Ilario

by Mary Gentle

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

Abandoned and alone, the fosterling Ilario grows up as the King's Freak, surrounded by all the pomp, intrigue, and danger of the Iberian court. Fleeing a failed treacherous attack, Ilario crosses the sea to Carthage, where the mysterious Penitence shrouds the sky in darkness. There, a strange and awful destiny awaits the would-be painter, one that spans continents and kingdoms.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 672

Sample

We are so often a disappointment to the parents who abandon us.

A male voice interrupted my thoughts, speaking the language of Carthage. ‘Papers, freeman—’

The man broke off as I turned to face him, as people sporadically do.

For a moment he stood staring at me in the flaring naphtha lights of the harbour hall.

‘—freewoman?’ he speculated.

People shoved past us, shouting at other harbour guards; keen to be free of the docks and away into the city of Carthage beyond. I had yet to become accustomed to the hissing chemical lights in this red and ivory stone hall, bright at what would be midday anywhere else but here. I blinked at the guard.

‘Your documents, freeman,’ he finished, more definitely.

The clothes decided him, I thought. Doublet and hose make the man.

The guard himself – one of many customs officers – wore a belted robe of undyed wool. It clung to him in a way that I could have used in painting, to show a lean, muscular body beneath. He gave me a smile that was at least embarrassed. His teeth were white, and he had all of them still. I thought him not more than twenty-five: a year or so older than I.

If I could get into Carthage without showing documents of passage, I would not give my true name. But having chosen to come here, I have no further choice about that.

The Carthaginian customs officer examined the grubby, wax-sealed document that I reluctantly handed over. ‘“Painter”, Freeman … Ilario?’

King Rodrigo Sanguerra had not been angry enough to refuse me travelling papers, now he had freed me, but he left me to fill in my own profession – furious that I would not consent to the one he wanted. But I am done with being the King’s Freak. Nor will I be the King’s engineer for machines of war.

‘My name is Ilario, yes. Painter. Statues; funeral portraits,’ I said, and added, ‘by the encaustic technique.’

Show me a statue and I’ll give the skin the colour of life, the stone draperies the shadows and highlights of bright silks; ask me for a funeral portrait, and I’ll paint you a formal icon with every distinguishing symbol of grief. I thought it likely that people in Carthage would want their statues coloured and their bereavements commemorated, as they do elsewhere.

‘It’s a good trade.’ The man nodded absently, running his wide thumb over the seal of King Rodrigo of Taraconensis. ‘We get a lot of you people over from Iberia. Not surprising. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting Carthaginian citizenship—’

‘I’m not here to apply for citizenship.’

He stared at me as if I had taken a live mouse out of my mouth. ‘But you’re immigrating.’

‘I’m not immigrating.’

The Visigoth Lords of Carthage tend to assume that every man and woman would be one of them if they could. Evidently the assumption extends to their bureaucracy.

‘I’m visiting here. On my way to Rome,’ I said, using the Iberian term for that city that the Europeans call ‘the Empty Chair’, since St Peter’s Seat has stood unoccupied these many generations. ‘There are new things happening—’

They are putting aside painting the iconic meaning of a thing, and merely painting the thing itself: a face, or a piece of countryside, as it would appear to any man’s naked eye. Which is appalling, shameful, fascinating.

‘—and I intend to apprentice myself under a master painter there. I’ve come here, first’ … I pointed … ‘to paint that.’

This hall is the sole available route between the Foreigners’ Dock and Carthage itself. Through the great arched doorway in front of me, the black city stood stark under a black sky, streets outlined by naphtha lamps. Stars blazed in the lower parts of the heavens, as clearly as I have ever seen them above the infertile hills behind Taraco city.

Stars should not be visible at noon!

In the high arch of the sky, there hung that great wing of copper-shadowed blackness that men call the Penitence – and where there should have been the sun, I could see only darkness.

I glanced back towards the Maltese ship from which I’d disembarked. Beyond it and the harbour, on the horizon, the last edge of the sun’s light feathered the sea. Green, gold, ochre, and a shimmering unnatural blue that made me itch to blend ultramarine and glair, or gum arabic, and try to reproduce it …

And yet it is midday.

Even when the ship first encountered a deeper colour in the waves, I had not truly believed we’d come to the edge of the Darkness that has shrouded Carthage and the African coast around it for time out of mind. Did not believe, shivering in fear and wonder, that no man has seen sunlight on this land in centuries. But it is so.

It alters everything. The unseasonal constellations above; the naphtha light on ships’ furled sails at the quayside; the tincture of men’s skin. If I had my bronze palette box heated, now, and the colours melted – how I could paint!

‘You’re a painter.’ The man stared, bemused. ‘… And you’ve come here where it’s dark.’

A sudden clear smile lit up his face.

‘Have you got a place to stay? I’m Marcomir. My mother runs a rooming-house. She’s cheap!’

My mother is a noblewoman of Taraconensis.

And she will attempt to kill me again, if she ever finds me.

Marcomir looked down at me (by a couple of inches), slightly satisfied with himself. I thought there was a puzzled frown not far behind his smile. This short, slight man – he is thinking – this man Ilario, with the soft black hair past his shoulders; is he a woman in disguise, or a man of a particular kind?

The latter will be more welcome to this Marcomir, I realised.

The brilliance of his dark eyes would be difficult but not impossible to capture in pigments. And the city of Taraco, while only across the tideless sea, beyond the Balearic Islands, seems very far away.

‘Yes,’ I said, automatically using the deeper tones in my voice.

There’ll be trouble, accepting such an invitation, since I’m not what he thinks I am, but that kind of trouble is inevitable with me.

I shouldered my baggage and followed him away from the harbour, into narrow streets between tall and completely windowless houses. And steep! The road was cut into steps, more often than not; we climbed high above the harbour; and it had me – I, who have hunted the high hills inland of Taraco, and habitually joust in day-long tourneys – breathing hard.

‘Here.’ Marcomir pointed.

I halted outside a heavy iron door set into a granite wall. ‘You do know I’m … not like most men?’

Marcomir’s eyes gleamed bright as his smile when he flashed them at me. ‘Was sure of that, soon as I looked at you. You got that look. Wiry. Tough guy. But … elegant, you know?’

I know. It’s one of the two ways that men look at me.

He used my name without the honorific. ‘Come inside, Ilario.’

He hastened me past his mother, Donata, a white-haired elderly woman with the hawk-face that would be Marcomir’s too, some day, and I didn’t protest the brief introduction. The walls inside the cool house were swathed in baked clay, the light of oil-lamps turning them Samian red, and our shadows moved ink-black on the wall behind Marcomir’s wooden-framed truckle bed.

‘You ought to know this, at least.’ I sighed, having undone the ties of my hose; reaching to strip off doublet and shirt together.

Marcomir’s response was lost in the rush of cloth past my ears.

I have, occasionally, concealed what I am, under circumstances like these. I have no desire to attempt it again. I wriggled the knit cloth of the hose down my thighs and off my feet, and stood naked, with the faint chill of the room prickling my skin.

‘Not what you were expecting?’ I said wryly.

The Carthaginian Visigoth sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You’re …’

His gaze went from my rounded breasts – not quite large enough to dimple the front of an Iberian doublet – down to the phallus already standing up with desire.

Standing no taller than my clenched fist. God was not generous when He made me.

I watched for either a sneer or amusement on this man’s face.

‘Are you—’ Marcomir stood, and stepped close.

He touched a finger to my chin, feeling the soft, ephemeral scatter of hairs which I had let grow for travelling. His wide, capable hands slid down my side, feeling the curve of my hips. The tension of his not touching my penis made me shiver. And – as ever – my penis curved over as my stiffness grew, pointing somewhat downwards.

I searched his expression for something – something – I didn’t know what.

He put his hands between my thighs, fingers going up into the wet cleft of my female parts.

‘You’re a man-woman.’ His voice sounded ragged.

An hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. I didn’t bother Marcomir with that.

I said, ‘You don’t need to have any part of me that you don’t like.’

There is little else I can say, and it took me all the years between fifteen and twenty to devise that particular remark.

His face altered. I steadied myself. I have been put out onto the street before now. I guessed him not the kind of man who uses violence in an uncontrolled manner. But I can be wrong. There was a knife close to my hand, in my discarded clothes.

The height of him hid the lamp’s flame. The close warmth of his body made every hair on my skin stand up.

His frown emerged. ‘I thought you were a man like me. Not a ladyboy.’

‘Marcomir …’ I sighed, reaching for my shirt.

His skin was shadowed ochre- and soot-coloured as he stood with his back to the lamp. Despite the keen sensation of my body, satisfaction is not always worth what one must go through to gain it.

Marcomir sounded uncertain. ‘Do you want this? Are you sure?’

‘Being a slave,’ I said, ‘I have not, until recently, been able to take decisions for myself. And now that I can … I intend to take every decision I can get!’

He lifted his hand, closing it on my right breast so tightly that a pang of desire shot from there to my groin.

He took my down-curving phallus in his hand.

I could dimly feel that he fingered for balls. There is a lump in the lips of my flesh, there, that sometimes deceives men into thinking I have them. The desire to spend came over me with such force that I barely noticed his investigations.

‘Come here!’ He urged me at the bed. Not expecting it, I stumbled; fell on my knees on the padded-cloth mattress and wool bedding.

His hands arranged me firmly, belly down on the bed so my breasts couldn’t be seen; head to one side, so that we might look at each other in the face. His weight came down on the bed with me as he knelt between my thighs, pushing them together, urging me up onto my knees so that he could get at my buttocks. I felt the position absurd; it still made my heart thump, and my penis become harder.

His hand rubbed flat against my spine, sliding over the breadth of my shoulders. As his palm cupped my hip again, the heat and weight making me shiver, he abruptly took it away. ‘I’m rider, not horse. And I don’t fuck women.’

I could barely catch my breath. ‘Then don’t!’

He leaned forward and stroked my wispy stubble. For the first time, I allowed myself to hold his gaze. His pupils were wide and black.

With a rush of relief, I realised, He wants me.

Just – not all of me.

Passion fires passion like nothing else. Face-down on the rough wool of his bedding, I spent into it with my male parts before he was fairly in the saddle.

Towards the middle of what I could not keep in mind was the dark afternoon, when he had slept for a short time, Marcomir took me between sleeping and waking as a man takes a woman. I spent as a woman does. He sank asleep again. He won’t recall this, later, I thought, as my body shed his seed.

The relaxation of flesh after sexual congress is an infrequent joy for me. I dressed myself, looking down at him stretched out naked and sleeping.

Can it be possible – might I stay all my time in Carthage here?

I didn’t dare hope.

Will this man Marcomir be willing to look me in the face when he wakes? Can we do this more than the once?

I have learned, from others unlike this man, that afterwards is always the more dangerous time. I went downstairs. Even if he comes to regret what we did, he is less likely to hit me in front of his mother, I think.

In the warm, fire-lit kitchen, Donata got up from the floor-carpets as I entered. She crossed to the hob, and took the lid off a pot.

‘You’ll be hungry.’ She said it so plainly that either there was no innuendo, or she was used to her son bringing home men for the occupation we had been about. ‘Here.’

I seated myself on the cushions beside the hearth. In Taraco, we would be sitting around a wooden table, on wooden benches; here … even the house-door had been iron, and not iron-studded oak, I reflected.

Because nothing grows here, under the Penitence. It must all be shipped in. Corn for bread, olive oil for lamps, charcoal for fires, timber for construction. Brought by sail and caravan from Iberia and Egypt, to this great city, so rich …

‘I can make you meals of an evening, as well as hire you a room.’ Donata handed over a full pottery bowl, and sat down as limberly as a woman half her age. I decided there was a glimmer of amusement in her bird-of-prey gaze. Some indulgence of her favoured son?

‘I don’t know how long I’ll stay.’ The crushed grain porridge tasted unfamiliar, but was pleasantly filling – And I haven’t eaten since the ship! I thought.

And since then, I’ve had … physical exercise.

That made me smile. Shovelling up the thick porridge, I scraped the bowl empty within minutes. The old woman Donata gave an amused snort, and went to a capped well in the corner of the room to draw up water.

I realised I was more tired than I thought: the room swayed about me.

My body thinks, because it’s dark, I should be asleep.

I miss the light.

‘A drink will be welcome – is the water safe, here?’

‘Safe as anything else.’ The old woman scooped water from the metal pail with something that flashed silver; I couldn’t see what it was. A cup, a ladle?

The walls swooped up. I felt sick and dizzy.

The carpeted floor filled my vision as I floated down among the cushions. I felt the thud of my body falling as if muffled by more than eiderdown. A wave of heat and dizziness mounted up into my head.

In Taraco, the court once thought it amusing to give the King’s Freak opium.

And this is how I felt then—!

Marcomir’s feet came into my field of view, bare on the dusty floor.

He rumbled something to his mother. Not surprise. Not a complaint. My baggage appeared in my field of vision; he must have carried it down from ‘my’ room.

I wondered muzzily, Will they cut my throat when they’ve finished going through it?

The last conscious thought I had was How many strangers have they done this to? and How could I fall for it!

‘Who’s “Rosamunda”?’

I ignored the voice at my ear and fumbled at my face. What I touched was smoother skin than I am used to, unless I use depilatories, or pluck out hairs painfully as the ancient Romans used to. It stung.

‘Oi! Girl! Shut up about Rosamunda, whoever she is!’

My throat felt sore. There were cold, cracked tiles under my hands. I pushed myself up into a sitting position.

The man squatting in front of me said something over his shoulder. I didn’t catch it. He stood and walked away, his robe’s hem flicking me painfully in the eye. The same style robe as Marcomir’s.

I am in Carthage, still? – Or at least in lands of the Carthaginian Empire—?

I heard him say, ‘Probably shrieking for her mother. Shut her up if she does it again.’

She?

Nausea rolled through me. My sight focused.

Along the granite wall beside me, men and women sat with heavy leather collars around their necks. Chains ran from the collars to ringbolts. The stink of old sweat and piss haunted the air. Beyond a grille, a few yards off, men walked up and down. Naphtha lights hissed.

I am in a slaver’s hall.

And Marcomir and his Hell-damned mother have shaved me, because I won’t sell as a skinny man with no strength for manual labour.

The urge to shut my eyes and shut out the world was strong. I didn’t follow it – my opium dreams are detailed, precise, and lengthy, and I had indeed been calling for the mother who bore me: Rosamunda.

Calling for her not to stab me.

My fingers felt fine skin at my jaw-line. The next man along from me dropped his gaze, leaning away. The man on his far side muttered; I heard ‘—woman built like a stonemason!’

Oblivious of their cynical laughter, I blurted, ‘I can’t be a slave again!’

Once, when I was sixteen, King Rodrigo and his court thought it amusing to hold mock-marriage ceremonies for me, to a woman the first night, and to a man the second night. After that, my bride and my husband got to tell the assembled nobles the particulars of the ‘wedding night’.

That gained me two things. Firstly, the friendship and sympathy of Father Felix, a priest of the Green Christ who disapproved of such blasphemies. And secondly, the irrevocable knowledge that when my foster father and foster mother gave me to the King, they gave me soul and body with the legal deed of sale.

I glimpsed, down the hall and outside a stone archway, the identifiable skyline of Carthage.

A sweat of relief soaked my robe.

‘Where’s my papers?’ I staggered up onto my feet. Bare feet on cold tile. ‘I have King Rodrigo’s writ of manumission; I’m a free—’

A moment of split-second decision.

‘—woman; I can prove it! If you try to sell me, I’ll appeal to the King-Caliph!’

The man who had shaken me awake put a hand on the whip at his belt. The chiaroscuro of his face gave him one gleaming eye and one empty socket.

He stepped towards me, and the shadows shifted. I saw he did indeed have but the one eye.

‘You think the King-Caliph here’s going to care about some poxy little Spaniard king over in the border states?’ He chuckled. ‘You might have been free then. And you might be free in the future. You’re not free now. So shut up while I get a good price for you – although Christ-Emperor Himself alone knows, I couldn’t sell you to a halfway decent whorehouse! Look at you! Damned cart-horse of a woman, you are.’

My hands touched wool. I looked down. I wore a much-darned robe, almost long enough to be women’s skirts in Taraconensis; a belt pulled it in to show the shape of my breasts beneath.

The shock felt like cold water.

Not to see my baggage here – well, Marcomir and his mother are thieves, yes. Not to have concealing clothing; to know they must have undressed and dressed me again while I lay drugged …

And King Rodrigo’s papers will have gone in their fire.

‘Was anything brought in to be sold with me?’ I asked the one-eyed man. He was not particularly tall; I stood on a level with him.

‘What?’

‘My tools, my equipment.’

He stared at me.

‘I’m literate.’ It was no more than the truth. ‘I’m apprenticed to a master painter’s workshop—’ The truth, stretched. ‘—and I shouldn’t be sold as unskilled labour! You can get four times the price for what I can do.’

He gave a thoughtful nod.

Part of his thought, I knew, would be the realisation that I had not always been free, since I knew so much.

But then, that’s not uncommon: even in the kingdoms of Iberia, there’s many a general, or chancellor, or powerful merchant, who either began life in a slave’s collar, or wore it at some time in their career. They tell me it’s different with the Franks in Europe; that even serfdom is gone a millennium, there.

Another reason for going to Rome.

Sell me; I’ll be gone within the hour.

One-Eye could likely guess that too. I found I didn’t care. That Marcomir and Donata must have a habit of drugging and selling unwary travellers – that didn’t rouse my fury like the thought of my pigments and Punic wax, my scapulas and heating-irons, tossed on the trash somewhere, or sold off piecemeal for a tenth their value.

For all that Federico and Valdamerca (I wasn’t invited to call them ‘foster father’ and ‘foster mother’ to their faces) picked me up as a foundling, I have all the skills of a noble soldier of Taraconensis. I was taught well, so as to be their gift for the King. Taught the arts of embroidery and the harp, and singing, as a woman; taught to joust with the lance, and fight with the sword, as a man.

Marcomir isn’t worthy of a sword. A wooden cudgel will do for him, once I’m free.

‘There were some old metal boxes and knives in a sack.’ One-Eye gave me a shrewd look. ‘They dumped them with you. I’m not letting you have anything sharp. Now shut up, before I have to mark you and make you worth even less.’

Abruptly, I found my gaze drawn by something – someone – over his shoulder.

Drawn by stillness, I realised. The man had been standing, an uncounted shadow in the background, for a little time. He stepped forward to the grille as I made eye-contact with him.

‘You are literate, you claim?’ He spoke directly to me, across One-Eye as the slaver turned around. ‘More than merely to write your name?’

‘I’m a painter; I can both draw and write.’ Possibly I sounded stubborn. ‘My name is Ilario. Give me parchment and a pen, and I’ll show you how literate I am!’

Once out of the shadow, the newcomer was a large man, with a shaven head and naked broad shoulders. In the naphtha light, his reddish-tan skin shone very smooth. A woven reed and cloth headband kept sweat from running off his shaved skull into his eyes.

I noticed that his hands, crossed at his chest, were too large to be proportionate. Also his feet, I thought, as I glanced down at his sandals. The white cloth kilt that wrapped his waist was not wool, but some weave of flax; and not a Carthaginian garment, either.

To be sold to a foreigner … who may take me anywhere …

‘She’s special, is Ilario.’ One-Eye picked my name out of the air without a stumble. ‘And not cheap, because of that. Now—’

I folded my arms and stood watching them. Something about the stranger’s body made me want to sketch him, to see where those odd proportions of hands and feet would lead me. He carried his head high, almost daintily; I wondered if he had made the same error that Marcomir had, and took me for an effeminate man.

‘No more than one hundred,’ he said mildly, his large, lustrous eyes turning towards me. His voice was resonant, because of his depth of chest, but I thought he would sing tenor if he sang. Possibly higher.

I was so lost in speculation about where his people might live that I didn’t pay attention to the negotiations. A clatter of metal startled me into alertness as a bag landed at my feet.

‘Don’t drop that!’ I instantly knew, by the sound; and fell to my knees to yank open the hessian sack.

The pigments had gone, being saleable. Likewise the small sculpted heads, and the acacia and lime-wood boards I’d prepared with size for painting icons. No surprise. As for my battered tools …

One-Eye caught me with hands full of rush-stalk calami and reeds, spatulas and scrapers; bent close over my bronze box and cestrum and cauterium-iron, scrutinising them for damage. Before I realised, he had unlocked the chain from the ring-bolt, and put it in the stranger’s hand.

‘My name is Rekhmire.’ The foreign man spoke to me gravely, in barely-accented Iberian – as, indeed, he had spoken barely-accented Carthaginian to the slave-owner. He had a rounded aspect to his chin and nose that should have made him appear soft, but only added to his gravitas, given how tall and broad he stood. ‘I have need of a literate slave, here. I don’t need one that will run away. You,’ to One-Eye, ‘will therefore fix a name-collar around this one’s neck, large enough to be visible in public.’

‘You—’ can’t!, I bit off.

So much for being sold to a fool and a quick escape.

Rekhmire’ said, ‘The other alternative is a brand. You would prefer your face not spoiled, I suppose?’

Dumb, I nodded.

I stood dumb as the slave-owner and his handlers took the leather collar off me, and knelt dumbly beside the anvil as one of them deafeningly riveted an engraved iron collar closed beside my ear.

I have not often worn a slave’s collar, but I was a royal slave from fifteen to twenty-four; I have no illusions that there is any difference.

‘Let me have my sack,’ I said as I stood up.

Rekhmire’ said, ‘You won’t need—’

I took the risk of interrupting him.

‘What am I, your slave all twelve hours of the day and all twelve hours of the night? I came to Carthage to paint. When I’m not working, I will paint.’

He met my gaze, calmly staring down at me. The bones of his brows were pronounced, under the roundness. The set of his mouth was strong. He held an authority all the more effective because he seemed to be at pains to hide it.

Behind me, One-Eye chuckled nervously. ‘I should have charged you double for her; she’s feisty.’

‘Provided she can read and copy, she may be as “feisty” as she wishes.’

I wondered, seeing the gaze that went between them, whether the slave-owner had himself been in a collar once, and likewise this foreign man.

Rekhmire’ gave a nod towards the sack of my belongings. I picked them up, careful not to pull against the chain.

I can paint; the rest is a problem to be solved.

With my leash in his hand, he walked towards the exit, and I hurriedly followed, the bronze box in the sack banging against my shin.

‘“Ilario”. An Iberian name?’

I grunted assent, matching my pace through the hallway to his with a little difficulty, being shorter. ‘Where’s “Rekhmire’“ a name from?’

I did not call him ‘master’.

He gave a light sigh.

‘Alexandria-in-Exile.’ He gazed down at me. ‘You would call the city “Constantinople”, I expect. I come from all there is now of Egypt, under the reign of Pharaoh-Queen Ty-ameny; I am,’ he said, ‘a royal book-buyer, for the Library. And when I cannot persuade a man to let me buy his scrolls, I can sometimes persuade him to lease me the right to copy them. Hence what you will be doing, Ilario.’

Constantinople: that great city of the east, that has stood as the last remnant of the Egyptian empire for more than a millennium, while Carthage and the Turks debate with war their old lands around the Nile. That great city, that stands as a bulwark against the Turks, with its Queen, and its bureaucracy that – that—

I stopped as we came out between iron-grille doors into a dark street. The chain yanked my neck painfully, but I only stared at him. ‘You’re a eunuch!’

Rekhmire’ halted, giving a gracious, if cynical, bow. ‘And you, too, are something of the sort, and not a woman.’

I ignored that. ‘I thought eunuchs were fat! I thought eunuchs all spoke in high voices.’

‘They do, if gelded as children. I was an adult man before I applied.’

His tone gave me to understand that more trespass would be rudeness, but still he did not speak as a man does to a slave.

Astonished – appalled – I said, ‘You had yourself castrated deliberately?’

His narrow, plucked black brows came down. ‘And you did not? No … No, I am wrong. You are no gelded boy. What are you? Is this—’

He made a gesture that took me in from head to heels.

‘—this the reason why you left the Iberian kingdoms?’

The shock of waking as a slave again, and the shuddering kinship I felt for this mutilated man, moved me to speak honestly.

‘I left because my mother tried to kill me with a poisoned dagger. And … she plans to follow me, and try again. But – yes. It is because of what I am. Everything is because of what I am.’

Above the roof-garden of Rekhmire”s hired house, the North African constellations shone clear.

By night, I saw, the correct season’s stars shone visible; evidently not shrouded by whatever hides the sun by day. On the western horizon, a tinge of brown and gold marked the last of the unseen sun’s setting. Above my head, veils of aurora-light rippled in the black sky: blue and green and gold.

Past sunset now. It gave me a sudden ache. I haven’t seen the sun since we entered Carthaginian waters.

The Egyptian Rekhmire’ rested his head on his hand, and his elbow on the couch, watching me as we ate. ‘You are too ready to be a slave to be someone who has been free long. You say your King Rodrigo manumitted you?’

I looked up from the carpet on the tiles, where he had told me to sit.

‘On the feast of St Tanitta, this year. For “long service”. Truthfully …’ It hurt to say it. “I think he was bored. Pension the freak off – after a decade at court, its tricks are all well-known.’

The small smoked fish were a delicacy not to be found in rooming-houses. I crunched them, bones and all, while my stomach settled from the poppy-drug.

‘And besides, some other nobleman had given him a married pair of Frankish dwarfs. Cheaper for the King if I have to support myself. He pensioned some of the others off, too; and half his menagerie.’

Rekhmire’ gave me a glance that made me feel a dangerous willingness to confide further in him.

Shock, I thought. And the disorientation of opium.

He said, ‘And you are a danger to someone at the court of Taraconensis? Or was your mother acting for private reasons?’

That made me bli