“Solomon! Back!” Telemakos shouted, and was daring and desperate enough that he tried to turn and shout his vain command in Solomon’s face. But Solomon only gave him time for that first glance, and for Telemakos to throw his arm up and try to shield his neck. Solomon was sevenfold Telemakos’s weight. Telemakos went down beneath him like a stem of barley to the blade of a scythe, his hand clutching frantically at the back of his neck, his arm bent double and trapped, nearly from wrist to shoulder, in the brutal, saw-toothed vise of Solomon’s jaws.
For what seemed a very long time, Telemakos thought about nothing but protecting his neck.
Then his father was bundling him into his arms and weeping as he ran, and Nezana was rounding on Solomon with his whip to hold him at bay while Medraut carried Telemakos out through the tunnel. The jolting of his father’s strides tore his equilibrium apart, and Telemakos was sick all down Medraut’s shirt and then again all over his own arm when Medraut laid him on the paving stones of the court outside the lion pit’s lower walls.
“You monstrous, thankless child!” his father wept. “Give me half a chance to put you back together before you go about polluting yourself!”
The keeper came running out to them. Medraut held on to Telemakos with iron fingers that bit into his arm more pressingly, it seemed, than Solomon’s teeth had.
“Get me the emperor’s physician,” Medraut ordered. “And at least two attendants. A brazier, searing irons, a full kettle of clean water. Spirit, salt, a bolt of cotton, and needles, and a spool of fine gut. Opium. Now. Bring all of it out here, now. If I let go of him, he’ll bleed to death.”
Oh, Telemakos thought.
He lay quietly and stared at the sky, waiting for what would happen next.
Medraut bent over him as they waited, his fingers cutting into Telemakos’s arm like knives. “Telemakos? Stay here.”
“I am here,” Telemakos whispered. He tried to focus on his father’s face and the silver-fair hair that was like a reflection of his own, but the sky pulled back his gaze. It was the beginning of the season of the Long Rains, and though it was not raining yet that day, the air was thick with mist. The far winter sky soothed him, bright and gray and soft.
Desperate for time, they burned shut the wounds that were killing him even before they gave him the opium. No matter what they did to him, his vision never went entirely black, his mind never entirely unaware, until his inability to lose consciousness and shut it all out made him want to scream and scream and scream, except that he had no strength to do anything but stare dazedly at the sky.
His father and another man worked over his arm and shoulder with needle and thread. It was like being eaten alive by a flock of tiny birds. Something occurred to Telemakos suddenly, and he spoke through his father’s endless, endless stitches.
“Oh, please—sir,” Telemakos gasped. “Solomon! Please… Don’t—kill—Solomon!”
“Hush, child,” Medraut murmured at his ear, never hesitating in his work. “Foolish one. Would that punish Solomon, or you? The emperor won’t allow his pets to be executed.”
Telemakos said clearly and abruptly, “Because when she is bigger, I want to show the baby.”
“Oh.” Then for the first time, Medraut faltered. “The baby!”
Telemakos saw that his father had utterly forgotten her.
Medraut bent his head over his son. His hot tears scorched Telemakos’s arm. “Better she had never been born,” Medraut whispered.
After a time, with great reluctance, Telemakos realized it was easier to lie with his eyes shut than with them open.
But he stayed awake. For hours he remained aware of all that was happening to him, and dimly aware of all that was happening around him.
Gebre Meskal, the young emperor of the African kingdom of Aksum, had on several occasions let it be known publicly that he was indebted to the house of Nebir. He gave up a suite of rooms in his palace so that Telemakos would not have to be carried home in his drugged and blood-dazed stupor. Long past dark, long after there was nothing more his father could do for him, Telemakos lay conscious of Medraut kneeling with his head on the cot by his shoulder, watching the shallow rise and fall of Telemakos’s chest as he breathed.
It seemed late at night when the emperor came in.
“Ras Meder.”
Gebre Meskal used Medraut’s Ethiopic name and royal title, Prince Meder, as Telemakos did when he addressed his father. Telemakos felt his father come to attention.
“Majesty.”
“Be at ease, sir,” said the emperor, and sighed. “Please. Take my hand. Sit. Never have I known a birthday smutted by a grimmer cloud. Will he heal?”
Medraut’s answer was no answer. “He bore our surgery like a soldier.”
“So he would. His mettle bests the better part of my army. Telemakos Lionheart, Beloved Telemakos. Few men could have endured the punishment he suffered in the hands of the smugglers at the Afar mines, when he sought to discover those who would sabotage my plague quarantine. And he was only a child.”
In gentle affection, the emperor brushed his cool, dry palm over Telemakos’s forehead.
“Beloved Telemakos,” he repeated.
Even so innocent a touch, so close to Telemakos’s eyes, made him shudder. For one endless, confusing moment, Telemakos thought he was there, back in Afar. The brutal foreman that he never saw was tightening the blindfold—Telemakos was lost again in a dark, constricted world of thirst and exhaustion, labor and torment, where his eyes were always covered and his arms always bound, and his legs were locked in iron while he slept. If he lay blind and unable to move like this, where else could he be but in Afar, in the Salt Desert?
But, but. The emperor was still talking.
“—he was only a child. What age is he now?”
Medraut answered with dull, mechanical politeness. “He will be twelve at Trinity next month.”
“I have kept my eye on your lionhearted son this past half year,” the emperor said in a low voice. “I would not use so young a servant as a spy another time. It was a season before he had his full weight back after the captivity. And I have lain awake some nights regretting how publicly I involved him in the trial that followed. I should not have risked bringing anyone’s wrath against the boy.”
Medraut let out a sharp breath of dismissal. “Wrath!” he said hoarsely, his voice rough with unhappiness. “Majesty, what does any of that matter now? What more evil could be done to him than this? If any one of these wounds should fester, only one…Tooth and claw. There are so many. I dread their infection.”
“It is past curfew, Ras Meder,” the emperor said quietly. “I am holding the Guardian’s Gate open for you. I want you to go home.”
Medraut let one hand fall on Telemakos’s chest, and Telemakos gasped faintly. His torn ribcage throbbed beneath the pressure of his father’s touch, but it was a relief to feel its firm reality. He was not in Afar.
“I myself will keep your watch this night,” said Gebre Meskal. “You, Ras Meder, have the boy’s grieving mother and newborn sister waiting for your comfort. Your son is at rest for the moment. Please go home now.”
There were not many who could command Telemakos’s father, Medraut the son of Artos the Dragon, Medraut who would now be high king of Britain if he had so desired. “I should do this for no other man,” Medraut said in a low voice, rising to his feet.
“Do it for no man’s sake. Do it for Turunesh your wife, and your new daughter. Ras Meder—”
The emperor spoke steadily. “Ras Meder, I have a question to put to you before you go. Let me ask it quickly, for I do not like to consult you on matters of policy when you are so pressed with hope and fear for your children. But it cannot wait. A dispatch has come this morning, and I must send an answer before rain makes the roads impassable. My cousin the king of Himyar, Abreha Anbessa, whom the Himyarites name Lion Hunter, wants me to lift my quarantine.”
Telemakos’s mind went suddenly keen, clutching at this distra
ction. Even only half-conscious, he was fascinated as always by the complicated adult world of power and influence that surrounded him.
“Why do you consult me?” Medraut said. “Consult my sister, the princess Goewin, your so-called British ambassador. She is your Mentor, not I; your Athena, your queen of spies.”
“Do not ever call her that,” the emperor said sharply, “even though we are alone.”
“Your pardon, sir,” Medraut muttered. “But why consult me?”
“Because you are a doctor. I want to know what risk I run of bringing plague to Aksum if I lift my quarantine and resume trade in the Red Sea. Abreha has his eye fixed on the Hanish Islands, and I fear he will try to secure them if I do not exercise my right of dominion there. He has been my ally these six years, and I do not want to wake the ghost of my father’s conflict in Arabia.”
Oh, the wealth of intrigue you heard when no one imagined you were listening.
Telemakos tried to divest himself of his ruined arm and the numbing, flashed return to last summer’s captivity, to concentrate on the low voices over his head.
“What do you lose if you lose Hanish?” Medraut asked.
“A colony of exile and our first port of entry from the Orient to the Red Sea, since plague took Deire. A vast mine of obsidian. Rich pearl-fishing grounds.”
“Majesty, run the risk of losing Hanish. Have you condemned whole cities and plunged nobles into poverty with your quarantine, to be tempted by a handful of obsidian and pearls? Throw wide your gates before time, and your people will fall to plague like corn to locusts; they will have no hardiness against a disease they have scarcely encountered.”
Medraut drew a long breath. But he finished firmly, “Ask that your cousin forgive you for refusing his request. Abreha Anbessa is a forgiving man. Show him that you trust him. Hold your quarantine another year.”
It took every fragment of Telemakos’s will to understand and remember this exchange.
“So. The quarantine holds. Thank you, Ras Meder.”
“It is advice easily given. It is not so easily enforced.”
“The quarantine holds.”
This assertion seemed curiously reassuring. Telemakos opened his eyes.
“You prying young demon. You never miss a word.” Medraut drummed his fingers against Telemakos’s chest, his touch fond and feather light, so that Telemakos hardly felt it. “Look at this, my lord, he is awake. He is hanging on our every syllable.”
Medraut bent near him, searching his face. Telemakos watched but could not move his head.
“Queen?”
Telemakos made the word with tongue and teeth, but no sound came out. With a great effort, he gathered himself.
“Queen of spies?” he whispered.
His father and Gebre Meskal glanced at each other over Telemakos’s still form. Then the emperor leaned close to him as well, with one finger raised to his own lips.
“It is a secret,” he said. “No man must ever know the true name of my Mentor”—his voice was gentle—“or that of my sunbird.”
That had been Gebre Meskal’s name for Telemakos himself, when Telemakos had moved in listening secrecy, alone in Afar among the salt pirates, the year before.
But no one knows my name, Telemakos thought. Our ports are closed, the black market was stopped six months ago, the men who ran it are all exiled or dead. Why then, he thought, and this time found himself shaping words without meaning to: “Why now, if all is finished—?”
It was utterly exhausting to try to speak aloud. Telemakos closed his eyes again.
“All is not finished,” said the emperor Gebre Meskal.
II
IMAGINARY BEASTS
TELEMAKOS LAY IN THE New Palace for a month. A day or so after the accident, when he was vaguely sensible again, he begged so piteously to go home that they finally sent for his aunt to come stay with him. It was not the same as being at home, sharing an apartment with Goewin in the New Palace, but it was a little like last year’s arrangement in the governor’s house at Adulis, when Telemakos had first begun to uncover the plot to undermine Gebre Meskal’s quarantine. Goewin came to sit on the edge of Telemakos’s bed after her day’s meetings were finished, just as she had done in Adulis. She read to him from Homer’s Odyssey, his favorite book.
“Do you think Telemakos knows?” Telemakos asked about his namesake, Odysseus’s son. He had to whisper because he could not talk. “Do you think he knows that Mentor is really Athena—his advisor is the goddess Athena, inspiring him to do everything he does?”
“Of course he knows.”
“He always pretends he doesn’t.”
“He is a diplomat. Prudent Telemakos,” Goewin said, turning and settling the pages. “Athena likes to hide her nature. The advisor Mentor is only a mortal, a loyal servant of the king. He has no special power to speak of, other than wisdom. It is the perfect disguise for the goddess.”
“You are my Mentor,” Telemakos whispered.
Goewin looked up sharply. If Telemakos had not loved her as much as he did, he would have been afraid of her warning glare; she was so different from everyone else, black haired and white faced, tall and pale and proud.
“I see why you would call me that,” she said. “We’ve always been like that. The first thing you ever said to me was to quote Telemakos’s welcome to the goddess.”
Goewin put aside the manuscript pages and laid one cool hand on his forehead, to smooth the pale hair back from his brown skin.
“But Telemakos, there is a reason you ought not to call me Mentor.”
“I know. I heard—” Telemakos hesitated. He had tensed at her touch. She had seen it and, perhaps thinking it hurt him, took her hand away. “Ras Meder and Gebre Meskal were talking about you,” Telemakos said. “They called you Gebre Meskal’s Mentor. ‘Queen of spies,’ they called you.”
“You should know,” Goewin agreed. “But it is knowledge worth as much as my life. Or yours, should an evil mind make the connection. Don’t speak it aloud carelessly, even when we are alone.”
They were nearly the emperor’s exact words. And it could scarcely be said that Telemakos had spoken aloud.
Goewin sat back and picked up the book again. She took a breath as if she was about to continue reading, but Telemakos stopped her.
“Goewin,” he whispered, “have you been threatened again?”
“I am threatened daily,” she said, as if it were nothing.
No one had liked the quarantine when it first began, and people blamed it on Goewin because, in her role as the British ambassador, she had first suggested it. There were ugly messages pinned to Grandfather’s gate with knives, and the skull of a lioness with an arrow wired through it, and once, a sinisterly mutilated doll carved in salt, white faced and bloodied.
“You get threats because of the quarantine. Because you are Goewin. But you are also…You captain those who serve the emperor in secret. And someone knows?”
“They don’t know anything,” Goewin answered contemptuously. “Someone is trying to frighten us, but they are not doing a very good job. They have to use their own code words. Old ones. They still call me hyena, as they called you harrier, once, having no other idea of what I am. So—a hyena’s head arrives in the emperor’s kitchens one day, hidden in a crate of coconuts. And similar clever tricks. Some pirate we didn’t catch is growing bored, with no salt shipments to arrange, all his friends in exile and no one to talk to.”
Goewin looked up from the book and saw Telemakos frowning at her in calculating concentration.
“There’s no connection between the murdered lioness sent to our house and the murdered hyena sent to this palace,” she said more calmly. “There’s no connection between Goewin and Mentor. Some threats are openly aimed at me. These are not. Oh—”
“At me, then?” Telemakos croaked. “At the sunbird? Don’t tell me, I have it. Not at the sunbird, but at the harrier! That’s what they called me, isn’t it? Have they found dead harriers in
among the royal chickens?”
Goewin let out a bark of laughter. Telemakos found himself choking on painful laughter as well.
“You are terrible, boy. It’s not a joke.”
“They have! Someone kills harriers and sends them to Gebre Meskal!” It was tremendous that Telemakos should be lying here, half-dead, and out in the streets of Aksum someone imagined his secret self to be dangerous and frightening enough to warrant sending threats to the emperor.
Goewin nodded.
“But they don’t know it’s me,” Telemakos said firmly.
“They do not. But I don’t like it. It means there’s someone we haven’t accounted for….”
Goewin slapped the book down on the floor. She stood and walked to the window, where she put up both hands to rattle them among the colored glass beads and strips of beaten copper that she had hung there to catch the light. “Let’s talk of something else, Telemakos.”
“Tell me about my sister,” he demanded immediately.
Goewin smiled. She stood with her back to the window, one hand still playing lightly among the wind chimes. “I will bring her to see you someday soon,” Goewin said. “If your father allows you company. She’s fussier than you, though. She cries and cries and cries. The only time she ever stops is when she’s suckling, or sleeping on top of someone.”
“Does she sleep on top of you?”
“I took her to bed with me for two nights, just after she was born,” Goewin said. “Otherwise your mother would never have got any sleep at all. Then I came here, of course.”
“If Ras Meder would let me go home, the baby could sleep on me,” Telemakos suggested.
Goewin gave him a withering look. “Do you think your father will allow a wriggling slug of a baby kicking at your bare ribs anytime soon, boy? Maybe after your skin grows back.”
The Sunbird Page 15
