Ilario, the Stone Golem (2 page)

‘Don’t kill Carrasco.’ A sudden unannounced fear went through me,

jagged as lightning. ‘Is the baby— Did the
baby
die?’

That sent the crowd to the cradle.

I slumped back on the mattress, shutting my eyes. So small, born so

much before its proper time . . . Likely she will have died when all this violence shattered the atmosphere of peace in the room. For one

moment I was completely certain.

It – she – did not feel like my child. I could feel no love, no warmth, no

attraction to her. A sheer wave of fear rushed through me; making my

head feel as if it was swollen, and my vision black as grief.

‘Here.’ Honorius placed the carefully-wrapped warm bundle on my

chest: it wriggled and thinly whined. ‘She’s here. She’s just hungry.’ A

confused look went across his sun-burned features. ‘I
think
she’s

hungry.’

His men looked amused, Rekhmire’ gave him a look of sympathy, and

the unspoken stare that commented ‘Ignoramus!’ came – I noted as I

gazed around – from the midwife, Baris¸ the physician, the priest, and

Neferet. I wondered at that last.

‘I,’ I said, ‘don’t know any more than you do.’

Rekhmire’ gave a nod, and turned to speak to the midwife.

‘Wet-nurse,’ he said.

The men-at-arms dragged Ramiro Carrasco de Luis out by the heels

of his boots, and I heard his head bang against every tread on the way

down the stairs.

6

2

With a chair moved close to the window, and a blanket about me, I could

avoid the worst of the draughts coming in around the cracked wood, and

still gain a clear view of the blue sky.

Winter’s heavy grey and sharp blue was softening, and the frost

whitened the earth only in the early mornings and late evenings.

I kept the room warm for the baby, although the air outside in the

middle of the day was temperate enough for me to cast off an over-robe.

While making my own way as far as the Riva was impossible, I heard

from my father that ships from other ports already began to dock in the

San Marco basin.

‘Travel’s becoming possible again.’ Restless, I abandoned a sketch of

my knife and plate – the elipse of the plate defeating me – going to lay on

my bed that was now beside the hearth with the child’s makeshift cradle.

I watched Rekhmire’ experimenting with a walking-staff taller than he.

‘Messages. Men. We’re not cut off. Or, soon won’t be.’

The Egyptian finally settled on using just the one crutch, lodged under

his right arm. He had abandoned the linen kilt of the Alexandrines for a

tunic and trousers in the Turkish style. I suspected this was so that no man could look at his knee, now that the bandages were off it.

A clatter of rapid footsteps sounded. Rekhmire’ shifted himself with

difficulty to open the room door. The noise resolved itself into Neferet,

wearing pattens that tracked mud down the passage past the bedroom.

She gave a distracted wave of her hand, not stopping to speak, or pet the

new-born.

‘No news of Leon Battista,’ I speculated.

‘Still in the Doge’s prison.’ Rekhmire’ thumped his crutch against the

floorboards. ‘As is your Ramiro Carrasco de Luis. A man I hope
rots
there.’

I felt no love for the baby – which convinced me I was the monster I had

always assumed. A true mother would well up with love, knowing the

child as her own.

If I felt anything, it was fear and wonder.

Amazement had me laying with her in the crook of my arm, tracing

her perfectly-folded eyelids and dark lashes, and having my stomach jerk

whenever her flailing hand intersected mine. I couldn’t tell if her fingers

closed of their own volition over me.

7

Fear made me watch like a patient falcon as her skin colour passed

from blue-red to red to the normal shade – and panic when her feet

stayed the peculiar blue-purple of the new-born. It took Baris¸ an

afternoon to reassure me that this would change in several days, and I

blushed at seeing the Turkish doctor after that, feeling a fool.

‘I’ve been asked all questions!’ Baris¸ gave me an aquiline smile as his

fingers checked the red fontanelle patches on her skull. ‘The fathers,

they’re the worst. “If it cries when it sees me, does that mean it’s not mine?”’

I thought of asking him if he was ever asked that very question by

mothers.

But that might lead to disquieting information about his previous

Caesarian surgeries, and I had, if I was honest, no desire to know. I

merely desired my burning belly to heal.

‘She
doesn’t
cry,’ I said. ‘Is she too weak?’

‘Some of them don’t.’ He smiled down at her, lines creasing all his

narrow face, and touched his finger to her perfect cheek. ‘When she

does, you’ll be sorry you asked! Now, have I told you how to care for the

birth-cord?’

Fear made me lay awake hour after dark hour in the night, waiting for

her to wake, and Tottola or Saverico to bring up boiled cow’s milk so

that one of us might feed her with spoon and cup. After the first few days

she turned her head repeatedly from the hired Venetian woman who had

more milk than her own son could drink.

But
she
grows
heavier
on
animal
milk
, I judged, weighing her in my two hands every day. And she did not have the stolid, lethargic look of those

lambs that refuse to thrive. I wondered if I might judge her in the same

way that one judges a beast, or whether humankind is different.

After five days, her birth-cord dropped off. It was the last of the

landmarks Baris¸ had charged me to watch for: her bowels and bladder

both proved themselves functional earlier, and I learned to pin cloth

around her.

She was yellow for a few days, which the Turkish physician also

dismissed as a cause for fear.

I felt fear of the darkness; fear of the cold winter nights with the damp

blowing in off the lagoon; fear of every gossiping rumour of plague or

fever. Her eyes moved under her eyelids as she dreamed. I wondered if

she could dream of Torcello, and the sights and smells imprinted on me

while she began her birth.

My time passed in small landmarks and the overhanging dread of

death.

Days went by. I grew stronger. Neferet lost her womanly plumpness and

grew gaunt with worry.

8

I knew Rekhmire’, as well as Neferet, must be contacting all the men a

book-buyer would know in this city – but Leon Battista was a son of the

Alberti family, it seemed, and the Alberti family had been exiles in

Venice these twenty years. If their accumulated interest couldn’t move

the Doge’s mercy, I doubted two Alexandrines could.

Supine in bed, stitches healing, I studied Leon’s treatise on vision as if

some obscure sympathetic magic would ensure that the more attention I

gave it, the more likely Leon Battista would have good fortune.

I blamed the Green priest for superstitious thoughts. Neferet’s Father

Azadanes claimed the baby’s (and my) survival as his own Green

Christ’s miracle. I found the argument not persuasive.

‘Sheer chance!’ I said, when Rekhmire’ had his prayer-box open,

lighting incense to the eight gods within. ‘Chance plays far too much of a

part in the world for men to be easy thinking of it.’

Rekhmire’ finished his ceremony with a bow of his head to the Eight,

and clipped the box shut again.

‘A man should always be polite . . . ’ He dusted incense from the front

of his tunic and trousers, and used his crutch to cross the room, putting

the prayer-box away in his oak chest. ‘ . . . Especially to minor gods. The

advantage of deities who control small things is that one need never

worry about why evil and pain rule so much of this world – minor gods

are obviously too weak to prevent it.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know what

the excuse of Father Azadanes’ God is.’

I was inclined to smile at that, but very wryly. ‘Heathen! Pagan.

Atheist!’

Rekhmire’ snorted. ‘Make up your mind which!’

The tiny, warm, damp weight of the child on my chest became

something I was used to, as I rested in the great bed in the Alexandrine

house and regained my strength.

When I complained that I was strong enough, Rekhmire’ invited me to

move, and I discovered how badly the stitches knitting the walls of my

womb could hurt.

I steered clear of Father Azadanes’ company, weary as I was of hearing

about his ‘Green miracle’, and how he attributed the baby’s survival and

mine to the Green Christ. It was difficult to avoid him, since he was

much with Neferet.

Once, coming into a room more quietly than I realised, I overheard

Neferet asking, ‘But can’t your God make
my
body mirror what my
ka
is?’, and I backed out as silently as I’d come. Her –
his
– desperation hurt

me.

The more so because of her jealousy. She watched the baby, in my

arms; watched it avidly enough that, if I hadn’t had Honorius with me, I

would have been half inclined to offer it to her for adoption. Certainly no

one would ever get past that lioness-of-Alexandria attitude to harm the

child.

9

Physician Baris¸, with a sombre face, came to tell me he doubted his

surgery could mend a womb like mine so that it could conceive again.

Especially since it had been such a remote chance I should conceive the

first time.

I felt a rush of relief, and at the same time terror, looking at the

miniature sleeping face and thinking,
This
is
the
only
one
.

‘Tell you truth,’ Baris¸ observed dispassionately, having finished his

investigation of my healing surgical wound. ‘I’m more surprised to see

you
live than her. Frankly, it’s a miracle you survived.’

He looked confused when I muttered, ‘Don’t
you
start!’

The baby’s small size continued to flabbergast me.

She was barely bigger than Honorius’s hand when he caressed her in

her swaddling bands. Although she didn’t wear the tight strips of cloth

for long – a day or so later, Rekhmire’ muttered something about

barbaric customs, and (with Baris¸’s help) overrode the Venetian midwife

and my father. The baby girl was allowed to lay on my bedcover, only a

swathe of linen around her, in the patches of sunlight that made her dark

eyes close and open as slowly as if she were under the sea.

The stitches being painful for longer than I expected, I found myself

frustrated in my desire to care for her. Neferet, unsurprisingly, took up

every chance to feed or bathe her – somewhat more surprisingly, I had

help from not only Honorius himself, but from Saverico and those others

of the men-at-arms with younger siblings or their own children at home.

Berenguer slid in and out of the room when she was a few weeks old, and

left a fish carved out of ash-wood, that she might play with – or at least

watch – in the shallow water of her bath.

I wondered much if there might be something wrong with her. But I

kept those thoughts to myself.

After a few weeks, as she put on weight by the efforts of cow- and

goat-milk, I found that I knew what her name ought to be, even if she still

might not live to use it.

I spoke to Honorius one midday, when the rest of the house was still at

their meal.

‘With your permission – I would like to call her “Onorata”.’

My father smiled and wept together, without shame.

‘I feel nothing like a mother,’ I said to Rekhmire’, as the Egyptian handed

Onorata back to me after she burped milk over the feeding-cloth on his

shoulder. ‘I can’t put her to my breast . . . ’

Looking up, I surprised concern on his face.

‘But I feel I should protect her,’ I added. ‘Perhaps I should think of

myself as Onorata’s father?’

The Egyptian’s brows dipped into a scowl. ‘If it comes to it, I would

suppose you both, in that sense. But why not a mother?’

Because
I
would
not
be
Rosamunda
if
my
life
depended
on
it
.

10

The thought of that woman, in Carthage or Taraco, still sends hot