“Because,” his mother said firmly. “Because it isn’t fair.”
All the while they were speaking, Telemakos held a betrayed dove securely between his hands, while his mother bound fast its wings.
“Get rid of the parrots. I don’t like the parrots, they bite. I like the doves.”
“No one sacrifices parrots,” Turunesh said. “We’ll let them go.”
Telemakos thought it wholly unjust that the doves, which were sweet-natured and soft-voiced, were to be bound and slain, and their bodies burned; while the parrots, which were bad-tempered and noisy, got set free.
His mother had not forgotten his original question. “Tell me about this ‘not a thing’ that you don’t want to do,” she said. “Is it a dare from another boy? Have you found a playmate at last?”
Telemakos made a point of keeping quiet about the difficulties he had with other children. “I don’t play,” he said scornfully.
“O silent tracker of lions,” his mother teased, “I did not mean to insult you. I worry that you are lonely.”
Telemakos laughed in surprise. “I am never lonely.” He bent over another caught dove, whistling and cooing.
“You have no best companion.”
“So I have. Goewin is my best companion.”
His mother laughed in turn. “Telemakos, that is not what I mean. As you know. But what’s your challenge, sweet heart, that you don’t like? And who’s challenged you?”
Telemakos answered seriously, “I can’t tell you who. I’m no tale-teller; and I can’t tell you what it is, either.” He went back to the niches in the wall to trap another dove. He was beginning to be sorry he had said anything.
“If you will hide the heart of the matter, sweet one, I can’t give you the best advice. But let me ask you this: Why don’t you want to do this thing? Is it a game? Is it silly? Is it pointless?”
“I said it was important, and it is.”
“Will it harm anyone? Help anyone? Will good or evil come of it? Do not answer, ask yourself. Is it something you shouldn’t do, or something you don’t want to do?”
“I think it is something I should do,” Telemakos said slowly. “But I don’t want to.”
“Why not, then?” Turunesh took the fluttering dove from his hands.
Telemakos waited until she had finished with the bird, then pressed himself close against her to make his mother hold him. He stood clasped in her arms, looking down at the imprisoned doves, and whispered, “I am afraid to do it.”
Turunesh spoke calmly, her voice normal and matter-of-fact as she stroked his hair. “Can’t someone else do it, then?”
“I don’t think so,” Telemakos answered, and tried to speak as calmly as Turunesh. “Not so well as I could, anyway.”
She laughed at him, and held him close. “What if you weren’t afraid?”
“I’d do it.”
She let go of him, and set the lid on the basket. “Thank you for helping me, Telemakos. I know it makes you sad to lose these friends.”
“It’s all right. I’d rather do it myself than hide and sulk and make someone else do a nasty job in my place.”
Telemakos suddenly felt the strength in his knees turn to water. He had to kneel and lay his head on the lid of the basket, stricken. “Oh.”
His mother knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his hair again. “Sweet heart, my little one, I’m so sorry.”
He let her think he was mourning for the doves. But that was not what had struck him down. It was hearing himself speak aloud what he would have to do.
V
IN THE LION’S DEN
“ …. in the palace now. My mother knows nothing of this. No servants either.”
2:452–53
LEARNING THE SCHEDULE OF the emperor’s council was easy. Telemakos had only to lean casually outside the door to Grandfather’s study on a few occasions, and to lie among the oil jars in the antechamber to Grandfather’s reception hall.
Getting into the council room in the New Palace was not so simple. The door was always guarded, but once Telemakos knew when the bala heg convened, before and after their meetings he was able to slip in with the butlers. He could even manage this without having to hide, by scavenging broken buns from the trays that were set out for the council’s refreshment; the guards and butlers tolerated him begging at their heels because he was familiar, and because they knew he was vaguely royal. It was tempting to take advantage of this ease of access, but Telemakos did not dare seem particularly interested in any one room.
He spent an entire day pestering a couple of cleaners, following them all over the New Palace, and so made his most valuable discovery regarding the council room: it had a latrine with a slotted window backing over one of the training yards. Telemakos stood on the waste box, surreptitiously, and easily slipped his head and shoulders through the window. It would have been too narrow for a grown man. Telemakos pulled his head back inside and looked up. The walls were close enough to climb if you leaned your back against one and braced your legs against the other; the ceiling was low. There was a ledge high along the wall behind the waste box, and when Telemakos reached up to explore it, he felt a little wind play about his hands. The ledge led to a chimney that was somehow connected to the closet above.
Telemakos jumped lightly to the floor. No one was paying any attention to him. He took hold of the curtain that separated the council room from its antechamber and flapped it back and forth exuberantly.
“You want to give this a good dusting,” he said to the cleaners.
He discovered that the privy window was guarded from without only when the council was in session, presumably to stop anyone listening beneath it. The window was set in the outside wall at thrice Telemakos’s height. There was a ledge at the level of the room’s floor that ran beneath the window, beneath the screened window of the council room itself, and at last, beneath another window twenty feet farther along.
It can’t be so simple, Telemakos thought. Surely they guard that entrance. Why, an assassin could climb up there and hide in the chimney—
Not unless he were a dwarf. They’re well guarded against other men, against one another. But they have no fear of children.
Telemakos needed to be sure he could do it, and he thought he needed at least two days in the New Palace to put the entire plan into practice. When next his father appeared and seemed to show interest in taking him hunting, Telemakos told him that he could not escape his new instruction in Noba. He did plan to attend these lessons, partly because he did not like to lie to his father, and partly because it would give Telemakos a reason to be at large in the New Palace. He told his mother that he was hunting with Medraut, an untruth so easy it felt unfair. Medraut would never tell Turunesh otherwise, and she would never ask him; and Karkara, the Noba tutor, would surely not complain to anyone that Telemakos had in fact turned up for a lesson.
Telemakos needed days alone. He did not want the pressure of having to sneak or wheedle his way out of the palace after the gates were closed for the night, and he needed darkness to test and enact his plan.
In darkness Telemakos made his way through the dim furnishings of the deserted audience chamber next to the council room. He wound his shamma around his waist, tying it out of his way, and crawled out the window. In darkness he edged himself across the ledge above the training yard, until he gained the narrow air vent to the council’s latrine; he crawled through the opening and into deeper darkness.
This much had gone reassuringly well. The true test, now, was to see if the chimney could be used as a hiding place. His success hung on this, Telemakos felt; if not, he would have to be content with wrapping himself in the folds of the privy curtain and hoping no one pulled it away, or climbing to the ceiling if anyone came in and hoping no one looked up.
He walked up the walls, his back to one and his feet to the other in the blind dark, until he was level with the ledge. The gap above the ledge was less high than the length o
f a man’s foot. Telemakos put his head through, and choked and pulled it out again. The stench was overwhelming. He held himself rigid between the walls for a few seconds, gasping, then climbed down and took off his clothes. He climbed back up and put his head and shoulders and one arm through the gap. He breathed lightly through his mouth this time, and could almost taste the smell, but his hand told him the walls were clean and dry. The boxes were emptied daily, he knew; only the smell remained.
Somehow he managed to twist and tease his body up into the airshaft, until he was standing on the ledge. The darkness was utter in here: it made no difference whether he opened or closed his eyes. The space was barely wider than his body. He could not stand free of both walls at once. It was like being entombed.
Mother of God, how did I get my legs in? How do I get out again?
Getting out the first time was a struggle. He managed it at last only driven by panic; his ribs and knees and elbows caught every flaw in the stone walls and every corner of the waste box as he tumbled to the floor.
“Oh!”
He lay in a breathless heap, coughing and barking with the effort not to yell. Then he began to choke with hysterical laughter at the thought of how he would explain himself if he ended up trapped in the airshaft of the bala heg’s latrine.
The worst part of the whole exercise was making himself climb into the airshaft for the second time. He practiced getting in and out until it became, while not exactly easy, at least fast and fluid. He knew what he was doing now, and could do it quickly and quietly.
By the time he made his way back through the palace corridors they were still and empty. There was no light in the Golden Court. The fountains were off for the night. Telemakos washed quietly in one of the pools, rather desperate to be rid of the smell of the airshaft. He lay full length in the dark water and held his breath while he rinsed his hair, then got out and sat shivering on the fountain’s rim. Here it was that Goewin had set him this challenge. With light fingers Telemakos touched the wide lip of the pool, the stone surface that Goewin had used as her desk. When he was dry, he wrapped his shamma tightly around his shoulders, settled himself in his favorite hiding place among the Golden Court’s reeds and palms, and went to sleep.
He dreamed he was stuck in the airshaft. The opening at the bottom was sealed shut, and he could not breathe. He woke up struggling and gasping and trying to cry out, tangled in his shamma. Esato was crouching next to him with her hands clamped over his nose and mouth; Sofya knelt opposite her. Telemakos tore Esato’s hands away.
“You pair of vultures!” he hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you think you’re doing, sneaking little crossbreed?” Sofya whispered back. “This isn’t a wayside inn!”
“He, he, he,” Esato giggled. “He’s got pond weed in his hair.”
Telemakos sat up and ran a hand over his head. It was daylight, but only just. The fountains were not on yet.
“Do they always set you loose this early?” he asked, and crawled out of the palm bed. The twins followed him, both of them giggling now.
“We’re to have breakfast with Our Mother. Every third week,” Sofya said. “Come with us, if you’re not hiding from anyone in particular this time.”
He considered this. Candake, queen of queens, the emperor’s aunt, was fond of Telemakos. It would be a good way to spend the day, and he could count on being fed, as well.
“You do look a state,” Sofya said critically. “Has your grandfather made you leave home? What are you doing here, in truth?”
“I stayed past curfew. I didn’t want to argue with the guards to let me out, so I came in here.” And this was true enough, though Telemakos knew the Golden Court was lost to him now; he had been found out beneath the palms by no less than three different people in the past three months, and he could not count on hiding here again.
“You’ve been fighting, too.”
His elbows and knees were scraped raw.
“Look, it’s none of your business,” Telemakos said shortly.
“It is if we take you to breakfast,” Sofya said mildly. “Come on. Our Mother will want to fix your hair.”
Candake did not ask him any questions. She roared with laughter when she saw Telemakos, and made him kneel between her enormous knees while she fussed over his head with combs and oil and clarified butter. She was a great admirer of his hair; in recent years this had driven Telemakos to avoid her company, although he liked her, and she let him drink coffee.
“Put his hair in a thousand plaits,” suggested Sofya, and Esato giggled again.
“He’s not a girl,” grunted Candake. The queen of queens was the size of about six women together; she ate constantly, and laughed like an hysterical hyena. She had attendants who helped her to move. Telemakos was fairly certain that seldom as he saw her she gave him more attention than she gave to her own daughters. “Eh, Telemakos Meder, tell me. How fares the princess Goewin, the terrible British ambassador? How is my little queen of Sheba? Her quarantine is bringing ruin on us.”
“It’s the emperor’s quarantine,” Telemakos dared to object in Goewin’s defense.
“It was her idea.”
“Does everyone blame it on her?” Telemakos asked, curious.
“Many do,” Candake wheezed, and chose another comb.
“That’s most unjust,” Telemakos said. “Goewin only advised it be done. No one was forced to act on her advice. And see what happened in Deire.”
“He knows so much about it,” commented Sofya, sitting despondently at her mother’s feet with her face between her hands, her body arranged in a very tableau of boredom. “I thought we were to have breakfast this morning, Our Mother. Esato’s hungry.”
“I’m hungry,” echoed Esato.
“She would have eaten the boy if I had not rescued him.”
Esato grinned at Telemakos, and Candake gave one of her deep-throated chuckles. “Yes, yes, my silly babies. But indulge me this silver hair a moment longer, and this boy’s talk. The Tame Lion, my imperial nephew, is too busy for coffee with his old auntie, too serious to talk while he eats, and I am too fat and slow to chase him into his study when he has his Hour Alone. Telemakos Meder will tell me all the courtly news.”
Telemakos was suddenly alert.
“The Tame Lion, you mean the emperor. What’s his ‘Hour Alone’? Does he have a private study?”
Sofya said darkly, “Don’t tell him anything, Our Mother. He’s a little spy.”
But it was Sofya herself who pointed out the emperor’s private study to Telemakos when he excused himself for his Noba lesson in the afternoon, and who told him how often the emperor came and went from it, and who guarded it.
“Who’s the spy?” Telemakos said. “How do you know all this?”
“Gebre Meskal is my cousin,” Sofya said loftily. “Oh, go away, Esato, let go of me.” She slapped her sister’s hands from her skirts. “Yes, I know you’re scared of Karkara, but no one else is. Get off !”
The actual afternoon in the council room the following day was anticlimactic for Telemakos after the trial run. He installed himself in the antechamber after dark the night before, and slept wrapped in the curtain; he hid in the airshaft while the caterers prepared the room, and sat comfortably on the privy floor while the bala heg was in session. Telemakos heard everything; indeed, he could see more from beneath the curtain than he had been able to see in full view of the councilors, with his face to the wall.
He had one bad moment when someone came into the privy. He saw the man rising from his seat on the council—it was the young one, Ityopis, the twins’ elder brother. Telemakos fled up the chimney without trouble, but standing there he suddenly realized he had no way to hide his feet. The airway was too narrow for him to bend his knees or to turn himself sideways. He finally held himself up by bracing his hands against the end walls. He managed to hang there until he heard Ityopis leave, and he thought that was the absolute limit of his strength; he nearly
wept when someone else came in before he even had a chance to shake the numbness from his hands or get his breath back. But no one noticed him.
When it was over, he had to hide in the airshaft again while the cleaners did their work; but he could not escape the room until it was dark. He sat on the floor to wait for nightfall, his mind full of the meeting. It had been particularly dull, much talk of taxes and revenues, which Telemakos found tedious and difficult to remember. He repeated patiently to himself all that he had learned.
He had been in this one room for nearly a day now with nothing to eat or drink, and long before dark he was so thirsty that everything else began to go out of his head.
Why had he not considered this in his plan? He would die rather than give himself up now, just because he had nothing to drink. He waited stubbornly, licking dry lips, his head beginning to ache. Even after night fell he forced himself to wait another hour to give the palace time to grow quiet. Then he climbed back through the narrow window and across the ledge on the outside wall, and discovered courtiers drinking and laughing in the room he meant to escape through.
You lot of bushpig herders, he cursed them silently.
He listened at the window for a few minutes. The men were boasting to one another about their horses. It was interesting, but not worth listening to while clinging to the wall in the dark and going mad with thirst.
Telemakos spidered back to the council room and climbed back in, and wandered about checking the baskets and bureaus in case anyone had left any refreshments behind. But the cleaners had been thorough, and there was nothing. The outer door was barred and guarded, Telemakos knew; he could not get out that way. He waited another two hours, judging by the moon, and tried the neighboring room again. The party was still going on.
Well, I can’t stand this, Telemakos thought, and lowered himself as far as he could off the ledge, and dropped into the training yard below.
The fall knocked all the breath from him, for the second time in as many days. For a few minutes he lay flat on his face vowing not to do this to himself again anytime soon. Then he began to think about what to do next. He was not sure he would be able to get back inside the main building at this time of night, and even if he did, where would he go? He wanted a drink more than anything in the world. His mouth felt as though he had swallowed a jugful of sand, and his head was pounding. He would not be welcome in the kitchens; he smelled like a sewer, and he could not bathe in the Golden Court again, where the royal crocodiles Esato and Sofya would be watching for him. He could go home as soon as the gates were opened in the morning, but he had to find something to drink now—
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