.'

'Oh!' She swatted lightly at my arm, and this time she didn't stifle her laughter.

The old man glanced back at us. I saw his concern fade into a disgust at youthful horse-play.

Sulva's light-heartedness ceased, abruptly. Her eyes, under her oval lids and long lashes, lowered with doubt.

'This is Rome.' I wrapped Sulva's hand more securely over my arm, steadying her on the slick leaves. 'It contains the most worldly priests on earth. You arrange your ceremony at the-villa?'

'The villa in the trees.'

'And I'll see there's a marriage here first. Is that what you would like?'

Her smile was painfully raw in its joy.

11

Restlessness swarmed inside me, needing wind on my face to disperse it.

Masaccio swore and sent me off for an hour, for fidgeting as I sat.

I walked around as much of the ancient parts of Rome as I could encompass. Because who knows how much longer I shall be able to stay in this city? I have plans to make.

Must I leave Masaccio's workshop. How can I? There must be away to manage it all!

At the bottom of one green valley, a great white marble arch stood-a gate to and from nowhere, covered with the triumphs of a general whose name no man remembers. I walked to the domed chapel of the Vestal Virgins: so small it seems impossible any woman could ever have lived inside. And I walked uphill-all Rome seems to be up a steep hill, or else down one-to an amphitheatre half-buried in the ground.

Row upon row of empty windows pierced the oval surrounding walls. Inside the roofless amphitheatre, and around an equally half-buried column (carved with Roman soldiers overcoming long-haired barbarians), all the earth was covered over with cob-walled, thatch-roofed houses; crammed up against each other, chickens and children running in the dust between them.

The sun burned down on my head. Even in the late months of the year, the high hours after noon are not well spent outdoors. I put away my charcoal and the board I always took with me to sketch on-put them away without regret; nothing of the monuments I had drawn was of any merit. In one corner of the board, I had managed a line or two that gave a hint how Sulva's cheek and shoulder looked when she turned her head. This, only, I will keep.

Closer to the Vatican, the buildings were mostly of ancient stone or brick. I welcomed the shade in the narrow passages. Seeing an open taverna, I ducked inside. The sun-blindness cleared from my gaze and I thought; Luck is with me. Sitting over my wine, I watched half a dozen clerics drinking and talking.

Over the next hour, two left, and a number more came in. It was strange to see no man in the robes belonging to a bishop's staff, but after a while I saw the green cloth robes of friars. And a friar would be sufficient.

'Where might a man go for a special marriage licence?' I asked my man, after I had chosen him and spent some time in drinking and conversation.

The priest, a Friar Sebastian, as he had introduced himself, looked at me shrewdly and wiped his finger across his upper lip. 'Time is too short for banns?'

He sketched a curve with his hand. I understood him to intend a woman's great belly, when she is about to have her child.

'I must leave Rome on business,' I improvised, the words coming fluently. 'My master, who is a painter, is sending me to Venice to buy blue pigment.'

Friar Sebastian nodded at that. In Rome, one evidently finds priests who understand the painting trade: how the colour blue is made solely from lapis lazuli, and how lapis-stone can only be bought at its one port of import from the East, Venice. He can probably quote me how many ducats the ounce-four for the good, and two ducats for the inferior stuff!

'I don't know how long I'll be gone,' I added, 'and my betrothed's father is anxious that I wed before I leave.'

His lip quirked up. My hands itched to draw that worldly smile. Let him conclude what he will: scandal is nothing to me. But I should encourage him towards silence, I thought. In case Sulva ever desires to return to Rome.

'A licence might be acquired,' Friar Sebastian remarked. 'By, let us say, tomorrow morning? I don't see how it can be done earlier. There will be fees, of course.'

'Of course,' I said flatly. I put down on the taverna bench between us the sole silver coin I had. It had been sewn into my cloak-hem since Carthage. But he need not know that. 'There is a down-payment. What church shall I come to?'

'To St Mithras Viridianus. By the Catacombs,' he added, seeing me look blank. 'You've not been long in the Empty Chair, have you? There again, so few people move into the city these days.'

He did not add, in our ruin, but the sigh that followed his words clearly implied it. Among the things I had seen in my walks were the great number of permanently closed churches.

'I consider Rome beautiful beyond all cities,' I flattered him, 'having found a bride in it. What hour shall I come to the church? There will be myself, and the bride, and her father and family.'

And no family of mine.

Nothing I do here can get me into more trouble with Aldra Videric, since he already needs me dead--

I jerked my thoughts away from Videric-and Rosamunda-and found my mind momentarily turning to Honorius. And Rekhmire'. Who before this I had imagined would stand in for family, were there the need.

'Tomorrow morning, before Matins.' Friar Sebastian reached across the ancient stained wood of the table. 'Now, let us finish this wine, shall we?'

12

I suppose every man asks himself on his wedding day, How did I come to be here?

Not so many will be confused about whether they ought to be the bride or the groom.

My confusion was not aided by a night spent largely sleepless-Masaccio had not thought it odd I should stay in the workshop when we returned from more hours spent covering square inches of stone golem with the accurate colours of skin. I lay awake, watching slivers of the moon's light cross the floor.

Rekhmire' did not send a message.

Nor did I.

How did I come to be here? I thought, walking in the pre-dawn mist through the wet, clean streets of the Empty Chair. It made me smile to myself-if wryly. Had I known the ship from Carthage would bring me to Mastro Masaccio, and sitting endless stiff hours as model for a man he thinks a traitor...That might have amused me, given what names the Aldra Videric must be calling me now. Had I known it would bring me wonders: a statue that moves of itself, a club-footed girl with a beauty so much greater for its imperfections...

I looked up as I reached the lodgings that had been mine and Rekhmire''s.

'Your master's already left for his work!' the woman from the next floor up remarked as she came down the stairs. She gave me a grin. 'Late night, was it?'

'Yes...' Thinking rapidly, I improvised the look of a man frustrated in some effort. 'And I need to get my things, and I haven't his key--'

'Oh, that don't matter; I can let you in. Quintilla leaves the key with me most mornings.'

It was that easy to make an entry into the familiar low-roofed rooms, with the bustling woman at my back.

She nodded, as if to signal I should get on. I began grabbing at random among the men's clothes I still had here. If she won't leave--

Another woman came down the tenement stairs, carrying a slop-bucket; the two of them leaned either side of the door, and entered into conversation. Neither looking at a harmless slave.

I reached under his mattress, lifted the loose floorboard that Rekhmire' had indicated to me-'Should we ever be in need of help, either of us'-and took, by feel, a handful of the coins that I knew were there.

No matter that he told me they were there to take-Now I am a thief.

Even worn baggy, I was finding Italian hose too close-fitting for pockets. I dropped the coins into my shirt-sleeve and tightened the draw-string; nodded to the two women, and left.

Friar Sebastian greeted me at the very door of St Mithras Viridianus. The coins vanished into his robe as if I had never stolen them.

His hand came out again.

'I had not appreciated the particular nature of the family,' he murmured.

I fumbled again in my sleeve, counting tiny ducat-coins into his hand until his face showed agreement. He nodded and led me in. I barely noticed the ornamental stonework, struck through with a sudden panic fear of poverty.

The back of the church was part of the catacombs themselves. Each wall I passed as he led me towards the altar was hollowed out into an ossuary. Morning's light through the round-arched windows couldn't combat the sticky darkness clinging to piles of bones, behind stone bars. Brown and yellow skulls stared out at me from their empty orbits.

'Ilario?' a soft voice said.

I had arrived before the rood-screen. Sulva stood to my right side, a veil covering her face. The bleached flax was transparent enough that I could see her eyes. Her irises the colour of turquoise-stone.

I smiled at her.

I can pass as a man; I can work; if I paint, I can sell my canvases and boards. Somehow, we'll contrive.

The rood-screen was not made of carved wood as they commonly are in Iberia. Like half the churches in the Empty Chair, it was built of brick or masonry, covered over and decorated with mosaic. On the other side of me, Aranthur Paziathe glared at the mosaics of the Bull and the Tree; barely hiding his affront.

I could not help studying the mosaic's antique style. Do men still know, now, how to make that blue, that green, that gold?

The crowd of men with Aranthur, who I took to be relatives, stood in a tight fearful group.

'Will we go to your country?' Sulva whispered to me, hardly audible. 'When we're truly married? I should like that.'

I would not, I thought grimly. Matters will have to be safer before that can happen.

And there will have to be a mending of fences before I can bring her to Rekhmire'. Or to Honorius, if the Egyptian won't be reconciled. This will take some thinking out...

Heated flesh touched mine; Sulva's fingers crept into my hand. Startled, I gripped her tightly. She gave me a tremulous smile.

'They say,' Aranthur emphasised the word enough to hint at complete disbelief, 'that the heretic Gundobad would have devastated the whole Frankish world, if Saint Heito hadn't stopped him. By which I suppose they mean, his heresy would have supplanted their heresy.'

It was a Frankish name I had not heard. '"Heito"?'

Aranthur Paziathe stepped forward, stabbing a walnut-coloured finger at the mosaic panels that hid the altar and Friar Sebastian praying.

Beside a figure burning on a bonfire-which must be Gundobad the Prophet-another man was depicted. His dress was antique, and white deer's horns sprang from his brow. That was enough to make me raise my own brows. What superstitions do the Franks believe?

'That's Saint Heito,' Aranthur's voice rumbled. 'And this man, burning, this is the Carthaginian's Prophet Gundobad, who cursed Rome and brought about the Empty Chair...They say Heito prevented him doing worse. Here is Pope Leo, whom the mob tore to pieces, and blinded and castrated. Pope Stephen the Fifth, whose horse trampled him, three days after he took the Papal Keys. Pope Paschal the First, who was struck by a levin-bolt. Pope Eugene, killed by a bust of St Thomas the Doubter falling from the front of St Peter's in a storm. All in the space of three months.'

Beside me, Sulva whispered, 'Father!'

Aranthur grunted, staring down at a patch of sunlight on the miniature glass tiles. 'Valentine, Gregory, Sergius, the second Paschal. They haven't room enough here to show all their dead popes! And they blame it on this Gundobad, when they must know that the true Gods find Frankish priests an abomination!...It didn't take long for the cardinals to become fearful. Their conclave has sat these two hundred years; it will never elect another pope-or not one who will consent to serve.'

'Father! '

Sulva's embarrassed whisper got his attention just in time for him to step back, and be standing beside me as Friar Sebastian arrived from the altar. I recovered my expression as best I might. The true Gods?

'Who,' Friar Sebastian enquired, 'gives possession of this woman?'

I glanced at Sulva-and found her looking back at me; her expression finally an exact copy of what I thought my own must be.

I paid little attention to the rest of the ceremony, only speaking in the right places, and signing my name where it was desired. Sulva Paziathe, now of the family Honorius, made an ink-mark with her thumb in the registry book. I had a hard job not to flinch every time a door opened somewhere in the church.

I wouldn't put it past Rekhmire' to walk in and proclaim: 'This ceremony is void: this slave has no permission to be married!'

Not until we walked out into the still-cool morning air did I draw an unrestricted breath.

'Sulva--'

A two-wheeled cisia-carriage stood waiting: Aranthur swung himself up into the seat, and peremptorily gestured for her to follow.

She put her hand up to my cheek in evident farewell. 'It won't be long now.'

'"Won't be long"?' I was bewildered.

'I have to be...' She searched for a word. 'Purified. After that.'

She nodded at the front of the church. Friar Sebastian waved at us, cheerfully, too far away to hear what she said.

'You come to me in three nights' time.' She put her veil down, her gaze still on me through the translucent cloth. 'It's outside the walls. You'll have to travel secretly. Etruscans aren't supposed to leave the city without a permit, but one of my cousins will come and bring you to the villa in the trees on the third night--'

'"On the third night"?' I stared. 'Why didn't you tell me this!'

'Wasn't it obvious?' Her brows dipped down, a little vertical fold of flesh between them. 'I thought you'd know! You're a heretic too!'

How old is she, sixteen?

Hardly surprising if she forgets, or makes assumptions...

Gently, I touched my thumb to her forehead, smoothing the skin. Hathli gave me a sour look. I smiled down at Sulva. She smelled of musk; I supposed her veil to have been perfumed.

'A different kind of heretic,' I said softly. 'No matter. I'll come to you.'

Her skin flushed with a colour that I could never have caught in marble, not to make it lifelike.

'The custom is...that there are no lamps,' she said, in a hurry. Her gaze dropped. 'All will be in the dark. For the...wedding night.'

Quickly, she turned away, took Hathli's hand, and made an ungainly jerking movement that got her up into the cisia vehicle. The driver touched the horses with a whip and it moved away-no faster than walking-pace; the relatives and servants hurrying behind it, leaving me alone. Sunlight dazzled my eyes as I stared after them.

The sound of wheels on cobbles clattered into the distance, fading under street cries and the sounds of two men having an argument, and a barking dog. All the morning noises of the Empty Chair.

I smiled. I am a married man.

I stopped smiling.

I am a married man.

It will be in the dark. She desires it because of her foot, but I--

It was not until that moment that I realised. A wedding is not legal until consummated. And, until now...

Until now, I haven't thought to wonder what will happen when I come to her bed.

Standing alone in the street, I realised: I've become so used to passing as a man that I never once thought about the danger of discovery!

What have I done?

What have I become?

13

I strode back through the early morning to Masaccio's workshop.

I felt the pull of the lodging-house-a desperate need to speak with Rekhmire'.

But I doubt I'll get good advice from a man who calls me bitch on heat, I reflected, face burning at the memory of the tall Egyptian shouting just that across the bridge at Castel San' Angelo.

If she does not desire it, I will not touch her. We can lie about the fornication that legally seals a marriage.

The Egyptian thinks me besotted. He has no idea of the world a woman finds herself inhabiting.

'Your master's been here for you,' Mastro Tommaso Cassai greeted me as I came in. He jerked a thumb at the couch where I'd left my belongings. 'Took your bag back with him.'

Rage flared through me. 'Why didn't you stop him?'

For once, Masaccio didn't answer in words; he pointed. At me. I stared, for a moment; then reached up to touch my neck.

My fingers encountered my iron collar. I have grown so used to it resting there that I forget it. The engraved words would be plainly visible to him:

I am ::ILARIO:: owned by ::REKHMIRE'::

In Carthage, they only need to fill in the name-blanks; the collars come ready-chiselled with the remaining form of words. Now I had taken my cloak off, any man might see it. I wondered if Friar Sebastian would have objected in the slightest, had he noticed it in church. Perhaps he would have charged me more.

'I'm sleeping here tonight,' I said, in a tone that let Masaccio know I was not inclined to listen to joke or reason.

He shrugged. 'Sleep in the street if you like, boy. It's all one to me. What have you done to upset the Alexandrine?'

The tension brought truth out of me. I pointed at her statue: the goat-foot coloured like life, the face a white marble blank.

'I've married Sulva Paziathe. My master doesn't approve.'

'You've married--You've married--?'

The Florentine shook his head furiously, as if he cleared a bee out of his ear. His black eyes glinted at me.

'Did I hear you right? You, you are speaking of-you married that bitch?'

Had I been at Rodrigo's court (and had it been a day there that I was dressed as a male), I should have thrown a steel gauntlet in his face, or simply found a sword and stuck it through his belly.

Having only a dagger, and an immense respect for Masaccio as a painter, if not as a man, the red blur had washed through and past me by the time my hand touched my belt.

Masaccio noticed none of that. He grated incredulously, 'How is it she'd marry you?'

I shrugged lightly, and walked past him to throw the cloak I carried onto the couch. 'Perhaps because you only saw a pretty face?'

His voice dropped; he sounded like a man in a taverna ready to begin a fight. 'I loved her.'

That stopped me. I looked back at him. 'I'm sorry.'

He blinked.

'Married you?' he repeated, after a moment.

Yes, me: is that so strange?

Well...yes.

'When are you-when did you--?'He stopped, and looked at me. 'Is the ceremony done?'

'This morning. Just now. At dawn.' I intended him to hear the finality of that.

'Dawn?' He echoed me, stupidly. The pupils of his black eyes altered in the light of an oil-lamp left burning on the table. 'But-you want to sleep here tonight?'

Flustered, I said, 'Yes. But--'

'So you're lying. Or else-eh, she's using you, isn't she? The bitch! You fall in love with a pretty stone face. And she sees a fool who'll marry a whore! And be fooled into not sticking his prick in her!'

'She is not a whore!'

The bearded man straightened, chin coming up. 'I know more about her than you do. Boy. All you see is a pretty face, you know nothing of her--'

'Then how is it you don't know why I have to sleep here until the third night? Or don't you know the customs of the Etruscan people?'

The workshop echoed my defiance.

Silence succeeded it.

My back ran with sudden cold sweat.

'Etruscan?' Masaccio stared in shock. 'That...would explain much.'

He gazed at me, his expression shuttling through unreadable emotions and settling on disgust.

'One of those people. And the whole family--? Yes, of course. Of course. I always knew there was something wrong about the Paziathe.'

Bewildered, I watched the Florentine shaking his head. I wanted to ask: If you still loved her, as indeed it seems you do, how can you go from that to this, in a matter of moments?

And-what have I said?

'It's a good thing your baggage is gone,' Masaccio said with harsh contempt. 'Model for Judas! Judas! Go. Leave! Get out of here!'

'What?' I said stupidly.

'You're fired. Go. I don't want to see your face again. Out of my workshop, now!'

He made flapping gestures at me, like an old woman shooing hens, that made me burst out into shocked laughter.

'Out!' His hand dipped down: he caught up a pestle from a mortar on the bench, and threw it.

The heavy porphyry implement hit the door-frame beside me in a shower of red pigment; thudded down onto the floorboards; left a dent in the wood.

I stopped laughing.

His hand scrabbled for another missile.

'I'm going!' I slid my foot back, pushing the door open; caught it and swung it closed behind me as I darted through.

Something solid hit the inside, hard enough to dent the planks.

Masaccio's voice raised in incoherent rage. I couldn't make out what he yelled; I could hear the raw fury. I took a pace or two back into the narrow cobbled street.

The threat of violence faded from my muscles and tendons.

'Mastro, you won't fire me.' I realised that I found myself not so bereft as I might have expected. 'Not until Judas is finished and on the church wall.'

Give him a day or two...

Should I try to warn Sulva? That I've said she's...Warn her of what? What can he do?

Like the Jews in Taraco, I guessed, it would be no real secret which families in the city were Etruscan.

Masaccio can only spread gossip. But words are a dangerous enough poison.

The impossible-to-paint blue of mist and sunlight grew in the sky overheard.

Thirty paces down the narrow street, I realised: I am still left with nowhere to sleep tonight. Or tomorrow.

'Then again,' I said aloud, 'I don't have to sleep.'

Tonight will be a night or two before the full of the moon. That will give me monochrome light enough to walk the city streets, go from district to district, draw sketches in return for jugs of wine in tavernas. I could do that tonight and tomorrow, and on the third night, share the hours of darkness with Sulva in this 'villa of the trees'.

I looked up from placing my feet between scattered mule-dung, and recognised where instinct had taken me. The road down to Castel San' Angelo.

I turned to go back, and stopped.

'No,' I said aloud.

Whether I need to sleep or not, whether I can hide or not...

No, I will not hide from anything I've done.

And whatever mess I've made-I'll clear it up.