7

I gave them all the coldest look possible, which, after nine years in King Rodrigo's court, I had perfected. 'I don't need to see a doctor.'

Honorius's expression clearly weighed up Rekhmire''s immediate need against my later one.

The white of his eyes showed momentarily all around his irises.

I believe he's just realised what childbirth may mean for me.

'We'll talk,' Honorius said, his tone both commanding and noncommittal, and meant for me as much as for Physician Baris,.

Honorius needs to catch his breath as much as all of us.

And to prepare to be one of those who holds down Rekhmire' during the mending of his knee.

At the Alexandrine house door, Baris, gave an apologetic shrug. 'I had thought this house was shut up after the foreigner died. It was said you had your own physician here. If he's gone, will you also need a midwife found?'

Honorius held the door for him. Neferet and I gave identical shrugs, I was annoyed to note; she as unwilling to talk about her nesting in the closed embassy as I was about my belly.

Immediately after the morning's ambush, with Rekhmire''s agony echoing off the walls of endless squares and across innumerable bridges, my back had prickled with apprehension. Every tendon in my body pulled taut-as it now did again. Can we trust this Baris, not to gossip?

I thought of mimicking a forgettable, skulking, idle slave, but that might not work as well in Frankish or Turk lands as it does around the Mediterranean.

Honorius inclined his head, every inch the Iberian knight. 'Master Baris,, you'll be well paid for your trouble.'

For your silence, I translated.

Honorius accompanied Baris, and the giant Balaban as far as the iron gate, while I stood watching from the door, and returned looking satisfied with himself.

'We'll stay holed up here.' He took my arm, escorting me in as a man does a woman. 'I doubt the Aldra's man will try ambush again on the streets, and this house is defensible. Most criminals, banditti, hired thugs; they don't want to take on soldiers. Word will get around. If our "friend" gets to hire a second gang of ambushers, I'll eat my gauntlets...'

His effort to put me at ease made me smile, and then sober. 'Do you think he was at the ambush-this Ramiro Carrasco?'

'I couldn't make out their captain's face. But we can hope!' Honorius glanced around the Alexandrine house, or all that could be seen from this entrance hall. 'It took me long enough to find the Janissary doctor, and I was visible on the streets. While we were searching-this is the first time in three weeks that I haven't caught sight of some bastard skulking about behind me. Either Ramiro Carrasco can't find a man willing to play spy, or, God grant it, we hacked his head off in the confusion of the fight.'

I understood, belatedly, why men might carry their dead away from an ambush. It leaves us uncertain.

The shock of the attack still made my heart shake. The bruises Honorius's armour left in my flesh showed now, coming out green and black. I clenched my fists, and unclenched them, forcing the tendons and muscles to relax.

'This.' Honorius put his fingertips gently on the swell of my belly. 'We must speak of this.'

A muffled cry upstairs made me look in that direction.

'Yes. Not yet.'

The lean man frowned, but he allowed me to walk away from him and climb the stairs.

'I have my own decoction of poppy,' Baris, observed, the day following. 'It's stronger than you Franks use. It should make the surgery on your knee less of a painful butchery than you would otherwise find it.'

I found I felt sick.

'We use straps,' the Turk added, setting out his sharpening stone and instruments in the lid of his case, 'and you have three men to hold the leg still. Balaban, and those two of your soldiers like him in size.'

Honorius nodded, calling for Tottola and Attila without arguing about it.

As preparations began, Honorius stabbed his finger at me. 'You don't get to do this. Belly! God He knows what it would do to a child in the womb, to witness blood like this!'

'That is nothing but superstition--'

He seized me by the scruff of my silk bodice. I dug my heels in, so he should not thrust me out and bar the door behind me.

'I'll go if Rekhmire' wants me to, not otherwise!'

A sensible interior voice asked what a slightly-built man-woman with no medical training might do, apart from witness Rekhmire' humiliated by his lack of control over his own pain. Stubbornly, I reminded myself: It's not my decision to take.

'You will leave when I say.' It evidently defeated Honorius that he could neither make himself use force on a pregnant daughter, nor beat the obstinacy out of his son. He fumed. 'I have no idea how I'm supposed to keep you safe!'

Rekhmire''s voice interrupted from the bed. 'I want Ilario here.'

Honorius turned his head and stared at him.

My bowels twisted, as if I would need to run to the necessary-house before long.

'You do?' I sounded startled, I realised.

Rekhmire' met my gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, but the irises still glowed the colour of old brandy where the light through the window caught him. He gave a pained, gentle smile.

'You've got a cool head.' He made a movement of his lips that would have been a wry shrug of the body, could he have moved that. 'I want to know what's done to me. Even if I weren't out of my mind with poppy-juice, I wouldn't be capable of seeing it. You sit here, right here next to me, and draw it. Then I can look, when I'm recovered.'

I held out both hands to him.

'And your fingers will stop shaking as soon as you sit down with a drawing-board.' There was a hint of the brusque master I had met in Carthage, offset by the deprecating humour in his gaze. 'Will you do this?'

I didn't hesitate.

'Of course I'll do it if you want me to.'

I drew with charcoal, so that when my hand shook, it was easy to erase the mistake. I copied the shapes of bone and gristle and stitches, in the clear north light, highlighting with good quality white chalk. I shut my ears to his howling pain.

8

I have never been so glad in my life as when his skin was sewn up and the surgery was over.

Over the next few hours of the morning, I sat anxiously, dreading that Rekhmire' would wake up a different man than before the poppy had stupefied him.

Making copies of the surgical drawings occupied my hands. I drew them out with pen and lamp-black ink, with a spare copy also for Physician Baris,. (At which he smiled, and remitted ten per cent of his fee.) And then I had nothing to do but sit beside the sick-bed.

As the largely silent Attila dosed out smaller and smaller amounts of tincture of poppy, Rekhmire' ceased to wake and slip into drugged sleep at regular intervals, and woke fully.

At midday, becoming conscious, he snarled at me to help prop him up against the low bed's headboard. I had sent the men-at-arms away, seeing how he flinched as their heavy tread on the floorboards jarred his leg, even bandaged and bound securely as it was between wooden planks. It occurred to me that I should call them back to restrain him.

But he'll be quieter if allowed some part of his own way.

I put my drawing-board and ink-pot down. Eventually, Rekhmire' sat white-faced and sweating, supported by bolsters.

'Cursed, stuffed, moth-eaten Frankish furniture!' he snarled, staring at the hangings of the bed. He shifted uncomfortably on the mattress, and made disgusted attempts at removing the blankets. I wasn't sure of the wisdom of it, but I helped him anyway.

Tottola had come in earlier, deftly lifting the woollen blankets and putting down a framework woven of willow-branches, that held the covers suspended up over the Egyptian's right leg. Head down and muttering almost inaudibly, he confessed the weaving skill was his own.

Rekhmire' now sniffed, grabbed at the wooden frame, and attempted to push his large and now ungainly body out and off the side of the bed.

'Not a chance!' I grabbed his wrists; each muscular enough that I could barely close a hand around it, as long as my fingers are.

'Copulation!' Rekhmire' spat out, in a pure Alexandrine accent, and shifted his hands to grip me, instead, while I eased him back onto the mattress. 'I intend to get up--Copulating diseased male dogs!'

'Don't move your leg, damn it--'

'Go bugger a bastard mule!'

'I can see this is going to be an educational experience. Learning a lot of useful Egyptian phrases...' I attempted to stifle a grin, and found myself needing to wipe wet eyelids. I rubbed my face on the shoulder of my dress.

'You're not hurt.' Rekhmire''s taut tone kept it from being a question. 'I didn't ask before-was any other man...?'

'No, no injuries. We're all well.' I let go, and went to push back the shutters, allowing more light into the dark Frankish room, and giving myself a clearer view of the Egyptian's worrying pallor.

'There was a doctor? A Frank?'

'That's the one your cousin Neferet threw off the premises...' Momentarily, I recalled the face of the Egyptian doctor in Rome-Siamun. For all his ability to see me as an interesting set of organs, and lack of tact, I would have trusted him more with Rekhmire''s injury than the Sorbonne-trained Burgundian that Neferet had thrown out.

'...Then Honorius found a Janissary. He's good. And coming to check on you again this evening.'

The human body breathes, moves, speaks. As a slave at sick-beds, I have seen how very easily it falls prey to hot infection, thickened lungs, brain-spasms, and inexplicable deaths in sleep. I do not want to see the Egyptian die.

The clouds outside the window shutters shifted, winter sunlight brightening as if a shutter had been opened in a lamp.

Rekhmire' pushed himself further upright, his colour changing. 'Find me something I can use as a crutch.'

'You can't get up!' I spoke with no more patience than was to be expected under the circumstances. 'You've just had your leg blown open and sewn closed!'

'I need to talk to Neferet!'

'However important it is, it can wait!' I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. So what if it makes the Egyptian wince? That in itself should tell him to stay still!

'When did you start work as a book-buyer?' I demanded.

Rekhmire' gazed at me with dark pupils reduced to pin-points, every line denoting stubbornness showing clearly in his face. Both his eyebrows shot up.

He answered the question, to my surprise.

'Sixteen. I was apprenticed to old Nebwy.'

People moved about in the house below. Nothing sounded urgent. I continued: 'What else have you done?'

'Ilario--'

'What trades? Occupations?' I didn't move from the bed, despite Rekhmire''s continual fidgeting to shift the covers, since I didn't trust him not to attempt to leave it again. 'Nothing, am I correct?'

His mouth set in a familiar obdurate line.

'So,' I said, 'that would mean that for, what, half your life, you've been wandering around the Mediterranean lands. And Asia. And the Frankish countries. And Christus Imperator knows where else!'

Rekhmire''s glare was less impressive when delivered sitting up in bed.

'Oh, but I'm sorry I took your collar off you! What's your point, Ilario?'

'"Ilaria",' I corrected, and saw I wouldn't need to further explain that. 'Rekhmire'-when did you last stay anywhere longer than a few months?'

He frowned thunderously. In the voice of a man running out of his store of patience, and not much inclined to look for replenishment, he demanded, 'What precisely do you mean by that?'

I reached forward and shoved a supporting bolster more firmly against the side of his ribs. 'I mean that you're going to be a God-awful invalid!'

It reassured him, so much was immediately visible.

I could all but see his thoughts on his face-'Ilario would not joke with me in this particular manner if I were dying.'

The Alexandrine eunuch, well aware of his build and six-foot height, imitated the pout of a small boy. Clearly it was designed to make me laugh in turn. Regrettably, I couldn't help a spluttering giggle.

'You look ridiculous!'

'You'll be sorry when you have to nurse me.' He beamed, glancing about the room. 'I believe I shall ask Neferet to bring in a truckle-bed, so that you can sleep here-in case I need a drink of water during the night.'

'There's a canal outside your window,' I assured him. 'Although if you drink from it, I think all your troubles might be ended, judging from the smell.'

Rekhmire' grinned. 'Ilaria. Listen. If you let me lean on your shoulder, I can very likely walk--'

'No! '

The Alexandrine woman Neferet glided into the room as I gave vent to a bellow entirely too rough to be female.

She raised a brow in a manner that left me in no doubt she and Rekhmire' were fellow countrymen. And fellow bureaucrats. She swept her robes about her with one long-fingered hand, and seated herself gracefully on a linen-oak chest near the head of the bed.

As if I were no more present than a slave, she addressed Rekhmire'. 'How are you, now the surgery's over?'

Rekhmire' grunted.

Brightly social, the woman persisted, 'And how is Lord Menmet-Ra?'

She did not call the plump ambassador to Rome old Pamiu, I noted. Or not in front of me.

'He's trying to avoid promotion to here!' Rekhmire' snapped testily. 'Ty-ameny wants him to take over in Pakharu's place. The last thing Pamiu wants is an ambassador's place where he'll have to work. I imagine he thinks it was overwork caused Pakharu to drop dead at his desk, and not the fever!'

Neferet chuckled. Her behaviour seemed more free than a Frankish woman of Venice: I wondered if this was always so in Constantinople.

And wondered also whether Rekhmire' might like me to interrupt this conversation. Since she's plainly come up to get whatever she can while pain and the poppy makes his tongue unguarded!

Standing and passing behind the woman to close the room door, I gave him a questioning look.

Timed while Neferet poured him water, he returned the weak ghost of a wink.

Neferet helped him to sip, and then clasped her hands under the folds of robes in her lap. 'Rome may be a backwater, but I understand the food is good there. Menmet-Ra would like that.'

The line of Rekhmire''s shoulders altered enough to tell me his pain was increasing.

Bluntly, he demanded, 'Where's your guest? The German Guildsman?'

A memory of ship-board conversation on the Iskander came back to me. I watched Neferet's large, long fingers creep out and play with the string of faience beads that hung from her belt. 'Guildsman?'

Rekhmire''s normal equable expression dissolved into a scowl, either provoked by the pain of his wound or using it as a credible excuse.

'Yes, the man who claims to have invented a writing-machina! This "Herr Mainz" from the Germanies! The man Pamiu wishes me to see. The man your employer Ty-ameny urgently wishes to speak with!'

He struck the side of the bed in exasperation, and with worryingly little impact.

'You must have seen the messages, Neferet! I know that the Queen wrote to Ambassador Pakharu before he died; it will have been in the papers you cleared up and sent home--'

'Did she send you to check up on me?'

Neferet's expression held shrewdness and some dislike, but I had no idea what to attribute to the situation, and what to past interaction between them.

With the silent deference of a slave, I went to make up the fire in the hearth, relying on those movements to make the woman, at least, automatically forget that I was present. Lumps of sea-coal dirtied my fingers; I wondered what nature of marks one might make on paper or wood using it.

My back was to the bed. I heard it creak as Rekhmire' leaned against the headboard.

'The embassy mail hasn't had time to catch up with me, these last few months. What I know, I know from Menmet-Ra. He asked if I would come here--'

'To check up on me.' She re-emphasised the words.

I turned my head to watch covertly, and saw that her every limb was stiff.

'I didn't ask for Pakharu's job! I didn't ask to be here when he died! Sacred Eight, I'm a book-buyer, not a diplomat! All I've been able to do is shut the embassy down, and tell the Venetians that the Queen-Goddess will send a replacement when the weather allows travelling. And deal with some minor essential matters myself. I'll be happy to hand over to Pakharu's replacement-whether that's Menmet-Ra, or any other man, or you--'

'Me?' Rekhmire''s voice was a dry squeak. 'I've no desire for an ambassador's post!'

'Really?' The Alexandrine woman leaned forward, sitting right on the edge of the linen-chest. 'Is that why you're here before Pakharu's sandals are cold? Travelling in winter? Because you're not looking for a promotion into the diplomatic service, and out of book-buying?'

Her pronounced features were all drawn up in concentration as she studied him: the light from the window would have made her a wonderful study to draw. Kohl emphasised the narrowing of her eyes as she searched his face.

Some kind of conclusion came to her; the moment of decision was obvious.

She rose to her feet with fluid grace. 'I'm sorry; I shouldn't speak to you like this while you're injured--'

'Neferet! I really have no interest--'

'You sleep, if you can; I'll come up again later.'

Her sandals clacked across the oak floorboards. The door shut behind her.

I poured a mug of Frankish small beer and moved to offer it to Rekhmire'. The brightness of the sun showed me droplets of sweat coalescing on the skin of his forehead, trickling down his temples.

'She's not going to tell you about this Herr Mainz,' I observed. 'Whoever he is. Who is he? Is it the man you mentioned while we were on the Iskander?'

He drank, and closed his eyes briefly. 'Is that an effort to take my mind off pain? Or merely vulgar curiosity?'

'Both,' I admitted. I added, to make him laugh, 'But mostly, vulgar curiosity.'

The Egyptian smiled faintly, opening his eyes. He shook his head when I offered to help him hold the drink; the pitch-lined leather cup shaking dangerously in his hands, liquid all but slopping onto the sheets.

'Apparently--' Rekhmire''s voice sounded weak, but familiarly acerbic. 'According to Menmet-Ra, all the Eight bless his name and loins--'

I couldn't help a snicker, even if he hadn't been trying to provoke it.

Rekhmire' continued dryly: 'According to him, as I mentioned on the Iskander, there's a man here in Venice who claims to have a machina that will print out written books, as easily and as clearly as woodcuts. This German Guildsman, Herr Mainz, is that man.'

Most of the picture-dealers I'd been to in Rome kept a stock of several thousand woodcuts ready to sell, since they were so popular and so cheap. The idea of a book being so available...I blinked, dazed, wondering how sick I must have been aboard ship not to hear this when Rekhmire' told me.

I reached out to take the Egyptian's tipping cup, and Rekhmire' blinked himself back to awareness.

'Naturally, Ty-ameny of the Five Great Names wants Herr Mainz to come to Alexandria. Think of such a print-making machina at the Royal Library! Ambassador Pakharu died before it could be arranged. Menmet-Ra told me Neferet hasn't answered messages he sent in the autumn, but she is only a book-purchaser, and not a member of the diplomatic service; she can do no more than be a caretaker. Menmet-Ra is clearly hoping someone else will be posted ambassador to Venice if he delays long enough in Rome...'

I must have looked blank.

'Ensuring the golem is sent to Alexandria.'

'Of course. You said: I remember.' I would not bring it to my mind's eye, I swore. And found myself vividly conscious of every delicate cog and piece of gearing in those polished marble and bronze fingers. Marble slick with scuffs of drying blood.

'This Herr Mainz may be a charlatan.'

Rekhmire' evidently sought to use the subject in turn to distract both me and himself from our different pains.

'I've seen men who claimed to set letters in the same way a woodcut can be printed off, but never one that wasn't slower than a good copyist, or more likely illegible after the tenth copy.'

I smiled. 'My job's safe, then.'

Rekhmire' punched at his pillow. 'The profession of scribe is safe. The chance of anyone ever employing you, with your habit of annoying marginalia...'

'My ambitions are crushed.'

It made him smile, but with more lines of pain in it than I wanted to see.

'The Janissary says some men stop breathing if they take too much poppy,' I said apologetically.

He nodded, the scored lines in his rounded face not diminishing. 'True. Or else they're left buying poppy to take for the rest of their lives. The pain is not as bad as it was.'

The spots of dampness on his brow, and spotting his stubbled scalp, called him liar. I kept my mouth shut.

Rekhmire' switched the direction of his thought with no apparent warning. 'You should show yourself here in Venice. Go to the squares, the palazzos, the markets. Let Neferet take you to the salons. Show yourself alive-as soon as possible. It puts a small obstacle that any of Videric's murderers will need to avoid.'

'It's the Council of Ten who rule here, isn't it?' I took over Neferet's linen-chest to sit down. 'If they ever catch and question the men who ambushed us, I suppose Videric's name would eventually come up?'

Rekhmire' narrowed his eyes, looking slightly impressed. 'Which is what we have to thank for the Iskander not being boarded as soon as we docked, and our throats slashed there and then.'

I found I was resting my hand on my belly and the salt-stained silk skirts. 'I'll go out. If I must. But we can discuss this later--'

'You need Frankish woman's dress. My purse is on the chest, there. The Merceria will have tailors and cloth: buy clothing.'

I pointed at the wooden framework over his leg, half-uncovered with sheets and blankets as it now was.

'That evidently affects the memory,' I explained.

Rekhmire' looked bewildered. 'What?'

'I'm not your slave any more!'

The lines of pain on his face were cut by the creases of a deep, appreciative smile. 'A little louder, please-there may be some man on the mainland who didn't hear you!'

'Just so I'm heard in this room!' Restless, I got up to walk from door to window, and window to door again. 'I don't have money to waste on Frankish women's clothes!'

He gave up the argument too easily. 'You might see if Neferet has anything she'll loan; she dresses in Frankish fashion when she has to.'

I had made a sketch or two of the exotically foreign woman, during Rekhmire''s restless periods of sleep, marking her deeply reddish-tan skin, satin black hair, and large eyes. Generously built, with a high brow and flawless carriage, she carried herself regally enough that I felt short, mannish, and laughable in her presence.

Somewhat satirically, I said, 'I don't think her gowns are going to fit me.'

'Pin up the hems. I see you haven't been looking with an artist's eye.'

'No, I doubt I am looking with an artist's eye! Consider yourself lucky I'm looking at all!'

Rekhmire' grinned, seeming unoffended.

I demanded, 'What am I missing?'

Despite pain and dishevelment, he looked infuriatingly smug. If I hadn't known it another of the Egyptian's attempts to cheer me, I would have quarrelled with him there and then.

'Listen.' He held up one long, spatulate finger.

Voices came in through the open window. I leaned out a little, between the shutters. In fact we were overlooking the walled garden, and not the canal directly, I found. Neferet was speaking with the Florentine lawyer Battista, and one of Honorius's men-at-arms.

I stared at her, and then back into this room, dim by contrast. Her national kinship with Rekhmire' was immediately apparent; even if he was all curves, and she all angles. It spoke itself in the tint of her skin, the long-lashed dark eyes, the large and elegant hands--

Large hands.

My head whipped around: I stared out of the window.

Rekhmire'. Neferet. Rekhmire'.

I stared from the one to the other, comparing this line with that.

'But!' I protested.

Rekhmire' threw his head back and laughed out loud, even as he clutched at himself in pain.

'But-she's the perfect woman!' I protested. 'I could paint her so!'

'She...doesn't have anything of what you have,' Rekhmire' said mildly, rubbing long fingers into the top of his thigh, massaging bruised flesh. He showed me all his teeth in a smile. 'Or, indeed, what I have. She was Jahar pa-sheri, when I knew my cousin first--'

He used the term as I'd heard him before, speaking of the Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny's bureaucrats.

'--and Neferet is a true eunuch.'

If I'd picked up anything about Alexandrine habits in Rekhmire''s company, and at the embassy in Rome, it was that it's common for Egyptians to take different names at different parts of their lives.

And that pa-sheri means 'son of '.

Rekhmire' added, 'Neferet chooses to dress as a woman in Venezia. And be one in all ways.'

Now that I looked, her softly plump shape had the appearance of being sleeked down under her robes by a corset. She was subtly too rounded at the shoulder and chest. The Egyptian woman stepped out of my view, under the colonnade at the front of the house; I heard the door open, and her voice and the soldier's diminish inside. If I listened with attention, her voice was low for a woman, and sensually husky: she might be a male alto.

'Christus Imperator!' I muttered, leaning back from the window ledge. 'Does anybody ever leave Egyptian Constantinople with their cock and balls intact!'

Rekhmire' choked.

I lurched to rescue the pitch-lined cup, taking it and setting it down on the chest. Rekhmire' wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, wincing between laughter and pain. His eyes spoke a volume or two.

'Many do!' he protested, when he had control of his voice. 'Neferet's an old friend as well as a cousin; she's not as intimidating as she seems, and she'll be happy to make you feel welcome in Venezia.'

'I suppose one of us should tell her about "Ilaria".' I managed a creditable imitation of his brow-raising. 'And as her old friend, "cousin", and my old master-that would be you.'

He thanked me, but not with the sincerity a man ought to use. I practised my sweetest feminine smile.

A thought intruded, pushing the mutual amusement aside. 'Is that why you never concerned yourself about my-condition?'

Rekhmire' laughed. It became a cough and a wince. The sweat of pain was back on his forehead; I regretted raising the matter. He snorted.

'Because my friend's made himself known as a girl since he was old enough to speak? As far as Neferet's concerned, she's been convinced since she was four that she has a woman's ka-a woman's soul. I've never doubted the strength of her opinion. And, truthfully, she lives a woman's life far more easily than a man's. But you-a matter of the body...and I would like to think that you and I get on rather more amiably than Neferet and I. Good a person as she is, we were jealous of each other as children, and it took some years to grow beyond that. It still comes out at times.'

He sweated. I sat on the edge of the bed again, to wipe his forehead with a clean kerchief.

'I don't know if it's a matter of the body.' I avoided meeting his eye as I spoke. 'It felt easy enough to live a man's life in Rome. Harder to be a woman here-but then, a woman's life is hard, almost everywhere. Restrictions are worse than obligations. What part of the soul is this ka?'

I doubted Father Felix, or any of the other clerks at the court of Taraco, would consider me competent to take part in a discussion concerning the soul. But I'm willing to try, if it takes his mind from how he hurts.

He fell asleep during his explanation.

The Janissary doctor Baris, came several times, twelve hours apart, worried for a time over the heat of the skin sewn over the wound, and then relieved. I let Honorius speak with him-he got more honesty, both being military men. After three days, he announced his visits could become less frequent.

He spoke with one eye in my general direction. I refrained from making myself scarce.

After a considerable pause for study, he observed, 'Five months, or a little more. Too late for measures of removal, without you die.'

I nodded, finding no voice.

Baris, gave me a smile strangely effective as reassurance. 'Then we concentrate on birth. Early or late.'

9

'I don't care!' I snapped, five days later. 'I'll move my bed in here and you'll have to watch me give birth! I'm not having you put any weight on that knee yet. You don't try to walk! Understand?'

'Yes, master...'

Rekhmire''s assumption of a slave's manner was too accurate for him to have been a freeman all his life, I thought, or even an Alexandrine bureaucrat-slave. He cocked an eyebrow at me. At my belly, in particular.

'I apologise,' he corrected himself. 'Yes, mistress.'

Since an appropriate insult eluded me, I reached down and ruffled the wheat-coloured bum-fluff that was growing on his scalp now he hadn't been able to get up and shave.

'That would carry much more weight,' I observed, 'if it didn't come from someone so closely resembling a dandelion!'

The Egyptian's eyes narrowed to slits, giving him the evil look of some ancient stone monument. 'Ask me if I wish to purchase you as a slave again-just ask me...'

'Not a chance!'

It made me grin to see him cheerful. Even if, to a degree, it sprang from being comfortably isolated in this sick-room from all responsibility.

'All those punishments you never subjected me to, master, and now it's too late...'

'Clearly.' He folded his arms and gave up the evil glare in favour of a blatant attempt to gain pity. 'But, as I recall, I never threatened you with anything so dire as being present at a childbirth. You're a cruel...'

'Yes?' I watched him trapped between gendered grammatical phrases, and was for the first time honestly amused.

'...I don't know. But whatever it is, you're a cruel one!'

I shifted my drawing-board to show him my work in silver-point. 'No, "cruel" would be drawing you when you're pouting.'

'Much as you may think you're amusing me,' Rekhmire''s smooth face might just have been concealing a grin, 'I assure you, I don't pout!'

'The silver-point drawing does not lie...This isn't bad. Of course, you don't have much choice about staying still for the modelling.'

'Ha!'

The sound of a book-buyer in full-throated outrage was something I'd missed. I grinned, and watched him fail to suppress a snicker.

'I can tell you're feeling better,' I added. 'So can everybody else. But you're still getting your food on wooden plates...'

And his drink in turned wooden drinking bowls, too; well-made Frankish ware. The beautiful grain of the wood was hardly the point, however, and by the Egyptian's shame-faced look I guessed he knew that.

'I only threw a bowl at you once, yesterday,' he protested. 'And it was completely called for!'

'Because I called you a bad invalid? You are--'

The drinking-bowl was at least empty when it bounced off the low ceiling-beam.

We sniggered like small children for a while.

I welcomed that, too. After the third and fourth days of his incapacity none of the Frankish servants would enter the room. Honorius's soldiers had had plates thrown at their heads with a frequency that frankly amused them, and caused them to openly admire the book-buyer.

But since I knew by now how little Rekhmire' likes to display temper, I could estimate the fear and fury that must be driving him.

'I assume you'll be walking before the birth...' I added cross-hatched shadows that failed entirely to round out the drawing of his hand. 'I wouldn't mind if you were there.'

I looked up at Rekhmire'.

'I...hadn't intended to say that.'

The Egyptian briefly nodded. 'I'll be there.'

It had become second nature by now, I realised, to push the ballooning fear away, before it robbed me of all breath, and to assume a fatalistic stance.

My body will dictate when I deal with this. There's nothing I can do.

Close my mind firmly to the future as I might, I couldn't ignore a dislike of spending Honorius's money and living on the Alexandrine house's charity.

I doubt any workshop master would hire me for a job. But that doesn't mean I won't try to find one.

It surprised me that Honoriusd idn't attempt to stop my search.

'No man's seen Carrasco, or any other man watching us.' He shrugged. 'And besides, the lads and I will be going with you...'

I thought he preferred to see me outside the sick-room from time to time. The weather remained a dry cold without snow. I was willing to go out only because Rekhmire''s wound appeared to be mending both faster and better than even Bar is, had anticipated.

No man in Venice appeared to teach the New Art. Which was no surprise, but no less infuriating.

On the next failed attempt to find employment, I thought it no coincidence that Honorius and I and a dozen of the men-at-arms ended up going back to the Dorsodura quarter by way of a campo that held pigment shops. I feasted my eyes on the rows of wooden boxes full of colour, and the small amount of unearthly and glowing four-ducat blue.

'I would go for a job picking the ashes for lapis lazuli.' I displayed my palms to my father, and we matched finger against finger. 'Women have small hands; they tend to be employed at it. But it's a job that goes nowhere in the industry, and my hands are in any case suspiciously large for a woman.'

I bought red chalk with Honorius's money and came away.

'I won't be a parasite.' I could not sufficiently voice my frustration. 'I don't have enough money left from Rome to support myself. And I owe Rekhmire' for the sea-voyage, leave aside what I owe you. Yes, you'd pay to have me apprenticed to a master here, if it could be managed safely, but this is a backwater-there's no one here who can teach me anything.'

Honorius pushed his lips together in a silent whistle.

I snapped, 'What?'

'I like a man who's determined in her opinions!' Honorius grinned. 'But leaving aside the hypothetical genius we'd evidently have to find as your workshop master--'

One of the older men, Fulka, chuckled. I sneered at Honorius, since he evidently invited it. The Lion of Castile beamed warmly at me.

'I don't want you in a workshop.' He sobered. 'Even if any man would hire a pregnant widow--'

I winced, both at the necessary public pretence, and the brutal but true statement.

'--how would you explain the dozen or more soldiers there with you? You'd be too open to attack in a workshop--'

'I won't be locked up in the embassy!'

'No.' Lines wrinkled at the outer corners of his eyes. 'I see a lot of you in me. I'd hate Sergeant Orazi to be continually hunting you down after you climb out of windows.'

The Armenian grinned at me with his remaining teeth.

'As if I'd do a thing like that.'

'Trust me, you'd do a thing like that.' Stopping at a chestnut vendor, Honorius rubbed his palms and held them out to the iron brazier while his men bargained.

The roast nuts burned my fingertips and mouth, peeling and eating, but were worth it for the hot, dry taste.

Walking on, Honorius observed, 'Remember you're not the only one in danger. That whoreson Videric will bear a grudge. He will have heard the part played in all this by Master Rekhmire'. I'd as soon the Egyptian was tended by someone I implicitly trust.'

Is it too early for this untried trust between Honorius and I?

I can feel in flesh and bone the tension of his body covering mine, while the flames of arquebuses blasted over our heads.

Honorius's sand-coloured brows lifted in faux-innocence. 'And ask yourself who you think Master Rekhmire' would prefer as a nurse-you, or a bunch of hairy thugs from Castile?'

The eponymous hairy thugs grinned their agreement.

'I could ask. And he'd probably go for your crusader veterans!' My basic knowledge of nursing extends no further than patching up a beaten slave.

Honorius had an air of being much pleased with himself.

'Which of us can ensure the book-buyer doesn't make a cripple of himself, by assuming he's fit enough to get up and wander around Venice tomorrow? And the day after. And the day after that.'

There was enough nodding and murmured agreement among the men eating their roasted chestnuts that I realised, They've adopted the royal book-buyer as a mascot. Along with the 'lucky hermaphrodite'...

'Rekhmire''s got enough common sense to stay off his feet while it's necessary.'

'While there's spies in the city, and he's looking for this German Guildsman he keeps yelling at the Egyptian woman about, and he knows you've been ambushed once already?'

I settled for an irritated grunt.

Honorius said, 'You have the best chance of keeping him from crippling himself. And, while I want you under my eyes until we've removed this spy of Videric's, I think also that you feel you owe the Egyptian a debt, and would like a chance to repay it.'

I found myself giving Honorius a startled look.

Begin with the fact that Rekhmire' bought me, and never treated me as slaves are treated in Iberia. And that, even if he upset my life like an overturned cart, he intended well. He took me out of Rome when he had no reason to; when any other man would have abandoned me to my own business. But, more to the point, he is a friend who lifts my heart. If he cheers me whenever I see him, it only seems reasonable that I would want to do the same in return.

'I'll do what I can,' I said. 'Maybe I can sell some of my sketches while I'm here, though. There ought to be some money I can bring in.'

'I'll give you a commission.' Honorius held up both hands, palms out, as if to forestall an explosion. 'No, listen to me! The chapel at home needs rebuilding; I'd have to bring somebody in to fresco it. I've seen your work books. If you're not good enough now, you soon will be. And if what you paint is amateur--'

'You won't pay me?'

'I'll pay you half, for the time and work. But-worse, to you-if it's rubbish, I'll have another artist in to rip it out, and re-do the plaster and fresco. Do me a proper one.'

Fresco has to be done right the first time: there are no second chances. For all Masaccio's teaching, I'm nowhere near practised enough.

I wondered if I could talk my father into painted wood panelling without him realising that. Probably not. So I must merely be honest.

'It need not be fresco,' Honorius added. 'I'm open-minded on the medium.'

I suppose a man does get to be a reasonable judge of character when taking on soldiers for his companies. Or else my father is coming to know me.

'What subject do you want for the painting?'

'One of the soldier-saints. To be honest, I'd like it focused around St Gaius. A triptych, maybe. That would give you the joining, the betrayal, and the exile to the East.'

He seemed certain enough, which is a bonus in a client.

I could have wished my first patron not to come from nepotism, but I'll hardly be the first artist to begin that way. And I detected the steel under his surface-if his son-daughter produced anything inferior, no man would ever see it.

I'll make it good enough to take his breath away!

'There's no hurry,' I said, 'but I'll start some compositional drawings, so you can be thinking about them. What?'

My father stopped grinning like an idiot, said, 'Nothing,' and began grinning again.

Good enough that when he sees my work, he won't even be able to speak, never mind laugh.

'Ilario?' Honorius didn't correct himself, either because it would draw attention to my gender, or because he hadn't noticed.

'What? Oh.' I was walking with my hand high on my belly again, I realised, although it was scarcely less flat than before. The archetypal pose in which to paint the Mother of Christ Imperator. If without the toga and tiara.

With resolute optimism, Honorius said, 'I acknowledge you. I'll acknowledge my grandchild when it's born. If you want to claim the father in Carthage, I'll help--'

It must have been clear on my face that I pictured him and his household guard breaking down the doors of Donata's rooming-house, and beating Marcomir senseless.

'I have enough money even to hire lawyers,' he said mildly.

I smiled.

'I don't want Carthage involved,' I said, after a moment. 'They're too interested in me as it is...But thank you.'

Honorius patted my shoulder. 'One day you'll realise that you don't have to thank me for anything. I'm your father.'

I wasn't in a bad enough mood to mention Videric and Federico, my other experiences of paternal affection.

'I'll nurse Rekhmire',' I said, affecting a sigh.

Honorius smiled. Our gondola waited at the edge of steps, by the arc of a bridge leading over an ice-fringed canal. Honorius's men occupied both it and the wider oared boat beside it. I allowed my father to help me in.

Sitting, I hauled my skirts into some semblance of tidiness, arranging myself on the padded velvet seat in the stern; looked up, and saw Sergeant Orazi go down with a feathered shaft hanging out of his back.

'All'ar me!' Honorius bellowed in the local dialect. 'To arms!'

A flood of men-twenty, thirty, more-poured out of the nearby alleys, splitting into plainly practised groups. One group pushed the boat containing the majority of Honorius's men out into the centre of the canal, where it circled aimlessly for all one of the men attempted to paddle, and another to rack his crossbow.

I had only time to see senior Ensign Viscardo leap into the black water and start swimming grimly towards us. Honorius scooped me up off the seat with a powerful tug unexpected in a lean man, and dropped me in the bottom of our boat, turning back to command the brawl. Sparks shot into the air where two blade-edges slid down each other. Windows flew open overhead; banged shut again.

I managed to crawl forward, the skirts an intolerable obstacle where I kept kneeling on them.

One of our oars had fallen in-board. It was solid hard wood, perhaps twelve feet long, with the blade painted indigo and white on either side; far too cumbrous to wield as a staff-weapon, as I had with the iron candle-stand in Carthage.

Kneeling up, I squinted, spotting which man on the canal-path was plainly directing the operation.

A cloaked man wearing a Venetian white half-mask that covered him down to his lower lip. A plain expressionless mask-face...

Blank as a golem, I thought, as he loped towards the edge of the canal, calling out brusque orders.

I hefted the oar, found its point of balance, stood straight up in the rocking gondola, and cast the oar as a man casts the javelin in Taraco's Roman games.

The man turned, just as I fell forward from the impetus and landed on my hands and knees in the boat.

His movement shifted him enough that only the edge of the oar's end caught him-but the blow was to his temple. I heard the thuck! clearly over men shouting and metal scraping against metal.

The man's legs went out from under him: he dropped like a sack of meal.

'That one!' I yelled to Honorius, pointing. 'There!'

A scuffle of swinging blades intervened. Men in blue livery with Honorius's badge swayed past me, in a rough and tumble that was more beer-house brawl than battle-line. Honorius's voice rose up from the back, shouting as much. The hired assassins fell back, routing into alleys and across the square

I stared along the edge of the canal.

Bare. No fallen man

I don't suppose he fell in and drowned.

No, that would be too easy. Either he recovered, or some of the men abandoning the fight piecemeal dragged him with them when they ran.

'Was that your Ramiro Carrasco de Luis?' I demanded as Honorius jogged up, calling his own men back.

'Couldn't tell. Didn't get a good look at him.' He panted, scowling at me. 'You shouldn't be doing things like that!'

'Why not? Oh.' I found myself with my hand resting on my belly. Again. I felt no different to how I ever have. 'It...doesn't seem to have done any harm.'

Or any good, depending on how you look at it.

'Has to have been Carrasco,' Honorius grunted. 'If the Council was letting thieves' bands get that big, we'd have heard gossip about it-Ilario, where do you think you're going?'

Sergeant Orazi swore as one of his men extracted an arrow-head from between the plates of his brigandine. Orazi didn't seem hurt; more embarrassed. Viscardo was probably in worse case, on hands and knees on the path, puking up dirty water.

Making my way with care down the rocking boat to the padded seat, I lifted my gaze to Honorius.

'This has gone on long enough! You know the way to Aldra Federico's palazzo, don't you? We're going there. Now.'

Honorius and his sergeant, who had been exchanging glances with far too much exaggerated tolerance in them for my liking, both looked disconcerted.

'Or,' I remarked into his silence, 'I can find the way on my own.'

If I were wholly woman, the words crazy pregnant girl would have passed Honorius's lips. But he and his soldiers sensed also the knight's training I have had in King Rodrigo's court, and that confused them.

Honorius grumbled, signalling to the gondola oarsmen.

'And what do you propose to do when we get there!'

10

Travelling along the Canal Grande, I failed at memorising details of the facades, for Honorius's protests. He had a look on his face which I suspected his officers must have seen, in a command tent, on crusade.

'It's too dangerous for you. You can't go anywhere near--' He broke off. 'Damn, that was stupid. Whatever you had in mind, you'll do now, won't you? Those skirts are deceptive.'

His sergeant smirked.

'I don't know what you're so happy about,' my father muttered, 'since I happen to know you owe Attila twenty ducats!'

'A bet?' I didn't know whether to be offended or amused.

'Orazi here bet you'd go haring off after Carrasco on your own. Attila--' Honorius nodded towards the large man at his oar. 'He wagered you'd want an escort.'

'They both bet I'd follow him?'

Honorius gave me the 'raw recruit, you don't know enough to lace up your own sandals!' look.

I huddled back into my cloak, uncertain how I felt about Honorius's men-at-arms knowing me well. On balance, I found it reassuring.

'This Ramiro Carrasco de Luis,' I offered. 'You have to have some sympathy for the man.'

Honorius choked. 'What!'

I smiled sunnily at my father. 'You say Carrasco's hired by Videric. He thinks all he has to do is assassinate some young man. What could be easier? Take a young man out drinking and whoring, stick a knife in him when he's dead drunk, and there he is-dead. Only now Ramiro Carrasco finds out that reputable young widows tend not to go out whoring and drinking...'

The youngest officer, Ensign Saverico, snickered. Since I was facing forwards, I saw the other soldiers grinning. Honorius very wisely didn't turn around in the gondola to castigate them. He knows a losing battle when confronted with one.

'If Rekhmire' weren't recovering so well,' I added, 'I doubt I'd be so sanguine about chasing down the man who attacked him.'

'Attacked us.' Honorius humphed. 'What's to stop Ramiro Carrasco sticking a dagger in you as soon as you walk up to him?'

'Six heavily-armed men with more axes than sense?' I made a show of counting heads. 'I beg your pardon. Eight. Oh, except you don't have an axe...'

Ensign Saverico apparently choked on something. Sergeant Orazi whacked him hard in the middle of his back-plate.

'...Besides which, I don't know what the Doge's Council do when they catch public murderers, but I'd bet it's painful and disgusting and better avoided.'

Honorius shook his head, but whether in agreement with that statement, or despair over my attitude, I didn't know. Long ago, I discovered that a minor joy of wearing skirts is baiting respectable men. I wasn't sure if I was amused or annoyed that it worked with my father.

'That's Federico's house.' Honorius pointed towards a landing stage, over the pale green ripples of the canal. 'Be careful--'

Having gathered up my skirts beforehand, I was able to step ashore the moment the gondola touched the canal-side, before Ensign Viscardo could throw a line around the mooring-post.

The impetus of my foot pushed the boat. It drifted back away from the quay.

I heard Orazi curse behind me. And the slap of rope falling onto water.

Pole-axes and crossbows aren't the way to solve this.

We had turned into a small side-canal-the access to this five-storey building for tradesmen and others who wouldn't disembark at the main jetty. I found myself on a paved quay with Gothic-arched windows in front of me.

Ignoring the shout from behind, I walked towards the narrow door, approached by six or seven stone steps.

On the top step, a dark-haired man in a cloak sat with his head resting down on one hand.

He looked up as I approached. A red and rapidly-darkening swollen lump showed on the left side of his forehead, bleeding from a narrow split in the skin. He blinked, his gaze glassy.

I walked up the flaking steps and smiled at him. 'That looks as though it hurts.'

I pulled a linen kerchief out of my sleeve.

The man sat and stared up at me.

I licked the kerchief and reached down to dab it carefully against his swelling flesh.

He hissed a breath, blinking, eyes focusing.

I showed him pink stains on the yellow cloth. 'Not so good. You may need a physician. Although it seems Venetian doctors are usually worse than the disease.'

'Indeed.' The man plainly agreed by reflex and instinct, not conscious thought. He had the curly black hair of Taraconensis, and skin the colour of old ivory, where it wasn't swelling and turning bruise-blue. Brown eyes showed so dark that pupil was barely distinguishable from iris. Under his cloak, the plain red doublet and hose he wore were servant's quality, not fitting him well; I concluded they were not his.

He didn't desire to come out dressed as Federico's family secretary.

'Who are you?' He struggled to get words out, squinting up from the steps. The sun must be at my back. He could see even less of me than I anticipated. 'What are you doing?'

'Don't be foolish. You know who I am.' I licked my kerchief again and gently cleaned around what looked like a splinter, driven shallowly under the skin of his forehead. 'This is going to hurt: hold still...Got it! You, your name is Ramiro Carrasco de Luis, and you-work for my mother's husband.'

He winced under my hands, wide-eyed.

I saw him visibly think to use the pain of the splinter's removal as an excuse-and then dismiss the idea.

'You're...'

'Ilaria.'

'Ilaria.' He emphasised the feminine ending very slightly.

'That's right.' I could hear voices, not far behind, on the quay; evidently my father and his men had achieved a landing, and were disagreeing over something.

Whether or not to interrupt the mad hermaphrodite, probably.

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis flushed darkly, high on his cheeks. He glanced dazedly at the armed men. I was uncertain whether or not he registered their significance.

'Madonna Ilaria...sorry...I'm-only a servant; I'm secretary to Aldra Federico's daughter--'

I managed an expression that stopped him stumbling out with a false story. He looked at me foolishly, his mouth open.

'You have an interesting face,' I said. 'Who should I ask for permission to draw you?'

Carrasco appeared thoroughly flustered. 'Draw me?'

'I'm sure you were told I'm a painter...'

It isn't easy to exert any impression of authority sitting on your arse on a doorstep. I could have told him that myself. Every time he attempted to rise, I pressed down on the bruised flesh of his brow with fingers and kerchief.

He caught his lip between his teeth, bit down, and failed to suppress a yelp.

'Madonna Sunilda!' he managed to get out. 'Would give any permission. Or her father! Madonna, I don't understand what-why--'

'You should use witch-hazel for that bruise.' I straightened up, folding my kerchief neatly, and put it away under the bronze silk and brown velvet of my sleeve. Borrowing clothes from Neferet had its advantages. I reached up and put my large, lined cloak-hood back.

'It's nice to see a face from home.' I grinned at him amiably. 'Even if it does belong to someone who's been sent to kill me. I'm sure we're going to be great friends, you and I!'

It took me a minute, perhaps two, to wave and get Honorius to stop grousing at Sergeant Orazi and approach.

In that time, Ramiro Carrasco de Luis sat with his mouth open and couldn't seem to speak a word.

Other servants showed us inside.

The palazzo's tall rooms were decorated in the Classical style, ceilings plastered so that the structural beams didn't show through. I had no eye for the decorative work, or the carved ash-wood door frames and wall panelling.

After going so long without speaking to my foster father-What am I to say to Aldra Federico, now? And if Valdamerca's with him, or my sisters...

The servants threw open the doors to a great gallery overlooking the Canal Grande.

It was full of people.

11

Most were middle-aged men; most were in Frankish gowns and hose. Rich Venetians.

Honorius muttered, 'Fuck,' under his breath, and straightened his shoulders. 'You do pick your moments.'

I looked for the horse-face and dark hair of Valdamerca, for the fiend-sisters of my childhood, and saw none of them. Only a male gathering, I realised, as Aldra Federico looked up from the servant who directed his attention to us.

He hadn't changed-still a good-looking middle-aged man, as curl-haired as Carrasco. He washed his hair in henna, I suspected. He must be in his middle sixties by now, but seemed fifteen years younger.

Federico stepped out of the crowd with a formal smile. 'Welcome! Ilaria!'

The smile took on an avid edge, that he must imagine he was keeping concealed.

'My dear! When I invited Venezia's artists, I'd no idea you'd hear of it! But welcome! I had no idea you were in the Serene Republic!' Federico waved a careless hand. Following his gesture led my eye across the throng.

I glimpsed the Florentine lawyer Leon Battista, talking to soberly-dressed older men. No Neferet, that I could see. No other man I recognised.

How do I broach the subject of Videric sending a paid murderer to kill me?

I caught the moment that Federico's pupils widened.

Rosamunda's voice sounded in my memory. 'As soon as you stand in a room together.'

I saw by Federico's open stare at Honorius that at least one secret was now out in the open, to be gossiped about.

Best court manners returned as if I'd never left Taraco. 'You know Captain-General Honorius, he tells me. I was certain, sir, you wouldn't mind him accompanying me; he's a fellow art-enthusiast.'

'Not at all...' Federico spoke absently, his deceptively sharp gaze still anatomising Honorius's features.

Is Federico interested for any other reason than gossip and scandal? Is he Videric's man, now? Useless to guess. He would be interested in scandal, in any case; I'd known that since he took me to court at fifteen.

As to whether he now reports back to Aldra Videric...

'Honorius!' A large, floridly blond man lurched between the conversing groups of Venetian men, rolling up with a blast of brandy on his breath. He slammed a hand on my father's shoulder, which somewhat to my surprise didn't knock Honorius over.

'Had no idea you were down this way! Not looking for a job, are you?'

The retired Captain-General of Castile and Leon smirked, looking down at the Frank. The fair-skinned man was in his late thirties, I estimated. Both men allowed themselves to be served wine, in Venetian-made glasses. Both looking as if they shouldn't be holding the delicate spiral parti-coloured glass stems. And for the same reason, I realised. They're both soldiers.

'Ilario.' Honorius didn't correct his suffix. 'This is Messer Carmagnola. We commanded troops together up in Aragon. He's running Venice's land forces now-isn't that right? Carmagnola, my daughter Ilaria.'

The piggy red eyes of the Captain-General of Venice surveyed me with subdued lust. Subdued out of deference to Honorius, I realised.

'I'm a mercenary; I do what I'm paid to do.' Carmagnola grinned, took my hand, and kissed it. He wavered, falling-down drunk.

Honorius slapped him on the shoulder in return. 'You beat the Milanese!' He spoke expansively to me. 'The current Doge has been in power these five years: he wants a mainland empire. I think our Carmagnola's going to give it to him. Are you being treated all right here, boy?'

My father gave an expert demonstration of a man concealing that he is not entirely sober-which, since he hadn't yet drunk from his Venetian-made glass, would give this Carmagnola and my foster father Federico the reassuring idea that Honorius had been apprehensive before he arrived. And so more likely to put a word wrong, here and there.

'Doge Foscari's very good to me,' Carmagnola slurred. 'Everybody is.'

The law I learned a long time ago in Rodrigo's court-always speak as if you are overheard-seemed to apply here, despite the talk around us being philosophy and the arts, rather than politics, or anything else the authorities might not like. I glanced about, uneasy.

The Frankish man Carmagnola leaned forward and prodded Honorius's shoulder with a weather-beaten finger. His nails had been chewed down so much, and plainly so consistently, that they had grown back a little deformed.

'Is it true Carthage is sending the legions into the Iberian coast? You know-where you always said you came from. Taraconensis.' He stumbled badly over the name.

Legions!

Social mores dictate downcast eyes for women; I was glad enough of it then, or else I would have given away my shock. If this man is a captain for Venice's Council of Ten, he's involved deep in Frankish politics, and North African affairs too. And what he says is a confirmation of all Rekhmire''s concerns over Carthage.

'Legions?' Honorius spoke mildly enough to rouse my suspicions, if not the drunken mercenary's.

'Lord God, you know Carthage! They've got to have their import grain! Give 'em half an excuse and they'll take over any farmland outside the Penitence--' Carmagnola waved the hand that held his fragile glass; expensive wine slopped on his doublet's velvet cuff, and the so-fine flax linen of his shirt under it. I wondered numbly if I could accurately reproduce that stained translucent effect in oils.

'Didn't the government in Taraco fall?' Carmagnola added, visibly pulling himself together, glancing over at Federico. 'Or a king die? Or something? Honorius, I know you always said there was no career for you there-no wars.'

My foster father Federico shrugged, at his most diplomatic. 'There haven't been wars in Taraconensis-wars involving Taraconensis-in twenty-five years. Our noble Honorius needed to travel north as far as Castile and Leon to make his name.'

Honorius bowed with the lack of subtlety of a blunt soldier. I doubted Federico would believe that role now, with me standing beside a visible blood-father.

Carmagnola, apparently as if he forced his senses to obey him through the wine-haze, said, 'Taraconensis has a border with the Franks, doesn't it? Only a short one, where the Via Augusta runs between the mountains and the sea, but still a border. Carthage would love a land-route into Europe.'

I assumed the stupefied expression of a woman confronted with politics.

Given that Federico still thought of me as a King's amusing freak, he might credit my lack of interest, too.

I took a polite step back. A woman on the edge of any group is easily ignored; I wondered if I could use that to avoid the urgent questions Federico would doubtless have for me.

Bad weather will have delayed messages. How recent will this Carmagnola's news about Taraco be? Do mercenary commanders have better means of communication, even in the months when war is impossible?

Lost in deliberation, I missed my moment-Leon Battista appeared at my elbow without sufficient warning for me to avoid him.

'When may I see your brother?'

Whenever you like!

I managed not to smirk at my thoughts. If I did, Leon would put it down to feminine frivolity.

'He, ah, went into Dalmatia for the winter. Can I help?'

If one ignored his boat-prow of a nose, it was possible to note that Leon Battista had small, keen eyes. He studied me for a longer moment than was polite, and steered me a step aside from the crowd.

'It was you, madonna, wasn't it?'

'Me?'

With all else-with not being able to step outside the Campo San Barnaba without expecting an ambush-I have forgotten to think up a plausible tale for Neferet's Florentine.

'You.' Leon's hazel eyes shone bright with two catch-lights from the sunny window. 'There is no "brother". You disguised yourself as a man to work in Masaccio's workshop, didn't you?'

I managed to reply without hesitation. 'I wore men's clothing in Masaccio's workshop, yes.'

That much is certainly true...

'You will excuse me.' Leon's voice held subdued excitement. 'I'm here on business, but I saw you, and was suddenly sure...'

He had a roll of papers clasped in one hand. He noticed my interest, glanced about, and on a sudden pushed them into my grasp.

'These are common enough in Venice.'

The top one was a manuscript news-letter-composed of foreign news, propaganda both political and military, and stories of horrid crimes and murders, and the state executions they inevitably led to, all described in minute detail. Murders of husbands by wives appeared especially popular.

'I brought them to circulate, useless as they are. All bell-tower politics,' Leon Battista sneered. 'No Italian city-state ever cares about matters further away than the ringing of their own campanile can be heard! But I pass them privately because the Council of Ten would ban them if they could,' he added. 'The Doge thinks it's only one step from circulating manuscript news to having women preaching, pagans in the Senate, and the baptism of cats and horses!'

Most of the letters purported to have been written by some 'foreign visitor' to Venice. I turned my head sideways to squint at the penmanship, recognising the Venetian style.

'This is something I never considered when I was looking for employment! Although I suppose they hang the scribes, as well as whoever dictates the news-letters?'

Leon narrowed his hazel eyes, evidently not decided on whether I had a morbid sense of humour, or whether I made some attempt to feel out his political stance. Before I could add a joke to push his mind in the one direction, he reached out to extract one sheet of paper from the sheaf in my hands.

I held on to it, having a better grip than a woman.

'What's this?' I turned it about in my hand, adding, not too quickly, 'I don't speak your Florentine Italian.'

The relief in his expression was brief, but I caught it.

'This? Oh-I have bought some foreign letters to circulate, also. This is a similar letter of news, but for Florence.'

It's true I don't speak the Italian language of Florence. However, months in Masaccio's workshop, puzzling out the notes Tommaso Cassai left me, mean that I read a little of it.

Enough to enable me to make out 'Cast down the blood of the Medici Duke!' and 'Make this a true republic!'

Dangerous, I reflected.

I wondered who he had come here to meet, and pass these papers on to. Not that it matters. If I know little about Venice's politics, I know even less about those of Florence, but any invitation to depose a duke is rarely welcomed by a ruler.

It was not that which made me retain the paper.

This one was not written by a scribe.

The letters showed round, black, even, and as clear-edged as oak-gall ink and the sharpest quill could make a line. No smudging-I pushed the pad of my thumb across the page.

'How long did this take to make?'

Leon Battista's wariness vanished, seeing me involved in the manufacture of the news-sheet rather than its contents.

'As long as it would take a man to count to thirty.' He grinned at my expression. Relief may have moved him to speak out more than he intended. 'The setting up of the letters takes longer, to begin with.'

'Like a woodcut.' Masaccio had talked a little to me of that, and engraving.

Leon nodded. 'But then...this is neither the first nor the five hundredth sheet made.'

Which makes the sharp clarity of the edges more than remarkable.

'How many in Florence can read?' I mused aloud.

Leon Battista shrugged. 'Enough that if you nail a news-letter to a door, one man can read it aloud to a dozen before the Duke's guards arrive.'

Too much of a coincidence, that Leon Battista would have something printed of such quality, and that Neferet knows of the existence of the Herr Mainz that the Pharaoh-Queen wishes to see.

'Can I keep this?'

Because I know Rekhmire' will want to see it!

Leon shook his head. 'I'm truly sorry, madonna, but you know what the authorities are like about news. I take enough of a risk conveying letters myself; I wouldn't forgive myself if I put you in danger of being thought a spy.'

A flicker of movement in my peripheral vision: Ramiro Carrasco de Luis.

The sleekly muscular dark man made an unobtrusive presence in Federico's apartments, acting as major-domo to pass on orders to the lower servants. He had taken a necessary handful of minutes to change out of his muddied and blood-stained clothes, reappearing in a charcoal-black Italian doublet and hose, of a quality remarkably good for a servant. But then again, it would be like Sunilda to want her secretary to appear smart.

The secretary rolled his eyes, evidently overhearing Leon Battista.

I said amiably, and a little loudly, 'True. Venice can be full of dangers.'

Leon frowned. If not for Carrasco being a servant, and therefore invisible, the Florentine might have noticed him flush, and deduced that I'd landed a dart in a vulnerable place. Which might lead to further undesirable conclusions.

Without showing haste, I changed the subject back. 'The printing is very fine.'

'Yes.' Leon didn't look guilty, which gave me some hopes for him as a conspirator or insurrectionist, or whatever he was to Florence.

He did bite at his lip, as he looked down at me. Momentarily, his gaze was distant, as if he could not help where his mind turned.

'Masaccio...Tommaso...' He spoke in a sudden rush. 'Is the child his?'

I might burst into laughter, or tears, or punch the Florentine.

The moment of decision must have given him the impression I was distressed.

'Madonna, I'm sorry! Forgive me for hoping that there was at least something left of my friend.'

I smiled forgiveness, as women do, and sought a way to distract him. 'How did you know that "Ilario" was not a man?'

His lips quirked in a very small smile. 'You know too much about painting for a normal woman, Madonna Ilaria. I doubt that comes from talking to a brother-you're too passionate about it, and you use Masaccio's very phrases. He must have been the master you learned from.'

Leon's expression was so seriously intent that I again desired to laugh. The thought of eavesdroppers sobered me. It was difficult not to stare around at the nobles of Venice that Federico had gathered under his roof.

What Leon evidently thinks a romantic, adventurous tale will be looked on as criminal by the Council of Ten, especially if they find out the whole of the matter.

A movement signalled Honorius's approach.

I looked Leon Battista in the eye, with what I thought he would read as defiance and shame. Speaking in an undertone, I said, 'Master Leon...I can only ask you not to reveal what I've done. The child isn't Masaccio's. He never knew I was with child. I went through a marriage ceremony in Rome. Then...then the bride was deserted by her groom.'

My father hung back until Leon Battista had finished his apologies, protestations, reassurances, and promises that he would come to the Alexandria House in the near future, to further put my mind at rest.

Arm linked implacably through mine, Honorius steered me steadily towards the doors.

'And you say I've been too much under the Egyptian's influence!'

'I said nothing to Leon that wasn't true!'

'But you said it so he'd hear a lie!'

'You recognised that,' I said mildly, 'so I blame Rekhmire', because mercenary commanders are blunt, unsubtle, unpolitical animals...'

He laughed, hard enough that he choked. 'Ah, you have been talking to Carmagnola. The man's as much a conspirator as any damn courtier-we're better off out of here!'

I could only agree.

'Ilaria!' My foster father Federico reappeared. 'You're not leaving?'

'I have business elsewhere.' Honorius's smile was amiable and intractable in equal measure.

Nothing need be said out loud, I realised. Here I am. Here is my face on an older version of myself. If Federico's a pawn of Videric, he has scandal to pass on; if he's an ally, then Honorius's men-at-arms downstairs are adequate warning.

And as for Aldra Videric's assassin...

I glimpsed Ramiro Carrasco de Luis behind Aldra Federico, and guessed it to be the secretary who had prevented us slipping away unnoticed. He gave me a very swift, covert stare.

'Foster father.' I confined myself to a modest female's demeanour. 'I know you'll understand that, for my work, I have need of a trustworthy and discreet artist's model. May I borrow Secretary Carrasco from you?'

Federico put his hand through his curly hair, dishevelling it enough that the baldness of his crown became visible. His expression was extraordinary.

'You don't need to worry about disgrace,' I added. 'While I'm dressed as a woman, I have a duenna at all times-Madonna Neferet, the Egyptian representative in Venice. Well, her, or her women-servants. And Master Honorius loans me his honour guard when I go out.'

Seeing neither of the men with me react to 'dressed as a woman', Federico demanded bluntly, 'What about when you dress as a man?'

Either he's unobservant, or I don't show as much as I feel I do.

Valdamerca, he said, was out at the Merceria with my foster sisters. She was always the more intelligent one in the family. And she has a woman's eye for such things. One look at my very minutely larger breasts...Thank God it's just Federico!

'I don't dress as a man in Venezia.' I met Federico's suspicious gaze. 'For a while, it's easier to be a woman.'

He snorted. 'Oh, well, it would be! No need to work for a living, or defend yourself, or trouble your head with business.'

Work for a living? What do you think your household's women servants do?

'This drawing, though...'

'I have a commission.' I need not even lie about it. 'I need to make sketches for a chapel fresco. I haven't yet decided on the treatment of the subject, but the Franks seem to have a certain attitude to Judas-St Gaius-that I'd like to explore.'

Ramiro Carrasco had evidently been educated well enough, or been around enough Franks, to pick up the reference. His face was as blank as the wooden panelling on the walls.

'Tomorrow will do, to start,' I said briskly. 'If you don't need him, foster father?'

It occurred to me that the difficulty with Aldra Federico always seeming a little shifty is that it made it impossible to know if he was being more so, now.

'Oh, you can take him-you and Sunilda always did squabble over your toys.' Federico managed an unpleasant smirk. 'I'll have her send him over.'

Departing publicly enough that Federico couldn't ply me with questions, I promised to come again when my foster mother and sisters should be present, and allowed the Aldra's servants to show us out to the canal jetty. The salt wind off the lagoon caught me with a razor-edged chill.

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis, as my father and I passed him on the way out, turned his head away, incidentally giving me his best profile. Which was, at this moment, quite definitely not the left.

12

Knowing how little Rekhmire' liked his mind unoccupied, I gave him the story while I unpacked my chalk.

'Messer Leon Battista has letters not written by a scribe's hands...' Rekhmire' tapped his thumbnail against his teeth.

His bed had the occupied air of the long-sick. Rumpled sheets and blankets were covered in scrolls, among which I saw the accounts of the Alexandrine House, as well as several military treatises loaned him by my father. He snarled absently at the willow-withy cage supporting sheets over his strapped leg.

'You're certain?' he queried.

'There was a nick in the "e".' So small as to be all but invisible, except to an eye used to drawing letters. 'That made me think of woodcuts, where an error's repeated in every printing. These letters were printed that way, I think. Every "e" had the nick.'

'And Messer Leon is Neferet's...lover, one assumes.' Rekhmire''s eyebrows lifted, which together with his unshaven skull gave him the air of a ruffled buzzard-chick. 'If Leon Battista of the Alberti family has found a man who prints letters, and it's not the German Guildsman that Menmet-Ra is after, then that is a remarkable coincidence.'

'Surely Leon wouldn't have let me look at the letter if he'd known his printer is wanted here?'

'It may be such a coincidence. In which case he wouldn't know.' The rounded brows snapped down. 'Or he may not have been told all by Neferet. I'll keep an eye on her. Matters may be opposite-you say Leon Battista was unwilling to let you see what is, after all, seditious writing. He may feel he needs to keep Neferet safe in ignorance.'

'Or Neferet provided him with this German Herr Mainz.' If Neferet was Rekhmire''s friend, it was up to me to state the obvious, and save him sounding as if he condemned her. 'It's not possible to travel anywhere in this weather. She may think the German can't go to Alexandria yet in any case, so he may as well help Leon.'

'By getting embroiled in Italian Peninsula politics!' Rekhmire''s fist came down too weakly on the bed-frame. 'They burn the authors of sedition here!'

He heaved a sigh, his body slumping at the end of it.

'We therefore proceed with great caution. If anything should come to you, be certain to tell me. If this is not the trail of Herr Mainz...then I have nothing at all to follow.'

'I'll listen out,' I promised.

His gaze through the leaded window at the cold sky became distant. 'You will not have seen the Great Library. Walking past mile on mile of scroll-cases...Do you know what there is, every few yards, on every floor in the Library?'

I shook my head.

'Sand buckets. Blankets. Against fire. So many of those scrolls are the sole copy. Our scriptoria work through the night as well as the day, but...can you imagine? To have as many copies as a printer's machina could make?' His voice took on a pained quality. 'And then-never to lose the last copy of a book, ever again?'

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis arrived at the Alexandrine House the following day, in a fine wool cloak against the winter rain, under which he wore a charcoal doublet so dark as to be almost black, the metal tags of his points all silvered. His shoes had small fashionable points, and his hose fitted his legs as close as another skin.

Not the clothes in which to control an ambush, I reflected, and put up with half an hour of the man preening when I ordered him to sit on an upright wooden chair and lift his head, as if he gazed up at the Tree.

Finally, I abandoned coal and chalk and tinted paper. 'Remorse.'

Ramiro Carrasco's head snapped down. He gave me a startled look. 'What? Madonna,' he added hastily.

This was in part a response to the glare from the duenna whom Neferet had provided: a round, elderly Venetian woman who evidently didn't hold with handsome young foreign men. And in part a certain natural sense of self-preservation, since Honorius detailed off-shifts of his more intimidating household guard to sit in my room as I sketched.

Over the last weeks, the soldiers had dragged home a few unfortunate men they suspected of being spies for Lord Videric. 'In the way that a cat brings dead birds home to its master,' Rekhmire' commented, although these men tended to be only half-dead. After questioning them, Honorius donated the wounded men to the city's charitable hospices, where they could be more easily watched.

If what he learned is true, Aldra Videric might have more men than Ramiro Carrasco in Venice.

Or Ramiro Carrasco might hire men in order to give us that impression.

'You're St Gaius.' The white chalk had managed to mark not only my hand and my cuff, but the front of my bodice, and my lap. I shifted the drawing-board, and thought it just as well I'd borrowed old clothes from one of Neferet's Frankish servants. 'St Gaius-Judas, according to the people who pray at the local chapels here. You're looking up at the man you betrayed. Whether it's Christus Viridianus on the Green Tree, or Christ the Imperator, it's all one. He's been hung up and broken, on your word; bones broken but no blood spilled; he's dead-and it's your doing. So stop looking as if you're wondering how many girls are staring at you...'

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis blinked, and then essayed a small smile. 'As far as I know, just the one, madonna.'

I let his smile die in the coldness of my reaction, and under the granite looks of the duenna and soldiers.

'There's a difference between staring and studying,' I said.

He appeared bewildered, and put out.

I added, 'And I'm not sure you'd like me staring at you...'

Carrasco opened his mouth to make some gallant protest, evidently recalled I was not entirely a woman-or a man-and blushed like a court page of fourteen or so.

I told Rekhmire' I could keep him off-balance. So far, I'm right.

'Studying close enough to draw detail,' I mused aloud, 'tells me things. You may dress well, but you didn't start in the literate class of servants. Your bones say you were hungry as a child. You're very clean: that means you'd like to keep the position you've earned. And then there's that nasty lump on your head. Somebody seems to have hit you, perhaps as you turned towards them, but clearly not with a fist...'

My hand moved as I watched him; I couldn't help making the briefest line sketches, trying to capture his successive expressions.

I can see why Videric would choose him as a spy; he barely gives away anything.

But a spy doesn't normally suffer the close inspection of an artist's model, and I could see every minute flinch, and tiny sheen of sweat under his hairline. At my last comment, his large, limpid brown eyes met mine-and I had been right to want to paint them.

'Somebody hit me?' His tone struggled with incredulity, and with outraged dignity, also; which is not what one usually sees in a servant. Someone has praised him above his merits, and he's wanted to believe them.

'A regrettable accident,' I said briskly. 'It would have to be, wouldn't it, messer? Anything else would mean reporting to the Council of Ten that I have my suspicions about who headed the gang of brigands that attacked the representative of Alexandria-in-Exile, and the noble retired Captain-General from Taraco.'

I had thought he would give away annoyance, if anything got through his poker face. Instead, I found my chalk and coal giving shadows and highlights to eyelids and pupils that showed, as they went down on paper, an expression somewhere close to desperation.

Now why would he...

'Isn't that appropriate for the nobility?' Ramiro Carrasco's tone sounded acid, although he returned to the pose of staring up at a hypothetical Tree of Grace. 'The merchant-princes of Venice are entirely happy to look after the interests of the landed princes of Iberia.'

'You ought to talk to a friend of mine, a lawyer...' I rubbed at coal-dust with the pad of my thumb, and achieved a gradation of tone so impressive I abandoned it for fear of ruining it. 'He's all for containing the power of princes. He wants to do it with law...'

'The law's nothing beside armed power.'

'That depends on how many people agree to behave as if the law were a real thing.'

Carrasco's face had changed yet again when I looked up to take the line of his jaw.

Is he amused?

As if he spoke to an equal in status-and I suppose he did, if you rank 'King's Freak' against 'paid assassin of Aldra Videric'-Ramiro Carrasco explained, 'I thought I was a cynic.'

'Oh.' I smiled. 'For all I know, you may be. I prefer to think of it as recognising how the world really functions. You see a lot of that, as court fool.'

He blinked, fractionally fast, as he did every time I spoke with blatant honesty and appeared not to care I had an audience. I suspected he had realised that the old woman was very deaf. And that Honorius keeps his trusted soldiers well informed.

'Really,' I said. 'What would be the point of me pretending you haven't been told these things?'

'I, ah--'

'In the same way that I know you've tried to have me killed twice.'

I nodded at the ugly lump on his forehead, turning purple-black and green in about equal parts, with a scab beginning to form on the cut.

'I don't know whether or not you know why you have those orders. If it's assumed that I've told you...well, it probably will be assumed I've told you all I know. That puts you under a death sentence, if you weren't before.'

The same over-rapid blink was all that gave him away.

'Madonna...' His shoulders, in the Italian-fashion doublet that showed every broad muscle, relaxed a very little. 'What comes next? The bribe? After the threat? You are attempting to get me to change sides?'

I found I was biting at the end of my tongue, while I took the shape of his short hair, tapering back to the nape of his neck in a servant's crop. Even the shortest hairs still had a curl.

'No, Messer Ramiro...that would just be silly. No one trusts you, and you must have realised at the beginning of this that you'd be wanted dead at the end. By your employer, if no other man. For some reason, you must think that's worth it...Or that you can escape. You can't.'

I flicked up a gaze and caught him staring at me with absolute fury.

It was gone in a second, but I held it in my memory long enough to put it on paper. Staring down at the constellation of heads and facial features on the caput mortuum tinted surface, I wondered where his ferocious outrage stemmed from, what it meant.

How I might use it.

'Don't blame me,' I said quietly. 'I certainly don't blame you. I'm sure you have your reasons.'

Ramiro Carrasco looked completely bemused; whip-lashed back and forth.

'The Franks revile Gaius as Judas,' I added. 'He betrayed their Green Christ with a kiss, and they say he'll be the last man still in Hell, when all the other damned have been redeemed and released. But you and I know the story goes differently. Someone had to make the betrayal, because He needed it. The world needed that act, for Him to redeem them. And Gaius was the only man with courage enough to do it-because it was necessary.'

Carrasco closed his hands on the chair, knuckles shining white through tension-stretched skin.

'Don't move.' I smiled at him. 'I've got you exactly where I want you.'

The expression I managed to get down on my sketch paper was notable.

A thunderous knock sounded on the outer door. One of Neferet's other servants got up from where she had been sitting by the fire in the antechamber-able to observe us through the doorway, not close enough to overhear, and in any case chatting with two more heavily-built soldiers in brigandines that Honorius had insisted also be present. She padded across the chill floorboards to answer the knocking.

'Madonna!' she called. 'It's Messer Leon.'

I had no chance to say I was busy; Leon Battista of the Alberti family bustled in, brandishing a sheaf of papers in one hand, smiling broadly at me, and ignoring the duenna and the Iberian men completely-both soldiers and assassin.

Leon must assume Carrasco is another Venetian I've called in as a model; obviously not one of freeman status-no, what do the Franks call it? 'Yeoman'?

While I tried to remember how the Franks divided up their society, the artist-lawyer walked up and laid the papers beside me. Hand-written, I saw; covered with diagrams. I picked the bound sheets up, turning them to look at one of the drawings.

'I invented that.' Leon Battista sounded proud. 'Did Masaccio use one in his workshop? Or outside?'

A drawing of a frame of wood, with lines crossing it.

Cloth, I realised. But spun with a heavy thread at every inch-mark, so that the translucent linen was crossed with a grid.

'See.' Leon held his fingers as if they framed a square, absent-mindedly putting a startled Ramiro Carrasco in the centre of his view. 'Now imagine you have it held still, by some means, and that you see all against these lines. How much easier is it, to see where your perspective must be drawn?'

I glanced from the papers to his hands, visualised-and wondered if one might use drawn wire, as the men-at-arms used to repair their mail. A wooden frame, strung with taut wires laterally and vertically, like the strangest of musical instruments.

I realised that I was now taking no more notice of the assassin than Leon had.

I shot Ramiro Carrasco a womanly flirtatious grin, that I thought might unsettle him, and added, 'I wonder how long it would take to build one of these?'

'Your "brother",' Leon prompted.

'Masaccio never mentioned it, that I knew,' I said honestly. 'You knew Masaccio...'

'I'm his executor.' Leon drew himself up a little; I could see the pride in him. And also see why Masaccio would choose a friend who was both a lawyer and an artist to draw up his last testament.

I said all I could think of. 'You will not have expected it to happen so soon.'

'No. Nor he.' Leon lifted his head, with a little shrug. 'He was often used to add to his will, or take things out...He wrote me a letter, and asked me to bring this to Ilario if the man was still living then.'

At this, he indicated the bound sheets.

'They're mine, in fact,' he added, almost shyly.

'What is it?'

'A draft of something I was working on. Masaccio was to read through it, and tell me what he thought should be added, but I don't know if he did before...' Leon Battista picked up the paper sand smoothed them, looking at the writing. Which must be his, I realised.

Leon Battista said, 'I follow the ancient scholars on how it is that the eye sees things. I'm trying to devise a way for the New Art, for the artist's eye to truly see what is there.'

Ramiro Carrasco chuckled.

I looked up. The Iberian man might never have made a sound. His expression was as demure as any servant in the presence of a master.

'Truly see what is there.'

He thinks Leon takes me for a woman.

If I had not been used to such conundrums in Taraco, I suppose I might have blushed.

Leon Battista looked irritated at the interruption.

I said carefully, 'Masaccio wanted my brother to have this?'

It was painful to have to lie, even though Leon Battista insisted on keeping my 'secret', as he conceived it.

More painful to think that Masaccio never knew who he had in his workshop as his apprentice.

'Tommaso wrote to me that Ilario might benefit from reading it. Might learn.' Leon looked embarrassed. 'He also wrote that Ilario would benefit from meeting me, but...that was mere kindness on his part.'

Having the assassin present at that moment of humility was awkward, although Leon Battista took no more notice of Carrasco than if he had been furniture.

'I wouldn't object to sketching outside,' I said, standing, and looked back at Ramiro Carrasco. 'Are you permitted to come tomorrow?'

The Iberian secretary-assassin spoke demurely. 'Aldra Federico permits it.'

And what am I to make of that? Aldra Federico would happily see his foster son-daughter dead in a backwater canal? Aldra Federico is too stupid to know why one of Videric's men is travelling with him? Or why Videric wants the King's Freak found? Not after the scandal when the Carthaginian envoy arrived-and now he's seen Honorius and I together.

Leon held the door open for me to leave with him.

Glancing back, I caught an expression on Ramiro Carrasco's face.

The assassin, now realising what he has been looking at without seeing. The gentle curve of a pregnant belly...

Ramiro Carrasco looked deeply confused.

He's not the only one, I reflected, resting my fingers on Leon's arm as the lawyer led me out towards the campo.

I wonder if he will succeed in getting this news back to Lord Videric?

And if it will make Videric willing to let Nature assassinate me, rather than his paid murderer?

13

It may have stemmed from having a killer in the house. Dawn light reflected up onto the room's ceiling from the canal, making bright fractured crescents on the plaster, and I woke from a vivid dream of Rosamunda.

Rosamunda, much younger, with her womb full of her child; giving birth, and then-what?-being forced up from child-bed, still bleeding, to be wrapped in a cloak and led out into the snow, and told to leave the new-born on the chapel steps?

Or was that a lie? Did the midwife show her what was between my legs and did she turn away? Did she hide her face and let Videric give the orders to dispose of the thing as a foundling? Knowing all the same, by the snow and the winter cold, that it would die before being found?

I lay listening to Rekhmire' grunt in pain as he slept. My body stayed motionless under the flat of my hand.

If anything quickens in my belly, it's too faint for me to feel.

And I can hate Rosamunda, since she had every reason to expect to get up out of child-bed.

As a slave, being a shameless snoop aids survival at court, and indeed anywhere else. Privacy is for freemen. The absence of a collar, I found, couldn't convince me differently.

Rekhmire''s voice echoed out of his partly-open door:

'You will not walk out of this room!'

I winced, because as statements go, that one is so easily proved untrue.

Since it was Neferet who'd come upstairs earlier, I expected Neferet to come striding out of Rekhmire''s room. I froze to the spot at the head of the stairs, unable to decide whether it would be ruder to enter and demonstrate I'd overheard them quarrelling, or to appear as if I was eavesdropping.

'What in the Eight's name are you doing keeping the Queen's offer away from him!' Rekhmire''s voice sounded high, cracked-as out of control as I'd ever heard him. 'It's there in the ambassador's papers! "Bring him to the Library; Ty-ameny will give him all the funds he wants." You couldn't miss seeing it!'

Impetus carried me on until I stood in the open doorway.

I might have been modelling nude for both roles of the Whore of Babylon's seduction-dance, and neither one would have looked at me.

Rekhmire' sat just on the bed still, his strapped-up leg dangerously close to teetering off the edge of it. Neferet had her back to the window, so he must squint against the light. Her arms were folded tightly across her just-too-wide-for-proportion chest.

'I need Herr Mainz!' Her heel dug at the floorboards. 'He can go home in a month or two--'

'He can end up in the Council of Ten's dungeons in a week or two!' Rekhmire' hit his fist against the feather-stuffed pillows. 'You've got him printing sedition for that boy of yours--'

'My "boy" is the man who'll bring the Alberti family back to power in Florence.' Lines dug in beside her mouth and nose, and I saw how she would look when she was fifty. 'As opposed to your pregnant boy, who does nothing to earn her money except scribble drawings!'

Rekhmire' pushed forward, missed his grip, and the plank on which his leg was bound slid forward and cracked one end down on the floorboards. I winced, automatically inclining forward, and then stopped as Rekhmire' slapped Neferet's offered hand aside.

He leaned, both hands on the splint, not touching anywhere on his bandaged leg, never mind his knee.

'If Ilario is in trouble, it's my fault.' His voice was stiff. 'I did something ill-advised in Carthage--'

Neferet snickered.

Rekhmire''s scalp and face turned a dull plum-red.

Dropping her hands to her hips, Neferet drew herself up, still smiling. 'I'm not that stupid-the day you sire a child is the day I give birth to one!'

The line of Rekhmire''s body folded forward from the hip, losing tension. He sighed. 'Whatever it is you're mixed up in, it must be bad. You used to do this when you were a boy-pick a quarrel until everyone else had forgotten the question. You've just grown better at picking tender spots.'

'I was never a boy.'

Rekhmire' corrected himself without the shadow of malice or contempt. 'When you were a girl with prick and balls.'

The older Egyptian nodded. She sat down on the oak chest under the window, with the graceful movements that it occurred to me she would have had to learn. Just as I was trained in them.

I was trained to move as a woman does, and as a man does. The difference between myself and Neferet being that neither one of them seems natural to me. A woman's movements are restricted, a man's exaggerated.

Neferet sighed and rubbed the heel of one hand into her eye. 'Talking of women born into the wrong bodies-will the scribe survive child-bed? Should I keep the Turkish physician on retainer? Or are you just making her comfortable until the time comes?'

I couldn't see Rekhmire''s face. Mine felt numb and swollen, as if any expression would emerge caricatured.

'Neferet...' Rekhmire' straightened, leaving his leg propped between himself and the floor as if it were not part of him. 'Stop this. Ilario is with me because I took an ill-advised action in Carthage. Cousin Ty-ameny will be happy to rip me open for the wider political aspects. Don't you start on anything else.'

'Ill-advised'-the politics of the matter? Or buying me?

Nothing stopped either of them seeing me in the doorway, except that I was so still. Hearing these things, I couldn't move. Only the blood went to my cheeks, knowing that within moments I would be mortified by discovery.

'You have the apparent right to question what I do with Leon.' Neferet's voice took on an ugly, uncontrolled rasp. 'But you think-Cousin Ty-ameny will think-that it's acceptable for you to abduct a boy-girl she-male, who's a magnet for Carthage and Iberia.'

'Jahar.' Rekhmire' used the male name as if it were both challenge and appeal.

'Why did you have to follow me here? What business is it of yours!'

'You're right: it's not my business. I'm here as a favour--' Rekhmire' grunted emphatically, trying to shift his leg. 'A favour to Menmet-Ra--'

'Oh, I might have known! Fat old Tom-Cat doesn't want to leave Rome, so he twists you around his little finger until you come nosing in here!' Neferet grinned triumphantly. 'And another report goes back to Ty-ameny and your name gets written up in phoenix gilding! Great Sekhmet, don't you ever get tired of creeping around the Pharaoh-Queen?'

The strain of the tilted plank obviously hurt him: I was frozen between helping him and hearing Neferet's words spill out. Lines cut deep on Rekhmire''s face.

Neferet turned back to the window, the morning's light showing gold thread in the weave of her linen over-dress. It was not true gold, I thought.

'Just because you're happy to run around doing favours for an old friend from the scholarium...' Neferet unlatched the shutters, opening them to the winter air. I could hear the tolling of church bells, deep in the mist; the sound of a passing bell, for some man drowned or dead of plague.

'You'll run anybody's errands, Little Dog. What I'm doing here is important. In Florence they have laws to permit the burning alive of men who copulate with other men-twenty years ago they burned hundreds, under this Duke's father. And they decide who is a man.'

'And your Leon has of course told the Alberti family here in Venice that you have a woman's soul, but not the womb to give the family an heir...'

Neferet spat out a piece of fishwife-Greek and I couldn't blame her; if Rekhmire' had spoken to me in that self-satisfied tone, I would have punched him.

'Leon loves me!' Neferet finished. 'Barbarian Frank he may be, but I had to come a hundred leagues from Alexandria to find a man who sees I am the woman for him!'

Her cry was equal parts pain and pride. In the same way, I didn't know whether to shed tears, or take up the refuge that cruel laughter would be.

Rekhmire' stubbornly dropped his chin down. 'Yes, I would happily see the Inquisition out of Fiorenza. And every other Frankish city! But Alexandria carries no weight against the believers in the Green Christ, or any man who chooses to speak for him. You of anybody ought to know that it's essential for Ty-ameny to have this German Guildsman. If he can do what he says he can do-and he won't have written it down, will he? There won't be more than sketch-plans; the secret of it will be inside the man's skull!'

He waved a hand, as if he indicated the passing bell.

'So easy to lose everything! It need not even be a competitor who wants him out of the way. An accident, a brush with cholera...Then it's gone, can't you see that?'

'I need him.' Neferet's voice was flatly stubborn as she stared down at the canal, three floors below. 'Leon needs him.'

'And why could this not happen next year? Let Herr Mainz come to Alexandria first.'

I was fascinated enough to breathe; shift, as men do when not sitting for painters or sculptors-and immediately both their heads turned.

Not next year, I realised, seeing her undefended face. Because for all Neferet says he loves her, she doesn't believe Leon will be here in twelve months' time. Not without the scribe-machina. She thinks he only stays because of that.

I don't know Leon well enough to know whether that's true or false. I know Neferet just well enough to be sure she'll hate me if I speak my guess.

'How long have you been spying there?' Neferet turned from me before I could answer, spitefully prodding at Rekhmire'. 'Training her up, are you? To listen at doors?'

Rekhmire' gave me the look of a disappointed pedagogue. As if, for a few denarii, he'd demand I stand up straight and apologise politely.

They reminded me so much of Sunilda and Reinalda before their coming-of-age feasts that I had to stifle a smile.

Stepping inside the room, I said equably, 'If you don't want people to know these things, I advise not quarrelling at the top of your voices with the door open.'

The Alexandrine woman looked taken aback. The same expression showed on Rekhmire''s face.

Her voice hostile, but subdued, Neferet demanded, 'What did you hear?'

'Nothing that was my business. A lot that wasn't. You can probably be heard as far as the kitchens.' I exaggerated. 'And Visigoth Latin and Alexandrine Latin aren't that different. I'd have a word with Honorius about his guard, if I were you-you know how soldiers gossip.'

Rekhmire' and Neferet exchanged the kind of look that only a childhood spent quarrelling over the same toys will give you. I suppressed a smug grin at successfully uniting them against a common outsider. That doesn't come from Rodrigo's court, but from thirteen years of scrambling for a place with 'Nilda and 'Nalda.

'Pushy little thing, isn't she?' Neferet's long upper lip quivered, in the way that Rekhmire''s does when he suppresses a smile.

'Ilario, pushy? What would give you an idea like that?' He turned a pitch-coal eye on me. 'Help me up with this leg.'

'Your will is mine, O master.'

'One can only live in hope that some day that will be the case...' Rekhmire' looked pious enough to make Neferet and I grin; she less willingly than I.

Is lipped into the room past Neferet, and studied the position the book-buyer had got himself into. He abandoned the pose, braced himself on his hands, and shifted his backside towards the headboard as I lifted the plank and splints, taking care not to touch his leg at any point.

'Fornicating Carthaginian goats...' He used the cuff of his Frankish morning-gown to wipe his forehead, immediately darkening the blue velvet with sweat. Without a word, Neferet poured him a drink from the pottery jug and passed it over.

I had a moment to wonder how the green glaze was done on the jug, and whether it was possible to reproduce the room's curved and monochrome reflection. Rekhmire' and Neferet spoke at once.

Neferet gestured elegantly, ceding. 'I'll leave you to talk to her.'

'I thought you might!'

The Alexandrine woman avoided the sotto voce comment, gliding out of the room with an elegance I envied now that all my weight was high and forward.

'I won't insult you by asking for secrecy.' Rekhmire' cradled the cup on the blankets in his lap. 'The Hermopolitan Eight know, we're aware enough of each other's lives. I will ask you to curb your immediate indiscreet tendency to leap astride the nearest horse and gallop off in all directions...'

'You have an over-inflated idea of your skills as a judge of character.'

I imitated him as closely as I could, and was rewarded by one of those quaking giggles that robbed his monumental gravity of all dignity.

'I wonder,' he said, regaining composure, 'whether it's too late to return to that Carthaginian slave-dealer and ask for a refund?'

'Much too late.'

It's a narrow step from macabre humour to thoughts that make me shudder-that Rekhmire' was in Carthage by the merest chance, and might never have bought me, is one of those things.

The Egyptian said quietly, 'You should never have been sold before. By your Aldra Federico, I mean. You were freeborn. Of two freeborn parents, even if not legitimate-but your father would have acknowledged you. Granted that was unknown then, but the sale itself is invalid. If you are ever back at the court of Taraco in anything like peace, you might ask Honorius to have lawyers look into that and void the original bill of sale to Rodrigo Sanguerra.'

Ever since I realised that Rodrigo's manumission documents burned in Donata's fire, there has been a nudging discomfort at the back of my mind-that even Rekhmire''s manumission of me in Rome was not valid, because it did not cover the years before he bought me.

'I take it back,' I said. 'You're a reasonable judge of character.'

He snickered and patted my shoulder; it might have been friendly mockery, or consolation, or-knowing Rekhmire'-both. He gazed levelly at me.

'Are you prepared to have a look around on my behalf? If you'd stayed my scribe, I would have begun this with you. Now you get a choice. I hear you keep your escort busy enough, taking your drawing-pad out. I swear I heard Tottola yesterday talking about "egg tempera fresco"...'

'He asked.' I may have sounded injured.

'And now he knows. Quite a lot, apparently, for a man I've never been convinced grew up knowing how to cook his food...'

The picture of Tottola and Attila in the depths of some German forest untouched since Varus's legions went missing, growing up on raw rabbit and fish, was all too easy to bring to mind.

'They'd like you thinking that,' I said, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed. 'They cultivate the reputation. People think if they don't speak, that means they must be stupid.'

'Not a mistake any man will make with you, scribe...'

The combination of Pharaonic dignity and angelic innocence was a sure indicator of whether he meant a compliment or insult.

'If I were about to ask someone a favour, I wouldn't insult that someone...'

'No, indeed.' The innocence increased.

'So what am I about to do?'

'Take your drawing materials out. You have an excuse to go anywhere. The soldiers will doubtless complain about this cold, but you do Honorius a favour by keeping them keen-edged.'

'Oh, I'm sure I do...'

And I'd hear all about it, too, now that the variegated group of men-all of whom had been with Honorius a decade and more-had got over their shyness at the General's son or daughter turning out to be a son-daughter. It had been easier, or at least quieter, in Rome, when they'd been in awe of the phenomenon of the hermaphrodite. Familiarity had now brought matters down to, Oh, it's just Ilario.

Which I supposed has its own comfort.

I gave Rekhmire' a hard stare. 'It's not like I know how to do any of this...stuff...that comes with being a book-buyer. What am I looking for?'

Rekhmire' smiled. 'Listen. Watch. Don't ask questions, if you can avoid it; they will always sound awkward. If nothing shows up, that's what sometimes happens. And--'

'And?'

'And,' Rekhmire' said, 'if you can find the German Guildsman Herr Mainz, you can tell him I'd very much like a word with him.'

My freedom in Venice lasted ten more days.

14

It was Leon Battista who ended it.

Departing from one of our discussions while drawing Ramiro Carrasco, Leon remarked, 'I know your father is careful of you, in your state of health-but will you come to any of the Carnival festivities, with Madonna Neferet and myself? It would be my honour to show you how we do these things in Venezia.'

Wisdom fought desire. I could hear the arguments before Honorius voiced them. And I thought Carrasco's ears were keen enough to have overheard Leon.

'I think,' I said, 'that my father will say that Carnival is too dangerous a time for me to go out of the house.'

My guess proved accurate.

I argued only half-heartedly with Licinus Honorius. Part of me, at least, agreed with him. I have taken my pitcher to the well twice already in the Most Serene Republic...

The Alexandria House immediately felt as if it became a cramped prison.

Granted, there was no room to set up a full painter's workshop-but I could still work. I found myself missing the space in Masaccio's workshop...even missing the stench of fish glue being rendered down for size, and the permeating odour of varnish. Or in Tommaso Cassai's case, fifty different experiments with varnishes, to see which did not blue or yellow the pigments in his tempera painting.

'I've given up colour, for now,' I observed to Rekhmire', speeding my pen to try and catch his features before the angle of the light changed.

If I flicked through this particular work-book, I could see him become less gaunt, less pained, more himself, over the past weeks.

'Colour's a snare and a delusion.'

The Egyptian smiled. 'If not colour, what's left?'

I glared at him. 'Tone. Value. Perspective. The proportion of one part-every part-to every other part. How things grow short and fat when you foreshorten them--'

Rekhmire' felt at his nose.

'I even gave up drypoint,' I said, ignoring the implicit joke. 'I've been using a reed pen, so that I don't get trapped into fine detail. I do what Masaccio said: observe, observe, observe...But it's knowing what I'm looking at.'

I was beginning to accept Masaccio's death. Or at least, I could bear to recall his precepts, and speak of them without tears or shudders.

Honorius entered, and stood behind my back for some time, observing me draw.

'Isn't he supposed to be smiling? He looks more like he's bawling his head off!'

'Since when did I ask for your opinion?' I blotted the reed pen dry, so I might cut it to a sharper point, and gave my father a frustrated smile. 'I'm still planning compositions for yours. I take it you want the donor's right of appearing in the picture?'

'He does,' Rekhmire' put in hastily. 'Sit down, Captain-General-it's the Lion of Castile's turn to be told off every fifty heartbeats for fidgeting!'

They continued somewhat in this manner while Honorius called for a drink, and Ensign Saverico bought a jug and drinking bowls. My father sat on the wooden settle facing the window, light falling on him unobstructed, and I began to draw.

The results were beyond bad.

I stared at my fingers, flexing them. I couldn't blame the black chalk, even if this batch was too hard and somewhat particulate, making for scratchy drawing. Sometimes the closer the subject is to the artist's heart, the less well it is painted.

I need to direct that artist's eye that Rekhmire' had me point at Neferet, and turn it on il leone di Castiglia.

Changing black chalk for willow charcoal, I smudged the paper where there were shadows on Honorius's face, and lifted part of it off again with rolled bread-crumbs, to lighten it. The shift in values was pleasingly gradual.

'Have you thought more about how you want to see St Gaius?' And then, particularly because my father must have spent so much time close to the Frankish border, 'Why St Gaius, Judas, of all the soldier saints? Why not Michael, or S. Bellona?'

He pushed his fingers through his hair. His nails were not bitten like Carmagnola's, but pared neatly down.

'I wanted something...' He struggled for words. 'When you're fighting...Men die. That simple. And if you're giving the orders, they die because of you. You send men out to fight as a feint or diversion, when you know that, even though we'll win, these men will all die...All, to a man.'

Tottola came in with more wine at that point, and lifted his thick brows, and nodded to show assent.

'That's what soldiering is,' Honorius said. 'Who dies last. And someone has to give those necessary orders.'

He paused. I began a new drawing.

'St Gaius didn't kill himself,' he added softly. 'After the Lord-Emperor was dead, he went East, to the Turks and Persians and Indians, and beyond. Could you paint him when he's deciding that?'

'No.' I didn't hesitate. 'No. Not yet. I've had to forget every way of painting that I knew, and learn again. Ask me in a year. Better-in a year I'll make an altar board of St Gaius for your chapel, and you tell me if I can do it.'

My father slowly nodded.

He set his drinking bowl down and came to look over my shoulder again, effectively cutting off the drawing, but he spent long minutes studying what lines there were.

'I wish I could call up faces as you do.' His fingertip moved high above the paper's surface, mirroring the line of his jaw and ear. 'I made good friends when I first went north. Many of them. I can see them, in the eye of my mind; men I fought beside. We loved each other like brothers; died for each other. The last of them was killed at Candlemass, last year, and I decided I was done with fighting.'

He removed his hand, staring at what I had drawn of his face as if it could tell him something.

'I felt no grief when Antonio died. None. A man I knew for twenty-five years...Nothing. Then I knew I could either continue as a successful captain, and never mourn any butchered man of mine, or I must stop. I told King Juan the following day that I would be returning to Taraconensis.'

I rubbed my charcoal-black fingers on a rag, turning my skin grey. 'How can you command for all that time and still grieve when men die? How could you bear it?'

'War is horror. Let no man tell you otherwise. But if this is war, then at least it can be prosecuted with the least possible waste. I did not desire to turn into one of those commanders who gets their troops killed carelessly, and then hires more and does it again.'

After a moment, when I saw he wouldn't say more, I remarked, 'And I thought St Gaius was going to beeasy!'

Honorius chuckled, as I thought he would, and leaned his arm across my shoulders. 'I mean to get my money's worth out of you, son-daughter!'

The desire to urinate thirty times a day, along with aches in joints and a general feeling that my body was becoming unfamiliar to me-and God He knows, it was unfamiliar enough as a human body before this!-left me in a foul temper.

'Out!' Honorius bellowed, on the second morning of Carnival season, when my ill-temper rubbed up against Rekhmire''s until the Egyptian so far forgot himself as to quarrel violently with me.

'Tell him to stop shouting!' I snarled.

'I did not shout!' Rekhmire', loudly indignant, slammed his hand down on the side of the bed and flinched. 'I may have raised my voice. I do not "shout"!'

'Then I'll leave!' Honorius snarled, and stalked out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the scroll cases, pestles and mortars that stood on the shelves.

Silenced, I looked at Rekhmire' in embarrassment.

The book-buyer huffed out his breath, and looked at me from the corners of his eyes.

'He's a lot like you,' Rekhmire' said after a moment.

'Ha!' I was torn between the compliment and insult, both implicit in the Egyptian's words. I waddled over to sit in the wooden armed chair by the fire.

'I wish I thought I'd do half as much with my life as he has. Do you want to play another game of chess?'

'Not until you learn enough skill at it that the whole experience isn't a worse tedium than this!'

I left it a minute, and looked at him from the corners of my eyes. An unfamiliar eye wouldn't have seen it, but I read a degree of contrition on his face.

'Suppose you teach me chess, 'I offered, 'so that I get better at it.'

Rekhmire' shrugged and nodded. It was an attempt to indicate that he didn't care either way, and a not hugely successful one.

'That might be better.' He waited for me to edge the chair over to the bed, and set the chessboard up on the cover. 'Thank you.'

'You're welcome.'

He smiled, almost shyly. One of the soldiers, Vasev, I think, currently shaved him in the morning, so he was back to his neat self. You would not have known he stayed in bed for any other reason than apparent idleness.

Which means he must be good at concealing pain. Considerable amounts of pain.

I wondered where and why he had learned it. Which for some reason turned my mind to Taraco's court, and I turned it resolutely away.

Sixteen moves into the game-with Rekhmire' explaining extensively at each where I might have done better-Honorius stomped back into the room. Evidently his body-servant had only got his cloak from him; his boots tracked slush across the floorboards and old dried rushes.

'Strange pick-pockets they have in Venice!' Honorius snorted. 'Most thieves cut your purse to take something out...'

I must have looked bewildered.

'Here!' He tossed his leather purse to Rekhmire', who caught it out of the air with a wince. 'See what you make of that.'

I eased my belly by leaning back from the chessboard. 'What's happened?'

My father looked down at his leaking muddy boots as if surprised to see them. 'Saverico!'

With one hand resting down on Saverico's shoulder as the man drew each boot off in turn, Honorius went on:

'The usual thing in the Mercaria, I thought-knocked aside by one man, purse cut off my belt and passed to a second. I chased them into the back alleys, thought I'd lose them; my fault for not taking one of the lads at my back. Then I saw the purse by the first bridge, where they'd dropped it. The money was gone...There's now a letter in it.'

Rekhmire' lifted his head from peering at the unfolded sheet of paper.

'This is an approach from Carthage!'

'That's what I thought, yes.' Honorius dropped down onto the hard wooden settle and wriggled his feet in front of the fire, as if that would dry his hose faster. He shot me a sharp look. 'You may have been right back in Rome. The King-Caliph thinks I'm interested in betraying King Rodrigo.'

'Or he'd like to have evidence that you would.' Rekhmire' carefully refolded the paper along exactly the same lines. 'Either would help Carthage. You'd make an equally good figurehead governor, or distressing evidence of further internal dissent in Taraco.'

'The King-Caliph can sodomise a male goat!' Honorius said, in passable Carthaginian Latin. 'But that isn't the point!'

'Ask the goat!' Rekhmire' surprised the life out of me by murmuring. He nickered almost precisely like a horse when he stifled his laughter. It was silly enough that amusement bubbled up irresistibly in me, and I had to put both hands over my mouth.

'This is the subtle wit of the Alexandrines, evidently,' Honorius muttered, and tried hard to look as if he were not pleased to have reduced the large Egyptian to a quaking mass.

Honorius looked back at me, after a moment or two, and the laughter left his face.

'The point,' he said, 'is that this message has been delivered to me here. There are agents of Carthage in Venice. They must have arrived a month or more ago-travel's impossible now. If they know where I am, they know where you are, Ilario.'

Rekhmire' looked annoyed, plainly feeling that he should have been the one to say this.

'Carthage has no reason to hurt me,' I pointed out. 'The reverse, if anything. They need their witness alive and well.'

'That's as may be, but I don't fancy hiring a pirate fleet or a company of mercenaries to haul your backside out from under the Penitence!'

I smiled. He stopped glaring and looked embarrassed.

'Rescuing the maiden in distress?' I raised a brow at him, as much in Rekhmire''s manner as I could imitate.

'Carthage can have you!' Honorius snorted. 'In fact, I have a better idea-when I offer my services as local Carthaginian Governor of Taraconensis, I'll offer to sell them my son-daughter at a very reasonable price! Then there'll be no North African interference in my government, because you will have driven them all mad...'

I whispered solemnly to Rekhmire', 'You can see he is cut out to be a tyrant.'

The book-buyer, having been perilously near a sulk, abandoned it and gave me a smile; perfectly well aware that I attempted to entertain him into a better humour.

'That will stem from commanding armies,' he said as if Honorius were not in the room. His gaze grew sharper, directed at me. 'And your peace-making talents come from your years as Court Fool.'

If anybody would know that there's more to the position of Royal Freak than a quick tongue and a dual set of genitalia, it would be Rekhmire'.

'Rodrigo didn't like his nobles to kill each other-well, more than was absolutely necessary. And not at court.'

'Ilario!' Honorius rapped his knuckles against the wooden seat of the settle, as if he called a meeting to order. 'This settles it. You don't go outside at any time with fewer than two guards-and Lady Neferet can get used to my men doing guard duty in this building.'

Rekhmire' rested his fingers on the folded letter. 'What will you do with this?'

Honorius grunted, stood up, and slipped the paper out from under the Alexandrine's hand. 'You reminded me-I was on the way to the privy!'

Rekhmire' gazed at the door as it shut behind Honorius.

'And this is the man the Carthaginians wish to make Governor of Taraco...'

He gave the particular secretive smile he had when something amused him, and directed it at me.

'Not that I say the people of Taraconensis wouldn't benefit from being ruled as if they were a company of mercenaries.'

'I could say the same about the book-buyers of Alexandria!'

We went back to chess. In the short intervals while Rekhmire' considered his moves, I regarded the world beyond the leaded glass window, where the rain had now turned to sleet.

Videric's spies. And now spies from Carthage.

I said nothing of Rekhmire''s injured leg, in the same way that he made no reference to my swelling abdomen.

Neither of us debated the possibility of a winter voyage to Alexandrine Constantinople. Between storms by sea, and washed-out roads, mud, flooding rivers, avalanches, and landslides, there's little enough travelling done in this quarter of the year. Which should have comforted me-if we couldn't move, neither could any other man. But it persisted in seeming to me that things weren't as simple as that.

Rekhmire', being as keen a reader of expressions as drawing was making me, echoed my thoughts aloud. 'Likely we have trouble enough already here in Venice.'

Honorius, re-entering the room in time to hear it, scowled at the Egyptian, and then at me as he squatted to warm his whitened fingers at the hearth fire.

Abruptly, he said, 'Let me adopt you.'

'Will that make me safer? Or merely give you the illusion of having authority over me?' I grinned at his expression. 'I'm half inclined to think life was easier as a slave.' I looked at Rekhmire'. 'You wouldn't buy me again, would you?'

'Sun-god's egg, no! You were far too much trouble!'

If there had been anything breakable and moderately inexpensive to hand, I would have thrown it at him. Neferet stored only expensive knick-knacks in the embassy, and art that she said would repay the investment within a few years (which I personally doubted). I was reduced to glaring at the Egyptian.

'I was a better slave than you were a master!'

Rekhmire' and Honorius swapped looks. They had the effect of making me feel closer to fifteen than twenty-five.

'You see?' the Egyptian remarked. 'Nothing but trouble. And insolent, too.'

I grinned at him, and ambled to the window. If I could, I would paint the darkening sleet-streaked sky, with the serried ranks of wide-capped chimneys spouting smoke bent over by the wind.

'And you two gang up on me,' I added.

'Self-defence!' Honorius.

'Self-preservation!' Rekhmire'.

I snorted. 'If I had a job, I wouldn't have to sit here and listen to you two old codgers every day...'

Rekhmire' sounded offended. 'I'm not old!'

The retired Captain-General of Castile and Leon distinctly snickered.

'Isn't it Carnival?' I said sourly. 'You two should take that act on a commedia stage.'

Rekhmire' pointed a large, blunt finger at me, his expression changing. 'Yes. Carnival. Masks. Parties. Riots in the streets. Boats overturned. Could anything make life easier for an assassin?'

'Well, I'm already making it as easy as I can...'

I grinned at the Alexandrine's expression.

'They say "keep your friends close and your enemies closer", don't they? Ramiro Carrasco can sit next to me any day he pleases. He knows that. He just can't kill me. He knows that, too. It may,' I speculated, 'be driving him slowly insane.'

'I sympathise!' Honorius rumbled, but I could see that he was suppressing a smile. He had confidence in his men-at-arms.

As a slave, one grows used to living with no privacy. I had envisaged life as a freeman or freewoman significantly differently: plainly that was an error. It had taken a distinctly female fit of hysterics to keep Sergeant Orazi out of the garderobe with me. Two men slept in my room at night; one across the door, and one under the window.

'Federico will assume I'm only to be kidnapped.'

Honorius frowned. 'He must know that's ridiculous!'

'He'll know nothing he doesn't want to!' I snorted. 'There are plenty of pleasant lies Federico can tell himself, if he wants to. That Videric merely wants me kidnapped, not killed, say. He's capable of believing Videric only wants to lock me up in some back-country fortress, like an errant daughter.'

I wiped my hands free of charcoal on a rag, and realised it was a lost cause. My oatmeal-coloured woollen bodice and skirts were comprehensively smudged with black.

I got a look from both of them that silently informed me it was a penalty of wearing skirts.

I know that.

'If I don't get out of this house, I'll go mad! I know where Ramiro Carrasco is--'

'You don't know where every thug he's hired is!'

Honorius straightened up and looked at me with a hurt expression. 'I've told you, you can go anywhere you want to--'

'If I don't mind taking six hulking great Taraconian farm-boys with armour on their backs, and a Venetian woman with a face like a prune!'

The retired Captain-General put his hand over his mouth. I realised he was hiding a grin.

'What?'

'You really do sound like a woman when you put skirts on.'

Rekhmire', appearing to study the chessboard, grinned.

Honorius's gaze went up and down me, in a way that I am used to.

More soberly, he said, 'You don't walk in Venice on your own. Not dressed as a woman. And not because of Carrasco. You know what cities are like, for a woman--'

'Why do you think I dress as a man in Frankish countries!'

'--and if you're hurt when you're alone, every man will say that you deserved it. Do you understand me?'

My hand rested on my abdomen again, I found. The obstruction to me wearing doublet and hose here in Venice, because my body has so evidently the shape of a womb, and not a man's belly.

As if we were alone in the room-which spoke volumes for his trust of the Egyptian-Honorius asked, 'Has it kicked yet?'

I shook my head. It may be dead, I thought but didn't say.

The lean ex-soldier drew in a breath, and stared into the low flames of the hearth-fire.

'My wives-both of them lost children early on. I suppose I know the signs. I don't...I don't know whether to hope to see them, with you, or hope not to.'

He shot me a look that, after a moment, I realised was to see whether he was hurting or offending me.

'The Egyptian says you could die of the birth,' he added.

I glared at Rekhmire', where he sat with his leg strapped uncomfortably to the ash-wood plank. 'The Egyptian should keep his damn mouth shut!'

'You weren't going to tell me?'

I faced both men. 'It hasn't quickened. It's more than five months. I don't feel anything. Except fatter and off balance. It's not a baby to me-and it might not be a baby,' I added. 'It might be a monster. Look who it's been fathered on.'

Honorius stood up and put his arm around my shoulder. Which I would have shaken off, had I not found it unexpectedly comforting.

'Skirts make you want to weep more,' I said, pulling out Neferet's kerchief, and dusting my nose hard. 'I blame skirts.'

'Oh, so do I.' His grip tightened.

'Will you get a bad name if I go walking around on my own?'

'Yes. Of course.' He looked as hangdog as a man used to commanding armies can. 'But I worry about your safety, not that.'

'I'll take the Eight-gods-damn-them escort, then!'

I suspected I would narrowly escape being dragged back by the men-at-arms themselves, none too keen on being reprimanded by Honorius in the mood he would have been in.

Honorius steered me to sit down beside him on the settle, the hard wood not comfortable under my aching joints. Rekhmire' looked up from under his eyebrows, tipped his king over, and began to set up a new game.

'What I need to do,' I sighed, 'is talk to someone about what happened in Rome.'

Honorius gave me a look and a nod, both straightforward and accepting. Rekhmire' placed a row of pawns. He has heard this before, or most of it. My father...

I leaned my shoulder against the shoulder of Honorius. 'It involves more than you think. More than you'll be able to repeat. But I trust you. And I need to tell someone how it is that Masaccio died.'

I stayed indoors throughout Carnival.

Leon and Neferet came in after midnight every night, flushed with wine, and shaking gold-tissue streamers out of their hair. I tried not to sound as bad-tempered about it as I felt. Each campo had its own particular festivities, and a commedia dell'arte team set up in the square by the Alexandrine House for several days in succession.

'In Taraco, I would have been allowed to watch that,' I muttered at Honorius. 'Even if the King's Freak were dressed in skirts on that day.'

'Ilario--'

'You want to know where the assassin is?' I demanded of Honorius. 'I'll send a message and invite my foster father here, with Sunilda and Reinalda, and I'll make sure Ramiro Carrasco is with them. If he's here, nothing's going to happen!'

Rekhmire' began an objection.

'Nothing will happen,' I repeated, 'because Sergeant Orazi and the other men will happen to him. If he so much as looks at me funny. Am I right, Father?'

Honorius matched the Egyptian for gravity, clasping his hands lightly behind him, and rocking on his toes. 'She's right.'

'She's always right,' Rekhmire' muttered. 'Ilario, I suppose you want to draw the actors?'

'That too.'

I did draw them. The swaggering captain who played up to that portion of his audience consisting of the Iberian military, and won himself a great success, with Honorius slapping at his thigh and laughing until the tears came. The wily thieving servant, smarter than his masters-at whose appearance I shot a look at Carrasco, and was rewarded by something very like a blush. The woman--

There is only one woman in the commedia, and unlike the others she goes bare-faced. Except that her uncovered face represents Young Girl, and is as much of a mask as the others.

And the plague doctor, with his long-beaked leather mask, pretending to drink all of his urine flask at some turn of the plot that depends on the Girl's pregnancy.

Rekhmire' saw me put my chalk down. Barely audible over the shrieking, guffawing crowd, he queried, 'Ilario?'

I put my mouth close to his ear. 'Nothing. Lend me a cloak. It's cold.'

It was cold-a white rime of frost outlined the bricks, carved wooden house-beams, and well-trodden earth, and gave the commedia artists more pratfalls than they planned for. But it wasn't the winter that chilled me.

Mummers came next, from some northern country. From the Alexandrine House's upper windows, by torch-light, I watched them play the Frankish Sacred Boar's ceremony.

No one played the aulos flute.

The day after that, we were back to masked revellers; and so it went on, for what seemed like weeks, and was in fact nearly a month, until Ash Wednesday cut all short, and there was only a sludge of papier-ma^che masks left floating in gutters and canals.

Frankish Lent being a time for austerity, I was glad to be in Neferet's house. She muttered something unusually low-voiced about 'superstitious Europeans!' when an official from the Council of Ten called to ask why the household didn't attend church. She told him that the servants certainly did attend, she and her colleague Rekhmire' were preparing to sacrifice to the gods of darkness and invisibility, and didn't mention my name at all.

'We need a young man and a young woman to eviscerate on the altar, for the requisite entrails,' Rekhmire' said, far too mildly. 'Thinking about that, you...'

'Could do both?' I threw an old paint-sponge at him. 'Have I mentioned how very much I dislike you?'

'Daily. Hourly.' He grinned, which was a startling expression on that monumental face. It turned rueful. 'If that young officer was as devoid of humour as he seemed, I may have to spend some time explaining to Doge Foscari that Alexandrines don't, in fact, practise sacrificial rites...'

'Wouldn't it be easier just to eviscerate someone?'

The knock on the door came with such fortuitousness that I couldn't help remarking, 'Ah. Carrasco. Come in...'

Ramiro Carrasco de Luis was shown in by Sergeant Orazi. Carrasco looked at Rekhmire', clearly more than a little bewildered by the Egyptian greeting him with a snort of amusement.

I smiled. Videric's man had been far too close to recovering his mental balance, now he was used to sitting as my model.

'Come in,' I repeated. 'Sit down, Ramiro. Take your hose off.'

'I beg your pardon!' he yelped.

Rekhmire', who had been rising to his feet, exchanged a glance with the sergeant and the other soldier, Aznar, and sat back down on the settle. 'I'll stay for this session, shall I?'

Ramiro Carrasco was looking satisfactorily aghast.

I beamed at him. 'Judas-St Gaius, rather-should be in Roman legionary uniform. I need to make some studies of your legs and feet. Do you have suit able legs?'

Carrasco muttered something unintelligible, and glanced around the room as if he would much rather not have been under the eye of the Egyptian and two of Honorius's crack troops. He shot me a glance in which I thought I discerned some unflattering disgust. As if this might have been titillating if I were a woman, but a man-woman was merely revolting.

'Stand there.' More harshly, I pointed. When he had rid himself of boots and hose, and wrapped around himself the cloak that I had put out for him, he stood not far from the fire, pale-skinned muscular legs on show. He was moderately hairy, but his feet were well-shaped-few people have actually well-shaped feet-and I lost myself in capturing their dimensions from various angles.

Not every man can retain his self-possession when bare from the thigh down. Ramiro Carrasco held his cloak around him with one hand, and stroked the narrow, clipped beard that he had taken to growing in this Frankish city, and eventually looked perfectly at ease.

Rekhmire' stirred, and departed to check Neferet's current stock of imported scrolls, and advise her on what should be sent back to Alexandria when the ships could sail again-not that he needed to give the advice, or she to hear it, but it gave the man excuse to pore over the finer points of papyrus, ink, ancient treatises, and rare finds with which they could make each other jealous.

Consequently, Leon Battista stepped in for some moments, on his way back from visiting Neferet, and studied the wood-and-linen frame I'd made up from his plans, scribbling some alterations down on a scrap of paper as he watched how I used it.

Without giving away my small reading vocabulary of the Florentine language, I had to think carefully how I would phrase it when I asked.

As he put the perspective frame down, I said, 'This is hardly my business, except for living here in this house-is it really wise, to be passing around letters that the Council of Ten have banned?'

'Some things have to be done.' Leon looked intensely at me. 'As for Florence-my family has been so long exiled from it...If Taraco were--If Carthage sent legions in and occupied your homeland, would you not do the samething?'

'No.' I rubbed my thumb over the line of Carrasco's thigh, hopelessly botched, and began again. 'It's different for a slave. But you're not occupied-Florence isn't occupied. It's a quarrel between rich families--'

Leon crumpled the paper he wrote on, glared, and the door slammed behind him before I could find anything to say.

I found Sergeant Orazi and the soldier Aznar, and Ramiro Carrasco, looking at me with identical expressions.

'That...could have gone better.'

I ended the day's session because I tired of Ramiro Carrasco's grin. Which was not unlike that of Aznar, or Orazi.

The sergeant murmured, 'Could have told you that! Ma'am...'

'Suppose we go for a nice walk?' I muttered. 'All six of us?'

I managed to see quite an area of Venezia in what fine winter weather there was, by walking to places in which Honorius's soldiers might take an interest. This covered areas from Dorsodura to the shipyards-the Venetian Arsenale being the fifth largest in Frankish territory, as Aznar decided I needed to be extensively informed-where I decided it wouldn't be wise to sketch, given the number of guard-towers. And back, past the Doge's palace, to an area containing a number of commercial armouries.

By way of a fair return, Honorius's household guard were possibly the most well-educated soldiers in respect of church frescoes that you could find in a hundred-mile radius. I suspect they were pleased when my sixth month made me tire more easily, and desire to stand for shorter amounts of time gazing up at paintings.

It was the first time I had spent a period in close contact with men who were very much of an age with me (the sergeant excepting), and who were prepared to treat me as Honorius's son-daughter without anything in the way of questions. Berenguer was loud-mouthed and lectured me on the way I ought to behave as a man who was 'handicapped by being partly a woman'. Viscardo and Fulka and the others treated me as I was dressed, but with much less of that attitude common in Rodrigo's court: that a woman who can talk like a man is as amazing as a trained jackdaw-or that a man who can speak as a woman must be an effeminate catamite.

True, the same loud-mouthed Berenguer made a comment or two about 'men with no balls'. But a single look from Rekhmire' taught him an instant lesson in tact. The Egyptian pretended to no skill with a sword, but he didn't need to-it was an article of faith among Honorius's soldiers that he could break most of them in two with his bare hands.

'Torcello,' I remarked, on a morning in February when the first stirrings of spring were perceptible on the wind, and put my hand on my curved stomach, looking up at Honorius. 'I want to see the frescos on the island of Torcello. Before I can't walk more than fifty yards at a time!'

15

'Frescoes--' Honorius glanced over his shoulder at the bare garden in front of the Alexandrine house, where his guards had been a moment before. 'Look at that. Not a man in sight!'

Neferet, walking outside at that moment, smiled down at me. 'Ilaria, Leon will act as your escort, if you like. And I'll come with you. I like the idea of being out of the house.'

'So do I.' Honorius put his hand under my elbow as we walked back into the house to prepare. 'I'll detail off men to go with you. I suppose you want me to keep Aldra Federico and the damned assassin busy?'

'Ramiro Carrasco's useful. The longer we keep him writing messages to be sent back to Videric, the longer it'll be before Videric sends more men here.'

Honorius harrumphed under his breath about how many others we might not know of-though they would likely be hired men, by his opinion, and worth little without Carrasco's motivating presence.

Rekhmire' stumbled off the last stair as we came in, one crutch firmly under his arm as a support, and the other skidding on the oak floorboards. Honorius steadied him with one hand, at the same time notifying him of the proposed visits.

I picked up the dropped scroll Rekhmire' had been carrying under his arm. 'I wish you could come with us.'

The Egyptian cocked an eyebrow at me. 'Torcello?'

'Island. On the far side of Murano and Burano.'

He snorted, amused, hobbling towards the warmest downstairs room-which in the Alexandrine House is the kitchen.

'Is it a monastery?' He answered his own question before I could. 'No. Does it have old scrolls or books? No. Does any man live there now the bad air brings plague? No--'

'It's winter! There's no plague in cold air. Besides which...' I adjusted my pace to keep level with him, avoiding his crutch impaling my foot. 'You could hold my hand, while Neferet holds Leon's. So I don't feel so-superfluous.'

'Not even for that.' Rekhmire' smiled. 'Charming as the thought is. I intend to stay here, and check over this stock that Neferet is so slow in sending back to Alexandria. By a brazier. With wine. In a room that's warm.'

'Coward!'

'At your service.' His round features curved into a grin.

But he was persuaded to leave the vast inglenook fireplace in the kitchens to bid us farewell, and my last sight was of him swinging his immobilised leg between the two crutches, and with difficulty waving a hand.

Leon Battista helped Neferet down into the low, wide boat that was to take us across the lagoon to the island of Torcello. His smile was brighter than the winter sun, and Neferet smoothed her white-and-lapis Alexandrine robes around her, gazing up at him with an affection that held no cynicism at all.

'Careful!' She caught my hands in hers as I sat down on the stern seat beside her. 'Ilaria, you really should take more care. The baby...'

This 'baby' is likely a dead stone within me.

Sergeant Orazi, at the prow, gave the order to cast off and row. I adjusted my borrowed bronze and gold robes around my shoulders, and the thick winter cloak over them. Neferet brushed my fingers aside to assist. Of all of them, she never had any hesitation in calling me 'Ilaria'.

I muttered, 'The baby will kill me. Or die at birth. Or turn out to be a monster. Rekhmire' must have told you what I am.'

She looked at me less coolly than I expected. 'You're a woman, Ilaria. Oh, I know, you may have a vestigial penis-but you're a woman, truly.'

Ensign Saverico, who happened to be sitting on the bench in front of me, coloured a bright red all up the back of his neck. Somebody choked; I thought it might have been Orazi. Certainly the sergeant looked back with an expression that spoke a desire to have the Alexandrine under his orders.

'Neferet-I'm not a woman!' I held up my hand, as she started to object. 'Yes, I'm woman enough to have conceived from some man's seed. But I'm also a man. I stand up to piss!'

Her calm demeanour didn't crack. Berenguer's neck went purple: he leaned forward and put his head into his hands, despite the rocking boat, I don't want to be here! written clearly in his posture, for all I couldn't see his face.

That made megrin. 'Believe me both. Not one; not the other. I'm- Honorius's son-daughter.'

'You behave like a woman,' Neferet contradicted. 'I've seen you.'

'I'm not permitted to behave like anything else here!'

'You couldn't if you tried!'

I felt a desire to smack her. And to take her around Rome, to the places I frequented as Masaccio's apprentice.

'Your body doesn't matter.' Neferet peered intently into my face. 'The spirit matters. The ka. The soul. What you truly are. Your ka is female. Like mine.'

I opened my mouth, and shut it again. Who knows how many of Honorius's men know that Neferet is the same as Rekhmire'? This is not the moment to educate them.

My drawing skills had improved enough that I'd borrowed a mirror from Neferet and achieved several charcoal and red chalk self-portraits. Drawn as a woman, you could see the male in my bones. Drawn male, I looked too effeminate. I drew as I saw myself in the mirror, and came back to my sketchbook to find Sergeant Orazi and Attila arguing over whether I'd drawn a man or a woman. Both their arguments seemed to come down to 'But it's obvious!'

Neferet, tall and elegant as she was, made a better woman than I. With her throat covered-since her male shape there was noticeable-and ignoring her too-large hands, she showed in my drawings much more of a female than I ever did.

'You won't be able to avoid the matter, once you've had the baby,' Neferet added. 'I know a Green priest, Father Azadanes, who's very adept. You could think about having your vestigial-organs-removed.'

Saverico put both hands over the cod-flap of his hose and crossed his legs.

It was unkind but I howled with laughter, slumping back against the padded stern seat and ignoring how both of them-for different reasons-glared ferociously at me.

'I need nothing removed!' I stated. 'It's not a matter of being one thing or the other.'

'Your ka is female.' Neferet sounded utterly stubborn.

'Fine,' I grumbled. 'My ka is female. My cock is male!'

If she had ever been inclined to abandon female decorum and punch me in the eye, I thought that was the moment.

I took the moment to be one in which shivering, huddling down in my cloak, and asking Saverico if I could borrow his cloak, too, to put over my knees against the spray, was a good idea.

Torcello had a thousand-year-old church, the stone throne of the Emperor Attila, a fresco which even I had to grant wouldn't teach me anything, and broken capitals from Roman pillars, scattered in the grass down by the landing place.

'The style is nothing new.' Leon Battista straightened up from studying the church's fresco 'torment of the damned', completely unmoved by their pain. 'The architecture-this is the old Roman style...'

I abandoned Neferet to be lectured on architecture, taking my sketchbook out of the church and back towards the boat. Ruins covered the sparse turf, embedded in the earth. I crossed my legs and sat on one fallen pillar, drawing another; the layers of petticoats doing something to keep out the cold.

Under the petticoats, I had put on and pinned up an old pair of countryman's breeches, mostly unbuttoned. It might make me look fatter than my pregnancy, but it was, thank Rekhmire''s Eight, warm.

I grinned to myself, thinking of the Egyptian's firm refusal to be rowed out to the island of Torcello. He's not wrong, I acknowledged, squiggling a line that was more acknowledgement of the acanthus leaves in ancient marble than an actual drawing. Notes for a drawing, perhaps.

My fingertips, where they protruded from the gloves I had trimmed for the purpose, were a whitish-blue that didn't argue well for control of red chalk, or charcoal.

'Learn all about naves and pediments?' I remarked as Neferet and Leon walked back down the slipway towards me, she with her hand tucked into his arm, and both of them flushed more than the winter chill would account for. 'Barrel vaults? Apses?'

Leon gave me the look a man would give a cheeky younger sister. 'Your appetite for knowledge being so inexhaustible, of course?'

'I needed to sit.' I tapped the front of my cloak. 'You don't want knowledge of swelling ankles...'

He agreed with unflattering haste.

It was a spring day come unexpectedly in the latter stages of winter, the sky a deep blue, and the sun warm when the wind fell, and if one did not discard a cloak too hurriedly. Even the lapping water looked deceptively blue, and not so bitterly cold.

'It's past three. We should think of going back.' Neferet shaded her eyes with one gloved hand, looking down the strand to where our soldiers and oarsmen were squatting around a driftwood fire and cracking obscene jokes in a dialect I hoped she would not understand. Leon caught my eye.

Much speculating about who does what and to whom, I attempted to put into a look. Leon nodded, fractionally.

His glance went past me, to the lagoon.

The creak of oars, that had been present in the back of my mind for uncounted minutes while I drew, became louder.

I scrambled down off the fallen Roman pillar, feet numb and prickling, and grabbed onto the carved marble to avoid falling over.

Orazi appeared at my elbow. I realised he must have been no more than fifteen feet away from me, he and his men watching the island with care.

A large shallow-draft row-boat grounded on the strand, and a man leaped ashore, waving towards us what I suspected he intended to be a reassuring dismissal.

His hat was a Venetian version of a Phrygian cap, banded with embroidery in the same blue and white as his tabard. I registered the blue tabards of his oarsmen, and the blue-and-white painting on the blades of their oars as they lifted them from the water.

He's an official of some kind--

Six armed men jumped onto the slick beach behind him. In the Doge's livery.

'In the name of the Council of Ten and Doge Foscari!'

I glimpsed in peripheral vision our own oarsmen, and the rest of Honorius's men, jogging towards us. I looked at Neferet. Her reddish-brown face was grey.

We are short in numbers-Attila must have left with Tottola and Fulka again, patrolling the grounds of the ancient church.

Leon Battista took a step forward, as if he were the only man present and therefore ought to control the situation.

I spoke before he could. The cold air made my voice harsh and much too low. 'What do you want?'

The Venetian in the Phrygian cap raised his eyebrows. 'Not you.' A pause. 'Madonna. Now--'

His head turned as he looked from me to Neferet, back to me, and then at the Alexandrine again. I felt my face growing hot. The official said nothing, but I considered what I might use in the way that I had used the oar with Ramiro Carrasco.

'Leon Battista Alberti.' The man's voice grew confident as he looked at the obvious man amongst us. 'By order of the Council of Ten, you're under arrest.'

'I'm what?' Leon sounded stunned.

'You're coming back with me now.' The official lifted his arm in what must be a pre-arranged signal.

I started to walk forward-Viscardo caught my arm, and Saverico stepped in on my other side-and the six mens plit up.

Two walked to Leon, and took him by each of his arms. The other four trotted to our boat, leaned over the side, and thrust with iron spikes-spikes long as a man's arm; a tool used for something, but I couldn't tell what.

They smashed through the bottom of the boat in seconds.

The oarsmen running up halted as if a wall had appeared in front of them. One small, spare-bodied man swore and spat, railing furiously against the Venetian official.

'Council of Ten!' the official repeated.

The two of the official's men that held Leon thrust him forward, towards their boat. I wrenched free, pushed past Orazi, and Neferet's long-fingered, broad hand closed over my elbow:

'You don't argue with the Council of Ten! They'll take you too!'

Leon sat down in the prow of the boat. His gaze rested on Neferet. He did not call out. Not a word.

The official stepped aboard. The men who had wrecked our boat thrust theirs into the lagoon, lurching up over the side and onto their rowing benches as the water deepened under their hull.

I looked at Neferet. At our broken boat.

'They can't just--!'

'They can. This is Venice. If someone's denounced him...' She blinked, blind gaze turned in the direction of the boat. 'I don't have enough influence. Not for this.'

Squinting at the lagoon around Torcello, I saw no other craft. The blue-and-white-painted boat receded into the haze, oars delicately picking at the surface of the water like a skating-insect.

'Is there...anything we can do?'

'Appeal to the Doge.' Her eyes showed hazy, like the distance. 'But, foreigners. The Doge doesn't like...'

'My father knows the mercenary Captain-General of Venezia. He can probably kick Carmagnola into supporting us. What--' I wondered if she would tell me what I thought was the truth. 'What did they arrest Leon for?'

Neferet shook her head, gazing in the direction of the city of Venice. 'It really doesn't matter, you know.'

Attila's and Tottola's boots hit the soil hard enough to kick up divots as they pounded around the church's end-wall, and out onto the strand, outpacing Fulka and the few other men-at-arms who trailed panting behind. Orazi signalled his men into a defensive circle around us. I saw the oarsmen clustered, complaining vividly in low growls.

Orazi stared at the smashed hull on the island's beach.

'They can't...' the Armenian sergeant began.

Neferet spoke as if he should already know what she said. 'They're the Council of Ten. They can do anything they like. Foscari can do anything he likes.'

'We,' Orazi scowled, narrowing his eyes against the last of the winter sun off the water, 'can see if the boat is capable of being mended. You were right, madonna,' he added, to me. 'No one lives here or comes here now. Not even peasants. There's no help to be had.'

Pain crunched the muscles of my belly.

A streak of something piercingly hot and wet ran down the inside of my leg. An almost-welcome warmth flooded my thighs and breeches and petticoats. Steam went up white into the winter air.

I had a moment to think in agonised embarrassment that I had pissed myself through fear-and another roll of muscle-pain all but closed over my head.

I grabbed Neferet's arm, shaking in panic. A snap of Orazi's fingers sent the men into armed stance: swords and bows at the ready to face whatever might be approaching. Neferet winced: my fingers dug into her arm, clenching the wool of her cloak.

Another cramp creased down my belly, following the wet and heat, sharp enough to make me gasp.

I don't bleed upwards of twice a year, and sometimes not that. This is different from women's cramps-but only in intensity, not in kind.

Orazi's blue-grey eyes opened in frank amazement.

'Jesu Christus!' I prised my fingers out of Neferet's arm. 'My waters broke!'

Pain washed over me; I lost long moments to it. My vision blurred, I thought-and I realised that it was mist on the late afternoon surface of the lagoon.

'Use the wreckage of the boat,' Orazi bellowed. 'If we can't row it, we can set it on fire as a beacon! Someone'll come.'

Specks moved in my field of vision.

It took me sluggishly long to decipher what it meant.

I pointed, and dug my other fist into the side of my body, against the dragging, grinding pain that washed through me.

'Someone has come.'

Light-headed and sweating, I watched a long shallow boat streak towards us, propelled by four standing men with oars. The failing light didn't let me accurately count the number of men in the main body of the boat. I would be surprised if it were less than a dozen.

Help or harm?

'I thought,' Neferet stuttered. 'Rekhmire' said.'

'Carrasco's out of town with Honorius and Federico.' Narrowing my eyes didn't bring me a clearer view. The oars knocked up foam from the lagoon water. Ramiro Carrasco might be being dragged round a mainland villa in Sunilda's wake, or he might be sitting fifty yards away from me in the boat.

I blinked. 'The light's bad. We could run.' Nothing I'd seen on Torcello made me think that would last long. But-'Orazi, could we shut the doors of the church? Stand a siege inside? The windows are small, and those doors are solid oak--'

'Yeah. Best option.' He turned and gave quick orders. There was no milling about as men obeyed him; Honorius impelled his men to discipline even in his absence. I saw our oarsmen had vanished. Run. I wish I might do the same!

Hobbling with the pain, holding Neferet's arm, I let her inch me away up the foreshore. She glanced impatiently about; frightened, angry, frustrated. If I'd been shorter, or not pregnant, I think she would have picked me up and run.

But she doesn't seem to think of doing anything that a woman of her height and build can't, despite her male aspects.

Neferet peered back towards the lagoon, and slowed her steps. 'We're too late.'

The boat altered course, hissed up the pebbles on the foreshore and disgorged a band of men who pelted up the bank in a straggle.

Running to get between us and the church.

I stopped, legs aching, leaning one hand against a fallen marble pillar. No use in trying to race. Thirty heartbeats and they had us out-manoeuvred.

Orazi and Saverico and Tottola dropped back, swords out, yelling orders to the other men-at-arms-who spread far enough apart that their line would block attackers without bringing them close enough to cut each other.

The lessons of the Sanguerra sergeant-at-arms came back to me. If a sword falls, I will pick it up. Some acts stay bred into the muscle and bone. Even if that muscle is cramping so that the watercoloured late afternoon whites out into encompassing pain.

There will be swords falling, I thought grimly, counting the men now spreading out in a loose line before the church. Blocking us from refuge.

Thirty, at least. And we are, what, ten? A dozen with Neferet and I.

I suspected the men had known who they followed and how we were guarded: three against one are the preferred odds for beginning battle. If four against, or five to one, are impossible.

'All right.' Orazi's voice lifted a little. 'Here's what we're going to do. Vazev, Tottola, Saverico; you're going to feint like you're trying to break through to the church. The rest of you, we'll cut down to the beach and take their boat.'

I all but choked. I saw grins among his soldiers, too.

Orazi pulled the falchion from Attila's belt while the German furiously racked his crossbow, and pushed the sword's hilt at me. 'You can use a weapon.'

The weight of the blade-heavy cleaver pulled against my wrist.

He barked at Neferet. 'You?'

Even with the murderers closing in, she looked affronted at the insinuation that she might not be a woman. 'Give me a knife.'

Someone had a heavy, single-edged dagger with a bollock-hilt in ivory and brass, a souvenir of the Frankish Crusades, and a hand appeared and shoved it at the Alexandrine. I suspected whoever offered that particular weapon was entirely aware of why Frankish men wear it at their crotch, scabbard pointing down, the jutting two-lobed hilt blatant in its symbolism.

Neferet took the dagger, and I had a moment to look at each of the faces I now knew by name; to realise they may end here, and so may I, and to feel a burning fierce rush of fear and anger.

'I can't run.' I looked at Orazi. 'I'll move as fast as I can.'

There was a glimmer of contempt in his gaze, that I recognised as Not a proper man, before it vanished. The worst of it was that it was kind. Sympathetic.

'If it comes to it, we'll carry you.' His hand shot out and closed like a vice on my elbow, crushing muscle and nerve against bone, holding me bodily upright, ignoring my wet skirts. He abruptly glanced up the slope. 'Shit. We've left this too late!'

The silhouettes of shoulders bobbed as armed men jogged down the slope from the church. Towards us. Attila let a bolt loose. Judging the range.

We shouldn't see silhouettes, I thought numbly.

The light's wrong!

The other half of the church's huge oak door banged open, and the light brightened still further from candles within.

A throng of men charged out of the church, and piled into the back of our first attackers.

Tottola said, 'What the fuck?' in pure Visigoth Latin.

Neferet raised her dagger.

Orazi yelled with the voice of a brazen trumpet, 'A Honorius! A leone di Castiglia! All of you, follow me!'

Pain twisted my womb. Twilight blurred my vision. Orders, shouts, cries: all went up from the scrum of men desperately fighting on the turf in front of the church. In the light from the open door, I saw one man trip back over a half-buried Roman statue of a lion's head.

A sword caught the last true daylight, cold and blue. The man wielding it pushed it into the fallen man's throat, just into the soft part under the chin.

A hand went under my arms from either side.

My toes hit the earth. I tried to move enough to run, even to walk, but the two Germans Attila and Tottola lifted me higher and ran as if I were a sack of meal between them, sprinting down towards the beach. The pain in my shoulder-joints almost overwhelmed the pain between my hips.

'Fuck.' Orazi swung around.

My feet hit the sand by the lagoon. I staggered, taking my own weight on my feet again.

I smelled pitch burning. The boat the men had arrived in sent up flames too fierce to come from an accidental torch-fire. Coughing rasped the tender inside of my throat, and filled my eyes with water. Our last chance, gone!

The contraction buckled my knees.

Limp, I slid down through Attila and Tottola's grasp. Instinct wanted me up and pacing, but I couldn't force myself to my feet. Could only think Pain, Jesu!, as the waves of it bit down on me, burning into the pit of my belly.

On my knees on the fine sand and shells, I stared back at the ancient round roof of the monastery. Below that perfect curve, torch-light poured out of the doors, and fell like honey.

It fell on grass turned black by twilight, fell glistening on spreading blood, shone impartially on men huddled dead, and men shrieking and sobbing at mutilation and amputation, and men fighting who trampled over them all.

Pain made me weak-stomached. I vomited over the beach and my skirts, wet strings of mucus dependent from my fingers.

With so much death, I should think of the life I'm carrying under my heart, that I'm to give birth to. Except that it's never stirred, and the birth will kill me as dead as these men.

Five men ran shouting towards us, swords in hand.

Attila, crossbow racked again, shot the first one through the stomach.

The unwounded men skidded on the wet ground, boot-soles locking in the clinging sand-stared with doubtful expressions, in the light of the burning boat-and turned around and ran, so fast it resembled the acts of clowns in the commedia.

Attila raised his voice over the sick grunts of the shot man.

'Bugger's not dead.' He looked over at me. 'Did you drop my falchion?'

There was vomit on my right hand. The reason the fingers of my left hand hurt so much was that they were locked by cramp around the hilt of his sword.

I looked at it mutely. Attila squatted down and began to gently move each finger from the leather-bound grip, pushing his fingertips into my muscles and knuckle-joints, surprisingly gently. The cramp eased away.

Orazi prompted the men-at-arms in front of us into a loose half-circle, their backs to the burning boat and facing the church. 'What they doing up there?'

'Dead, hurt, or run.' Vasez grunted. 'Far too many of 'em run. If they get their shit together and come back, we're fucked.'

'That's "we're fucked, Sergeant",' Orazi rasped, and got the expected rawly-tense ripple of laughter from all. He shook his head. 'Now if we had one fucking boat in one fucking piece--'

A voice spoke up out of the twilight.

'There's a boat. Hidden thirty yards south. In the stand of willow.'

A convulsion pulled at my womb. The hairs on my neck shivered. I have never heard a human voice sound like that in my life.

After an appalling sound, the voice finished, 'But I don't know-when my men will come back for it.'

Orazi made a silent gesture, two soldiers picked up burning planks as makeshift torches, and he stepped forward with Saverico and Berenguer, all with naked blades in their hands. The small Armenian swore as his foot skidded.

The flickering light showed clearly what lay ten feet in front of me.

A man with fair hair and trimmed fair beard sprawled on the slope. He would have been flat on his back, but his face pointed directly towards me-because of the acanthus-flower capital of the fallen pillar behind him, propping up his head. A dark smear marked the marble. Skull smashed? I wondered, and then--

This is the man Attila's bolt hit.

I met the shining, too-bright eyes in his wet grey face.

I had not considered the kinetic force of a crossbow bolt, though I could tell you that of the stones from a trebuchet.

Chunks of bone scattered around him, as if his pelvic bone had not merely been pierced, but exploded. I thought at first the debris was stone, rubble, where the bolt had gone through him and struck the pillar. But the pieces showed white and scarlet, chopped like bones at a butcher's stall.

It was too cold to smell more than the throat-closing thickness of blood. Torn chunks shone, glistening like a display. His intestines bulged out under his ribs on one side; the same side that a leg lay motionless beside him.

It is his own leg, I realised. I had thought it could not be, because it lay in an impossible position. But it was not connected to his body. The rounded knob of a hip-bone glistened, exposed in the dim light.

Movement caught my eye-blood, bubbling up through the grass like water from a spring.

He can have only moments more--

'Ilario.'

The man's eyes caught the light of makeshift torches. He stared directly at me. His voice was numbed, and polite.

'Ilario...'

It felt as nightmares do: frozen, implacable.

I pushed myself forward on hands and knees, no man breaking his own shock to help me. Wet skirts rucked under me. I stopped, crouched, a yard from that appalling face, and stench of shit.

He moved nothing but his eyes and his mouth. 'You. Ilario.'

'Yes.'

The fair hair and the breadth of his shoulders gave him something of a resemblance to Videric. I might have wished just this on Videric.

I spat out sour liquid. 'You were trying to kill me!'

He actually smiled.

If I prayed, it was to Rekhmire''s Eight. I want only a small miracle. Let him stay numb with shock. Let him feel nothing of what's been done to him.

Attila bent down, his mail sleeve flashing in the twilight, and stuffed a bundled-up mass of rags into the man's groin. The German's hand closed over the injured man's shoulder, and I saw the line of his back tense with the pressure he put into blocking the artery.

The dying man whispered, 'I stopped them killing you.'

The men who came running out of the church.

Attacking those who attacked us.

Led by this man?

His eyes showed pale. I saw the black gauze rag knotted around his neck. Men from under the Penitence often bandage their eyes when they first travel in lands outside the Darkness, because of the intense sunlight.

Under the mess of blood, his drenched clothing was Carthaginian.

He spoke again. 'Take the boat.'

There are an unknown number of armed men in the dark winter twilight of Torcello. This man's. Videric's paid criminals. No man knowing who his enemy or friend is. Yes, we need the boat; we need to leave--

I bit back a groan as my belly contracted. It will be a ghost of pain beside his. I can control it.

I blurted, 'We can't just leave you here!'

By the burning spar's light, as Saverico held it lower, I could see that the man's eyebrows were blond, too. His lashes a dark sand colour. Laughter-lines on his face now cut too deep, in the intensity of agony.

'I was to take you to Carthage.' His voice faded to thread-thin. 'Your Alexandrine spy. Tell him he succeeded. All the way to Florence. And then I hit the ghetto walls...Your Etruscan wife-is lovely.'

Saverico all but dropped the makeshift torch; Orazi swore. Fear turned my guts liquid. 'Have you hurt her?'

'Not even-speak to her. They don't let New Races in.' His eyes glistened. 'It took me too long to realise you...Then, here...Go...so I know you live.'

I was to take you to Carthage. Kidnap me; my guess was correct.

Coming to Torcello with so few soldiers-I didn't realise how many people would find that irresistible bait.

Orazi gripped my shoulder. 'We're going.'

'What about him!'

He gave the Carthaginian a professional glance. Speaking directly to him, Orazi said, 'You can live two or three hours-but you probably don't want to. Want one of my lads to help?'

Attila shifted, where he gripped the man, but looked determined.

The Carthaginian agent looked as if he attempted to shake his head. An odd shudder went through him.

'No.' There was no resonance in his voice. 'You never know-what will happen.'

Orazi's expression was clear in the light of the burning boat. If he'd spoken, he clearly would have said he knew precisely what will happen. The numbness wears off and you die screaming.

'Every man should have his choice.' Orazi dusted his knees and got up, stooped to grab under my arm, and I gripped the hard edges of his brigandine as he pulled me onto my feet and I towered over him.

He jerked his head at Attila. 'Up.' Orazi widened his tone to include the rest. 'Find these fucking willow trees! Find the boat!'

Attila stood up, his arms soaked red beyond the elbows. I looked down. The Carthaginian agent paused, I thought, to gather his strength before speaking.

His face was utterly still. His chest didn't move.

His eyelids drifted down a little, leaving only a curved line of white visible.

The welling wetness at his hips no longer attracted the eye with its movement.

There must have been some moisture rising from the hot shining tissue, distinct in the cold air. It was gone now, all his exposed viscera dull. His ribs had barely moved in the shallow breathing of shock; now they did not move at all. My eye insisted that the rise and fall of his chest continued; my ear, that I could detect the hiss of his breath. All illusion.

There is no lack of motion, no silence, that is like death.

'Just as well.' Orazi jerked his head to call Tottola in on the other side of me. 'I would have had to tell somebody to do it. Couldn't have him telling those other fuckers where we've gone.'

He sounded faintly apologetic. I identified what else was in his tone after a moment. Gratitude.

Because this man attacked for his own reasons, to abduct me-but he kept us all alive. He must have secreted his men in the church crypt. And without that attack in the rear of Videric's other agents...

I crested another burn of the pain, and wondered if his sacrifice was useless.

'He may have papers.' It occurred to me in Rekhmire''s voice.

Evidently this was not unusual to Orazi in my father's service. He nodded, and gave Fulka brief instructions.

'He's painstaking,' Orazi said aloud. 'If there's anything, he'll find it. Are you all right?'

'It-hurts a little.' I couldn't decide if the surges came more frequently now.

Neferet jogged back, skirts held up, large bare feet muddy where she had kicked off her shoes to run in the winter mud. Fire and flame shone back from her black hair.

'There is a boat! We found it!'

'Thank Christ for that!' I looked wanly at her as another pang went through me. 'I don't want to give birth on this damned island!'

Neferet's eyes rounded, as if she hadn't realised until now. 'You're two months early!'

'I know!'

The death of the Carthaginian agent swept over me with an absolute horror. He had known what had happened to him; he knew what was happening as he died. But the knowledge had not helped him. His heart is cool and still in his chest even now.

Every word I had ever heard or read, between the Penitence and Rome and the Most Serene city; every warning from Rekhmire' or physicians or Neferet's tame Green priest that she had brought into the Alexandrine House-all of it closed down on me like the metal jaws of a trap.

My body will do this. No matter what I want, or what I do. My body will labour and try for birth, and if common opinion's right, in a few hours I'll find out what the Carthaginian now knows.

The Carthaginian, and whoever else of these men lies back there in the darkness, not wounded, not hurt, not 'in danger, but may heal'-dead. Dead, and there has never been any appeal against it.

Orazi gave a sharp nod, and Tottola and Attila linked hands and wrists and scooped my body up between them, carrying me out to the boat. Neferet splashed heedlessly through the rippling water and climbed into the bows, so that she could help me in, and seat me among cushions and half a dozen cloaks on the stern bench.

Saverico wrapped a blanket around my shoulders; he shook as badly as I. He took up one of the oars and smiled-or I assume his grimace was intended to be a reassuring smile.

'You did well,' I said aloud-startled, because I am not the person who knows how to encourage others. 'You've known Honorius longer than I have-but I know he'll be pleased with what you did here. All of you.'

Orazi's callused hand closed briefly on my shoulder as he scrambled forward in the boat, past me.

'Which is why,' he said generally and aloud, 'you idle buggers are going to row like fuck! Because you all know what the Lion's going to be like if we lose his son-daughter now...'

It was a reminder of warmth, more than the thing itself, but I saw Attila wryly grinning, and Vasev reach enthusiastically for his oar. The Carthaginian agent's boat had been intended for three or four lances of men, and what is heavy enough to carry thirty is a bitch for ten or a dozen to row.

We have no dead or wounded, I realised, breathless with relief, as the last man-at-arms shoved the boat into deeper water and scrambled in. Brushwood burned as makeshift torches, winter-dry gorse popping and crackling, and smelling acrid.

My stomach turned.

The child didn't quicken-and it's been barely six months--

I must have said at least the last words aloud. Neferet corrected me:

'Seven.'

I tried to count up the time lapsed since Carthage, and doubled forward again, lost in are dhaze.

If there's a time for womanly fainting, I reflected, this would be it.

The birthing pangs had the contrary effect of making me wide awake.

Conscious for every lift and fall of the oars, every spatter of cold water coming inboard as we were rowed past the cypress island, past the merchant ships, and after what felt like aeons, past the Arsenale, and towards the Piazza San Marco. The last light in the west showed silhouettes of Venice's roofs and funnel-shaped chimneys, black against the sky.

Neferet told me to count breaths between the pains.

I used what vocabulary I remembered from being trained as a knight in Rodrigo's court. No man has quite such a hand with an insult as a sergeant at arms.

'Not long,' Neferet said. And, 'Not long now,' Sergeant Orazi said, as the boat rowed what felt like infinitesimally slowly up the Canal Grande, and entered the side canals of Dorsodura.

Saverico began, 'Not lo--', and cut himself off in mid-word, at least giving me a smile as he did it.

The boat grated against the side of our campo, and Neferet leaped ashore in the dark like an Alexandrine eunuch, not a Venetian lady.

16

I could hear her screaming for assistance even as Honorius pelted out of the iron gate, and knelt down to help me from the wide stern bench. Between the cold, and stiffening against the pain, I could barely manage to stand on feet that were like blocks of wood. I flinched against the light of the soldiers' torches; held onto my father as he supported me in through the bare garden and oak door.

'Call the midwife!' Honorius bellowed at one of the ensigns, who left at a run.

'And Baris,!' Rekhmire', clinging to his crutch and the door-frame, shuffled with difficulty backwards into the hall. 'Go to the Janissary captain's lodgings. I've paid a retainer fee; Baris, will come! Ilario, you should do well enough, between the Turk and a midwife.'

The warmth of the Alexandrine House made me shudder after the night's biting chill. My cloak and sleeves glistened, sticky with half-dried blood. The Egyptian shifted his weight onto one crutch, and seized my shoulder with the other. I was used enough to obeying him as his slave that I inadvertently closed my mouth on what I had been going to say.

'Ilario. Whether the child is coming too soon or not-you will do well enough.'

His tone was firm and confident. If, as he met Honorius's gaze where my father supported me, it did not quite match what I saw in his eyes, I wouldn't question him. As full of fear as of pain, I only want to hear reassurance.

Neferet brought me to the room that was Rekhmire''s and mine, undoing every latch and lock in it, and let me sit on the larger wooden bed that was the Egyptian's, loosing the draperies. I sat with my back against the bolster, and gripped my bare ankles, and swore. The hearth fire spread heat; extra charcoal-braziers made the room warm-too warm, I might have thought, if, with the blissful sensation of heat soaking into my body, I could have considered anything as too warm.

The Alexandrine and her women changed me out of my waters-soiled clothing, into a voluminous light cotton shift. They undid my hair. It was not truly long enough to braid up, but they let it down in any case, and it hung around my face, turning into rat's-tails as I sweated.

'Where's Rekhmire'? Where's my father?'

Neferet frowned. 'Allowing men in--'

'Don't be ridiculous!' I barked the deep order. 'Do it!'

Honorius walked through the door with his hand on the shoulder of a Venetian: a rosy woman who looked somewhere between fifty and sixty. One of those midwives who has birthed thousands of babies and borne none. Rekhmire' followed, swinging himself adeptly on his crutches, in turn followed by the Turkish physician Baris,, who nodded a cheerful greeting.

Dual examinations stopped me from realising, until it was too late, that a green-robed and black-bearded Frankish priest also entered-Neferet's Father Azadanes. He and the Alexandrine women removed the chessboard from the table by the hearth, and set up a Frankish prayer-box.

'Son of a bitch!' Waves of pain rolled through me. The professional hands of Baris, and the Venetian midwife seemed unbearably clammy on my skin.

She and he stepped back to confer. Possibly to argue, from their lowered, intense tones.

'Closer together?' Rekhmire' eased himself carefully onto the side of the mattress, sitting with his crutches resting between his knees. 'Your pains, I mean.'

'Yes.' I gritted my teeth. 'No. I don't know. Perhaps. This will be over soon, won't it?'

'All I've read of first labours--'

'I can do without hearing that!'

The retired Captain-General of Castile sat down on the other side of the bed. 'How many of these people do you want here, Ilario? I can throw the rest out.'

My instinct is to hide in a dark place, like a beast wounded during a hunt. Send them all away!

I looked from him to Rekhmire', and back. 'You don't have to be here. You forget, I do know what men think about child-bed. If you wait outside, that won't distress me.'

The two of them exchanged a glance across the top of my head.

'I want to watch the midwife,' Rekhmire' observed in an undertone.

Honorius echoed: 'And the priest.'

They turned their heads in unison, looking at the dark, full-bearded man in the green cowl and habit, who was picking over the midwife's herb basket with her. Every so often the Venetian woman's gaze would stray towards me, but she never looked above the line of my now slightly swollen breasts.

The hours went past, as they do even when it seems impossible they will.

The warmth made me dizzy, I found.

'Could I have something to eat?'

The midwife immediately came forward. 'That can't be permitted.'

Baris, frowned. 'It's not uncommon, in my country.'

The argument went on long enough that, between the fierce pains of the contractions, my head sank back against the bolster, and I found myself all but falling asleep.

I closed my eyes until I could see only a line of the fire's golden flickering light. My body should have expelled this in Rome. Or before. To carry it so long, and now have it die-if it was ever alive...

Pain tires. I have found this from injuries, before now. I debated requesting my sketch-paper, to while away the time, but the warmth sank deeper into me, and I began to doze. It was not unpleasant, except where I would find myself riding up the crest of the pain, until it burst in a cramping wrench that felt as if it would tear my body open.

I did sleep a little. When I was next fairly awake, Rekhmire' had swapped to sitting on the other side of the bed, Honorius was deep in reminiscences of battlefield doctoring with Neferet's Father Azadanes, and the midwife was having what looked like a sulky argument with the Turk. I couldn't see Neferet. The clock's single hand showed it gone midnight.

'Eight hours...!' I sat up, appalled.

Rekhmire' propped more bolsters under me. 'In the courts of the Pharaoh, women walk about for their birth. Neferet's gone looking to see if anyone has a birthing stool, if you wish to try it.'

'Walk!' I snorted, and then squinted across the room at the midwife. 'What's the argument there?'

'She wants to give herbs to hasten the birth on. Or to stop it, in case this isn't time.' The Egyptian curved a large hand and rested it on my abdomen. The touch felt reassuring. 'Physician Baris, says you've dropped down; it's time.'

Whether the child can survive this or not.

Or I.

'I just want this over! And in God's name get them to stop treating me like an invalid!' I pushed myself more upright in the bed. 'Maybe your "pacing" has something to be said for it!'

Rekhmire''s solemn face split in a grin. 'I'm told that, after my mother birthed me, she got up and cleaned the house from top to bottom. My father aided her. You're just such another as she.'

I smiled. The mental image came to me of what she would have been cleaning. I stopped smiling.

'Gah!' A jolt of pain made me grunt. 'Teach me more of the eight gods' names, will you? I think I may need to blaspheme very loudly before long.'

In the warmth of the panelled dark room, Rekhmire' amused me by teaching me how one properly addresses all four duads of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad, under all circumstances, and Honorius went irritably in and out of the door until the midwife tried to banish him. He clearly had no intention of obeying, and took one of the clay lamps to the embrasure of the oriel window, where he sat and stared out at the Venetian night.

The Green priest's prayer-box was somewhat like Rekhmire''s own, but this one had in it a model of Christus Viridianus's mother at the foot of the Leafless Tree, the blood of the birthing red between her thighs, and the Eagle above and the Boar beside her. Father Azadanes set the female doll's legs wide apart. It seemed oddly obscene, even if she was wearing a minutely-sewn silk birthing robe. (Which I don't for one moment suppose the Mother of God had with her in the German forests.)

'It's-the superstition of sympathy--' Pain made me slow with words. 'That like can affect like. Rekhmire'--'

He shot a glance up at me from where he bent over, pressing his fingers into his healing knee. 'Less trouble to let him pray than to throw him out and have Neferet bellowing at us.'

'You are sure he's safe? Nothing to do with Videric?'

The Egyptian shook his head. 'Nothing. But if it eases your mind, Honorius will call the soldiers back. You couldn't be safer.'

'Draw the curtains.' I pointed up at the tester bed curtains, and realised my hand shook. The enemy is not outside this bed, not tonight. 'I don't think anything's going to happen for a while.'

I was accurate, and I could wish not to have been.

The hours of darkness went by. For some reason I expected to pass the child's dead flesh in the small hours of three or four in the morning, but all that happened was that the long cramps continued. Indeed, they began to lessen in frequency. I saw, between the curtains, Rekhmire' and the midwife speaking to one another. I was too tired to wonder what they said.

The slow grey light of pre-dawn illuminated in the sky.

Coal braziers burned black and scarlet, their scent contending with the winter air. I could not tell whether I was warm or cold. Neferet's insistence on having the shutters undone meant I could lay back in bed and look at the sky.

There is nothing left to do.

The long, slow, rolling waves of pain lifted me up, dropped me down, ebbed away, and slowly gathered again. It might have been a tide. I felt heat between my legs, and the midwife took soaked cloths away, but there was nothing else. When her fingers felt my belly again, she set her mouth into a hard and inexpressive line.

Baris, frowned, also, but at her.

Back at Federico's estate, much younger, I would sometimes aid with the lambing or the calving. It always frightened me to see beasts with bodies so different to my own. The weather beaten farm slaves handled their ewes and cattle much as the midwife offered to handle me, grease-slicked fingers poised to slide up the birth canal.

If her fingers were hesitant, I realised, it was because of the hermaphrodite organs she found when she raised my linen gown.

The Turkish physician Baris, caught my gaze and came over, shifting a bunch of cloth to cover my penis, and steered the midwife away with a hand to her elbow. I noted that this led to him sending Balaban for more water, and washing, even though the last of the dead Carthaginian agent's blood was long gone from my cuffs and his own hands.

'Ilario?'

Honorius's voice, I realised.

I had slid down the bolster. Trying to hitch myself back up, I caught a stench of human scent released by the movement. Sweat. Rank sweat. And blood of my own.

The pain didn't stop. I tried to concentrate on his words. 'Are they arguing again?'

Honorius smoothed black strands of hair from my eyes and forehead. 'You may have to choose. The midwife can give you herbs to bring on the birthing. But that will endanger the child, if...'

'If it isn't already dead?'

He held a wooden water-bowl to my mouth, and I sipped gratefully.

'I don't think it can ever have been alive. I've felt nothing.'

The herbs tasted bitter.

They did no good.

I lived through every hour between dawn and early afternoon, but have no great wish to recall them. They say the pain of child-bed is forgotten. This is a lie.

At one point, when the midwife and Neferet and Baris, and the priest were all screaming at each other-and I was too breathless to scream any more-I reached down, but could feel nothing different between my legs. It all stayed resolutely in my belly.

The memory of lambing returned. Dizzy, I wondered if they would try to pull the infant out bodily, which would fail as that always does, and if I would look white and blue and greasy, as dead ewes do when they die with their litter still in the womb.

'Remind me to have a word with your foster father.'

Honorius's voice sounded rusty and grim. I opened my eyes, realising I must have muttered aloud.

'Lambing,' Honorius added, with revulsion that sat oddly on a veteran of battlefields.

'Not my fault!' The midwife's voice rose self-righteously high. 'How can I help a monster give birth!'

Honorius's weight left the bed in a rush. By the time I had myself as upright as I could manage-leaning on my elbows-I glimpsed him hauling the woman out through the door. It slammed. Voices rose from the hall.

'"Monster".' I shrugged. 'She's not wrong.'

Neferet's Frankish priest, Father Azadanes, peered myopically at me from where he stood on the other side of the bed. 'Madonna Ilario, shall you and I pray for this child? And for you?'

I had not sufficient concentration to be rude to him. 'If you wish.'

For all the pain, I felt as if I were being kept from a job I badly needed to do-manual work, like a slave in a mine or on a farm. I could feel it in every sinew, every muscle: I need to get up now and work!

Pain rushed through me, hard enough that I crested it yelling, as I was taught to yell on the impact of my sword or axe in knightly training. Once: once more: once again--

'Nothing!' I snarled, frustrated. Looking up at Honorius and Rekhmire', I asked, 'What's Physician Baris,'s advice?'

Honorius was white to his mouth. 'That he should act as a surgeon.'

I think I have known since Rome that it would come to this.

I saw Father Azadanes praying by the hearth.

'I don't care what the Church says about the pains of sinful Eve in child-bed...If you cut me open, I want poppy.'

Pain and poppy together made me hallucinate a Carnival mask on Baris,'s face. The long-beaked leather mask of the Plague Doctor, in lapidary detail. If I could only see so well when I draw with a silver rod...

I must have struggled to get out of the bed. Hands pushed me down. I stared; felt myself writhing, sweating--

Honorius held my right shoulder in an immovable grip; nothing to suggest him fifty years old. Decades of soldiering have worn him to rawhide strength. Rekhmire''s hands pressed less heavily down on my left arm, where he sat on the bed, and I felt it when his own pain made him shift.

Each time the poppy took hold, I dropped into intricate, lengthy, narrative dreams, that took years to pass in my mind, and only moments by the burning-down of the marked candles.

Baris, set up a sheet that draped my knees.

I almost laughed out loud. I have no desire to see what's going on! And, for the others here-what do they not already know about me?

Another rolling wave of pain made me grunt, biting down until I drew blood from my lip; the small pain lost in the arid, scraping, swollen agony in my womb.

The poppy made clear in my mind the paper on which I drew Rekhmire''s flayed knee. Every fibre, tendon, shard of bone; and rivulet of blood among the so-fine hairs on his skin. There is no one present who can draw me. And no one who can draw these images from my mind.

Time slipped, as it does in high fever or pain; I caught myself cursing, and then lost interest and energy in it. The Frankish priest stood by the physician's shoulder, I saw, but I was not sure that Baris, knew it. All his attention fixed on something below my line of sight.

Below the raised flax-linen sheet-spattered with perfect ovals of blood.

I opened my mouth to ask how he did, and a constricting pain shattered my pelvic bones, and tumbled me into a state where time didn't exist.

Father Azadanes' bushy black beard moved. Anger boiled through me.

'No prayers!' I want no final rites from a Frankish priest! I don't want the rites at all--

Baris, straightened up, wiping a bloody hand across his forehead. His dark skin smeared brilliant red in the sunlight that shone in through the window. Is it afternoon? Another morning? I did not know.

The Turkish Janissary's eyes narrowed. He didn't look down at me, but at the two men either side of me. 'If it comes to a choice, which shall I save? The baby or the-mother?'

Honorius and Rekhmire' spoke together, both in the same breath:

'The mother!'

I saw Honorius give the Egyptian a look, to which Rekhmire' remained oblivious.

The mother. A faint feeling grew in me that I ought to protest that.

I ought.

The obligation seemed no more and no less than that: obligation.

A dribble of water ran down my forehead, narrowly avoiding running into my eyes. The stench of some herb or other startled me into jerking my head back against the bolster. The cuff of a green habit brushed my chin as the hand drew back. Azadanes' deep bass rumbled, 'Blessed mother, blessed infant, Mater dolorosa, Sancta Mater--'

I growled a protest, and a grinding pain sliced at my body; took me enough by surprise that I could only reach up and grab wildly-catching my father's arm, and Rekhmire''s shoulder-and grunt as something was lifted out of the cavity of my body.

The physicality of the sensation so amazed me that I had no memory of the physician's actions after that. Something seemed flaccid; moved. The Janissary physician reached down, I speculated, How many times on campaign does he deal with childbirth!, and there was a great gush. His hands as he lifted them were vermilion.

'Gahh!' I said, or thought I said.

Honorius chuckled and ruffled at my hair.

Rekhmire' squeezed my fingers.

I snarled weakly, 'I'll never lie with any man again! And if I ever see Marcomir, I'll geld him!'

A face leaned into my field of view. Neferet's reddish-tan profile. She peered down behind the sheet, where I couldn't see, and then looked back at me. 'Ilaria, shall I have Father Azadanes also pray to remove those vestigial organs you don't need?'

'No!'

Someone yanked Neferet aside. Rekhmire', I thought; since I could no longer feel the warmth of a body on that side of me. Chill struck on the other side, too, as Honorius leaned away from me, intently staring at something.

'Father...'

His lean, muscled frame sat back. His hands were cupped.

It must be something to do with me, I thought, or he would not be offering it. Am I to say farewell to my dead child? My chest was hollow, blown up suddenly with a grief that choked me.

'Take her!' Honorius whispered.

But I saw nothing, felt nothing!

I looked into Honorius's cupped hands. She was tiny. It took the breath out of me with a fierce tug, how very small she was. A miniature screwed-up face, pink and bloody and greyish-white, as if she had been lightly rubbed over with clay. I touched my thumb-tip to her face, before I knew I would do it.

Her small and perfect lips reflexively moved.

'It's alive!' I wondered instantly how long this would last.

'Look,' Honorius breathed.

The scrunched blue-purple-and-red face wrinkled itself up further under my gaze. She yawped, yawned, and settled into an undramatic breathy grizzle. A person, there before me.

'She's alive.' I put my hand out again, touching my fingers to her slick greasy-grey belly, where the swollen cord still lay. 'I'm alive. What--?'

She lay on Honorius's brown hand, barely long enough to cover him from wrist to fingertip. If she weighed two Frankish pounds I would be surprised.

The priest's deep voice rumbled at my shoulder. 'Thanks be to God Himself for this miracle!'

Baris, muttered something under his breath in Turkish. I didn't think it was devout. My body moved with the tug and rip of stitches being put into my skin, but the poppy kept the pain at a distance, even though I felt it.

I let him move my hands when he came to tidy up the birth-cord. I could not stop looking.

'She can't live, surely?' I measured my thumb against her minuscule hand, and jolted with shock as her fingers momentarily closed on me. 'It's too soon. She wasn't due for two months.'

Honorius's hand began to shake: he steadied it by gripping his wrist with his other hand.

'Your midwife keeps saying "seven-month babies live all the time"!' His voice was ragged, and his eyes ran over with sudden bright water.

The sheet shifted. I glimpsed a dark scarlet mess in the bed, that was either afterbirth or my inner organs. I thought I would feel considerably less well if it were the latter.

'She has black hair. Like mine.'

'The first hair is always black.' Rekhmire''s weight came down on the mattress, pressing against my ribs. He sat holding a clean cloth in his hands, dampened with Balaban's tepid water, and as Honorius continued to support her, the Egyptian began very delicately to clean the new-born.

He glanced at me. 'Do you want to do this?'

'It's...She's so small!' Her arm, as he lifted it to wipe the skin, was no bigger around than my finger.

Baris, reached over with a dry cloth, tucking it around the minute body. He scooped her from Honorius's callused palm, and put her against my chest. 'Sorry, madonna, it's a girl.'

I did not note the apology.

'Are you sure?' I stared down. It took no more than one of my hands to keep the new-born weight tucked against the warmth of my naked skin, on the slope of my breast. 'Are you sure?'

'Of course. Ah.' Baris, nodded.

With Rekhmire''s help, and Honorius's hindrance, the Janissary doctor re-examined the child's nether end. I thought about long campaigns, and soldiers' wives and whores.

I do not care if the child is female or male: only let her not be like me!

'Girl.' The physician tucked the cloth napkin back, his fingers extraordinarily gentle. 'Very small. There is sometimes trouble with small and--' He tapped his chest. 'The breath?'

Fascinated, I nodded, and rubbed the very tip of my finger over her lower lip. 'Look at her.'

The little mouth made a sucking noise.

Panic washed me hot and cold in one second. I saw in my mind the Carthaginian agent: how his chest stopped moving, how breath just-ceased.

'We have to find it a tit to feed from! We have to put it to one; it'll die!'

Baris, smiled at me. 'What? No. She doesn't need to eat until she shows she wants to. You think you won't be able to feed her?'

Seizing authority, he sent the priest out of the room, and directed Honorius and Rekhmire' to the fireside, since they wouldn't go further from me. Baris, set himself to examine my small breasts that, while painful, were no larger than before the pregnancy.

'Sometimes milk, this takes time coming in,' Baris

, said finally, frowning. 'I can find you a wet-nurse? If you haven't one?'

Numbly, I nodded assent. The damp, warm weight in my palm wriggled faintly-so small!-and settled her head back against my useless breast.

As Physician Baris, began to speak to Honorius about wet-nurses, Rekhmire' limped over from the room's door, propped himself upright on his crutches, and pulled the bed drapes fully back.

The child in my hand wailed faintly, rolling her head away from the bright day. Hastily, I shaded her with the fingers of my other hand.

Rekhmire''s brows dipped down.

'I know,' I said, dizzy with wonder. 'The chances of her living are...If she makes two months, I'll name her.'

Her hair was soft and dry now under my thumb, and I smoothed it down.

Rekhmire''s frown didn't lift. 'Azadanes wants to go through some Frankish Christian rite. To clean her soul?'

That would have been his business at the door, I realised. Throwing the Frankish priest out.

I shook my head, bemused. 'How can she have done anything wrong yet? An hour ago, she wasn't here.'

'Don't ask a man who worships the Eight...'

The small lashes on her cheek were perfect. As they lifted, I saw she had deep blue baby's eyes. If she lives, they might be any colour.

'You hold her, Rekhmire'.' I scooped both hands about her, supporting every part, waiting until the Egyptian settled himself on the bed. I placed her gently in Rekhmire''s large hands.

'It's strange.' I couldn't take my gaze from her. 'She never moved inside me. I never felt I was with child. She wasn't born to me in the normal way. She...Is she really from me?'

Rekhmire' smiled. He stroked his fingertip in her tiny lined palm. Her fingers could not grasp all his finger's circumference, but I saw her try.

'No one else here was with child. The evidence suggests she's from your womb. Or was that howling merely to entertain us?'

'I can't feed her.'

'You don't know that yet.'

'I know.' My conviction was irrational but strong. I took her back into the crook of my arm. 'See if they have a wet-nurse yet? Or at least if the kitchens would have any goat's or cow's milk?'

The door openly, briskly; I saw every man in the room startle. Ensign Viscardo's dark face made me sigh in relief. We are all as tight as an overwound harp-string here--

'What?' Honorius snapped, ferocious at an interruption.

Viscardo's eyes showed wide.

'Sir-it's Ilario's family!'

My heart physically jerked in my chest.

Which family?

The minuscule new-born let out a breath of a wail.

Viscardo's eyes opened wider, seeing me; he suddenly grinned like a boy, and as abruptly collected himself-although his gaze kept sliding sideways to the new-born child.

'Sir, it's Signor Federico, and his wife, and his daughters. They're here! They heard about the labour. They want to see Messer Ilario!'

Honorius looked completely blank.

Venetian servants, I thought. Since here it isn't slaves. The rumour-mill grinds just as efficiently. Federico and Valdamerca...

An ominous set of rising voices came from downstairs.

I pushed the sweat-darkened sheets into a nest on my chest, and settled the new-born where she could feel my heat and heartbeat. I looked up at Honorius and Rekhmire'.

'Can I have these sheets changed? Then, let them in.'

Viscardo nodded acknowledgement, barely waiting for Honorius's signal, and ran out.

'Ilario,' Rekhmire' warned.

'They can see me and go away.' I snorted. 'I'll be asleep in a quarter-hour! I'm exhausted. But I know Federico-he won't go away until he does see me.'

Tired as I was, I made the shift to the Iberian of Taraconensis, speaking both to Honorius and Rekhmire'.

'You know he won't go! Federico has come here to find out whether or not he can send a message to-to my mother's husband...telling him that I'm dying or dead.'

17

Neferet's servants worked around me, replacing the dirty sheets with clean cool linen that soothed my skin. The child lay in a makeshift wooden cradle-in fact, originally a small oak linen-chest-by the fire, with both my father and the Egyptian blocking all access to her.

Reclining up against the bolsters, I found myself unable to settle. Without that steadily pinkening small figure under my eye, how can I believe in a baby's existence?

Poppy-extract kept my scurrying mind numbed, as well as my body. I barely heard the shuffle of feet outside, that I knew must be Honorius's men-at-arms moving into position.

As the door opened to let in Federico, the invisible child proved itself far from inaudible. She sent up a hunger-wail that made my throat thicken and my eyes prick with tears.

'Ilario!' Federico bustled up to the foot of the bed, gesturing for the others with him to stand back.

I saw Valdamerca's long-nosed equine features at the back of the group; she caught my eye and gave me a grim smile. Reinalda's look was softer. She stood with her sister, her arm linked through Sunilda's, and had the same look as her mother. Welcome to the sisterhood.

That's right, I thought groggily. Carrasco told me. Reinalda married, a year back; she has a baby. Sunilda, no, she's not...

Baris,'s voice came from the far side of the bed. 'Don't trouble her long, sir. I've given her a drink for the pain, and she'll sleep now.'

Federico waved an impatient hand. He frowned a little, looking down at me.

'If I'd known...' he began slowly.

'If you'd known I could be put to stud,' I said acerbically, 'you would have included that when you sold me to King Rodrigo. Right?'

'You do me very ill.' He made a gesture, as if he would reach out to me, but didn't complete it.

'Signor Federico.' Honorius's brusque tones came from the hearth. He interrupted a minute or two before I had told him he should, but I was grateful all the same.

Jesu! I can't breathe!

With the servants of Aldra Federico, and the retinue attending Valdamerca and her daughters, and Neferet's women acting as chaperones, as well as at least four of Honorius's soldiers, armed in mail, and lining the walls, I found the room very much too crowded. Polite words were spoken, the dozen or so people in the room congregating at the foot of my bed, and then moving towards the cradle. I wondered if I could pull the bed-curtains and fall asleep without anyone noticing.

As I thought of it, a figure stepped alongside the bed, running the curtain soundlessly along and blocking off much of the view of the rest of the room.

Sunlight shone in on Ramiro Carrasco's black curls. He gave me a strained smile, reached for one of the loose pillows that lay on the bed, and pushed it down over my face.

About the Author

MARY GENTLE published her first novel at the age of eighteen, and has a master's degree in Seventeenth Century Studies and another in War Studies. The author of several novels, including A Sundial in a Grave: 1610, she lives in Stevenage, England, with her partner Dean Wayland.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Also by Mary Gentle

A Sundial in a Grave: 1610

The Wild Machines

Lost Burgundy

A Secret History

Carthage Ascendant

Golden Witchbreed

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ILARIO: THE LION'S EYE. Copyright (c) 2002, 2006 by Mary Gentle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Mobipocket Reader May 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-145323-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.uk.harpercollinsebooks.com

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com