15

It took me more than twenty-four hours to get him to speak to me.

The clock at St Martin's chimed six on the evening of the next day. Masaccio came out of the workshop door, throwing out water from stained bowls he was evidently swilling clean.

I stepped back out of the way.

Instead of I apologise, which he had not yet allowed me to get out at all, I said, 'A woman with her poor taste is a fool, Mastro. But you will forgive her for that.'

Framing it so was the sacrifice I made in hope of reconciliation. His lips moved, half-hidden in his beard. I thought I might touch his vanity. Now I saw I had touched his humour.

'You're right,' Masaccio said. 'In both.' He upended the last bowl and watched it drip.

On impulse, I said, 'Would you like a drink at the taverna, Mastro?'

He grinned at me, showing white teeth. 'No drinking until we're done working. Do you know, I actually fell behind yesterday, with you not there at the Gyppos' house? There must be some use in an assistant after all!'

If bigoted, it was still a remark that reached out for reconciliation.

He looked the nearest he might come to shame-faced, which was momentary. I bowed acknowledgement, after the fashion of the court at Taraco. If it's work that will reconcile us, I'm willing. Tommaso Cassai is not a man to apologise for anything.

More tools and pigments than three men could carry had been piled on a two-wheeled flat hand-cart.

'You push,' he said, unsurprisingly, with a more relaxed grin, and walked beside me. The cart jolted at every shove. Why I should feel so light-hearted at Tommaso Cassai's fast-ended anger, I wasn't sure-until he began talking, as we walked through the streets to the Alexandrine embassy.

'You will be a painter. One day.' He waved his arm in a gesture that brought a tearing-metal bray from a donkey tied up by a pot-shop. 'That's more important than women! That stuff you brought with you from under the Penitence-trash! And who but I could have seen the little that wasn't? That showed talent? I do flatter myself I can see promise.'

So blankly it must have been comic, I said, 'You can?'

'You're beginning-just beginning-to learn. Or to know what it is you don't know!' Masaccio's smile was dizzying. He nodded to the guards on the embassy door, and talked to them at high speed as I wheeled the loaded hand-cart down through the building, towards the room that we worked in.

He thinks I have talent. He really thinks--

I stopped in the doorway.

Having not seen it for two days, the impact of the stone man on my senses was profound. I could only stand for a moment, and gaze up at it; patchwork flesh and marble as it appeared to be. 'I...really don't understand this.'

'Why should you?' Masaccio shrugged, seized the handles of the piled-high flat cart, and with a physical strength I had not expected pushed it ahead of himself into the room. He began to untie the tarpaulin that covered it. 'I ask myself: is it a machine, or is it a miracle? But I am not priest-ridden, like most Franks, so I have no doubt. Men made this. What I don't know is how!'

I put in: 'Or why.'

'"Why"? It's a servant! What else could it be?'

'When I was in Iberia, the King--'

Whom I need not now, or ever again, call my master the King, odd as that feels.

'--King Rodrigo Sanguerra had me trained in the techniques of siege works, thinking I had some talent for that. Mobile assault towers, to be used against walls. Catapults, mangonels, scorpions, trebuchets, ballista...cannon. Mastro Masaccio, you say a machine is a servant. I have little enough training. But if I can wonder what would be the killing ability of a dart-throwing machine, were it powered in the same way this stone man is-then so can any man wonder.'

'Weapons of war?' He cocked a brow at the golem, his expression thoughtful.

'Stone can't be hurt like flesh.'

'Who knows what hurts it? Is it in pain now, frozen as it stands? What does it feel?' Masaccio tapped his finger against his red lower lip, half-hidden in his curling beard. 'It sees nothing, but is not blind. You will have seen bats after dusk, avoiding nets and traps and walls. Does it see with their blind senses? If I were to carve a whistle that only dogs hear, would it come to that call?'

He shook his head, his gaze as he stared up at the golem's face frighteningly intense.

'Could I paint an image of the world, as this golem perceives it? Perhaps. If I truly understood it...But I don't know,' he finished. 'I don't know.'

'You might go to Carthage.'

It was the obvious suggestion; it might excite suspicion not to make it.

Rekhmire''s Eight grant that he doesn't ask me to come with him!

'To see if I can find out who's making them? And how? That will be kept a secret. Guilds and trades...'

Masaccio shook his head. 'I never refuse knowledge to a man unless he's stupid enough that he can't benefit from it. Other men keep their secrets tight to their chests. And, I am weary of that. Very weary.'

'Mastro--'

He lifted a hand and pointed at the golem, interrupting me. 'Which is why I intend to do something about it. You'll see. Now, paint!'

He would say no more while we worked. Egyptian slaves came around two or three times to replenish the lamps with oil. Each time I felt a qualm. Masaccio did not comment on the weight of metal gone from my throat.

Being Masaccio, I thought, it may be because he hasn't noticed.

The sensation of lack was keen, to me. And watching the collared embassy slaves made me frown. Whether or not Alexandrine slavery is less onerous than the Carthaginian kind, they are still slaves.

Then again, they need not take decisions for themselves.

Evening wore on into night; overseers came to the door; Masaccio went to speak to them-to tell them we must continue working, I guessed. There looked to be less painting done than I'd expect since I'd last put brush to the stone.

I wonder if he spent time drunk in a taverna?

It might explain his tolerance of the thought of Sulva married, if wine had numbed him.

There were no windows in the low-ceilinged room. I did not always register the chime of the water-clock, but I guessed it to be past midnight when Masaccio put his brush down with finality. He cocked his head, listening. I could hear nothing move in the mansion. He opened the room doors. There was not even a sound of the guards.

'I had a friend in the Florentine militia,' he said, apparently out of nowhere.

In answer to my stare, he added, 'Who told me a thing that's certain. Soldiers would rather drink than guard! If there's one man on the door, now, I'll be surprised. A gift of wine may work a miracle.'

He grinned, his expression febrile.

'Mastro, what--'

'Didn't I say, I intend to do something about my lack of knowledge?' Masaccio put his hand flat on the unpainted part of the stone man's chest, looking up at it. 'This is the only golem I've ever seen. If I let this chance pass, I think it'll be the only one I will ever see.'

He turned to look at me.

'And that's why we're stealing it.'

For a moment, I couldn't speak.

I shot a glance at the unloaded hand-cart.

Masaccio nodded, without my needing to say anything; his lips stretching in an excited, enthusiastic grin.

'You planned this!' I accused.

The Florentine spoke amiably. 'It would be difficult to do it without planning.'

'You-you can't--' I put my single brush down with too much care. 'Mastro, I mean, you really can't. They'll work out who did it. They'll know where to come!'

'I have a cargo-boat moored down at the Tiber, ready to be rowed to Ostia Antica.' Masaccio shrugged. 'From there-well. Never mind. You shouldn't know more.'

Florence! flashed through my mind with absolute certainty. He'll take it home with him, to the city he calls Fiorenza.

'And all we have to do is get it down to the river. Come on.'

He made a beckoning gesture, as if I should fetch the hand-cart to him, and turned his thoughtful stare back to the immense statue.

I don't think the wheels will take it.

I didn't say it aloud. There was no necessity.

I blurted, 'Even if the guards are drinking, they'll still be at the entrances! We won't get as far as the front door!'

'Mother of God, boy! The wine's drugged, of course. Fortified with spirits-and poppy.' He stepped past me, impatiently grabbing the handles of the cart, and pushing it around behind the statue. 'Golem, lie down! Here! Golem, lie down here on the cart!'

Stunned, I realised: This is why we've brought no rope and pulley. He knew it wouldn't be necessary.

I flinched back from the impossible movement of the stone man. Swivelling at the joints of hips and knee, turning about; the great marble hands reaching down to grasp the sides of the cart...

The stone man lowered himself carefully-comically carefully-back down onto the flat bed of the hand-cart.

The sound of protesting wood creaked through the room.

Masaccio put his lower lip between his teeth, biting hard enough that blood ran down into his beard.

The wood sang-and held.

He gave a sigh and a nod.

The Franks, in their practise of trades, are very expert at estimating, by eye, weights and volumes-which they must be, since (unlike Carthage) they have no common unit of measurement. A barrel and a bale in Rome are not the same as a barrel and a bale in Venice. Masaccio had judged this weight just bearable by the cart. And so it is. Just.

'Now, we push it.' He showed all his teeth in a grin of triumph.

'We--? I--?' By an effort, I stopped myself stuttering. I lowered my voice, every nerve tense against some Alexandrine coming down the corridor, entering the room, finding this. 'I'm not going to do it!'

'Afraid, boy?' He sounded too jubilant for his insult to sting.

'It's theft.' I found my face heating at his stare. 'I'm not a thief!'

A voice in my thoughts whispered sardonically, Would that that were true...

'The world needs this,' Masaccio said soberly. He reached out to draw the tarpaulin over the marble man laying flat on the cart.

Its feet lay nearer the floor than its head, because of the way it had placed itself down. As the golem vanished under the oiled cloth, I thought: That foreshortening, that perspective-I could draw this, now, and stand some chance of doing it justice.

'Who knows how it works?' Masaccio said, tying off a cord. 'Who knows what else could be done with it, if we did know?'

He looked at me, as if for the first time he saw me: Ilario.

'Wouldn't you rather slave-work was done by stone men, than by men of flesh and blood with iron collars around their necks?'

'How can I answer that? Of course I would!'

'Then lend a hand here.'

'But it's not that easy!'

Masaccio ignored me and bent to the cart's handles, half crouching. He got the weight of his body on a line through foot and calf and thigh and hip, and thrust forward.

By some miracle the wheels creaked and began to turn. The cart began moving from that first forward jolt.

Almost automatically, I stepped forward and reached for one of the cart-handles.

Before I could touch it, the end of the cart rolled out of the room. The feet of the stone man passed over the threshold of the room, out into the wide embassy corridor.

Cords snapped. The tarpaulin slid away. Stone grated on wood.

A strut somewhere in the cart gave way. A sharp crack! echoed flatly in the room.

The stone golem sat up.

My mouth opened on a breath, a warning shout: 'Ahh--'

Too swiftly for heavy marble to move, the stone man sprang off the hand-cart, landing with an impact that jerked dust up from between the floor tiles. One of the tiles cracked under the weight.

The body of the stone man swivelled. It took too quick a step forward. Its marble hand shot under Masaccio's bearded chin-and closed.

He made one sound: a wheeze.

His lips stretched in a rictus grin, all his white teeth exposed. The handles of the cart dropped out of his fingers. His hands came up, locking around the golem's stone wrists. He kicked, furiously; slammed a boot at a knee-joint--

The statue lifted him, one-handed, into the air.

I sprang forward, grabbed at the painted marble wrist and knuckles, heaved--

And moved nothing.

'Let go! Let go of him! Golem, let go of him! Golem, let go of his throat!'

The cold brass joints moved unstoppably under my palms.

Masaccio choked.

His eyes bulged. His lips moved; his jaw worked.

Soundlessly.

Stone fingers clenched around his larynx. He couldn't speak a word.

His skin above his beard darkened, grew dusky blue; his eyes shone red as they filled up with blood. His fingers lost purchase on the stone arms. One flailing hand clawed towards its face. He caught me a sharp, dizzying blow with the other.

I stumbled; scrabbled down on the floor for a weapon.

'Help!' My voice echoed flatly in the room; outside; in the corridor. 'Somebody help us here!'

The haft of a mallet slotted into my palm. I straightened up. With all my strength, I brought the mallet up and slammed it down on the metal wrist-joint; hit it, hit it again--

The golem's hand flexed closed.

I heard a distinct, sticky, hollow click.

I know that noise-it is the noise a hanged man makes, when the rope snaps his vertebrae apart.

Masaccio's feet drummed rapidly, briefly, against the stone man's thighs; and stopped.

His body hung from the statue's hand. Every line of his flesh was drawn down by gravity; limp as a rabbit in a poacher's hand.

I leaned forward, choking, bringing up acid and bile.

Still holding Masaccio's body out at arm's length, the stone golem swivelled around to face me.

Every muscle in my body instantly weakened; my thighs quivered.

The golem stepped lightly forward, arm stretched out. Masaccio swung limply in its grip.

The golem brought its other hand up.

Up and forward.

Towards me.

I broke out of the frozen, powerless daze; jolted violently back as the golem's foot came down on pigment-bowls, crushing them flat.

The stone golem's outstretched marble fingertips swung, reaching out for me; brushed past my forehead--

The mere touch slammed my head over to one side. Sharp, solid pain blinded me.

I staggered backwards, spun around, and ran.

16

Masaccio's dead!

Rain and panic froze me.

Grazes stung my knees, through abraded hose. My hands shook, cut where I had fallen on stones. The pitch-dark of the city hemmed me in. Lost. I am lost. And Masaccio--

I shook wet hair out of my eyes. A distant glimmer showed the barred, closed door of a taverna. I snatched a torch from its socket under the high awning. The light let me see enough to finally recognise streets as I ran, feet pounding the broken pavements. My head pounded with pain.

He will know; Rekhmire' will know what to do--

Masaccio is dead.

No mistaking that; no hope of a doctor's help.

I have drawn men hanged, by the justice of King Rodrigo's magistrates. They kick; choke. They loose their bowels; they hang, when their necks break, with just such a boneless immobility.

'Masaccio!' I howled, at the freezing rain.

Rekhmire' didn't answer his door; I hammered on it with the butt-end of the torch, yelling. Shutters slammed open over my head

The woman Quintilla bawled something down.

Gasping in a breath, I held up the torch so she might see it was me. 'Rekhmire'! Wake him! Let me in; I'll wake him!'

'He's gone.'

Coldness flooded through me. I stopped-stopped breathing, almost.

'It is you, Ilario?' She leaned out of the window, peering down. 'If you want him, you'll have to follow him. His people came.'

Stupefied, I echoed, 'His people?'

'The other Egyptians. The Gyppies that live in the embassy house? One of them came banging on the shutters and woke everybody up; he's gone with them.'

Soaked, winded, I stood in the dark square; staring at the light spilling out through the embassy door.

Cold sent shudders through me. Rain slicked my skin.

I walked forward into the brilliance.

'You!' One of the linen-kilted guards reached towards his sword. 'It's the painter's apprentice; hold her!'

Egyptians see with the eyes of a different culture, I thought numbly. I'd never realised.

The Alexandrines are used to seeing eunuchs. So if they see a Frankish man who's 'wrong', they don't take him for a castrato as Romans do; they think him a woman. Even if that's equally inaccurate.

I didn't move as men rushed up either side of me.

'I want to see Master Rekhmire'. Take me inside, to him.'

Inside, nothing had changed in the time-minutes or hours-since I ran.

The end of the flat-bed cart still projected out into the corridor. Men milled around it; soldiers, diplomats, men whom I didn't recognise. My escort shouldered me through, into the room.

It smelled of dying.

The half-painted marble man stood in the centre of the floor, as motionless as if it was the statue it seemed.

Rekhmire' straightened up from examining its hands.

'Get away from that!' I snarled.

The Egyptian looked at the golem, looked at me-and walked across the room to where I stood.

'We're not safe in the same room with it!' My voice shook.

A sheet covered a body on the floor. I hadn't realised Masaccio was so small a man. It was his vital spirit that made him seem taller than he was.

'Ilario?' Rekhmire' glanced from me to the shroud. 'Tell me what happened here.'

I couldn't stop myself looking towards the stone golem. 'It killed him.'

A tenor voice interrupted from behind me, speaking Egyptian-accented Latin. 'The painter's apprentice? That's your slave, is it? Good! I'll have her tortured for information.'

Rekhmire' didn't take his gaze from my face. 'He is a freedman. -And a freedwoman. In any case, free.'

The tall, fat Egyptian man behind him, wrapped in a night-robe evidently snatched up at random, swore in his native language. His voice rose higher than tenor.

'Ilario.' Rekhmire' spoke in a deliberate, soothing voice. 'This is Lord Menmet-Ra. Tell him the truth of what happened here. You will not be punished.'

I must close my eyes to do it, but I told the castrato Menmet-Ra all.

'I didn't know,' I finished, 'what Masaccio planned. Or I would have stopped him. Somehow. I would...He would still-be alive--'

In the silence, I opened my eyes. The sheet covering Masaccio was rucked. I felt a foolish impulse to smooth it down.

He's beyond discomfort now.

'How could the Florentine do that!' Menmet-Ra snarled, thumping one heavy fist into his other hand. He was little shorter than Rekhmire', I now saw, but much broader; and with more of a belly of middle-age on him. His brows were soft and fine below the dome of his shaved head.

He drew his foot back as if to kick the corpse.

I made a jolting movement forward, and an inarticulate sound.

Rekhmire''s hand closed over my shoulder.

The Ambassador swung away from the body, leaving it untouched; spat another string of god-names that must be curses, and glared at Rekhmire'. 'If he hadn't struggled, it wouldn't have killed him!'

Cold sweat covered my skin.

'Who wouldn't struggle?' Rekhmire''s mild tone held an acid edge. 'Who wouldn't run? Menmet-Pamiu--'

He spoke the second word in the tone of a nickname. I suddenly understood: They know each other well.

'--How much trouble will this mean?'

Menmet-Ra let out an explosive sigh. 'Precisely as much as you think!'

'Well, then...' Rekhmire''s face altered; I knew him well enough to know he was thinking fast and deeply.

Menmet-Ra glared up at the half-painted marble face of the golem. 'It was a precaution! To stop it being stolen! To stop itself being stolen. It should have held onto a thief. Who would have dreamed that the painter...'

Rekhmire' lifted his head, looking at the Ambassador. 'You go, Pamiu. Send your men away. Nothing was seen; nothing was heard. I'll clear up here myself.'

If I'd had emotion enough left to have been surprised, I would have felt shock. I stared dumbly as Rekhmire' and Menmet-Ra conversed quickly, in low tones, and parted, each with a grip to the forearm of the other.

The servants and soldiers vanished so quietly they might never have existed.

All this Alexandrine-decorated Roman mansion could have been drowned in sleep-except that, stupefied as I was, even I could sense the tension quivering in the air. The haste fort he body to be dealt with, a scandal to be averted.

My knees loosened.

I went down on the tiles with a thump, beside Masaccio's body. Reaching out, I drew the improvised shroud more neatly over his face.

That shifted the cloth, exposing his hand.

I took it in mine and sat holding the still-warm flesh.

'Ilario.'

I did not look up. 'I thought...I know we joked...I thought you were a book-buyer who just carried messages, sometimes, or wrote-observations. You're...more, aren't you?'

'I am a man of some experience. And an old friend of Menmet-Ra.' Rekhmire' rested his hand on my shoulder, conveying reassurance, warmth. 'At the university, we called him "Pamiu", "Old Tom-Cat"...'

The smile in his voice faded.

'If Pamiu must take official notice of this, there'll be scandal. Who knows what, then, will be uncovered? Better if it's handled out of sight.'

I squeezed Masaccio's cooling fingers hard enough that it would have hurt him, had he lived. These hands, these very hands, with which he painted--

'Because the golem murdered him? That will be a scandal?'

'Politics.' Rekhmire' spoke with a deliberation that acknowledged grief, while he himself stood aside from it. His heavy lids shrouded his eyes, and lifted again. 'In Carthage, they translate "Lord-Amir" as "scientist-magus". This is a political matter. According to Pamiu, the stone golem is their gift, and it shouldn't be known to have passed through Rome on its way to Alexandria-in-exile.'

'Carthage again.' The irony bit hard.

'As matters stand, Rome should not be seen to be friendly either to Carthage or to "Constantinople".' Rekhmire' used the foreigners' name for his own city with distaste. 'I have friends in many of the Alexandrine embassies,' he added. 'People gossip. It is not ever difficult to know what must be going on.'

Stunned, dizzy, I said, 'Masaccio's dead. That thing murdered him!'

Rekhmire' touched the icy hand of the stone golem. It gave me equal chills.

The Egyptian said, 'If I understand rightly, it has no will of its own. It no more murdered this man than the runaway cart which kills a child in the street.'

'He was a genius.'

My voice came back flatly from the walls. I hadn't realised I was shouting.

'There's never been a painter like him; now it's all-gone.'

'Painter. Yes.' Rekhmire''s gaze for a moment seemed absent. 'Let me see...Mastro Masaccio was painting a triptych, wasn't he? For Cardinal Valente. So one, at least, of the cardinals will be interested in his death.'

His gaze sharpened as he caught my eye.

'It would be-better-if the Conclave of Cardinals weren't drawn towards this embassy. Or towards Alexandria. Or Carthage. It would be best if Master Tommaso Cassai had died a natural death.'

A flash of memory put the living Masaccio before my eyes. Lips drawn back. Spine arched. Held out at arm's length, by a stone statue.

I swallowed. Between my hands, his flesh still held tepid warmth. But it felt too soft, with none of the tension of muscle that belongs to a living man.

Carefully, I placed Masaccio's useless hand back down at his side. 'I don't like the idea of hiding this. Masaccio's dead! Someone ought to--'

'Pay?' Rekhmire' prompted gently.

'Why did this happen!'

My cry went unanswered. Rekhmire' shook his head. I had a sudden flash of memory, of Hanno Anagastes, whose house looked so like this one, speaking to me in the graveyard of children. 'You should remember,' he said, 'that punishments do not need a reason.'

Later, I wondered if he had been speaking of the 'punishment' of living in a body that is both man and woman. Some things have no reason, they only are.

And yet Masaccio did this, I realised. If ignorance killed him, still, he chose to act.

With the sensation of Masaccio's dead skin still imprinted on mine, I must force myself to be calm. To think. Because something must be done, done now, and what will it be?

Do I stay here with Rekhmire' and his people? Do I run out into the Roman streets and call for the Watchmen? Tell the cardinals?

The golem is only a machine.

And will it do good for men to know that Masaccio died a thief?

I looked down at his motionless fingers.

'What would be true justice here...isn't clear to me.' Slowly, feeling all the pain of my bruises, I got to my feet. 'This is too much. Too sudden. But I'll tell you one thing I can think of. Masaccio wouldn't want his name associated with scandal.'

I looked up at the Egyptian who was no longer my master.

'If people heard he was a thief-that Mastro Masaccio had been killed while doing something criminal-that might smear the New Art. I know what he'd think. That patrons might then not want to buy paintings from artists who are following his techniques. Because men are fools. And everything he's worked for; how he tried to reform painting, re-birth it-would be dead. Gone. The New Art would be...finished.'

In the periphery of my sight, the golem's blank white eyes stared without knowledge or remorse.

'I'm hardly impartial,' I said. 'But...I don't think I can let that happen.'

17

I had no need to uncover Masaccio's face. The blue, crushed, swollen flesh was imprinted in detail in my mind. I glanced around the room; then back at Rekhmire'.

'How can we make this look like a natural death!'

Rekhmire' frowned. 'I don't know.'

'You don't know?'

His lip twitched. If a man had not lain dead on the floor beside us, I think it would have been a smile, if blackly sardonic.

'You expect much of me, Ilario. This isn't easy...Help me put him on that.' Rekhmire' nodded at the flat-bed cart.

'What?'

'Would it be the first time a man's been brought home drunk from the taverna like this? On his own cart?' The Egyptian shook his head, answering his own rhetorical questions. 'Whatever we do, first we must take him away from here. Quickly.'

I nodded, and knelt. Masaccio's cheek felt colder. But still soft. Bodies stiffen some time after death.

The water-clock chimed.

It's not an hour, yet!

How can I believe he's dead?

It felt almost as if, should I sufficiently refuse to believe it, Masaccio might not be dead. All this might yet resolve into some nightmare delusion.

But that false hope often accompanies sudden death.

As if he still breathed, I gently eased my hands under Masaccio's armpits, waiting for Rekhmire' to lift him at the knees.

We put him on the hand-cart. Rekhmire' reached out to shift his limbs. I protested; cut myself off. The Egyptian arranged Masaccio's body on its side, cloak-hood drawn across to shelter the blue, bruised face.

With the macabre humour that comes with death, I felt a terrible grin stretching at my mouth. 'He does look dead drunk, not dead.'

'The Eight grant the Watch think so, if we meet them!'

The handles of the cart moved easily as I lifted them. Iron wheel-rims gritted over rush mats laid down on the way out of the room.

I didn't turn my head to look back at the stone golem.

Let it stay half painted: half-statue and half-man. It's all the monument Mastro Tommaso Cassai will have.

There was no rain outside. The air was damp and clear. A swollen moon hung high enough to guide us in the fetid alleys.

The cart makes it too easy, I thought. He should be more of a weight.

This is not how he expected to come home. Nor the burden he expected this cart to bear.

'We might claim he died of plague.' Rekhmire' spoke quietly, walking beside me. 'That would keep people from viewing the body...But a Roman physician would need to sign the certificate. No physician can look at him. There's no disguising an evident death by violence--'

'Murder.' My bare hands clenched on the cold wood. A sudden jolt went through me. 'Master-Rekhmire'-I've just realised! There'll be witnesses to say that he and I quarrelled. People will say, Masaccio loved the girl first...There'll be enough gossip to make us enemies; justify me having battered Masaccio to death. I could be accused of his murder. Easily!'

Rekhmire' shot me a glance from those oval, dark eyes. Even by the guttering light of the one embassy torch, I could read his agreement.

'I want to grieve for him!' I exclaimed. 'Not to have to think of-of...'

'Yes, I understand. But we must think of it all.'

This is all I can do for him now. Save his reputation.

The workshop door was locked.

Masaccio wore his purse tied to his belt. I felt inside for the key. My fingers brushed against his bare wrist as I withdrew my hand. His flesh felt cold as Carrara marble to the touch. Stiff, stuck in one position, undignified, absurd.

Yes, he is dead. I don't want to believe it, but he is.

Hot water tracked a single runnel down my cheek.

'All that skill, lost. The first painter for eighty years--' I couldn't keep my voice male-sounding, or level. 'He won't paint anything else.'

The workshop doors creaked as Rekhmire' opened them. He came and took the cart handles from my hands, pushing the vehicle quickly inside. I saw how the moon's light cast shadows from each individual cobblestone paving the street. Masaccio might have been able to paint that tenuous, deceptive light.

'His brother!' I exclaimed. I kicked the door closed as I followed Rekhmire' in. 'Giovanni Cassai! He went back to Florence, a few weeks ago. He'll have to be told. He can't get here in time for the funeral, but...'

My thoughts outraced my words.

Rekhmire' gave me a keen look and prompted me. 'Yes?'

'Wait...'

I looked around the shadowy workshop: at tables, easels, pestles, stacked boards and canvases. The crate upon which I had sat to be Judas negotiating with the traitorous officers of Mithras.

Masaccio didn't know he was leaving all this for the last time tonight.

I pushed the thought aside.

'I think I begin to see...It's not important what he died of. Plague, accident. Whatever lie. What's important is that no one sees him; that he's buried. Quickly. Yes?'

Rekhmire' nodded. 'But I gather he's not unknown in the city, and without a physician to certify the death--'

'I know a priest who'll bury him without one.'

'You do?' Rekhmire' looked startled. 'How can you be certain this priest won't merely report a murder?'

'Friar Sebastian married me, illegally, to an Etruscan woman.' I shrugged. 'And so he's susceptible to...'

The Egyptian had no hesitation in completing the thought bluntly. 'Blackmail.'

18

The smell of newly-turned earth is pleasant in spring, when planting crops. Although life in Rodrigo's court has not led me to have much more experience of it than watching other men strew seeds from their aprons.

In grey autumn, turned earth is merely clammy and cold. And it smells of corpses.

That thought might have been imagination.

The dawn wind blowing across the churchyard would have brought tears to my eyes even had I not had cause to weep.

Friar Sebastian did not gabble. He read with haste, undoubtedly, but still with a gravitas that gave Tommaso Cassai his due. Grave-diggers stood back towards the wall of the church. A scant half-dozen of Mastro Tommaso Cassai's Roman neighbours stood in front of Rekhmire' and I, around the foot of the grave. I did not know how gossip had brought them the early news, but it had. As his apprentice, I had been commiserated with on his sad, accidental death. Rumour differed as to whether it might have been a stroke brought on by drink, a fall in his workshop, or sudden illness.

I let my grief shelter me from any importunate questions.

This burial is just barely in time.

The prayers were unfamiliar in form, although much the same in content as I would have heard in Taraco: Judge this soul mercifully, and let the cold earth lie easily on him.

Under cover of the Frankish priest's intonation, Rekhmire' murmured, 'Your friar would be unwilling to do this, I think, were he not aware that we are about to leave Rome.'

'"Leave"?' I stared blankly.

'What else?' Rekhmire' had his gaze fixed on the coffin. 'Disruptive as that may be, we must go.'

'But Honorius is coming back here. We came here to hide from Videric and Carthage--'

'We came here because Rome was your painter's Grail-Castle.' Rekhmire' seemed at home with the Frankish metaphor. He kept his tone low. 'And now Rome's a place where Carthage and Alexandria are about to have a quarrel that will spread beyond their embassies, and involve the city authorities. The cardinals know my name. If they hear the name of the painter's apprentice, when they speak to the embassy...Too great a likelihood that Carthage will hear that my slave is in Rome.'

Now he did shoot a glance my way, his eyes bright with the cold wind, and his expression a complex mixture of grief, irony, and annoyance.

'Tommaso Cassai was an impetuous fool,' Rekhmire' said, his voice low. 'Which even you won't deny, Ilario. Do you think this friar would give in to threats of exposure unless we were leaving? It's that which makes this the easiest way out of the situation for him.'

Rekhmire''s forehead creased in concentration.

'I'll need to pass the Turkish document over to Cardinal Corradeo, or I doubt he'll allow me to go. I'll visit the Vatican immediately after the funeral's over. Can I rely on you to find us a boat for Ostia Antica?'

Leaving Rome?

The thought made me blink against the sliver of unbearable fire that was the rising sun. Shadows fell out of the east. I could have painted three of us about the grave: priest, eunuch, and another who is not a man. For better composition, I would have Friar Sebastian move to there...

No composition. No Masaccio. No apprenticeship. What is there to keep me in Rome?

Rekhmire' whispered urgently, 'I know you are no longer my slave, but will you pack belongings for both of us?'

The world snapped into focus around me.

'I can't leave.'

'Can't leave? When you could be arrested for murder?'

'What about my wife?'

Rekhmire' stared at me.

'I can't leave Sulva!' I made a movement somewhere between a shrug and a shiver, in the freezing morning air. 'Maybe...She liked the idea of travel. Maybe she'll be willing to leave Rome. But I have no money--'

Rekhmire' waved a dismissive hand. 'This woman. You're not legally married, you said?'

The third night is tonight, I realised.

'No, not until tonight, by their law. But I gave my word; I'm married in my eyes. Yes,' I got in, before Rekhmire' could interrupt, 'I have a lot to tell her! I will. She can do what she chooses, then, but--She needs to escape that prison of a house. I can't avoid that on a-a legal technicality.'

My heart beat out long, silent moments.

'That would mean not leaving until tonight. That's unwise. But--' Rekhmire' cut himself off.

A smile broke the monumental, forbidding surfaces of his face; out of place at a funeral.

'But that's not my decision, is it? Freedman. Freedwoman. My decision is only: will I wait for you, or will I leave now, alone?'

True as it was, I found it disconcerting.

'Ilario?'

I mentally shook myself, and looked up at the tall man by my side. 'What's your decision?'

He shrugged. 'I'll wait. The library will hide me a day longer-or so I must hope. Ilario, we must both stay out of sight. If the authorities arrest either of us, it will be of no use to appeal to the embassy. Pamiu can do nothing but disown me. And, now you are not my slave, he can do nothing for you; you're not an Alexandrine. We must be careful. And lucky. Ilario?'

I rubbed at the ridge of bone just under the skin of my brows. It felt tight. I touched the drying scab of blood where the golem's fingers had caught me, and winced.

Rekhmire' turned back to face the end of Friar Sebastian's praying. His murmur came softly to me:

'Inadvisable it may be-but I see that I will risk one more visit to my countrymen in the embassy. Injuries to the head are unpredictable. Potentially dangerous. You're hurt. I trust none of these Frankish butchers. You'll see a proper Alexandrine doctor before we leave.'

'Rekhmire'--'

'No argument!'

In the chill of the funeral, it was a moment's warmth.

19

The doctor, as it came about, was a short, round man-an essay in curves-with the confident manner of the professional physician. And while he nodded a greeting to Rekhmire' as to a friend, his eyes lit up when he saw me.

'This is Siamun,' Rekhmire' introduced me, folding his arms and leaning up against the Roman interior wall that some Egyptian hand had covered with cartouches.

'This is a professional consultation,' Siamun said, shooing him out through the door.

The physician Siamun prodded, poked; looked into my eyes; had me unlace my doublet and remove my shirt-and the bandages that bound my breasts. I did it all with no more than a sigh, rubbing my forehead against the insistent ache. He's a doctor: of course he will want to see this. What physician wouldn't? How many hermaphrodites will he see in his career?

It wouldn't have surprised me to see him taking notes.

'Your facial hair,' he murmured, 'it has been less dark than this, yes?'

I stared at him. 'It's my head that hurts.'

'But to answer the question?'

Sitting solely dressed in one's hose doesn't promote recalcitrance. My fingers were touching my cheek, I realised. Only a very little wispy hair. I had hoped it made disguise as a man more convincing. 'Yes, it's darkened, of late. My brows, too. I thought...I'm just growing older, yes?'

'And you perhaps have pains, here?' He reached down with a spatulate fingertip and tapped my knee. 'And other joints of the body?'

'Only when Masaccio makes me sit--' I began with a laugh; I ended in a reedy, thin croak. Constriction in my throat made it impossible to complete my words.

When Masaccio, who is dead, makes me sit for too long.

The doctor reached forward and took my right breast in his hand. He squeezed, firmly.

I yelped. 'What the hell--!'

'I apologise; I intended no hurt. Take off--' He gestured at my woollen hose, as if he couldn't find the Frankish word. 'Take off these, please.'

Not being laced to my doublet now, my hose were falling around my hips in any case. I finished their removal, and looked away as he felt at my belly, took my small penis in his hand, and then probed in with his fingers to find the cavity that lay behind it. The colours in the cartouches blurred. I stared as bas-reliefs of chariot warfare; winged gods; the fall of Old Alexandria to the Turks...Faces painted in profile, to the left or right; men's muscular chests painted face-on. Eyes elongated with kohl...

'Are you done yet?' I said harshly, self-conscious with the weight I'd put on eating Roman food. My arse is truly a woman's, now! 'Is looking at my belly-button going to tell you what's wrong with my cracked skull?'

Siamun straightened up from palpating my abdomen. His round, brown eyes fixed on me. 'Your skull is not cracked. Fortunately, you're bruised.'

You could have phrased that better!, I thought, grinning despite the pain in my head; but he hadn't finished.

'However,' he added, 'you are pregnant.'

20

The physical effects of shock are inescapable.

I learned that early on, being trained in the arts of hunting and war. A fall from a horse can leave you with more than pain or a cracked skull. The mind itself becomes stunned.

I have to see Sulva.

No lights showed at the barred windows of the Paziathe mansion.

Rekhmire''s hand at my elbow steadied me. Night had come. Clouds covered the full moon. No eye could distinguish detail below the roof-lines. I found myself too numb to realise, except vaguely, how lucky that was.

Rekhmire''s voice spoke in the dark. 'This will conceal us from passers-by.'

From time to time, as we walked here, Rekhmire' had spoken quietly tome; but by the time I worked out what he had said, the moment for answering seemed to have passed. I did not think he mentioned Carthage, or Videric, or the golem, but it might be that I just didn't hear.

How is it I didn't realise that things were worse than I knew?

'It was Marcomir.' I interrupted Rekhmire'. 'If I'm-if it's not far advanced--'

He echoed Siamun's words: 'Four months.'

'Then it has to be Marcomir. There hasn't...been...anybody...'

Rekhmire' touched my arm, his voice a breath. 'Look. There.'

The darkness gave up a figure holding up a pierced iron lantern.

Rekhmire' murmured, 'Is it the right man?'

Chiaroscuro: a face in light and shadow. Illumination made a hollow darkness of the eye-sockets.

I remembered his features from St Mithras Viridianus. 'It's one of Sulva's cousins.'

Rekhmire' lifted his voice. 'The groom is injured. I am here to help.'

His air of authority quashed any possible question. The cousin gave an uncertain nod, and beckoned. He turned away from the direction of the mansion. Towards 'the villa in the trees'.

The night blurred in my eyes.

We must at some point have passed a gate and left the city of Rome. If there were watchmen, I didn't see how we avoided them. The Etruscans, the 'Rasna'; they must be used to doing this...

For a mile or more, I recognised the Via Aemilia: that ancient road that runs north the whole length of the Warring States. Paving stones were cold and slippery under my shoes.

Broken earth. A track.

I lifted my head to find that we walked under trees, off the road.

Sulva's cousin spoke tightly, his voice breaking the long silence. 'Follow that path.'

Where he pointed, a broad, well-trodden trackway went off between mature oaks. In summer, no light could have penetrated the leaf-canopy. Now, as the clouds began to shred, full moonlight shone intermittently down between the bare branches.

The Etruscan man folded his arms. He made no further move to accompany us.

Rekhmire''s hand gripped my forearm. I realised that he had taken the iron lantern; yellow light dazzled in the corner of my eye.

'I don't need help!' It came out more harshly than I intended.

'You are still uncertain, from the wound.' In the lantern's light, I saw him glance at my forehead.

'You needn't worry.' I attempted to sound conciliatory. There is no obligation on Rekhmire' to come here. 'But I need to get there fast.'

We walked a distance.

Twigs crackled under my feet.

The noise became submerged by sounds I felt I ought to recognise, but could only find both familiar and unknown. I frowned. Rekhmire' swore under his breath, missing his footing. I thought I heard the faint sound of a reed.

'Music?' I blurted out.

Rekhmire' gave a sharp, preoccupied nod. 'It must be the young woman.'

I thrust out of my mind the thought How shall I tell her?

Because, now we're near, if I think about that, I shall go back.

Ahead, the trees began to thin. I caught sight of a slope rising up in the distance, out of the wood. On it, something that might be a villa. Bare branches all but hid a sloping roof. Splotched pillars-because painted, I realised, but the moonlight is showing only black and white.

The thread of sound grew strong.

Rekhmire''s voice was no more than a whisper. 'That-I think that is an aulos. An Etruscan flute. What...?'

I stepped between two oaks, and found myself entering a wide clearing. The double melody sounded stronger.

Over it, regular, rhythmic grunts echoed through the frosty air. Deep, echoing sound. Music...

Branches creaked behind me in the wind. The remainder of the cloud-cover shredded away from the moon. Silver light splashed every leaf and twig, every bramble, every frost-curled fern. The moon hung full-bellied enough to make me wince, until the sight before me wiped that thought away.

I shuddered to a halt, staring.

'Sulva's come out to meet me...'

She is not alone.

'Kek and Keket and all the Eight!' Rekhmire' exclaimed.

Sulva stood in the centre of the clearing, perhaps thirty feet away. She held a double-piped flute to her lips. Two strands of melody wove in the moonlight. A mantle draped her shoulders; tiny braids kept her flowing hair back from her eyes.

Ten or twelve giant wild boars clustered around her.

They rootled beside the skirts of her long pleated tunic, their pointed ears flicking each time the melody altered. Wild boars. Not the small, black shapes of domestic pigs-what trampled the leaf-mould in the clearing ahead of me was huge, lean, and razor-backed, with curved tusks glinting in the moonlight.

Men call that light deceptive, but it was clear enough for me to see the testicles hanging between their back legs, and the breath rising up from their mouths. As they passed in front of her, their shaggy shoulders stood as high as Sulva's breast.

I breathed out. 'I don't believe...'

The boar is the most dangerous beast of the hunt; its ferocity and bad temper make it a favourite among heraldic devices. Here are no horses, no men, no weapons. Here is only a sixteen-year-old girl. And, if we were this close, ordinary boar would attack. They would have attacked her before now...

Rekhmire' spoke as if we sat in our lodgings over a scroll. 'As I recall, there is a legend attached to the aulos. That the Etruscans could play it skilfully enough to entice wild boar out of the hills, and bring them tame to the huntsman.'

Sulva lowered the flute from her lips. She slid it into a fold of her mantle, and from another fold brought out something white. Bread, I saw.

Her eyes bright, she offered the food in her hands; her gaze fixed on the beasts.

The wild boars gruntled. They reached up their snouts to her, and took old crusts from her fingers with the greatest gentleness.

'Sulva.' My voice came out a squeaky croak.

Her head lifted; her glance went past the Egyptian without pause. 'Ilario!'

The boar furthest from her-and closest to me-swivelled his head around, staring. The gaze of his tiny wicked eye jolted me.

He turned his head back towards the nearest tree, and took a branch the size of a man's wrist between his jaws. Effortlessly, he bit down.

A sharp crack! sounded as the living wood split in two.

I shut my eyes.

The golem's closing hand.

Masaccio's face.

'Ilario...'

Sulva stood alone. Silent, but for the suck of mud against sharp trotters, the wild boar were moving away, fading into the moonlit trees at the clearing's edge.

Stumbling on the black, broken earth; pushing my way between the silver arcs of brambles; I closed the distance between she and I.

Sulva smiled.

It was painful; strained; embarrassed.

'What--' I started. 'Why--?'

'This.'

She pointed at moonlit stones I had not noticed buried in the bracken.

'This is the boundary. Beyond here is the villa in the trees. If you pass...'

Human feet sucked out of the mud. Rekhmire' came forward to stand by my shoulder, his sandals encrusted with wet churned dirt. He suddenly stilled.

I followed his gaze, downwards.

A flash of white.

Sulva's tunic was kilted up, to be out of the freezing mud. On one foot she wore a patten over her slipper, as before. The other--

The other shone white as an animal's pelt shines in moonlight.

She stepped forward on her perfect goat's foot.

I could only stare.

She ignored the fact that I was not alone. As if she had tensed herself to speak, and could let nothing stop her now, she blurted out, 'I prayed to the Christian priests for healing! They perform small miracles, sometimes. I thought...'

Her beautiful voice came clearly through the frost-bitten air:

'But I didn't receive Grace. Only a glamour that makes this seem to be a club-foot when I'm not in the forest.'

The moonlight shone undeniably on her.

Miracles.

Grace.

Glamour.

Frankish superstition!

I shook my head; laughed out loud; clapped my hands over my mouth. Just another strange occurrence-and how can I protest that, when I'm already one myself? As well be born with an animal's foot as the organs of both man and woman--

Rekhmire''s hand closed on my shoulder. 'Ilario.'

'I understand what this is. Sulva's...come to give me a choice. Haven't you?'

She gazed up at me. 'We are the Rasna,' she whispered. The people of Etruria. We're old. And these things happen in our families. The Christians' legends of satyrs...Will it matter to you so much?'

'Sulva...' I could barely speak.

'Only your people consider us married. We have yet to lie together.'

She means we have yet to lie in bed, in bodily communion.

I felt my mouth twist. 'No, there's been lies between us. Believe me!'

Whatever the truth of her disfigurement is, she has come to warn me. To give me a chance to back out of this marriage. Because she is honest. While I...

Reaching out, I took her cold, crumb-dusted hands in mine.

They are still warmer than the dead.

'I have to tell you something,' I said.

She parted her lips slightly, as if she would have protested, but said nothing. No man could have painted her.

'No man could paint the moonlight on your face,' I said aloud. 'And I am no man. Sulva, I have to explain, tell you; somehow. I'm not a man. Or, I am-but not in the way you think I am.'

Her pupils contracted and expanded as moonlight varied between the clouds. 'Not a-I don't--'

The confusion in her voice flayed me.

She frowned. 'Are you like your master? Him, there, beside you? A gelded man?'

I glanced back at Rekhmire', and saw in the dim lantern light that his expression was wretched, as if he hurt for me.

I shook my head hurriedly. 'Not my master, my friend. But in any case, no. I'm not a eunuch.'

'You're not a woman--'

'No! Yes! Sulva!'

My hold on her hands tightened. She gasped. I loosed her slightly.

'Listen.' I could barely get words out. The shock that numbed me at the Alexandrine embassy thawed-and I regretted it. I would sooner be numb, for this.

I shivered in the cold moonlight and frost.

'This is a night for myths, it seems. Have you heard of Hermaphroditus? The nymph Salmacis loved him, and Zeus answered her prayers by making them one flesh, man and woman joined in the same body. But this isn't a myth. I'm hermaphrodite. I'm both man and woman. I have the body of each.'

Sulva blinked, as if I had dazed her with a blow. 'I don't understand.'

I folded my fingers tightly around Sulva's. Pain coursed through my body.

'There's more. I must tell you it all. Listen to me! You know that I've been travelling. When I was in Carthage...In Carthage, I went to bed with a man. A man called Marcomir.'

'You're telling me you're a boy-lover? A sodomite?' She still looked beautiful when she was puzzled.

This is not something I ever wanted to say to my wife.

'Sulva. I'm telling you that I'm pregnant.'

She took her hands out of mine and put them over her face, and wailed like a child.

I did not wail-her grief was not mine to interrupt-but I wept.

21

'Is it true?' Aranthur Paziathe demanded.

The pictures on the walls of the villa were yellow, red, gold. Green ferns. Blue fountain-water. Either painted, or put on in mosaic. Men in primitive togas, dancing with their hands high. Pale naked girls in forests. Augurs before altars. Haruspices painted looking into the entrails of birds. The figures all drawn to depict, not what a man sees, but what a man knows is there.

The feet all pointing down.

'Tell me! Is it true?' Aranthur shouted.

'Oh, it's true! I've seen!' Sulva's eyes seemed literally to flash. In another frame of mind, I could have wished to capture the effect in wax and pigment.

'Yes,' I said. She has seen.

It had not been how I had imagined being in her bedchamber would be.

In her painted rooms, in this hidden villa, she assumed a brittle attitude that we were all girls, and so I might as well undress and show what I was.

Sulva frowned deeply, shaking her head. 'She's got a belly on her. He has. Not so big, but how he didn't notice--' She turned on me. 'Didn't your bleeding stop?'

I saw Aranthur wince at the mention of women's mysteries. Rekhmire' told me Etruscan women had freedom, in ancient times; I caught the echo of it in Aranthur's daughter's speech.

'Bleeding has never been a regular occurrence for me.' I felt cold, as if the house's warmth couldn't penetrate the night's frost. 'I thought-the travelling-the change of city-I'm sorry.'

Her hand flashed out. Her small palm cracked across my face.

Rekhmire' stirred, where he leaned against the wall by the door.

I shook my head, warning him back. A bruise on the cheek is hardly sufficient recompense for what I've done to her. It seems there are some hurts I can't cure.

Aranthur grated, 'Monstrous! A man, pregnant. A woman who's a man. Sulva, leave the room.'

He stood up from his high-backed oak chair. Simultaneously she stepped away.

Before I could protest what that told me-that, like other fathers now, Etruscans have come to beat their daughters-she noisily began to weep. 'I will not!

The room felt oppressive, the ceiling low for a single-storey building. The windows opened only out into the central courtyard. Just outside, folding chairs stood under the colonnade of pillars. I had an urge to walk out there; to find the forest; to run.

He turned on me. 'You.'

'I lied,' I admitted, before he could choke out anything else. 'I'm sorry. She's still virgin. She can marry--'

His expression stopped me.

'We have to abide by Rome's legal code.' Aranthur began to pace. 'That is the bargain made in Alaric's day. By Rome's law, my daughter is married to you. So it doesn't matter that by Rasna law she's still unmarried and virgin.'

The room was dominated by a long dining table; not polished, but covered in bright embroidered linen. He left his own chair and walked down past the length of the table, and paused with his hands resting on the back of another chair.

Aranthur's own throne-style wooden chair, carved all over with acorns and galls, stood at the head of the table, like the Romans who supplanted them. Pater familias, head of the house. All the other chairs were made out of curving slats, with a leather seat.

He rested his brown gnarled hands on the chair-back and gazed at me. 'Do you know what would have happened, if you had married Sulva by Roman and Etruscan law?'

All the answers I could think of were mere lists of disaster. I shook my head.

He pulled the chair back towards himself, and looked down at it for a moment.

I noted without in the least wishing to that the interlocking curved slats were beechwood, polished with linseed oil; that the shapes of air between the parts would make an excellent drawing exercise.

'You would have taken her away,' Aranthur said quietly. 'Even if you had never left Rome, you would have taken her away from us. That happens so often in this generation...She would never have come back. It would have swallowed her. She would have dressed as a Roman matron, not a puia-a wife. She would have prayed at a Roman church.'

I started to correct him, and stopped. If the details are here and there inaccurate, the picture is nonetheless true to life.

'She would never have associated with her family, after that,' Aranthur said. 'There would have been an empty chair at this table. It's our custom. We would have kept it for her. To remind us.'

I repeated, inadequately, 'I'm sorry.'

'That's what you're sorry for?' His head lifted; his eyes met mine. 'Sulva would have been safe.'

I stared.

He jabbed a finger at me. 'Not one of us, not part of this family any longer, no; not part of our people-but safe. And we would have honoured that, and sorrowed for it, with an empty chair here. Because I...'

His voice broke.

'I would have known that next time there were rumours of Etruscans poisoning wells, or Etruscan merchants cheating their Christian customers, or the city fathers needing a scapegoat and the Inquisition needing bodies for burning-Sulva would have been safe. As a Christian wife, a Christian mother. Not Rasna; not part of our lautun, our family. Lost to me. But safe.'

His hands slammed palm-down on the back of the chair.

'And in time, I would have added another chair, for the Etruscan husband who would never sit at this table! And then more chairs, on feast days, for the children she would never bring back here. In time, how many chairs would I put out for grandchildren?'

His torrent left me speechless.

'But you are not the young Christian man you made yourself out to be.' Aranthur Paziathe clenched his fists. 'You are not "he". And so she is not safe.'

My head felt clear. Pain will do that, sometimes. 'I'm sorry I lied. I will do what I can--'

'What can you do?' The old man pointed at my stomach. 'You have a child there. And you a man! And it a bastard!'

I let that one pass.

'Sulva can still be safe. It's as I tried to explain. Mastro Masaccio is dead, and I'm leaving Rome. If Sulva comes with me, I'll look after her--'

He slammed both hands down again on the carved back of the chair. 'You? What life can you have? You'll always be what you are! Sooner or later, men will know that. What life can she have with a--But no. No. I am not the bad father you think me. Ask her what she wants. Ask Sulva!'

He stamped across the room to his daughter, ignoring how Rekhmire' stepped fluidly back out of his way. He swung Sulva around.

His shout ricocheted off the illustrated walls. 'What do you want out of this?'

Sulva lifted her chin. Her eyes had red rims. Her skin showed pallid in some places, and blotchy in others. No man on earth would pay me to lay those colours on her statue.

That she should look that way, because of me, wrenched at my gut.

Abrupt, Aranthur demanded, 'Do you still wish to marry this man?'

She gazed about the room as if blind-a lautun room, I thought, remembering Aranthur's word. Where the family comes together. Where they can be what they are, themselves, instead of hiding, as in Rome.

I spoke to her. 'I'll look after you. As I promised. You-need not be wife in anything but name.'

'In name?'

Sulva swung around, staring.

'I thought you wanted to marry me.' Her eyes brimmed over: water ran in quick streaks down her face. 'Don't you love me? I thought you fell in love with me!'

Stupid as wood and fog, I said, 'I thought you wanted to escape. I thought you needed rescue.'

The room held absolute silence.

'"Rescue"!' Aranthur ended his pacing around the table back at his chair. He sat down suddenly, seemingly swallowed by the polished oak throne. 'A man my age has grown too old for the kindness of the gods. "Love". "Escape". "Rescue"!'

'This is my family.' Sulva sounded bewildered. 'Why would I need rescue? They love me. Even as I am. Ilario, I thought, you...'

Aranthur, brown face pulled by strain, spoke as if to himself. 'You Romans, you call it the disciplin a etrusca. The sacred books. The Libri Fatales. They tell the truth of it! An old man is a body with barely a soul in it. This is my punishment, for having a daughter when I was already old.'

Punishments come for no reason.

With my gaze fixed on Sulva, I said, 'I'm not a Roman. Nor am I a punishment.'

I forced the configuration of my body out of my mind.

'I will do what I can for Sulva and for you: I swear it.'

'What can you do!'

Rekhmire''s sonorous tenor broke in. 'More than sit lamenting foolishly about "punishment", for one thing!'

I startled. 'We agreed-this is my business to settle.'

'Oh, so it is, it is.' He waved a large hand, and resumed leaning against a mural of a god springing from a furrow. 'But not for nothing do the Romans call the Rasenna the most superstitious men on earth!'

I turned back to Sulva. 'You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Even with your foot. It seemed such a crime to keep you locked up in that old house.'

I broke off, sick at my stomach, watching how she looked at me.

'And as to love...Sulva...I knew you wouldn't want me.'

'"Want"? Want?'

Her expression changed, features tensing in a scorn that was absolute.

'I want a husband. Who loves me! Not some freak--'

'Aren't you a freak, too?'

It was no attack on her, only pain. My heart hammered, and my pulse all but blinded me.

'Your foot--Shouldn't that make you...shouldn't you feel more sympathetic? Because of that? And because your people are persecuted?'

'"That"?'

She looked down at her skirts, then up at me. 'That's why I want a normal husband! Isn't it all the more reason why I should want someone normal?'

She clenched small fists in front of her.

'I didn't ask to be like born this! I didn't ask to be born Rasna! And you-I wanted children--' She cut me off, before I could speak, with biting scorn. 'My children!'

I followed her gaze, down. I had done, without knowing it, what I have seen women do: put my hand flat over my belly, as if I protected what was inside.

Sulva sounded shrill. 'You'll give birth to monsters. And father monsters on me! I'm sick with being called a monster because I'm Etruscan; I don't want a double burden!'

I held up both hands, watching her anger abate a fraction. 'What do you want?'

She changed in an instant; as cold as the ice on the brown, dead oak leaves outside. 'I want you to go away, Ilario. If you're missing for seven years, the Romans will have you legally declared dead, and I can re-marry.'

So many emotions crowded her face: spite, malice, hurt, hatred, and grief. I understood every one of them.

'And I don't want to waste time,' she added, caustically. 'The seven years can start now. Tonight. Just go. Man-woman!'

This is because she thought I loved her.

And if I were to claim, now, that I do love her, this pique would disappear. And she'd think she can forgive me.

Very careful in my words, I said, 'Sulva, we could still appear to be a family. You, I, and the child. You must want to get away from this life.'

'You don't understand our ways.' Blurry-eyed, bewildered, she glared at me and wept. Her contorted face seared me. I have put those colours there.

So I will have no family. It seared me. I put the thought of my own body out of my mind, and turned to face the old man. 'I will do anything I can. I swear it.'

'You've done enough, girl!' White showed around Aranthur's eyes. I saw the realisation come to him. 'You have! You've brought everything down on us! The painter, dead-questions--All this will come out--They'll trace you to us--'

'Then let me help!'

'No.' Aranthur's hands closed over the ends of the chair-arms, knuckles whitening against the patina of ancient polish. 'We must shut up the villa; move from the Roman house to the one in--And you, you can't help. You can't even help yourself!'

Spite and malice flickered in the deep creases of his expression.

'You're a monster carrying a child. The Libri ostentaria talks of such things. Even if you could carry the bastard to term, it would kill you when you came to birth it. You leave us to our troubles, she-male! You'll be too busy finding a back-alley abortionist.'

22

Silvery scales collect on unwashed human skin.

I picked with a fingernail at my swollen ankle. The thought surfaced: I should do something about this.

Bathe? The mental comment had something of Rekhmire''s acerbic tone about it. It stirred my sluggish mind.

Footsteps sounded on the dhow's deck, and the flap of the makeshift canvas shelter lifted. For a moment, I didn't look up. The water-and wind-scoured planks held a grain whose pattern I could trace in patches of sunlight, losing thought for hours. Now, only faint light from the outside shifted with the lift and swell of the sea.

A weight settled on the palliasse beside me. 'We're in for ill weather, they tell me.'

Rekhmire' rested his heavy arm around my shoulder.

Whether it was the comfort a man offers a man, or the comfort a man offers a woman...Rekhmire''s tenor might have belonged to a deep-voiced woman if I closed my eyes.

After a moment, something unclenched inside me.

I shifted, albeit awkward and ungainly, stared forward, and looked out of the shelter at the Adriatic. The cloth walls made all converging vertical lines, leading the eye towards the small opening. Outside, I saw the dhow's wet rigging. And a ship's rail that rose up above the horizon and fell below it. A sky the colour of a three-day-old bruise.

'How far are we from land?'

The Egyptian shrugged, which movement sent a tremor through me also. 'Too far to reach a port, or so the sailors say. Apparently we may run before this storm.'

Rekhmire''s hand closed loosely over the ball of my shoulder; his fingers large enough to encompass it. Had I been intending to draw anything, the Egyptian's hands would have been a suitable subject.

'Well, then.' He drew a breath. 'You will remember the Turkish document? I took it to Vittorio, Cardinal Corradeo, as we were leaving.'

'What...?'

It was so poorly transparent an attempt to distract me-and from this man-that I must respond, despite myself, out of embarrassment and charity.

'What...happened? Is the Empty Chair to be cured?'

Rekhmire''s eyelashes flickered. I could all but see the other image form behind the lens of his eye with those words. Aranthur Paziathe, his hands gripping carved oak-wood--

Hurriedly, I said, 'And we can expect another Frankish pope, can we?'

'Not in my lifetime!'

'No?'

I met his gaze for the first time in many days, conscious of something other than numb misery and fog. Roused by his trivialities-by his design. I braced myself for the effort to reply:

'It wasn't true? The Turk wasn't truly there for the Prophet's death? Or...his scroll was a forgery? Or...knowing the words of the curse...doesn't help?'

Rekhmire''s unconscious shifting of body with ship, and the ship moving with the water, seemed soothing.

'If there is any such thing as a curse,' he remarked. 'But no, that's not why. Cardinal Corradeo took it away to be prayed over.'

A certain cynicism in his tone implied I ought to know why he phrased that so.

'He's a cardinal,' I objected, almost roused to asperity, had I sufficient strength. 'He's supposed to pray about things! What makes you think he isn't going to revoke the curse? And do-whatever the Conclave of Cardinals do when they elect a new pope?'

Rekhmire' smiled whimsically. 'Do you know where the Franks get their cardinals from, now?'

My ankle itched: I scratched at it again.

'From among bishops?'

'No. The death of all those popes discouraged men from Episcopal ambition. Only your Iberian and North African church has bishops, now. And the Franks would never elect a heretic bishop as pope...'

Rekhmire' held up a long dirty finger:

'The Franks have, these many years, depended on abbots to run their church. I'll tell you where they get their cardinals. Since they have no bishops, they rely on abbots, retired from their monasteries-"Cardinal Corradeo" was "Abbot Vittorio", not so many years ago.'

It began to concern me that my thoughts were so fog-ridden.

'Rekhmire', have we got any food?'

Rekhmire' leaned forward and bellowed through the open canvas flap to one of the crew. I felt a sudden and new desire for water. Or ale, or bread. Cheese. Solid plain food.

'So the cardinals used to be abbots. And...' I paused expectantly.

Rekhmire' sat back, and left one hand resting heavily on my shoulder. 'And-they have absolutely no interest in putting any man on Peter's Chair who will bring back the bishops! The abbots control the Frankish church. They desire it no other way. As for the College of Cardinals-electing one of the cardinals pope would mean one of them gaining more power than the others. So they prefer things exactly as they are.'

It had the feel of machinations at the court of Taraconensis. The familiarity was both nostalgic and ironic.

'So "prayed over" means "quietly taken away and lost"?'

'Corradeo has his reasons.' Rekhmire' waved his free hand illustratively. 'Decentralised power is obviously best. Look at Carthage and the Arian heresy. They have bishops-and they have the Penitence! Obviously God made a felix culpa out of Gundobad's curse, and is protecting the Frankish lands from the evils of Episcopal power...Or so the Cardinal says.'

My chest hurt. Wonderingly, I realised I had laughed. 'So, you having unearthed an eye-witness account...'

'Corradeo was remarkably happy to hear that I was on my way out of Rome, and not liable to return.'

Rekhmire' shook his head, chuckling.

'He can have a sub-committee of the other cardinals pray confidentially over this. It'll take them years, and the scroll will still be suppressed at the end of it. However, Corradeo did allow me a copy-on the firm understanding that I lose it in some dusty corner of the Royal Library, where no Christian scholar will ever look for it. It's not scholarship as I know it. But it does lead to original sources being preserved, rather than destroyed. Will you eat?'

Startled, I realised one of the Macedonian captain's crew-members squatted outside the deck-tent, balancing on the lifting and falling planks. I nodded thanks, and took the dark bread and ale. My movement disturbed the long shift I wore for warmth, and I realised how much it would benefit from rinsing, even if sea-water would make it scratchy against my skin.

Blackly, I thought, Who else but I should wear a penitential shirt?

Not Sulva Paziathe. Not Tommaso Cassai.

'And besides,' Rekhmire' added, pouring ale from a lidded pewter jug, 'Cardinal Corradeo is happy because, in the absolute meaning of the word, he need not lie if someone asks for the document to study. The Vatican library doesn't have a copy.'

Through a mouthful of bread, I found myself laughing.

Twice in a half-hour?

The food went swiftly, despite the swell's increase. Rekhmire' got up to claim more, and crept back under the deck-shelter with loaded square wooden plates. His platter cleaned remarkably fast, I noted. He stretched out his arms-no easy task in the combined space-and knocked open the canvas flap.

The salt-heavy wind blew in cold against my face, shocking more than skin and nerve awake.

'Rekhmire'. Where is this ship going?'

He wrapped long arms around his knees, and squinted at the rail and ropes outside. 'Venice.'

'Venice?'

Shock further broke the clouds surrounding my mind. I had assumed-beyond questioning-that it must be Alexandrian Constantinople this ship made its heading for.

'Why? Did you get more letters from Iberia? From Carthage? What...'

Hot liquid spilled over the lower lids of my eyes: I had not known until then that I would weep.

'Masaccio.' I wiped the back of my hand across my face. 'He said, once, he'd send me on a buying trip to Venice. For lapis blue. I made an excuse of it to that heretic priest that married me to Sulva...I never expected--Why Venice?'

'You were not in a state to give directions.'

The Egyptian shifted to sit closer, cautiously reached out, and combed his fingers through my tangled hair. His delicate touch worried knots undone without causing me pain. He made no other consolatory attempt, speaking with a bureaucrat's dry self-possession:

'In one way, this resembles our leaving Carthage for Rome-no man will expect us to travel anywhere else but Alexandria. So they will not look for us in the north. And there were considerable rumours of Carthaginian agents in Rome asking questions, the last week we were there. I left a trail I think will take any astray...'

His gaze, surveying something with inner satisfaction, left it and came back to me.

'Truthfully--' His bronze skin was a little darker on the high surfaces of his cheeks. 'Menmet-Ra, old friend that he is, called in a favour I could not honestly refuse him. He desires to stay in Rome, but some man must go north and sort out the Alexandrine house in Venice, after the ambassador there died this last autumn. Rather than Menmet-Ra being uprooted from his comfortable nest, he sees no reason why I need not return to Alexandria by the longer route...'

Much longer, I reflected, with the copied maps of travellers' itineraries in my mind's eye. The port of Venice being at the northern head of the Adriatic waters, and Constantinople way past the Greek Islands to the east.

'I thought it safer. The diversion's not uninteresting.' Rekhmire' absently set forefingers and thumbs to the knottier tangle of hair over my ear. To have his stare so close on me, but not meeting my eyes, felt oddly intimate.

He added, 'There seems to be some confusion with a printer of woodcuts. And whichever of Ty-ameny's book-buyers has been left as caretaker of the embassy. And rumours of a device--'

He cut himself off abruptly.

'No.' His large hand tilted my head back towards him; I hadn't realised I had turned away. 'Not the golem. That will leave Rome by ship, Menmet-Ra was giving orders as we departed--'

There seemed no way to control the tears that collected inescapably in my eyes, blurring my vision, running hotly down my cheeks and neck. I shrugged out from under Rekhmire''s grasp, crawled unsteadily to the tent-opening, and ducked out under canvas and ropes.

Straightening up on cramped and blood-starved legs sent me staggering to the ship's rail. And not only that: my body's balance of gravity felt altered, as if I carried it in the now-visible curve of my belly.

You will be too busy seeking a back-alley abortionist--

'What "device"? Something else from Carthage?'

Rekhmire' came up beside me, perfectly steady on his bare feet despite the deck's pitch and yaw, a bundle over his arm.

'No. Something from the Frankish North. Burgundy or the Germanies, Menmet says. I have a report to read on it, when I cease the profession of nurse...'

He smiled, unwrapped the bundle, and it became a heavy woollen Frankish cloak, which he threw about my shoulders. One of his powerful hands grasped the rail behind me, serving as a brace while I settled the warm swathes of wool around me in toga-fashion.

My own hands were cold enough that this was not unlike clothing a sculpted marble figure. I could think of nothing but Masaccio. I saw him die. And now I'll explore the New Art on my own, because from what he told me, none of it has spread to the Venetian state.

In peripheral vision, I saw Rekhmire' frown. Is that against grief, horror, bereavement?

The Egyptian turned his head away from the wind, droplets of salt water dampening his shaven head, raising his voice a very little above the wind.

'Ilario-listen to me. Aranthur was not kind in what he said. But there is some truth there. Too much to ignore. If you continue to carry this child...But then again, it's very rare for a hermaphrodite not to lose any child by miscarriage, long before birth...That would be an ill thing to have happen to you, yes. But, forgive me, better than the other. If you do carry a child full term, it may rip you apart. You're not made for it.'

If my throat is stiff from disuse and private weeping, it's not for that.

'Your doctor said I carry Marcomir's child in my belly.' I wiped sea-spray off my face. 'I have no motherly feeling. If it quickens...But I feel no different from before.'

'You might die in labour!'

The sea-wind smelled of cold depths. The deck under my feet dipped deeper. Cries came from the crew; the steersman and captain shouting orders.

Rekhmire' bent down so that he could speak close into my ear. His voice sounded high with tension.

'I desire that we find an Alexandrine physician to manage the business. There will surely be one in Venice, attached to the Alexandria house. But it needs to be done sooner, more safely...I can order us put ashore at wherever we can get a ship east. The Dalmatian coast, perhaps.' He sounded distracted. 'Soon. Before-if it is not already too late!'

'I made my decision in Rome.' I hadn't realised until I spoke it aloud.

'Suppose you carry it long enough that you're damaged when--what?' he interrupted himself.

He might have narrowed his eyes against the lashing water, or at me.

I faced him on the swaying deck. 'The doctor may be in error. If I am with child...If my body sheds this, well then, it's done. If not, then not. There's-what did you call it?-"the operation which birthed great Caesar". And that's my decision.'

'Don't you understand, you stupid--!' Rekhmire' cut himself off, I think caught between epitaphs, and lifted up his large hands. 'Your body is talking, not your mind; your mind is as absent as a woman in child-bed!'

My temper snapped. 'A eunuch gives me advice on procreation, does he!'

Rekhmire' straightened, towering over me. 'I'll speak it slowly. You. Could. Die.'

That he cared both warmed and puzzled me. Who would ever have thought that the man who purchased me would become so close?

'Rekhmire'--'

The deck shifted under me; came back at a slant.

I staggered two steps down the rail; grabbing at it.

One of the square wooden plates slid out of the tent-shelter and skidded across the deck towards the scuppers.

Rekhmire' bent and scooped it up, grabbing my arm with his other hand, and hustled us back towards the canopy. As I fell on my knees on the deck, I began dry-heaving.

Sea-sickness, that I had never suffered from in the seas between Iberia and Carthage, now emptied me and dried me out, until I could barely leave my blanket-roll.

I lost track of time, though I know that at some point the Egyptian demanded and got space for us under hatches with the cargo. In extreme physical misery, two things stood out in my mind. That Rekhmire' tended me, feeding me sips of water when nothing else would stay down. And that my belly remained distended, swelling and thickening even as I grew worn and thin. Once I bled, but it soon stopped, and did not happen again.

I dreamed of each precise fold of the sheet covering Masaccio's dead face. And of having to compulsively touch each one, before practising the charcoal drawing of cloth-folds to improve my use of tone. No more than that, but it made me wake myself crying out with horror.

The dhow Iskander ran south before the storm, lost itself among the first of the Greek islands-lost our armed convoy escort with the brass cannon, against pirates-and beat back against the tempests that came down one after another across the Adriatic.

And was driven repeatedly away from coasts and any ports by appalling seas.

'It is at least good we're where no man can search for us,' Rekhmire' observed, sodden from head to foot, and wincing every time the ship yawed. He looked across at me in the faint light leaking into the hold. 'It may be the agents from Carthage investigated the whereabouts of the King-Caliph's golem, rather than one Ilario, but--'

'Carthage won't be a concern if we drown.' Nor will my belly.

I wondered if Honorius had settled matters with King Rodrigo yet-and tried not to wonder if I would die before I saw my father again.

Days became a week, two, three.

I crept up on deck from time to time, suffocated by the creaking, shifting dark of the hold. The skies were filled with violet lightning, of a colour that I despaired of ever being able to paint; the crew screamed stories of sea-monsters; and one black noon I saw how such tales begin, with an optical delusion of the kind that men in the deserts call mirage-this time of a ship, an apparent sea-mile distant from us, with an impossible number of lateen sails making a tower of triangular shapes above the hull, and the whiskery face of a monster painted on the prow. Some trick of the storm-twilight made it seem immense, ten times the size of any mortal ship: a vessel that could belong only to giants.

I watched the geometric shapes merge into a squall, and remembered enough to sketch a line or two of the 'ghost-ship's' curious painted monster on damp paper with crumbling charcoal, before the next blast of the tempest made that impossible. It was the first time I had picked up charcoal since Masaccio died.

I let the sea take it.

The storms broke.

The clouds clearing, I could see that the stars in the night sky were not those of late autumn, now, but the constellations of deep winter.

The look-out sighted landmarks known to lie south-east of Venice.

I could no longer wear my doublet and hose. The hose would not stretch over my hips, nor the doublet lace up over my abdomen.

The Egyptian vanished into a far crevice of the cargo hold, and emerged with salt-water-stained cloth that unrolled itself and proved to be a shift and over-dress of soft linen and embroidered silk, respectively. As cargo it was ruined. Dried out, I could lace it loosely over my high belly and wear it.

I haven't worn skirts since the King's court in Taraco...

We were past the Republic of Venezia's guard and customs ships and the Lido before I came uncertainly up onto the deck.

'There.' Rekhmire' pointed.

Wind blew in my face from the rising sun. I squinted, seeing the sea and a great sky full of light; colours all so close to each other's shades as to be impossible to paint. Haze hid islands, ships' masts, and a glimmer of chimneys, roofs, and campanile...The lagoon's flat coastline was barely distinguishable from the water or the hazy air.

'Venice,' Rekhmire' said.

Painters, sculptors, architects, scholars...But all of the old schools.

I wondered where I might go, now Rome was closed to me, and noticed Rekhmire''s gaze sliding down to my bulge. So, as I came on deck, did that of the ship's captain. And the sailors.

Eavesdropping on gossip allowed me know that they supposed me a young woman who had come on board disguised as a man. The Egyptian, since a eunuch could not beget a bastard, figured as my protector only.

Venice's ships and spires began to solidify out of the dawn mist.

The beauty oppressed me. I went below, called for hot water, and shaved the last wisps of beard off my chin. In the event that Rekhmire''s hypothetical agent of Carthage did find his way to Venice, I wanted him to see nothing of the man who had been in Rome.

As I came back up on deck, Rekhmire' stepped in close, his linen kilt bright in the new sunlight. He towered over me, speaking quietly.

'Ilario. No argument. I'm sending for an Alexandrine physician as soon as we're docked.'

'You're not my master!'

'If I were still your owner, I'd order you--' Rekhmire' checked himself, an appalled expression on his face. 'Amun and Amunet! Thank the Eight I don't have to order that!'

For all my predicament, I couldn't help but laugh. 'Thank you. But I've dealt with my own problems all my life: I'll do the same now.'

The sun's warmth eased me, in body and temper. Dawn broke red over the islands and the lagoons, the winter geese rising up into the cold air. Hundreds of small ships poled and rowed their way past us as the dhow Iskander sailed in towards the mouth of the Grand Canal, and the dock at the steps of St Mark's Square.

Of course, Venice is a navy port, I thought, looking at the bigger trading vessels and the armed galleys. And much larger than Rome--

'But I wonder,' Rekhmire' continued soberly, as sails were furled above us, and small boats rowed out to ferry passengers ashore. 'You were a slave all your life. In your King Rodrigo's court-I know it was worse than you pretend. You have little experience of taking decisions.'

I winced, and thought of Marcomir in Carthage. 'I have some experience.'

'Yet you refuse to take responsibility for saving your own life.'

'I've taken my decision.'

I scooped up my small roll of belongings and let Rekhmire' offer me his large hand to steady me as I climbed down into a black boat.

From the flat level of the water, everything rose up to tower above me. Islands surrounded us; the sea hidden beyond a distant barrier. The oarsman sang in a thick patois as he poled us towards wide steps. Rekhmire' had the pinched expression of a man who will continue a conversation the moment he is not overheard.

Mooring-posts for boats jutted out of the water all along the quayside, in a clutter of straight lines and diagonals.

Trying to keep my balance as I disembarked, I found my gaze lifting from the murky depths of the lagoon, to steps rising up from the quayside to a piazza, and ancient red-tiled roofs. Chimes from a bell-tower deafened me as much as sheer visual complexity confused my eyes. I stared up at a Classical pillar on which a lion and a saint-San Marco?-wrestled for supremacy against the eggshell-blue sky.

Someone pushed against me. I staggered, shoved away from the moored boat by men's shoulders as they bustled past. Rekhmire' stepped ashore behind me, passing coins to the oarsman.

My share of the voyage will have to be added to the debt I owe for manumission, I thought, blinking at the stench of sweat and still water. Sailors I recognised from the dhow Iskander loped ashore and into the crowds. I saw porters, Venetian merchants, men and escorted women, unescorted whores, hand-carts and loaded mules, children running up with their dirty palms extended, bright eyes and teeth feverishly directed at me...

The Egyptian scattered a handful of small coins, which they pursued. I rested my hand by habit on my belly. Orphans beg, I thought, staring past the Riva steps at the facades of Gothic palaces, rising seemingly directly from the waters of a canal. The funnels of a thousand chimneys filled the skyline. I went to walk forward-and stopped.

In front of me, on the Riva steps, a familiar face resolved itself out of the crowds.

A lean man, on the tall side, his grey hair cropped down almost to baldness. Wearing military boots, and the high-collared cloak of the Iberian nations...

I stared at Honorius.

My father Honorius--

His eyes grew wider and wider. He glared at me. At Rekhmire'. At the moored ships--

And back at the Egyptian book-buyer.

'How dare you get my son PREGNANT!'

Part Three

The Most Serene