A Coalition of Lions

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  I cannot, I cannot be doing this again. I cannot lose my brother and his son in the same insane way—

  I called Telemakos for an hour, perhaps; who knows how long. Then I threw myself on the floor in despair and cried until I could not breathe.

  He came back, of course. I did not hear him or know he was there until he touched me, reaching out a hand lightly to make certain where I was, then locking his small arms around my neck affectionately.

  “Goewin, Goewin! What happened? Why are you crying so hard?”

  “You miserable sneaking little weasel!” I gasped, hugging him against me so fiercely that he choked, and tried to break free. “Pestilent son of a demon! Where have you been all this time? How did you find your way back? Good God, how you’ve frightened me!”

  “I’m not so stupid,” he said defensively, and put into my hands a bobbin of his mother’s spinning, half filled with fine wool thread.

  “You came prepared,” I spat through my teeth. “What if the line had broken?”

  “It’s quite strong,” came his clear, confident voice in the dark; “try it.”

  I tugged at a length of wool. He was right.

  “Anyway, I could smell where our camp is. The tomb’s got such a different air to the tunnels; and Mother packed raisin cakes for us.”

  “Give me your hand,” I said firmly.

  I found it in the dark, offered willingly. I looped the thread around his wrist, three times, five times, a dozen times.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Binding you to me,” I said sharply, pulling the knots tight and beginning to loop the thread around my own hand as well.

  “Do not—”

  He tried to pull his hand away, too late; I held him fast.

  “I won’t leave you again, I promise!”

  “You will not. I will see to it.”

  Our wrists were back to back now, webbed in wool floss.

  “Is that too tight?”

  “I’m all right,” Telemakos answered meekly. But instead of trying to pull away again, he curled himself against my side in the dark and finally whispered, “I’m sorry, my lady.”

  We had no way of telling the hour. I tried to make Telemakos eat and drink sparingly. Keeping him tied to me began to prove unimaginably awkward, but I would sooner have been stripped and flogged in the cathedral square than I would have let him go again.

  We were asleep when Turunesh came for us.

  “Let’s go,” she said in urgent Ethiopic. She repeated the command in Greek, and then in Latin. “Let’s go, let us go, let us go. My father is growing suspicious, wondering why he has not seen you. I don’t want to compromise his standing in the Council, or with Ella Amida; better he worry, knowing nothing, than be cast as a collaborator. Ai, this is proving more difficult than I thought. I had a time persuading the gatekeeper to let me in the cemetery so late at night.”

  She closed the door of the tomb and fastened it, moving with sure efficiency in the dark. Then she tried to take my hand.

  “Mercy on us, what is this?”

  She plucked at the wool that bound Telemakos’s wrist to mine.

  “Your son decided to go exploring,” I uttered through tight lips.

  “Ai, you wretched child!” she exclaimed. “I’ll have you whipped! This is not a game!”

  Briefly, Turunesh tried to unpick the knots, but she quickly dropped our hands and gave up. “What a tangle! Come up out of the dark and we’ll cut you apart.”

  Turunesh steered us around like a team of oxen, and set us walking ahead of her up the stairs. I could hear her hand brushing lightly upon the walls behind me as she felt her way. “We are nearly there,” she said. “I will not make a light; it will only blind us and hurt your eyes. I’ve horses waiting for us at the reservoir at Mai Shum. I hope; I left them unguarded. We must reach Adwa tonight and be away to the east tomorrow. Were you able to sleep?”

  “A little. How long has it been since you left us?”

  “Just more than a day. Look, the far stairway. You see the stars where the door stands open at the top?”

  We came out into the cemetery. The moonless night was alluringly beautiful; the spangled sky seemed like the brightest thing I had ever seen. The city below the Necropolis glittered also. I could make out the pattern of the lighted streets in the market area, where people still shopped and sold by the light of oil lamps and torches. Turunesh led us to a decorative arbor, and we sat in its shelter on a marble bench overlooking the sparkling city. She dug in her satchel and finally produced a flint fire-lighter.

  “I haven’t a knife. This will have to do.”

  When the wool cord was pulled taut beneath the flint, it seemed to grow razor-sharp, and Telemakos screwed his eyes shut and turned his face away, silent and cowed, as his mother and I took turns at sawing us free.

  “Maybe we won’t have you whipped after all,” she said at last, with sympathy, when finally Telemakos and I were parted from each other. “Remind me to take a knife with us when we leave Adwa.”

  Telemakos began rather desperately to pull the frayed and tangled threads away from his wrist.

  “Don’t drop those on the ground,” Turunesh warned. “I don’t want to leave tracks.”

  She put the flint away and produced an earthen flask stoppered with cork.

  “Have some coffee,” she said. Telemakos glanced up at her then with a hopeful half-smile, rallying. “It should be hot still. Some punishment, eh? This is no precedent, boy, don’t expect more tomorrow. But you need to wake properly, if we are to start.”

  The three of us shared the bitter drink in the dark, beneath the shadow of the carved monuments to kings long dead.

  “Will we be followed, do you think?” I asked.

  “No one is hunting, yet,” Turunesh answered. “The gatekeeper to the Necropolis thinks I have arranged a lover’s tryst here tonight! He will pretend not to see us coming and going. You look a little like a boy with your head wrapped in a turban. Tie your shamma so, and bind your skirts at the knee. The bow you carry will help fool him, as well; you will seem to be what he expects to see. Give your bundles to the child, so he may be taken as your porter.”

  We looked at Telemakos, quietly sipping his coffee, and relishing it. His hair caught the starlight.

  Turunesh sighed. “Have you another scarf, Princess?” she said. “Half the city will recognize him if we don’t hide his hair.”

  Telemakos looked up.

  “You don’t need to hide my hair,” he said. “No one will see me.”

  “What do you mean, boy?”

  His incomplete smile suddenly reminded me of his father.

  “Let me go ahead on my own. I’ll meet you at Mai Shum,” he said. “I promise.”

  Turunesh threw up her hands in baffled despair, but I nodded in agreement.

  “Trust him,” I said. “No one will see him, and he won’t get lost.”

  Telemakos stood up, pulled his satchel strap over his head, and handed me the bag. Then he took off his shamma, folded it carefully, and laid it in his mother’s lap.

  “It gets in my way,” he explained, his hands resting on the cloth in her lap.

  “Take care, love,” Turunesh said softly.

  Telemakos did not answer. He leaned close to his mother to touch his cheek to hers and kissed her, then turned away and cantered lightly down the hill toward the gate. We saw him go, but we did not hear him. He did not make a sound.

  CHAPTER IX

  Lord of the Land

  TELEM AKOS WAS WAITING for us with the horses. He was there ahead of us, as he had promised. He rode with me, before me in the saddle, and none of us ever said anything more about the tunnels.

  We left the city of Aksum. We followed the graveled high road to Adwa, three hours’ journey under the thick and luminous stars. We reached Kidane’s country estate in time to sleep before the sun rose, but we did not dare remain throughout the day. We were still close enough to Aksum that we
could easily be tracked. We studied the Itinerary over our hasty breakfast.

  “There are two ways to go,” I said. “One of them looks twice the distance, but the other follows the main road. If we take the longer route we can leave the highway today.”

  “Good,” said Turunesh. “Your white face will be remarked by everyone who passes you.”

  We took one of the farm ponies for Telemakos and set out. The roadside sparked with the wild gold of Meskal daisies, the bright asters of the Aksumite highlands. Terraced fields sloped toward woodland where coffee grew wild and monkeys danced across the treetops.

  “I want to see lions,” Telemakos said.

  “I don’t!” his mother exclaimed. “What shall we do if we come by a pack of lionesses hunting, hope the princess has enough arrows in her quiver to take them all herself?”

  “Maybe she could. She is Ras Meder’s sister, and he could. His name was lion.”

  “Medraut means marksman,” I said abruptly, “not lion.”

  “The lion is lord of the land. Meder. It doesn’t mean lion, but it is.” Telemakos spoke with absolute conviction; of course, it was his own name, as well.

  “Where do you hear such things?” his mother asked mildly.

  He tilted his head. “I hear everything.”

  We slept through the heat of the day in the village at Hawelti, then came through the trees at night. We saw nothing of the forest, but it breathed with rustling night birds and the cries of foxes and hyenas. The strange hours we were keeping put Telemakos in a fey temper. Turunesh worried constantly about attack from wild beasts. Once we were beyond easy reach of Aksum we stopped traveling by night.

  Soon the road coiled around mountain peaks that matched endlessly away from us on all sides. The air grew rarer, and now that we were well beyond the merchant ways, the road was no longer well maintained. The recent rains had done it no good either, and in one place it was so badly damaged that there were ruts in it up to Telemakos’s chest. Country children wearing crosses of woven grass, like Wazeb’s, helped lead us through the worst sections of the trail. Their parents offered us fried bread and handfuls of spiced, roasted grain. Everyone we met was fascinated by Telemakos, more so even than by me.

  “Foreigner! Foreign ones!” they cried in greeting. Telemakos got called also “salt-top” and something that might have meant “milkman,” presumably on account of his white hair.

  “I am Aksumite!” he yelled back at them, or if he was feeling particularly insulted, “Bushpig herders!”

  At last the rocky tablelands of the amba plateaus rose ahead of us. We could see the amba Debra Damo days before we arrived there, as we made our way through the ravines and rocky valleys.

  “Are we going to stay with the monks?” Telemakos asked. “Will we worship in a church cut from rock?”

  “We will stay in the pilgrims’ quarters at the foot of the cliff,” Turunesh said. “Do not pull at your pony’s mane like that; she is tired, too.”

  We had left the mountain villages behind. We traveled through desolate country for hours and saw no one. Then, three days’ journey from our destination, we picked up an escort.

  A young man and a herd of goats joined us. The goatherd greeted us politely and kept a discreet distance, walking well behind; and we thought nothing of it when by and by we came across another goatherd. The two men spoke quietly to each other, as though they had arranged to meet, and then each turned back the way he had come. So now we traveled with a different man. He stayed with us through the afternoon; then he, too, went his way, so that we were alone, or thought we were alone, for the night. In the morning two new travelers joined us.

  These were dressed in white robes bordered with broad red stripes, priests’ robes, except the men seemed young for priests. They carried bows and hunting knives. They made a great show of binding their knives in their sheaths so that they might travel with us. In the middle of the day they left us, and later we found ourselves in the company of two like them, but not the same.

  Then I decided that someone must have been watching and following us well before we became aware of it. The road to Debra Damo was patrolled for fifty miles. No one challenged our right to use that road or showed any interest in our destination. But we were guarded ever more constantly as we came closer to the hermitage.

  At the bottom of the amba was a small settlement, and two matronly women guided us to the cluster of huts that were kept ready for pilgrims. They spoke to us with frank and friendly interest.

  “They will not let you in, you know. It is a solemnly kept man’s community; they do not even keep nanny goats.”

  “The boy will act as our messenger,” Turunesh said calmly.

  “Is he to be dedicated? If you are of the house of Nebir, you may sequester him here with the children of the queen of queens,” one of them offered helpfully.

  The other gave Telemakos a sharp look and said to her companion, “His house is of no account. You can see why they would bring him here.”

  They both stopped still in their tracks and gazed at Telemakos.

  “I see, I see,” said the first.

  Telemakos scowled but held his tongue. He rubbed at his wrist where I had bound him, though it could not possibly bother him anymore.

  It made me think of Priamos rubbing at his own wrist in the exact same way, rubbing away the ghost of a chain. Priamos had been even younger than Telemakos when he came to Debra Damo. I tried to see him Telemakos’s age, serious and innocent, and could not imagine that heavy brow on a child’s face. Indeed, I could not remember anything of his look other than his worried scowl. It frustrated me.

  We were given a stone-built pilgrim’s cottage to stay in and had supper brought to us twice. I do not know if that was a real mistake or evidence of more vigilance. No less than three young girls came by to see that we had enough water, and the old man who kept the pilgrims’ cells was desperate for court gossip. He brought us a goat so that Telemakos could have milk. Then he sat outside the door of the hut until long after dark, chewing some kind of bitter-smelling leaf and plying Turunesh with endless questions about the New Palace.

  “Have they replaced the lions in the lion pit?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ai, all of a year now has the palace at Aksum been without lions! What will become of the kingship?”

  Telemakos appeared in the doorway like a wraith, his hair a halo of silver in the light of the waxing moon.

  “Who said lions?” he asked.

  “Go to sleep,” said Turunesh.

  “I cannot sleep while everyone is talking about lions.”

  “You will have tomorrow’s great adventure all to yourself,” Turunesh said. “Go to sleep.”

  In the morning we had another long uphill trek to reach the ascent to the monastery. But when at last we came there, we knew that Telemakos could not make the climb to the entrance by himself. The snake of leather rope that led to the portal hung nearly a hundred feet down the side of the cliff.

  I had not come this far to be thwarted by a rope. I handed my bow to Turunesh and set out to take Telemakos up the amba myself.

  At the foot of the cliff there were sentries, who helped visitors to fix themselves in the leather harness, and who gave them guidance as they climbed the cliff side. They, too, had the look of priests, and yet seemed to have a hard edge of strength to them, like soldiers or guardsmen.

  I set my mouth in the harshest expression of severity and disdain, and stared into all their faces as though I were a king. I said nothing aloud, but indicated that I wanted to go aloft with Telemakos.

  They gazed at Telemakos with a deeply interested and intense scrutiny. I was annoyed that holy men were not better able to disguise their fascination.

  “The boy?” the eldest of them asked.

  “He is here to act as messenger for me,” I said.

  When they heard my voice, they knew I was a woman.

  “You cannot stay here,” the spokesman said. “You c
annot touch these things; you cannot look at this place.”

  At once I felt my arrogance to be mean and discourteous. I knelt, and bowed my head. “Forgive me. I thought to spare the child the ascent.”

  They seemed unable to tear their gaze from Telemakos. They tried to answer me politely, but I could tell that their attention was greatly diverted.

  “One of us will bear him for you,” said the man. “What would you have him do here?”

  For one moment of panic it occurred to me that I did not know for certain whether Caleb was here. It had all been implied and hinted at, but nothing had been spoken.

  “The child is my messenger,” I repeated. “I seek the lord of your land. I am daughter to Artos the high king of Britain, and my father is dead.”

  “The one you seek is here,” said the sentry. “I do not know if he will see you, but the boy may take him your message.”

  I knelt by Telemakos and held him by the shoulders.

  “Hey. Hey, Telemakos Meder. What are you going to say to the great person when you meet him?”

  “I shall make a full reverence, on my face on the ground, and say, Your Highness, Goewin the princess of Britain is here to see you, Goewin the daughter of Artos the dragon.”

  “And apologize for having to ask him to come down to me. But you see they will not let me come to him.”

  “All shall be well,” Telemakos said, with an echo of his mother’s calm. He smiled, but he was serious. His front teeth were finally through, and it made him look older. “Caleb will remember me.”

  “You are a bold hero.”

  I kissed him on the forehead and got to my feet.

  “One of us will bring the boy down when he is finished,” said the spokesman, “with any message there may be for you.”

  They helped Telemakos onto the back of one of the younger men, and belted them together at the waist. I watched as they ascended the cliff. Telemakos fixed his eyes on a spot at the back of the man’s head, his lips pressed together, his expression fierce and determined. He looked so like Medraut.