Authors: Elizabeth Wein
One morning Telemakos boldly defied his escort on his way back up the stairs, and turned out of the corridor and through the door into the children’s room.
“Out,” ordered one of the guards.
Telemakos paid no attention. They had to follow him into the room, ducking around the hanging birdcages of willow and silver. Twelve of Abreha’s fourteen royal foster children looked up from their breakfast in surprise. Only Athena and the two youngest Scions, Habib and Lu’lu, were missing; they were presumably in the nursery with Queen Muna.
“Come away now,” the watchman told Telemakos. “Don’t shame yourself before your fellows.”
Telemakos made his way purposefully toward the nursery, and the other guard cracked his whip around Telemakos’s ankles. The sting made him miss his step; his legs were bare beneath his sandal straps. He stopped, not because he was afraid of the whip, but because it was embarrassing. The Royal Scions were all staring.
“Turn and face me,” the soldier ordered. He spoke as calmly as if he were offering Telemakos a second helping of rice. Telemakos hesitated, then confronted his escort squarely.
He saw, as he turned, that the three eldest of the Scions no longer showed any interest in this scene. Tall Jibril, motherly Inas, and the dark, edgy young king Shadi had all bent low over their bowls of honey yogurt.
“Will you stand fast to be disciplined?” the soldier with the whip asked Telemakos. “Or must Butrus hold you still?”
“I’ll stand,” Telemakos said.
The soldier struck him in the face with the tail of his lash, sharply and accurately. It left a narrow, burning blaze across his cheek.
“You are required to do as you are bid,” the soldier told him, with the same sure, controlled lack of excitement. “If anyone asks how you came by that mark on your face, you are to tell them you were whipped for disobedience. Now leave this hall and continue up the stairs to the scriptorium, where the Star Master waits to give you your daily instruction.”
Telemakos, his face afire more with humiliation than anything else, stalked back out to the corridor and continued up the stairs.
“What is that?” Harith the librarian in the scriptorium asked, when he came to the landing to let Telemakos through to the Great Globe Room. He stabbed a short finger toward Telemakos’s cheek, pointing. The soldiers stood waiting and listening, and Telemakos knew he could not lie.
“It’s a lash mark.”
“What were you lashed for?”
Telemakos bit his lip. He was beginning to realize how this particular punishment was supposed to work.
“Disobedience,” he managed to answer, through clenched teeth.
Harith escorted him to Dawit, who was waiting at the door to the Globe Room. “Your apprentice has got a great red burn across his face,” the librarian told him conversationally.
The Star Master’s cataracts so blinded him that he would never have noticed, but he knew the ritual.
“Oh? How intriguing.” Dawit’s tone was as dry as always. “Tell me what’s happened to your face, boy.”
“
I was whipped for disobedience
,” Telemakos snarled.
“You need not growl at me, or I shall ask them to whip you for insolence as well,” Dawit said mildly. “Come and set out the charcoal drawing sticks. I have a new project I want you to begin.”
That was all Dawit ever said about it. But it was ten days before the bruise faded, and Telemakos was forced to explain it over and over: to Queen Muna’s haughty handmaid Rasha, to the attendants who brought his meals up to him, indeed, to anyone who came into the library. Gedar the olive merchant, who was Aksumite himself and a neighbor of Telemakos’s grandfather, spent long, self-important hours explaining his inventories to the najashi’s librarian, and he always looked up if Telemakos passed. He spoke with utterly false concern. “Your whip weal has nearly gone, young prince, Lij Telemakos. It will stop embarrassing you soon enough. Haven’t you become well behaved, though!”
Telemakos had already sent his aunt a coded message denouncing Gedar’s deep involvement in the najashi’s conspiracy against the Aksumite emperor. It was worse than being lashed to have to be polite to Gedar.
There was also Tharan to face, Abreha’s lieutenant, who directed Telemakos and the najashi’s youthful soldiers in their spear throwing. The cadets themselves were relentless.
“You’ve still got that mark on your face, Aksumite. Tell us again, where did that come from?” They badgered him every morning for ten days. And afterward, as well, they would occasionally remind him: “Hey, Aksumite, didn’t you used to have a red mark on your face? How did you come by that?”
The young spearmen ribbed him equally without mercy over the alarm bracelet the najashi made him wear as part of his ongoing punishment for eavesdropping. Every cast Telemakos threw was accompanied by a flourish of silver bells.
Telemakos detested the alarm. More than anything he hated its gaudiness. It consisted of a narrow silver band fixed snugly just above his elbow, so thickly hung about with filigreed bells and wire tassels that it shivered musically if Telemakos so much as coughed. He had always been able to move with the sure stealth of a leopard stalking its prey, and the perpetual tattling of the charms maddened him. The noise kept him awake, and the bracelet itched. He had tried persistently to work it off in the early days of wearing it; but it was nearly two years since he had lost his left arm to blood poisoning, and his right elbow was impossible to reach with anything more practical than his toes. He could not shift the bracelet.
“Is that a trophy, or a love knot?” the young warriors teased. “Which queenlet has made a favorite of you?”
“Maybe the Aksumite thinks he belongs in Afar,” one of them suggested.
Afar
—
This took him utterly off guard.
Telemakos missed the next throw by so far his lance did not even strike the butt.
The sunbird is flying to Afar
—How could any of them possibly know?
Telemakos picked up another spear, without altering his line of sight, trying to hide how much the remark had jarred him.
It was three years, three years since he had been imprisoned at the Afar salt mines in the Aksumite desert, spying out smugglers for Gebre Meskal. It haunted him at random, triggered by a smell or a touch, and still, for a moment, he was there. Blindfolded, his arms fixed firmly at his sides with leather cord, he stood feigning deafness and trying not to quake as Anako, the governor of Deire, debated aloud how best to blind him permanently. It was a nightmare that swallowed him whole, even when he was fully awake. It might happen if he vainly tried to catch his balance with his lost arm, or if the wind lifted a fold of his shamma shawl over his face by accident, or at the smell of baboon or a certain combination of sweat and dust. The touch of salt against his lips or fingertips sometimes seemed to burn like flame. The sunbird in Afar! If Abreha should ever know—
Telemakos’s deception there had brought about the destruction of Abreha’s black market in salt. No man alive should ever know. So how on earth could Abreha’s young spearmen know?
After a moment the innocence of the jeer came to him. The Afar warriors wore bracelets to tally the men they had killed. They also wore more sinister decorations, Telemakos recalled, cut from their victims’ bodies.
He threw again. The dratted bells shook merrily at his elbow.
“If I were an Afar tribesman, which I am not, I would wear ornaments that were a deal more fascinating than this.” Telemakos made a rude and vicious gesture, and to his surprise and delight he got a good laugh out of his companions.
“Enough!” Tharan barked.
Telemakos endured the scoffing. He was deeply grateful that he had not been pulled straight out of training and forbidden ever to touch a spear again. If there was any consolation to be dragged from the wreckage of his standing in Abreha’s court, it was that he might one day be allowed to hunt again with the najashi and his beautiful saluki hounds.
Athena treated the queen Muna with savage dislike. She would not let Muna touch her, and had to be cleaned and dressed by Muna’s attendant Rasha and a team of maidservants. Athena stripped the leaves from every tree and vine on the terrace as high as she could reach. She threw a bowl through one of the jeweled windows. She fouled her bed and smeared the mess across the walls in the morning before anyone was awake. In desperation, Muna’s women began to tie Athena down at night. And then she would scream in fury until she could no longer stay awake, and go on sobbing sporadically even in her sleep. Telemakos dreaded the day it might occur to them to drug her. Muna was allowed access to the medicines, Telemakos knew, because it was she who distributed the painkilling powders he was offered if his ruined shoulder hurt him. Telemakos quietly scorned opium, but Athena might not have a choice.
Telemakos overheard Muna weeping, too, confiding in her servant Rasha, who had been her companion since childhood.
“Whatever that boy has done,” the queen sobbed, “is it worth my husband punishing all the household? Have I not been punished already for my own sins? I am second wife to my husband, second mother to these motherless children, never beloved as the first. It is true I have been faithless, but is it not enough I must bear the loss of my own children to plague, that I must also endure this mockery of motherhood?”
Telemakos bit his knuckles as he stared down at one of the fine maps the British ambassador had left behind when he had suddenly gone home, two weeks before Telemakos arrived in San’a. Gwalchmei of the Orcades had brought the British maps to Himyar intending to send them on to his cousin Goewin in Aksum, but the plague quarantine had stopped their onward journey. Now Abreha wanted copies made for his own library before the maps went to Aksum.
Telemakos loved these British maps. They had been made by Goewin’s mother, Ginevra, for her husband, Artos, the high king. It enchanted Telemakos to see and touch things his grandfather had seen and touched, four thousand miles away, twenty years and how many battles ago. Artos the high king of Britain had studied these, made notes on them in his own hand, amended them. Now they lay safe on another drafting table, for Telemakos to read. And he was Artos’s grandson.
The almost irresistible temptation to alter the maps before they went to Goewin, to try to conceal some message in them, drove Telemakos to study them so carefully that he was on the verge of being able to reproduce them from memory. He dreamed about them. He could look beyond the painted lines and see the winding rivers, wider and deeper than any he had ever known, never dry. An image of Hadrian’s Wall, the mortal remains of Rome in Britain, took shape in his mind as he stared at its long path from coast to coast across the island. It seemed to him he could picture it clearly: a vast ridge of rock and earth, stretching ruinous through miles of barren, foreign moor and forest. But there was no one who could tell him what it really looked like. It was the better part of a year since the British ambassador Gwalchmei had left Himyar.
I want to make a map that Dawit can read himself, Telemakos thought. Even if it doesn’t carry any secret meaning. If the magus could read the maps I made, Abreha wouldn’t have to check them. I should like to be able to do something that doesn’t make me feel as if the najashi is always breathing down my neck.
“Morningstar?”
Now all the palace used the name Dawit had given Telemakos in ridicule of his bright hair.
“Morningstar!”
The sound came from below, a hissed whisper. Inas of Ma’in, eldest of Abreha’s foster daughters, stood in the nursery directly beneath the pulley hole cut in the floor of the Great Globe Room. She was looking up. When Telemakos peered down, they were gazing at each other face-to-face, less than two yards between them. Inas had dark brown eyes and thick black hair, and the skin of her oval face was lighter than his own; the people of the Himyar highlands were generally not as dark as the Aksumites. The scratches Athena had torn in Inas’s cheeks had scabbed over. Her face looked dreadful. Telemakos hoped she would not carry permanent marks.
“You’re alone?” Inas’s voice was urgent.
Telemakos blinked at her, the Himyar children’s silent affirmation.
“We thought you would be alone. Queen Muna said she had to take her father, the Star Master, marketing for more paints, since you’re not allowed out to do it for him, and he doesn’t trust anyone else.”
“You will be in trouble if you’re caught talking to me,” Telemakos rasped back.
Inas spoke low and quickly.
“Not much. Anyone caught talking to you will be shut up without food for a day. But you’ll be whipped again, properly, outside at the posts, like a servant.”
“Never believe it,” Telemakos scoffed. “They wouldn’t dare beat me on purpose. Everyone has babied me since I lost my arm. If I take a fall riding, or if I get struck in mock combat when we use the unbarbed staves, they always make a great fuss afterward with salves and painkillers.” These were given to him at the written instruction of Telemakos’s physician father, and paid for by the emperor of Aksum himself, whose pet lion had tried to chew off Telemakos’s arm. Telemakos had grown tired of refusing opium. He took the portions given him and then disposed of them, unused, in the hidden pouch at the back of Athena’s carrying saddle.
“The najashi won’t whip me,” Telemakos added, to pacify Inas, though his confidence in this was hollow.
“He will. They will give you opium afterward, in deference to your father’s wishes, but they will not spare you the indignity. Do you see? Any one of us can have you lashed, just by calling out your name, and all we will pay for it will be a day’s solitude.”
She paused, suddenly, and Telemakos waited, staring down at her torn face, wondering why she was bothering to tell him this when she could instead so easily use it against him.
“We wanted you to know. If you pass us in the corridors we won’t look at you. We all agreed; even the little ones understand. We will act as though we do not know you, but it’s not because we despise you, do you see? It’s because we don’t want you to be whipped.”