“Damn, damn, damn,” repeated his small sister.
“Shhh,” Telemakos said, mortified. She would repeat anything. “That was naughty of me. Kiss my poor fingers.”
He got the door open, but Menelik would not come out. The lion stayed pressed against the back of the cage, cramped and miserable. Telemakos had to crawl in halfway after him, shuffling bent low, with Athena clinging to his neck like a bag of lead weights.
“Ah, Menelik, Menelik, my bold one, my brave one,” Telemakos sang under his breath, fondling the lion behind its ears and kissing its dry nose. “Come now, it’s all right, you are the prince of lions—”
Telemakos’s head was pressed down by the top of the cage. As he hooked the lead into Menelik’s collar, for a single airless second he was imprisoned again, held helpless and blind by hands he could not see. He struggled, and banged his head on the hutch. Dazed, he backed out quickly, still gripping the lion’s lead, and Menelik followed. Telemakos sat back on his heels, clinging to Athena and breathing hard, awash with relief to find himself back in al-Muza.
Telemakos looked across the edge of the sand at the city before him. He was weighed down by the baby on his hip and the satchel over his shoulder, and his single hand was going to have to be wholly devoted to controlling the lion. Maybe I should wait for the porters, he thought.
He glanced at the empty cage and slammed it shut with a sharp kick.
“Good-bye, traveling hutch. Never again.”
They crossed the mooring beach and set out to discover al-Muza.
X
THE HANGED MAN
THE AIR SMELLED OF sweet incense and stinking fish, like unrefined ambergris. All the walls and domes were washed with gypsum plaster, and the city sparkled as though it lay beneath a film of salt. Deire must have been like this, Telemakos thought, our port city lost to plague. White Deire, they used to call it.
The lion cut a path for Telemakos through the suq markets, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Athena kept her head up and alert, staring at purple men beating cloth with indigo, or blindfolded camels turning oil presses. In an alley of saddlers’ stalls and shops, Telemakos stopped to examine a row of colored belts and scabbards, considering a new strap for Athena’s slipping harness. He was kneeling before the vendor’s carpet with Menelik’s lead held down beneath one foot when he caught the scent of basil, freshly broken. He tensed himself for conflict.
A clutch of curious local children had gathered in his wake. Now they were passing fragrant sprigs of green surreptitiously among themselves, tucking it up one another’s sleeves and behind their ears. They spoke a local dialect of Ethiopic so mixed with South Arabian that at first Telemakos could make no sense of them at all, but he recognized what they were doing: warding off ill fortune. He stood up and turned to face them. Taking care not to touch his eyes, he shaded his face with his wrist at his hairline and his head bent, so that his terrible dead man’s gaze did not fall on anyone. It was the safest way to approach a host of strange children.
Athena copied him, covering her face with both hands. Then she suddenly threw her arms wide and announced, “Baby!” She reached up to pull at her brother’s fingers so the others could see his face. “Boy!”
Everybody laughed.
“Aksumite?” a girl asked in comprehensible Greek, the common language of the Red Sea. She wore a blue headscarf sewn with a fringe of jingling pale gold shells across her forehead. “We thought you were Socotran. There is a township on the island where all the people have blue eyes.”
“What a fearful lot of basil the other Socotrans must consume,” Telemakos said.
One or two of them sheepishly tossed aside their sprigs.
“The king’s wife is of that village,” continued the shell girl, “and you do look like the king’s children.” She flicked a finger at Athena’s bracelet. “Your baby sister could be Queen Muna’s daughter come to life again. The princess was born here, four years ago, her last child; the queen spent her confinement here instead of San’a because she had such a craving for fish. I remember when the najashi came for her, he held up the baby on the terrace of the archon’s mansion and said that her name was Amirah. My mother took me to see. They are all dead now, my mother, the king’s children, Queen Muna’s children, and his first queen Khirash’s children, Asad his heir and his favorite; they all died of plague.” She twisted her mouth wryly, as if to show how little this meant to anyone. “You know how it is.”
Telemakos did not know how it was. He looked down briefly and pressed his own lips together in grim sympathy.
“What are you buying, then, Aksumite?” asked an older boy who towered over the others. “A sword belt?”
“A muzzle,” Telemakos answered coolly. He knelt again and picked up Menelik’s lead. The children all looked down at Menelik, who had been lying quietly in the shade beneath a screen hung with boot laces and sandal straps.
“That’s not a dog,” one said, and they edged away.
Telemakos gave them his father’s crooked, incomplete smile, and said amiably, “Maybe you can help me. I need a tailor to mend my sister’s harness, but I do not know who would best do the work.”
“Oh, that’s business for the girls—” A boy whose face was cratered with smallpox scars started to walk away, but the big one asked suddenly, “Is the lion tamed? Will it let me touch it?”
Telemakos noted that they were simply a gathered audience, not a real gang; they had no leader.
“You can hold him while the harness is being mended, if you like,” Telemakos said. “I’ll have enough to do with the baby.”
“Not I, thank you!”