Ilario, the Stone Golem (73 page)

I said, ‘You think if I hadn’t been born, things would have been

different? You think if I hadn’t been born a hermaphrodite, none of this

would have happened? I think you were set on this course long before
I

was born.’

My voice went up and down the scale, out of control from anger and

pain.

‘I’ll tell you what would have made it
different
.’ I stepped right up close, staring down at Rosamunda, and over her shoulder at Videric. ‘I’ll

tell you. If, when I was born – no matter who fathered me – both of you

had
acknowledged
me. Yes, I would have grown up a man-woman, but

gossip only lasts so long. If you’d acknowledged me as your child, no one

could have blackmailed you later. That fear wouldn’t have made you

think you should kill me. What could anybody have done to you if there

hadn’t
been
a secret?’

I couldn’t speak for a moment.

‘I wouldn’t have been a slave, or a King’s Fool,’ I said quietly, ‘but

those are things that only caused hurt to me. When you think about

where you are,
why
things are as they are – think what would have happened if you’d kept me in the family and raised me openly as what I

am.’

I walked past Rosamunda and Videric, past Honorius and Rekhmire’,

my knees shaking. At the arch, I stopped and looked back.

357

My father and Rekhmire’ looked at each other, and walked to join me.

I turned to go, and could not.

I looked back at Rosamunda.

This tie will not be undone or cut, not without death, and perhaps not

even then. The past informs the present. And all I can do is speak as

honestly as I have learned to be.

I said, ‘The truth of it is – if I could find any way at all to get you free

of this, I would do it. Still. But if I did find a way . . . I wouldn’t hope for anything else. Not now. That’s gone.’

I stepped back from the archway.

Videric grasped her bound wrists and led Rosamunda past me, and

away into the palace.

The fountain rang clearly and bright on the stone, and my mother

stumbled, but she never looked back.

358

Epilogue:
Twenty-Four
Years
After

Rekhmire’ spent time in Alexandria afterwards, but never lived there

again, and he did not live to see the final fall of that great city in the year

1453, dying a few months before it.

Frankish Europe mourned Alexandrine Constantinople as the last of

the Egyptians gone; Carthage was jealous; Mehmet II gloated; I mourned

for the men and women I knew there, and for the aged Ty-ameny going

out to fire cannon on the walls of Alexandria itself, before the Turkish

bombards reduced all to flying splinters of rock. Fragile flesh vaporised,

no trace ever found.

Frankish Europe mourned until the tide of manuscripts and books

flooded to its shore; then it gobbled up science, medicine, and art in

equal greed. Carthage fumed, no trace being found of how Alexandria’s

mathematicians had disabled their golem. But, since the Turks appeared

to build none themselves, Carthage concluded that at least Alexandria

had not learned to build what it could break.

Neferet, visiting me after Rekhmire’’s funeral, announced herself an

importer of books – products of the Royal Library’s
machina
, which she

sold the length of Italy and France.

When she asked how I would live without Rekhmire’, I inquired as to

how long it was since she had seen that cardinal’s secretary and man of

letters, Leon Battista, and we parted with a quarrel that more than

twenty years had made familiar.

In the same year, Ramiro Carrasco and I travelled back to Iberia,

reaching Taraco a few weeks before Licinus Honorius died falling from

an untrained stallion, at the age of seventy-five. He lived long enough to

require me to escort Onorata to Italy, and to look at me with boundless

love.

Onorata apprenticed herself to a painter in the Empty Chair, and

introduced me to men as her brother. I dressed as a male, as I had done

with Rekhmire’, for one kind of freedom – though dressing as a female

gave me the right to kiss Rekhmire’ publicly.

Six months after a rumour followed us from Taraco, it became

known that I was a hermaphrodite, and Onorata took the Italian name of

Rodiani, and asked me not to contact her for a time. I had no need to

worry: her friendship with Honorius’s soldiers had lasted all through her

359

own childhood – which was at least hermaphrodite in its education and

training – so I might always ask Orazi for news of her.

Ramiro Carrasco sought her out before we left the Empty Chair, and

never told me what he said, but Onorata came out to say farewell in the

public street, and gave me the kiss of kinship within the sight of all men.

North, south, hill, valley: I could wander where I liked, and draw what

I might, but the absence of Rekhmire’ was an unbearable pain to me.

Carrasco, having studied me for six weeks, chose to remark that

eunuchs lived no great long lifetimes, like as not – certainly not while

they were employed as book-buyers – and it was possible hermaphro-

dites need not live too long either, based on that principle.

It should not have eased pain, to hear Carrasco suggest it; it did,

however. He knew me, also, after so many years.

‘We might go to Carthage again,’ he said, one day, out of a sky

containing no warning cloud.

I declined. Instead we went north, to Jethou.

I found Rosamunda a keenly sharp abbess, hair white with age, but all

six establishments of the Order of St Gaius under her skilled control. She

did not manage men – or women, in this case – with the ease of one born

to it, but what she had learned with pains and study, she had learned

well.

I met her in a cold room, the casement window open to the grey sea,

and her black Bride’s clothing covered in addition with a fur-lined cloak,

where she stood gazing at the implacable, endless sea.

‘How did you manage,’ I asked, ‘when Videric was assassinated, and I

answered none of your letters?’

If I hope to see pain made less raw by time, I did not see it on her austere face.

‘Find yourself an occupation,’ she said harshly.

I found the truth of it as I spoke. ‘There is nothing left to do.’

‘Then do what you will.’ Rosamunda shrugged, under the heavy wool

and wolf’s fur. ‘And remember.’

When I reached Carthage, to speak to Marcomir (Donata long since

buried in the Fields of Baal and Tanitta), I found Onorata had been

there before me, and I was not welcome.

I ended as I had begun, in Burgundy, in Bruges, in the house in which

Rekhmire’ had cursed the cold of all northern lands, suffered a week of

coughing and wheezing, turned surprised eyes on me as he woke one

morning, and died.

‘Go back to your family,’ I instructed Carrasco.

‘Give me my collar again,’ he grumbled, ‘if you don’t believe I’m

already
with
my family, here.’

We slept back to back, for comfort in the northern cold, since I did not

believe Rekhmire’ would begrudge it.

When spring came, I walked the length of Burgundy to Dijon, in the

360

south, and we lived within sight of the Good Philip’s castle, and worked

on painting panels by open windows, to the thundering of Dijon’s water-

mills.

And in the Duke’s library, while my sight remained keen enough, I

ornamented frontispieces for those books of his that were translations of

the flood of knowledge to come to Europa after Alexandria fell, while the

effect of those printed volumes began to change the world.

361

About the Author

MARY GENTLE published her first novel at the age

of eighteen, and has a master’s degree in Seven-

teenth 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

Ilario: The Lion’s Eye

A Sundial in a Grave: 1610

The Wild Machines

Lost Burgundy

A Secret History

Carthage Ascendant

Golden Witchbreed

Credits

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover illustration by Cliff Nielsen

Copyright

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 STONE GOLEM. Copyright © 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

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means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter

invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-

books.

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ISBN 978-0-06-147782-9

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• Title Page
  
• Contents
  
  • Part One: Serenissima
    
    • Chapter One
      
    • Chapter Two
      
    • Chapter Three
      
    • Chapter Four
      
    • Chapter Five
      
    • Chapter Six
      
    • Chapter Seven
      
    • Chapter Eight
      
    • Chapter Nine
      
    • Chapter Ten
      
    • Chapter Eleven
      
    • Chapter Twenty-Nine
      
    • Chapter Thirty
      
  • Part Two: Alexandria-in-Exile
    
    • Chapter One
      
    • Chapter Two
      
    • Chapter Three
      
    • Chapter Four
      
    • Chapter Five
      
    • Chapter Six
      
    • Chapter Seven
      
    • Chapter Eight
      
    • Chapter Nine
      
    • Chapter Ten
      
    • Chapter Eleven
      
    • Chapter Twelve
      
    • Chapter Thirteen
      
    • Chapter Fourteen
      
    • Chapter Fifteen
      
    • Chapter Sixteen
      
    • Chapter Seventeen
      
    • Chapter Eighteen
      
    • Chapter Nineteen
      
    • Chapter Twenty
      
  • Part Three: Herm and Jethou
    
    • Chapter One
      
    • Chapter Two
      
    • Chapter Three
      
    • Chapter Four
      
    • Chapter Five
      
    • Chapter Six
      
    • Chapter Seven
      
    • Chapter Eight
      
    • Chapter Nine
      
    • Chapter Ten
      
    • Chapter Eleven
      
    • Chapter Twelve
      
    • Chapter Thirteen
      
    • Chapter Fourteen
      
    • Chapter Fifteen
      
    • Chapter Sixteen
      
    • Chapter Seventeen
      
    • Chapter Eighteen
      
    • Chapter Nineteen
      
    • Chapter Twenty
      
  • Epilogue: Twenty-Four Years After
    
  • About the Author
    
  • Also by Mary Gentle
    
  • Credits
    
  • Copyright Notice
    
  • About the Publisher