“Don’t speak nonsense, Princess,” Kidane said mildly, cutting the twine around a minute wicker hamper handed him by Ferem, who waited on him. “What of the ruin of our port city Deire, when plague was there and the emperor’s soldiers were ordered to shoot flaming arrows into anyone who tried to escape?”
“I did not advise that.”
“You sanctioned it.”
“So did you, Councilor Kidane, though you may call me heartless.” Goewin spoke fiercely, defending herself.
She broke the seal on the letter she held. Grandfather opened the lid of his parcel. Ferem, who could see over Kidane’s shoulder, reached to take back the box, but Grandfather held up a hand to stay him.
“You should look at this, Goewin Dragon’s Daughter,” Kidane said quietly. “Look quickly, for I do not want to keep it here.”
She glanced up from her letter. “What is it?”
“A warning has come.”
Goewin carefully moved the pile of letters from her lap onto the floor and got to her feet. “What warning? To whom?” she asked in a low voice.
“The box is addressed to me,” Kidane said evenly, “but it is my house, of course.”
Goewin leaned over the table as Kidane pushed the parcel toward her. She picked up the box and lifted the lid. After a moment she narrowed her eyes and sneered in disturbed disgust, then suddenly slammed the lid shut. Telemakos saw all the color drain from her face as if a white person’s cheeks were a cup from which the blood could be poured out.
“This is a death threat,” Goewin whispered. “Who sent it?”
“I don’t know,” Grandfather answered with more ragged frustration in his voice than Telemakos had ever heard from him. “Who sends any of them? I don’t know.”
“What is it?” Telemakos asked, letting Athena go. She pulled herself up against Grandfather’s desk and helped herself to one of the documents lying there. She dropped it on the floor and reached for another, but no one stopped her.
Grandfather turned his face toward Telemakos with a furrow of concern drawing his brows together. Goewin followed Kidane’s gaze, her eyes wide with shock and her lips parted as though she were about to speak. Quickly she looked down at the box in her hands, then dropped it on the writing table as though it burned her fingers. Telemakos scrambled to his feet and reached for it himself, but Goewin snatched it up again.
“Do not.”
Telemakos smelled dust and faint decay.
“What is it?” he repeated. “Let me see.”
“Do not,” Grandfather echoed in sharp agreement.
Goewin’s skirts swept through one of her careful piles of parchment. Holding the box beyond Telemakos’s reach, she pounded out the front door and ran down the forecourt stair.
“Goewin!”
Telemakos left Athena among Priamos’s two hundred letters and raced after his aunt. Goewin ran across the courtyard to the kitchen wing.
“Let me see!”
Goewin threw the thing into one of the brick ovens. Telemakos, unthinking, plunged after it. Goewin pulled him out of the flames and boxed his ears so forcefully she knocked him over.
He went down hard, flailing for balance. Illusion tore away his being. My arms are bound, my hands are tied, I cannot see, I cannot see—
He could not break his fall. He took the woodpile down with him. The kitchen turned over, re-formed itself, and Telemakos saw Goewin snatch up a pair of kitchen tongs and rake coals over the little box. The wicker burst into flame; Goewin pounded the flaming parcel into ash.
Then she looked down at Telemakos. His eyes stung with smoke and fury and phantom salt.
“Forgive me, love,” Goewin whispered, kneeling by his side. “Did I hurt you?”
Grandfather’s cook was at his other side, bristling with outrage. “Get out of my kitchen!” she snapped at Goewin. “Such cockfighting ill becomes a pullet hen! Strike Telemakos Meder again and I’ll break an oil jar over your foreigner’s head. Mother of God! It is not a year since the child had his arm taken off, and you would beat him to the ground!”
Telemakos blinked fixedly, not daring to rub his burning eyes. Cook helped him to his feet and stirred the ashes.
“And what offal have you thrown on my fire?” she demanded.
“Just as you say. Offal. Worthless scrap.” Goewin shook her head as though trying to clear it. “Come, Telemakos.”
“Come back in an hour, boy, and I’ll have honey cakes fried for you,” the cook said.
“Don’t cook anything on that fire,” Goewin said, with icy command. “Sweep it out and build another. I shall send the houseboy to assist you.” She held Telemakos close against her with one arm over his shoulder and the other around his waist, her hands clasped protectively over his galloping heart. “I vow there is good reason for everything I do,” she said. Her voice was cold as frost, but her embrace was warm.
“Come away,” she repeated in Telemakos’s ear.
She let go of him, and they walked together soberly across the yard back toward the house.
“I’ll tell Kidane to have the next post sent to his office in the New Palace,” Goewin muttered, “and spare us all another such adventure.”
“What was it?”
Goewin voice went cold once more. “Don’t ask me again, Telemakos.”
Telemakos abandoned Athena to his mother and her maid for most of the morning, a thing he never did, so that he could shadow his grandfather like a ghost. Kidane led him from reception hall to study, back for a few minutes to Turunesh’s chamber and out to the garden, while Telemakos crept behind urns and wall hangings and potted palms, frantically hoping Kidane would drop some hint of what he and Goewin had seen in the little wicker box.
By afternoon Telemakos was exhausted by his own subterfuge. It was dull and nerve-racking all at once. How could I possibly have spent the first ten years of my life listening at doors? he wondered. There must be better ways to find out secrets.
He collected Athena and sat down with her on the wide dais in front of the house, rolling his mother’s empty bobbins down the steps. Turunesh rarely used them now, and the reels made fragile towers for Athena to knock down, if you balanced them carefully. Telemakos thought he could use this game to teach Athena to climb the stairs, but she refused to cooperate: she let Menelik fetch the bobbins for her.
She was sitting at the top of the stair and Telemakos at the bottom when the emperor Gebre Meskal himself walked across the forecourt, carrying in one hand a box identical to the one Goewin had thrown into the kitchen fire.
Telemakos went cold, then hot.
The emperor wore his customary plain white kilt and shamma, and the head cloth of gold-shot linen that was the mark of his sovereignty. His two ceremonial spear bearers stood at his back. Telemakos lay full length on the ground at the emperor’s feet, as his grandfather had taught him.
“Beloved Telemakos,” Gebre Meskal said, his firm voice gentle, “my young lion. You need not stand on ceremony in the privacy of your grandfather’s house. Come to your feet.” He knelt by Telemakos and held forth an open palm, which Telemakos took hesitantly. The emperor’s narrow hand was warm and dry, with a stern grip. Gebre Meskal raised Telemakos to his feet and released him.
“What game are you playing?” Gebre Meskal knelt again, and picked up a bobbin.
“We’re idling,” Telemakos answered. His attention, but not his gaze, was riveted on the box that the emperor held in his other hand. “Throw again, Athena. Show the emperor how his lion can fetch.”
She picked up a spindle in each hand and hurled them down the stairs. There was no force, no coordination, no aim behind her pitch, and the reels clattered slowly from granite step to granite step. One rolled on toward the spear bearers’ feet. The nearest guard batted at the reel with the butt end of his spear, pushing it teasingly just beyond Menelik’s reach, and the little lion chased wildly around his legs after it. The soldier laughed, and stamped his iron-strapped boots.
“Boy!” Athena wailed, startled by the noise. “Tena boy up—” In a panic to be close to Telemakos, she tried to climb down the stairs.
Telemakos had coached her well enough that she had the sense to turn around and make her way feetfirst. But then she could not see where she was going or where Telemakos was. Halfway down she stopped and wailed again pathetically, “Boy! Tena! Boy!” Telemakos vaulted up the steps and sat down beside her. She tried to climb into his lap.
“I can’t hold you on the stairs, Tena; be still.”
She stood tight against his side, clutching his hair.
“Sit down,” he hissed, embarrassed at all this to-do in front of Gebre Meskal. He managed to get her to release his head.
Gebre Meskal set down the bobbin, and his box, on the step below Athena.
“She calls you ‘Boy’?”
“It’s better than ‘Mama,’ which is what she calls Goewin and the maids and the cook and even poor Ferem. Any old body who takes care of her is ‘Mama.’ ‘Boy’ is special.”
Telemakos leaned forward and took a deep breath. The emperor’s package gave off the same faint dusty smell as Kidane’s had.
“What does she call her father?”
“Ras. Prince.”
The emperor nodded. “Of course.” Then he said to Athena directly, “What a pretty bracelet!” She shrank back, hiding her wrist between herself and Telemakos, gazing steadily at her sovereign with clear, solemn eyes. “Let me carry her in,” Gebre Meskal offered.
Telemakos did not think he would have made such an offer to anyone with two arms and did not like to insult the emperor by declining it. But he was afraid Athena would scream and shame them all.
“Do you forgive me, Majesty, she is no trouble to me.” Telemakos glanced over his shoulder. He had left her harness at the top of the stair. “Come on, Athena,” he said. “Up to your saddle, and I’ll carry you.”
“Let me get it for you,” said Gebre Meskal mildly.
He climbed the stairs past Telemakos.
Telemakos acted without thought. With his knee he knocked down the bobbin the emperor had been holding. It fell to the bottom of the steps, where Menelik raced after it around the guards’ feet again. For half a dozen seconds, the spear bearers were inattentive, and the emperor’s back was turned.
“Open that box,” Telemakos hissed in Athena’s ear, through the shining bronze cloud of her hair.
She lifted the lid willingly. They peered in together.
Athena cheeped and warbled, which was her way of saying bird. Telemakos drew in a sharp breath.
“Shut it,” he whispered.
His heart seemed to go cold and numb, the way it sometimes did in his dreams, as he lay bound and waiting to be tortured. This is a death threat, Goewin said.
Trapped by his own devious behavior, Telemakos now had to keep his face and voice perfectly composed as the spear bearers came to attention. He managed it. The emperor came down the stair with Athena’s carrier, and waited while Telemakos put it on. Telemakos’s fingers felt cold and numb, too.
