‘Ilario—’ He bit off whatever he had been going to say, glared back at
me, and snapped, ‘Because I’m a spy!’
The room poised, full of silence.
‘Ah.’ I didn’t look away from his gaze. ‘Good. I did wonder when you
might tell me . . . ’
Rekhmire’ positively snarled at me. ‘ What! ’
Honorius slid down a little on the bench beside me, hammering at his
thigh with his fist. Small tears easing out of the corners of his screwed-
shut eyes. I couldn’t make out what he wheezed.
‘Father?’
The Captain-General reached for the bottle and glasses, tipping a fair
amount of wine from one into the other. He pushed a glass at me, and
held one out to Rekhmire’, ridiculously delicate in his warrior’s fingers,
never mind the Egyptian’s large hand.
Honorius lifted his own glass, as in a toast. He remarked cheerfully, ‘I
bet you don’t get a lot of that.’
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5
At Rekhmire’’s suggestion, Honorius broke off from packing long
enough to send ten men, inconspicuously, to pack up and bring back
Herr Mainz’s printing- machina from his workshop.
They found the anonymous shed stripped bare.
I supposed the Venetians might gain some knowledge from the
construction of the machina itself, but the German Guildsman’s satisfied
smile confirmed that the metal type was key.
Since mercenaries must be expert at moving their habitation, and
Rekhmire’ I knew to be more than used to packing up as a book-buyer, I
left the household to their skills.
Ramiro Carrasco entered the room I had come to think of as mine, just
as I completed packing what art supplies I judged worthy into a chest for
transport, and throwing out what paper I had wasted on unsuccessful
rendering.
‘You can take these down.’ I indicated the ash-wood chests. It
disquieted me how easy I found it to give plain orders.
Although some of that is the influence of men-at-arms, and not merely experience of slavery.
A faint fuzz of black hair showed under Carrasco’s coif, growing back
in. A blue mark under his eye was a bruise, and new. No great wonder if
he didn’t mourn the departure of my father’s company for Taraconensis.
‘I feel strange at leaving this room.’ I looked about me, touching the
green velvet hangings of the bed, and continued without forethought:
‘After all, I gave birth to a child here.’
Ramiro Carrasco coloured from the skin at the neck of his shirt, clear
up to his ears and scalp; a glowing scarlet translucency of the flesh that
might as well have been a brand.
I refuse to be embarrassed that this man tried to kill me!
‘I’ll take these,’ he muttered, squatting to lift one chest. He did not add
‘master’ or ‘mistress’. I was willing to bet he owed his black eye to
another such omission.
Shooting an apologetic glance, he added, ‘Will I come back and help
with the child?’
Onorata’s blankets, clothing, and feeding gear still occupied the bed in
sprawled heaps. She herself, in her lidless oaken chest, was beginning
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that restless shifting of her face that meant she would wake soon and be
hungry.
‘ Lord Christ Emperor on the Tree.’ I sat bonelessly and suddenly on the edge of the bed, hard enough to jolt my teeth, and found myself staring
up at Carrasco as the only other adult present.
He put down the box, stepping forward. ‘Is she ill? Should I fetch a
physician?’
‘What? No.’ My knuckles were white, where my hands made fists
quite without my own volition. ‘I realised – I haven’t taken her out of the
city before. A sea voyage! Suppose it kills her? She’s so small!’
Carrasco gave me a bright-eyed and unguarded smile, still a little
russet from his previous embarrassment. ‘You put me in mind of my
youngest sister and her first.’
At sister he blinked uncertainly, evidently registering that I had dressed
in doublet and hose for travelling.
‘She’s a small one, but she’s thriving.’ Carrasco squatted down by the
approval.
‘How can you tell ?’ The Turkish physician had been extensive in his
description of stools, rashes, fontanels, birth-marks, crusts on her eyes,
and illnesses in general – but seemed to think I must know what
constituted good health.
Carrasco lifted his head and looked at me, amazed. On the bed and its
dais, I sat considerably higher than him; I felt it failed to give me any moral authority. He seemed momentarily entirely confident.
‘She’s growing. After the first couple of weeks, provided they grow
and they don’t get sick, they’re all right.’
‘Certainly she eats enough!’ I might sound frustrated, I thought. ‘Eats,
sleeps, shits – I swear you could set a monastery clock by her! Every
Vespers, Matins, Lauds . . . She doesn’t do anything else. Do you think there’s something wrong with her?’
Seriously, Carrasco observed, ‘Your father should have hired you a
nurse.’
He stood, and I saw him glance at the bed again, his flush reasserting
itself.
‘If I remember, madonna, she’s two months old or a little less. She’ll
do more when she’s older. They say she was early?’
Reckoning up weeks, it came to me that if she had gone full term, it
would be now that she would have been born. Looking at her in that
light, her minute hands and ears and eyes did not seem so undersized for
a newborn.
I made to stand and found my knees still weak. ‘How in Christ-the-
Emperor’s name will I manage when she starts moving about! Talking!’
If they were not my blood-kin, nevertheless, Honorius’s most trusted
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men-at-arms had filled the place of family these last months. But without
her grandfather, and with all the responsibility falling to me . . .
I wondered if the attempt to hire another wet-nurse would be worth
my child’s frantic roaring and screaming and obdurate refusal to feed.
My child.
‘I can make you a sling, for the babe.’ Carrasco shifted his weight from
one foot to the other as I looked at him, and shrugged. ‘Madonna. My
mother used to carry the little ones that way. Left her hands free.’
The blush was not quite gone from his skin. The involuntary colouring
spoke of shame. And if ‘madonna’ is not ‘mistress’ or ‘master’, it is still a
respectful form of address for the women of the Italies.
If I didn’t think Carrasco a man forced into violence by desperation –
if I hadn’t thought him capable of feeling guilt for attempting to kill a new mother – he would not be under the same roof as Onorata.
I managed to unclench my hands. ‘Thank you. Yes. How warmly
should I dress her, if I carry her in this sling?’
My erstwhile assassin stepped up onto the dais, sorting with quick
efficiency through the piles of clothes, and laying out thin shawls, and a
tiny fur-lined hood.
‘If there’s anything more odd than this
day in my life—’ I caught
Ramiro Carrasco’s gaze. ‘—I’m going to need to be better rested to meet
it!’
He made a movement that was part shrug, part slave’s duck of the
head, and all amazingly awkward. To my surprise, he followed that with
a smile.
‘Shall I help you with her feed, madonna?’
‘I can do that. You carry the boxes: I can’t . . . ’
He nodded, and took up the packed chests, and in the quietness of his
departure, I began to ready the pottery vessel with a glazed spout that
had proved the best thing for Onorata to suckle and feed from.
A scrape of wood on wood made me look up. Rekhmire’, crutch
lodged securely under his arm, had evidently just stopped at the open
doorway. He smiled and came in, awkwardly dumping the scrolls under
his free arm onto the bed.
‘Are you ready?’ He peered intently at Onorata in my lap, as she
suckled at the pottery spout, but directed the question at me.
‘Yes. No.’
Panic returned in a flood.
I did not let it alter my cradling of the tiny child.
‘How am I to feed her on the ship! We can’t be forever putting into ports to buy milk—’
Briskly, Rekhmire’ said, ‘It’s a galley, Ilario!’
At my bemused look, he added, ‘Built much on Venetian lines, I must
admit, even if it is out of an Alexandrine dockyard. Three rowers to
every oar, a full complement of marines, the captain and navigator and
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his officers, and I don’t doubt a passenger or two beside you and I and
Herr Mainz! With a crew of two hundred men, we’ll be calling in at
coastal ports for water and food every other day – the pilot’s knowledge
of that, and the headlands, currents, and landmarks, is what will take us
to each port on the way through the Aegean to Alexandria . . . ’
‘Calling into a port every other day?’ I had thought only of the deep
seas the Iskander survived, in the autumn storms, not this coastal
hopping from harbour to harbour.
Rekhmire’ nodded. ‘And even if not – you’ll find, down towards the
port side of the captain’s cabin, the enclosure where they pen up the
animals for slaughter during the voyage. The galley carries several goats
in kid, and three nursing nannies, for the milk, and your father has added
several more to that contingent.’
A smile touched his solemn face.
‘I think Master Honorius would turn the galley into a livestock cargo
ship, rather than think of the child going hungry.’
Evidently he would rather turn a joke than put into my mind the
dangers of the whole ship sinking, should we encounter bad storms.
There are banker’s scrips in my purse.
‘I can’t support her on my own.’ The reality of that failure biting deep,
I could hear an edge to my voice. ‘Lord Emperor Christ knows what I’d
be doing if I hadn’t found you and Honorius this year!’
‘Children should be raised by the whole family.’ Rekhmire’ brushed
his thumb over her forehead, and down to her flared lips, that had
latched onto the pottery spout with no apparent indication of ever letting
go.
I snorted. ‘Without all her soldier-uncles, I’ll be hard put enough to
feed her properly all day and all night!’
Rekhmire’ turned his head, looking mildly at me. ‘Does being no man-
at-arms disqualify me from assisting?’
My face was a little hot. I satisfied myself that Onorata had done with
sucking, and sat her upright to burp her, wiping off the resulting gob of
milk.
‘You have responsibilities . . . ’
I detected something like pique in Rekhmire’’s expression, I thought.
Experimentally, I added, ‘But you know she falls asleep fastest when
you read her old Aramaic . . . ’
He put his ruddy-coloured finger to her palm, and her pale tiny hand
clenched over his nail. ‘You know very well she’s working on a
translation. Aren’t you, Little Wise One?’
A slave is ill-advised to roll their eyes or be sarcastic; I was under no
such restriction. ‘Yes, master.’
A thought came into my mind on the heels of that.
‘Do you realise – if she’d been born in Rome, you’d have owned her
too?’
110
‘Dear holy Eight!’ Rekhmire’ closed his eyes devoutly, and somewhat
spoiled the effect by peeking out under his long eyelashes. ‘Two of you.
It hardly bears thinking of.’
Onorata burped again.
That, and Rekhmire’’s expression, made me laugh, as he evidently
desired. Taking my mind from the lives of slaves and their children when
not free.
‘The Sekhmet leaves at dawn tomorrow,’ he added, retrieving his hand
as Onorata abandoned interest in his finger. ‘Are you ready?’
‘No.’ As ever, I found it more than easy to give him the truth. ‘It
terrifies me, to think of such a small baby on a long voyage across the sea.
How can she ever survive it?’
If I expected baseless reassurance, I was mistaken. Rekhmire’
thoughtfully nodded agreement.
‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re as far from Taraco, here, as you are from
Alexandria-in-exile. So it would be no better for her to travel to your
home country. If you could stay here, that would be best – but Venice is
full of fever in the hot weather, and in any case, I doubt you can stay here
in safety from your enemies. This is not the best choice, but I can think
of no better.’
He softened nothing, but he did not lie.
I held the tiny solid weight of Onorata, marvelling at her dark lashes
and scant feather-light hair. Like Herr Mainz – Herr Gutenberg – I have
a need for truth, no matter how little varnish men put on it.
111
6
The dawn was not even grey in the east when the household stirred again
for our departure.
Licinus Honorius I found in the makeshift Alexandrine bath room,
when I came to tackle him on the final details of a military guard; two of
his men-at-arms bringing in jugs of heated water to fill the porphyry tub.
Naked, he was thin and muscular, with white scars crossing every area
of his body, in particular below the knees and elbows.
‘Shins and hands. Targets.’ He wiped himself down with a wash-cloth,
as dignified as if he were clothed in more than soap-opaque water. ‘You
need not nag. I’ll leave only two men with you – one as bodyguard for
you, one for the child.’
In the last instance, when all else has failed, a bodyguard’s duty is to
interpose their flesh between mine and a weapon. I thought I could have
refused it for myself. Not for Onorata.
‘Who?’
‘Tottola and Attila.’ He stood, receiving the towel I handed him with
equanimity. I wished I had ever thought to ask for a nude study of him:
he would be ideal, I thought, for one of the more martial Prophets.
‘They have the advantage,’ he added, ‘of looking nothing in the least
like Iberian soldiers. I’ve told them to take off my livery badges.’
‘You’ll take all the rest?’ I
fixed Honorius with as beady a gaze as I
might manage. Difficult to exert authority over a man older than I am,
and besides my father. ‘And take the Via Augusta?’
The skies will be clear, the stars able to be seen for navigation at sea,
but not yet as reliably as in the summer months.
‘ Yes.’ His exasperation was more reassuring than promises. ‘Hand me
my shirt. Besides, I have a surprise for you – you will appear to be travelling with me . . . ’
The importance of secrecy regarding my whereabouts and destination
was not lost on me; I could not, however, guess at his meaning.
Honorius, dressed, grinned and led me through to the Alexandrine
House’s warm kitchens.
‘No!’ the Ensign Saverico’s voice whined. ‘I won’t wear women’s
dress; I’d sooner be flayed alive!’
Honorius shot the boy a look that seemed to promise just that, and he
subsided.
112
Saverico, in a dark wig – purchased from one of the local whores – and
a gown I had borrowed from Neferet, was, it seemed, ordered to make
himself visible on the short voyage to the mainland, and as they rode
across the Veneto. He folded his arms across his bodice and blushed at
me.
‘Be cheerful,’ I advised him. ‘By definition, you need not make the
most convincing woman . . . ’
This time Saverico joined in the laughter.
‘ You’ll travel cloaked,’ my father directed me, with similarly no
apparent expectation of being disobeyed. ‘I don’t want to be able to tell if
you’re woman or man!’
I thought it was Saverico who muttered ‘Nothing new there!’, but he
was smiling, and I let him escape without retribution.
Honorius would have taken us by way of the S. Marco quay for a
farewell, I knew, but the importance of my seeming anonymous argued a
less public rendezvous with the Alexandrine galley. Honorius and I
therefore parted in the bare garden of the Alexandria House, behind high
walls, with only just enough grey light to see each other’s faces.
‘Let me say goodbye to my grandchild.’ He took a whining Onorata
into his arms. ‘I’ll miss her first walking and speaking.’
‘Just as well, or her first words would be military curses!’
Honorius grinned like a boy. He pushed his ungloved hand into