The Empty Kingdom

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  But nothing happened. Telemakos waited. The captain had left him a waterskin; Telemakos found he could manage to drink from it if he lay flat on his back with the skin on his chest. There was room for him to lie down if he pulled his knees up nearly over his head.

  He slept without dreaming and woke to a commotion of voices and footsteps hurrying against the wooden planks. The siding that had sealed him in came away, and Telemakos screwed his eyes shut against the sudden light. When he dared to open them again, he was looking upside-down into the captain’s face and at another man, a young warrior whose shadowy bulk made the ship’s master look like a dwarf. The big guard laid his hand on Telemakos’s forehead and gently forced him to turn his head aside, so that the back of his neck behind his right ear was exposed.

  “Look,” said the guard in a deep, rich voice. “Do you know what that is?”

  The captain peered at the brand. Telemakos waited still, his joints so strained by confinement that he could hardly bear to contemplate stretching them.

  “That is the najashi’s seal,” the captain answered in a low voice. “God help me. If I’d known—”

  “You know now,” said the guard. “Get him out of here, and bring him something to make a decent meal before we sail. I’ll see to it he brings no harm to any of your crew.”

  The guard lifted him out gently. Telemakos tried to sit up but found he could not straighten his legs, and that his neck was so stiff he could not lift his head. Panic seized him, and he struggled.

  “Stay calm,” the young soldier said quietly, working his hands over the cramped muscles of Telemakos’s legs. “There—stretch—now the other.”

  The captain helped, silent and guilty. Telemakos rubbed at the back of his neck as the two men set the sluggish blood moving through his body again. The brand was no longer sore. For the first time since Abreha had marked him, Telemakos tried to trace the outline of the najashi’s seal. He could make out the points of the star, but the lion’s head within the border was too fine for him to feel.

  He looked up at the guard. The young man was a giant. Telemakos did not recognize his face, but he made a shrewd guess as to his name.

  “Iskinder!”

  The other stared at him in surprise, and Telemakos laughed, feeling obscurely pleased with himself. It was the young man on whose behalf he had asked Abreha to grant a recommendation.

  “Iskinder of the al-Muza city guard! You of all men are commanded to be my watchman on this journey?”

  Iskinder answered slowly, “I know you.” He blinked in affirmation. “So I do. We met in the leatherworkers’ suq, two years ago, and you had just stepped off an Aksumite ship. You were there with your sister and a lion. You gave your blessing to a crucified spy.” Iskinder drew a breath. “You swore you would rather—” He stopped.

  “—take such punishment myself than have to deal it out,” Telemakos finished for him, gritting his teeth. He pushed himself up on one knee, getting ready for the effort it would take to stand. “So I said.”

  “You were right. It’s a hateful task.”

  Telemakos shivered involuntarily beneath Iskinder’s steely hands. Iskinder suddenly let go of him and drew back by a pace’s length, leaving Telemakos a clear space in which to get to his feet himself.

  Telemakos stood stiffly. The captain gave him his satchel.

  “You’re to answer to me,” said the captain. “Iskinder is your guardian, but he has no right of command over you. It’s a good thing you understand each other.”

  XIII

  POPPY

  THE VOYAGE TO THE disputed Hanish Archipelago was swift but rough, and Telemakos was so wretchedly seasick throughout the day it took to get there that he thought his impending execution would bring nothing but relief in comparison. But soon enough they reached the looming volcanic peaks. In the shadow of Hanish al-Kabir the captain told him, “There’s no landing place for a ship other than at the prison, on the western side of the island. We’ll approach from the north, so they don’t see us, and your guard can take you ashore over the reef. We’ll follow you down the coast. There’s not much tide here.”

  A thin mist of dull green scrub covered the lower slopes of lava. Below that, the coral sands shone white as bone dust. Iskinder paddled Telemakos to shore in a narrow hawri canoe and left him on the beach with a day’s water and a box of wax tablets. In the afternoon Iskinder picked him up three miles to the south. The next day Telemakos spent shipboard, while the captain took soundings and Telemakos plotted them, so that they were charting the water as well as the land. They slowly made their way around the island.

  To Telemakos, Hanish al-Kabir meant prison and plague, thirst and breathless heat, exile and war. And it was true that the island was nearly as dry as the Salt Desert. But it was so beautiful. On shore, alone, Telemakos would come around the curve of an inlet and find himself faced with a cliffside of flawless black rock, as sheer and smooth as silk, shot with veins of green like a dark emerald. The rock pools were seething with life: fish more bright than jungle birds, fish like needles of iridescent glass, fish disguised as underwater flowers. Flamingos and spoonbills stalked among the coral in clear pale green water. Dolphins leaped beyond the breakers, where the volcanic slopes dropped steeply beneath the sea.

  The beauty of it went to his head. Alone on the beach, Telemakos felt he owned it. Hanish al-Kabir did not belong to Abreha, or Gebre Meskal; neither one of them had ever set foot on it. It belonged to him, now, for every second of his limited life span that he stood as an illegal intruder on the shore with his ankles in the purling combers; the empty kingdom of sea and sky and sloping rock did not belong to him by right of deed or title, but by right of his being there when no one else was, by right of his astonishment at its unacknowledged beauty, and by right of his being the first to capture it truthfully in a map.

  Each evening Telemakos transferred his day’s notes to parchment in diligent detail. He took over the space at the bottom of the stepladder to the rowers’ benches, out of the wind but still in the reach of daylight. He usually had some room to himself here, because the oarsmen preferred to sit above, in the full light and air, when they were not on duty. Telemakos spread his equipment on the floor and over the benches, working frantically in the scant minutes before dark fell; this final hour of the day was the most demanding for him, when his most precise work had to be done at top speed. Telemakos held the parchment in place with knees and toes, trimmed and cleaned his brush with his teeth, and deciphered his notes in the wax with his fingertips when he could no longer see them plainly. When he delivered the finished work to the captain and sat down on the deck to eat supper with Iskinder, he always felt exhausted and triumphant, as though the race against darkness actually pitted him against a physical opponent. Iskinder laughed at his ink-stained mouth.

  “You are supposed to be inconspicuous!”

  Telemakos finished his circumnavigation of al-Kabir and moved on to Zuqar Island. Quietly skirting the traders’ outpost there, Telemakos considered what might happen if he did not meet Iskinder at the next inlet. Would they search for me? he wondered. If they missed me, could I then marry a fishergirl and spend the rest of my days diving for pearls?

  He narrowed his eyes and kept going. One-armed pearl diver: it was stupid even to think about it, and anyway, he was branded with the najashi’s mark. He could not hide that. If a hunt was made for him, no one would dare to give him harbor against the najashi.

  In something more than a month the project was finished. They sailed back to the prison harbor on al-Kabir and anchored anonymously off the beach alongside a half dozen other sleek turquoise warships from Himyar, opposite a squadron of larger, seagoing Aksumite vessels. Iskinder in his hawri canoe took Telemakos and the completed maps to Abreha’s flagship, which waited among its fellows.

  The najashi’s ship was larger than the warship Telemakos had grown used to, with a fully covered lower level for its oarsmen. Abreha had his own cabin, scarcely bigger than a cupbo
ard, fitted with a worktable that folded down over most of the floor; Telemakos had to stand at the najashi’s shoulder, there being no room to kneel, as Abreha paged through his new maps. He checked them immediately, even before he allowed Telemakos to ask about Athena.

  “Tell me about this harbor.”

  “You can’t see it from the water. You have to row around that headland to get in.”

  “Sheltered and hidden? And deep enough for a ship?”

  “If you steer clear of the reef.”

  The najashi turned pages in silence.

  “Fresh water here?”

  “A rain pool.”

  “Springs?”

  “There are two springs on Zuqar. You must know that. There’s a deep pool up the mountain on al-Kabir just here—I plumbed it. But you can’t get there overland, and you wouldn’t get a ship near the coast there.”

  Abreha said seriously, “These maps are remarkable, Morningstar. You’ve paid your sister’s ransom and more.”

  Telemakos hesitated, then dared to ask at last, “Where is she now?”

  “I left her in the port at Adulis, with your father, in the governor’s mansion, your great-uncle Abbas’s house. Abbas had sent a message to your mother to meet them there, but she had not yet arrived when I left. Athena is content enough, and safe. You may trust that, Morningstar. But it will be easier for you if you do not press me to talk about her over and over.” Abreha prowled through the pages of maps again, handling them carefully. He said, “I wish I had given you more time.”

  Three days went by, and still they did not leave the prison harbor. Abreha went ashore each morning; the oarsmen were idle. Telemakos was not allowed on deck by daylight. Iskinder hovered near him, usually with his back turned apologetically, alert and wary.

  Abreha asked Telemakos to eat with him, each night when he came on board his ship. “Why are we still here?” Telemakos asked on the third evening. The waiting made him want to weep and scream. It had not been so bad while he had work to occupy him, but in idleness his mind was left with nothing to do but construct his own execution a thousand times over. “Why not return to Himyar now? What are we waiting for?”

  “I have a negotiation to complete with Gebre Meskal’s representative and the warden on al-Kabir,” Abreha told him. “You remember I had asked for release of certain prisoners there.”

  Telemakos drew a sharp breath. He said evenly, “Anako called Lazarus, former governor of Deire.”

  “Nothing escapes your attention, Morningstar.”

  The injustice of it so overwhelmed Telemakos that for several seconds he did not think he could breathe, let alone speak or put food in his mouth.

  “I owe it to him,” Abreha said sadly. “Surely you understand that.”

  “If you’re securing his release,” Telemakos said, “does that mean he will be aboard this ship when it sails back to al-Muza?”

  “And if he is? How is he anything to do with you anymore?” Abreha asked. Telemakos pressed his lips together; he could make no answer.

  “How, boy? Can he hurt you? Instruct you? Beg a favor of you? Can he send you to prison? Condemn you to death?” Abreha paused, waiting for an answer, while Telemakos, in polite and silent hatred, stared fast at a splintered place in the deck between himself and the najashi.

  “He cannot touch you, Morningstar,” Abreha said. “I understand why you should detest him; I do not like him, either, but to fear him, when you are utterly beyond his government? You manage your fear of me with grace and strength. What effort wasted, that you should spend your life in fear of such a one as Anako!”

  He picked a comb of fine bones from his smoked fish and tested their sharpness with his fingertips. He looked directly at Telemakos from beneath his forbidding eyebrows. The najashi said, “Your fantastic title makes you his superior. I will require him to treat you with consideration, or suffer for it.”

  “Thank you,” Telemakos said stiffly.

  “I’m going ashore again tomorrow,” Abreha said. “Would you like to work in my cabin, and make me copies of certain of your maps? I am sorry to keep you confined below, but I do not want you to be seen.”

  “Thank you,” Telemakos said again.

  “There are fresh pages and ink in the chest below the table.”

  “Thank you,” Telemakos said through his teeth, and bent to his own meal, determined not to be forced to acknowledge any more of these courteous, meaningless offers of small kindness.

  He spent the next day at the folding desk in the najashi’s cunningly constructed cupboard workplace. Iskinder sat just outside, with his back to the entrance. The cabin did not afford Telemakos more space than he was used to, but it made a change from the monotonous horror of waiting with nothing to do. He was reaching for a new ink block when he discovered, rolled carefully behind the chest of supplies that Abreha had allowed him to make use of, the harness in which Telemakos had carried his sister at his side for the last two years and more.

  For a moment Telemakos was defeated, too unhappy and tired to think. He sat on the planking beneath the folding easel with the saddle in his lap. It had grown too small for Athena, Telemakos admitted to himself now; even his charm bracelet had had to be lengthened during the time he had worn it, but nothing had ever been done about the baby’s saddle. She should have learned to walk before she outgrew it. Why had Abreha kept it? Maybe it broke his heart, also, to part with Athena. Or maybe the najashi simply had not needed the harness as Telemakos had, having two arms, and had left it on board when he took Athena ashore. Telemakos slipped his fingers into the pockets at the side; Athena’s finger dolls and the bone rattle and the wooden giraffe were gone. She must have taken them with her. Good.

  Telemakos shook out the saddle’s familiar folds. The tanned hide was worn supple and smooth, nearly black in places. He buried his nose in it and caught, past the smell of leather, a trace of flour and spice, the faint baked scent of his sister’s skin. It made his throat ache with misery and longing. He took another deep breath, but the trace was gone; it was overwhelmed by leather and something like burnt poppy.

  Poppy?

  Telemakos glanced over his shoulder. Iskinder sat, as always, with his back turned. Telemakos hooked the shoulder strap over his head, so familiar a movement that again it made his throat suddenly close up with loneliness for Athena. He swallowed the loneliness and opened the saddle’s inner pocket. The dozen vials and packets of opium that he had disposed of during his stay in San’a were still there, untouched. So were the original portions his father had sent with him.

  Have I got enough here to stupefy everyone on this ship? Telemakos wondered. He calculated roughly.

  Maybe not enough to immobilize them, but enough to get their guard down. In the waterskins? Will they taste it? The waterskins and the wine jars; it’s more effective in wine. Then later, if enough of them are asleep, I can slip overboard and turn myself in to the Aksumite prison warden. Surely my own people will grant me sanctuary.

  Telemakos shoved the vials and twists of paper into his own satchel and quietly folded his sister’s saddle in its place behind the chest. He went back to work, wild hope bubbling within him like a springing fountain. It would be easy to get to the supplies; Telemakos had been left by himself with them in the lower deck several times every day. No one paid any attention to him down there; Iskinder sat at the top of the stepladder, in the sun, and spoke to Telemakos only if Telemakos addressed him first. Telemakos had spent hours alone, the day before, watching one of Gebre Meskal’s ships pull close to the beach so that men could slosh through the water unloading supplies for the prison.

  “I’ve finished here,” he said to Iskinder. “May I wait the rest of the afternoon below?”

  “Keep your head down,” his guard said, and guided him to the ladder. Iskinder stayed at the top, waiting above with the rest of the crew as usual. Telemakos sat at the foot of the steps.

  “Tell me when you see the najashi on his way back, will you, Iskinder? An
d if he is alone? He is setting free an enemy of mine.”

  After some time Iskinder called down to him, “They’re on their way, just coming down to the hawris on the beach. Go take a look through the starboard oar holes at the back. Is that your man?”

  Iskinder was above, watching the najashi and his attendants climb into the canoe, and Telemakos was alone for five minutes with the crew’s water supply and enough opium to stun several elephants.

  He glanced through the oar hole. He could not see the hawri on its way.

  His conscience hammered at him so mercilessly as he worked that all the sweet hope was suddenly made bitter with guilt. If Telemakos escaped, Iskinder would take the blame. He would be stripped of his advancement, maybe whipped, set to labor, imprisoned. It would be the same for any other guard who allowed my escape, Telemakos reasoned, and I would not suffer such pity for a stranger, would I? But I am sorry for Iskinder.

  Maybe that’s why Abreha chose him for this job. He guessed how it would pain me to sabotage the one I had recommended, and then I might hesitate and fail to take my chance when it came.

  But I’ll not hesitate.

  He worked over the storage vessels in silent efficiency, with knees and nails and teeth.

  “Morningstar?”

  Telemakos stoppered the last waterskin shut, bracing the skin in place with one foot.

  “Sorry. I was thirsty, and it takes me a long time to get one of these open.”

  “I’d help you. Anyone would help you.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Telemakos had drunk as much as he could hold, before he had started. He did not know when he would next find uncontaminated water.

  He folded himself into a corner of the hold with his knees against his chin to wait, but the najashi found him there. Abreha came down the narrow stepway past Iskinder and beckoned Telemakos to his feet.

  “Come up. You must share this ship with your enemy for a brief time, and I do not like to see you skulking down here as though in cowardice.”

  Abreha bent to one of the waterskins. He refilled his own leather bottle, drank from it, and offered it to Telemakos. Telemakos refused quietly.