coloured marble floor, reminding her of the wedding dress she had never worn. All the furnishings were made from the same rich, oily wood as Fabbro Bombelli’s banco, and carved in the most intricate shapes – Akka did not lack for labour; that was obvious. She wondered first what hope her mission had, and then what species of a sin it was to try to draw this prosperous realm into a distant war. Perhaps it was hypocrisy to pretend that she had fled for some reason other than saving her own skin.
Clothes had been laid out for her on a red cabinet beside the bed. Sofia didn’t care about fashion, but she knew the importance others placed on it. Donna Bombelli, and Levi, too, had often counselled that matters of form were not trivial in diplomacy. Sofia picked up first a headdress and veil, then the flowing, pale-coloured silks, looking at each with equal scepticism. She disliked the foreign style, but her old clothes had exhausted their powers of expansion.
‘Courage, Sofia,’ she told herself, and went to work. After she had donned the pieces in roughly the right order and the right way round, she stepped in front of the long mirror – she hadn’t seen one since Ariminum – to examine herself. The change just a few weeks had wrought elicited an involuntary gasp. No silks, however flowing, could conceal her condition now.
Plaintive bird cries drew her away from her terrifying reflection and she pulled the curtain aside and looked upon Akka, its bay, its churches, its high walls … The city was built from a pale yellow stone that intensified and reflected the sea’s harsh light into nooks and alleyways, places that ought to be veiled in a decent darkness. Rather than tolling bells, a clacking like an army of crickets sprang up from the white-domed churches, calling the Marian faithful to prayer.
Unlike Ariminum’s cramped but efficiently organised harbour, Akka’s chaotic sprawl had room to expand indefinitely. Some of the ships were fat-bottomed merchant haulers along the lines of Ezra’s old cog but there were strange small galleys with protruding mizzens and narrow hulls that narrowed into dangerously long bowsprits. With their slanted lanteen sails, they looked fast and predatory besides the staid Europan boats. Smaller vessels along similar lines, flimsy but elegant, manoeuvred among them like swallows around towers, and little tugs towed heavier ships into their allotted places like boys leading truculent bulls around. There were a few galleys in the Tancred’s class, though not quite as big; they docked further out and small skiffs ferried their passengers to and from shore. Akka had been the Oltremarine Empire’s temporary capital, until they abandoned all pretence of rebuilding Jerusalem and that status became official. As the Oltremarines started serving their own interests and not Europa’s, Akka blossomed like a deep-smelling steam-house orchid.
Sofia opened the door and found a blank-faced Ebionite servant standing there. As he silently bowed, she wondered if he had been there all night. She walked down the winding marble staircase, feeling the cool stone through her silk slippers, into a long, spacious corridor that felt more like a crypt. The walls were decorated with geometric patterns, interrupted intermittently by huge slabs of marble that rippled with dark veins like a shroud. On slender plinths in the middle of these slabs stood white ovals that Sofia at first assumed were marble portrait busts. It was only as she came closer that she realised with a sudden chill what they were: this was an Ancestor Room. The Akkans had preserved traditions that had long since died out in Etruria. The rows of peaceful faces looking down were the death-masks of Queen Catrina’s predecessors. The names and dates inscribed beside bold Etruscan mottos on the plinths were unnecessary: the progression was obvious.
The men, to begin with, were muscular, brutish Normans, with scars and broken jaws and a commanding intensity that survived even sudden death. The women were Ebionites with aquiline noses and docile, intelligent expressions: slaves with haunted, youth-frozen faces who had lived hard lives quickly. As Sofia progressed through the generations, she saw the ruder, softer characteristics being weaned out: the men became less brutish and died younger while the women became less docile and lived longer. They gradually mingled to the type Sofia had seen perfected last night in the cold, superior face of Queen Catrina. This panoply of ghosts had probably watched Catrina’s first uneven steps, had seen her fall down the stairs a