The Empty Kingdom (21 page)

“Or,” she added slyly, “you could keep the islands, seeing as you have jumped ahead of your najashi’s plans and struck out for freedom on your own.”

“You can see Hanish from al-Muza,” Telemakos said. He held forth the rest of the handful of jewels for her to put back in the bag. “You can see the peaks. It only takes a day to reach the islands, if you sail from Himyar. Of course they should belong to the najashi. What should I gain by keeping them—a new war between Aksum and Himyar,
on my account
this time? God forbid me!”

“You have grown, Telemakos,” Goewin said softly. She tied shut the little bag that contained his freedom, and sat back on her heels to gaze at him. “Mercy on us, I think you must be as tall as I am. Stand up and let me see.”

They climbed to their feet together. He was the taller by a fraction. Impulsively, she gave the back of his single hand a quick, reverent kiss. “‘Beloved friend, you are so well grown now, so wise—’” She quoted the goddess Athena briefly, and laughed again, her faintly lined face made young and bright with joy. “Dear one, you cannot know what a weight has lifted from my heart this morning.”

It was late in the day before a party came paddling over to them from Abreha’s ship. The najashi’s hawri pulled alongside them and Abreha rose up on his knees, brandishing a scroll of parchment. Goewin, with Priamos firm and frowning by her side, leaned over the rail to shout at him. Her high spirits had not waned all through the hours of waiting for this moment.

“Well met again, Abreha Anbessa, Lion King of Himyar!”

Goewin beckoned Telemakos forward and gripped him by the shoulders, so that she and Priamos flanked him protectively, like the emperor’s spearbearers. But when Telemakos leaned over the rail, Abreha did not speak. He gazed up at Telemakos in silence.

Telemakos did not look away. Long seconds passed, and after a time the sounds of wind and sea and the noise of work in the prison quarry seemed to become oppressively loud.

“My najashi!” Telemakos called down. “Please don’t punish Iskinder.”

Abreha only glared up at him accusatorily, until Telemakos felt almost desperate that the najashi speak to him.

“I’m sorry I poisoned your crew,” Telemakos offered. He was in truth rather appalled at the number of men he had laid low in making his escape. He was not sorry for any of the rest of it.

Abreha stated coolly, “You swore to me once that you are not a thief.”

“I am not a thief,” Telemakos retorted. “I am about to pay off all my debt to you. And anyway, you swore to me that you would forgive me anything but knowledge.”

“I did
what
?”

“On the night you sealed our covenant. Our first covenant, when you told me you had written out my death warrant. You held the mark of Solomon before me on your open hand, and said, ‘There is no tangible thing you could take from me that I would not forgive you.’”

The najashi knelt upright in the bobbing hawri, frowning thoughtfully. Then light seemed to break across his face, and he was smiling his joyful, child’s smile. “I remember. And you, silver-tongued sycophant, compared me to Solomon in my wisdom and forgiveness.”

Abreha threw back his head and laughed.

“I suppose I must forgive you, then, if I already gave my oath that I would.”

“My najashi,” Telemakos called, and managed to keep his voice from cracking. “Mukarrib, Federator of Himyar! I would like to link the Hanish Archipelago with your Federation!”

“So be it!” Abreha cried. “So be it. By heaven, you shall seal this contract yourself. You may keep my ring, on condition that you wear it, King of the Pearl Fishers! You may keep it, on condition that you bring it back to Himyar on your one fine hand, as my son should have done, if it is required of you! I will forgive the mark you took from me, if you forgive the one I made on you!”

Telemakos lightly touched the seal at the back of his neck, and thought about the pact he was about to enter into. The threat of death was gone, but it had never been real. The danger of death was real, and would be there always. All the old bonds were still in place and more: his service to the najashi, and the emperor, and the high king.

“You should have been plain with me,” Telemakos said. “You should have told me what it meant.”

“I did you wrong. I meant well. I am sorry.”

“If I did you wrong, I am not sorry!”

“But you are sorry for Iskinder.” The najashi laughed again. “Well, if I can bring myself to send
you
away with my pardon, it is a small thing to overlook Iskinder’s negligence into the bargain. When are you coming back to Himyar?”

“After your death! And not if I’m needed elsewhere first!”

“Good,” said Abreha. “That’s all I ask of you.”

Telemakos blessed him. “God grant you a great long life of prosperity, and also many healthy children of your own, my najashi.”

He meant it.

The Aksumite fleet was dismissed from al-Kabir. There was a change of guard at the prison, which Telemakos did not witness, because Priamos’s ship was long departed before the military formalities were finished. The monsoon had not yet begun and the wind was still in their favor; they sped smoothly back to Adulis, running before the wind.

Telemakos slept contentedly through the dark, gentle nights of the sea voyage. His dreams were quiet and unmemorable, save one.

He knelt alone at a well in the Salt Desert, dipping up water in a small wooden cup. The cup was perfectly round, like a globe; it fit smoothly into the palm of Telemakos’s single hand. When he looked inside it, the water was so clear he could see each grain of wood magnified, and the pattern made by these lines formed a miniature map of the world. Reflected light glinted here and there within the little hollow as though the map etched there was lit with tiny gold stars. When Telemakos lifted the cup to his lips he was astonished to find that the water of this barren place was sweet, and pure and cold as al-Surat mountain rain.

When Telemakos woke, he imagined the taste of this water lingered in his mouth.

“Peace to you, Lij Telemakos,” said the familiar gatekeeper of the archon’s mansion in the Aksumite port of Adulis. He bowed. “You’ve been lost. You have grown into a young warrior since you were here four years past!”

Turunesh was spinning flax in the basalt forecourt, expecting him. Telemakos knocked the bobbins flying across the glittering black pavement as he threw himself into her arms. Pandemonium broke loose as the white salukis joined him, competing wildly for his attention. Over his mother’s shoulder, camouflaged among the black columns and tossing green fronds of the ornamental date palms, he could see a small figure following the salukis.

“Athena!” Telemakos cried out, reaching to her. “My Athena!”

She came tearing across the courtyard. “Telemakos, Telemakos!” She did not walk. She ran.

(
G=GE’EZ, OR ANCIENT
Ethiopic; A=Amharic, or modern Ethiopian; SA=Sabaean, or ancient South Arabian; MA=modern Arabian)

Amole
(A): Block of cut salt used as currency.

Anbessa
(G, A): Lion.

Bitwoded
(A): Literally, “Beloved”; a bestowed, and unusual, noble title.

Emebet
(A): Title for a young princess.

Hawri
(MA): A narrow, open fishing boat, like a canoe.

Injera
(A): Flat bread made from tef, Ethiopian grain.

Kat
(MA): A mild stimulant in use throughout the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It grows as a small bush and the leaves are chewed fresh.

Kolo
(A): Fried barley (eaten as a snack).

Lij
(A): Title for a young prince (similar to European “childe”).

Meskal
(G, A): Feast of the Cross (literally “cross”), religious holiday taking place at the end of September.

Mukarrib
(SA): Federator.

Najashi
(SA): King.

Nebir
(A): Leopard.

Ras
(A): Title for a duke or prince.

Shamma
(A): Cotton shawl worn over clothes by men and women.

Suq
(MA): Market.

Tef
(A): Ethiopian grain.

Wadi
(MA): A valley, carved by rainwater runoff, that remains dry except in the rainy season.

Woyzaro
(A): Title for a lady or princess.

Elizabeth Wein was born in New York City in 1964. She moved to England at the age of three, when her father, Norman Wein, who worked for the New York City Board of Education for most of his life, was sent to England to do teacher training and help organize a Headstart program at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University.

When Elizabeth was six, Norman was sent to the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, to do three years of similar teacher training. In Christmas of 1970, while Elizabeth was living in Jamaica, her maternal grandmother, Betty Flocken, gave her a self-styled book-of-the-month subscription. Over the following three years, her grandmother sent her one book every month—some of them new, some of them having belonged to Elizabeth’s mother or grandmother when they were young. Elizabeth was introduced to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden
,
A Little Princess
, and
The Lost Prince
; all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books including
The First Four Years
and
On the Way Home
; Beverly Cleary’s
Henry Huggins
and
Ellen Tebbits
; Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series; and an obscure but adored favorite,
The Horse Without a Head
by Paul Berna (translated from the French). The anticipation of the arrival of these books, and the newly acquired satisfaction in being able to read them on her own, made Elizabeth decide at the early age of seven that she wanted to write books, too.

In 1973, Elizabeth’s parents separated, eventually divorcing a year later. Elizabeth and her younger brother and sister moved back to the US with their mother, Carol Flocken, to live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Carol’s parents, Karl and Betty Flocken, were based.

Life in Harrisburg was a shock to Elizabeth’s system after living in Jamaica, and she found herself besieged with homesickness. Going to school in Jamaica had left her fluent in Jamaican Patois and essentially “color blind,” and the racial divide she encountered in Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s was so ludicrous to her that she found it hard to fit in. She became an easy victim—when she attended an inner city school, it was because she was white; when she lived in the suburbs, it was because her friends were black.

So of course she took refuge in books. She wrote her first “novel” in sixth grade, setting herself the challenge of producing five pages a day on yellow-lined school tablets, eventually producing a time-travel novel of over two hundred pages. At fifteen years old, she completed her next work, an epic fantasy.

When Elizabeth’s mother, Carol, died in a car accident in 1978, Carol’s parents, Karl and Betty, took in and raised Elizabeth and her brother and sister. The grandparents who’d encouraged Elizabeth’s early reading now became her lifeline. Karl introduced her to T. H. White and King Arthur; Betty staunchly supported her determination to become a writer.

High school at Harrisburg Academy was a time of healing and learning for Elizabeth, as she found herself in the most supportive school environment she’d experienced since the Quaker elementary school she’d attended in Jamaica.

After graduating as the class valedictorian in 1982, Elizabeth went on to Yale University, determined to get a degree in English to prepare herself for a career in writing.

During a junior-year-abroad program called Yale in London, Elizabeth took the opportunity to revive the friendships in, and relationship with, the United Kingdom that she had begun in early childhood. She returned to England six months after the program ended to attend a summer school at Oxford, and then spent a work-study term in Manchester after graduating from Yale. By this time, she was already working on the Arthurian legend–based story that was later published as her first novel,
The Winter Prince
, and her travel to England was an excuse to do onsite research. It was also during this trip that Elizabeth began learning to ring church bells in the English style known as
change ringing
.