“We are Socotran,” he said rebelliously. “Dawit Alta’ir the Star Master is our uncle. Our great-grandmother was his elder sister.”
“You are related to everybody!” said the big girl, Inas. “That makes you some-cousin kin to the najashi. The Star Master is Queen Muna’s father.” She paused only for a moment, as though to take a breath, and then produced a calculation so rapid it was astonishing: “You would be second cousins once removed to the najashi’s children, if they had lived. Small wonder he is anxious to welcome you. He has no nearer lineage. He will treat you as his own son and daughter.”
“As he does all the Scions!” said Malika, the queen of Sheba. “Do you hear that, little baby girl? You are our sister. Shall you play with us while Telemakos goes to see the Globe Room? Take him aloft, Shadi. The Star Master likes you.”
“All right, come on,” the dark boy said agreeably, and stood up.
Telemakos hesitated. Athena stood in his lap now, with her arms around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder in a way that declared ownership.
“Come, baby,” Inas said. “Stay here with the birds while your brother goes to see his new bed. Look, we can paint you, too.” She daubed a swirl of blue across the back of Athena’s hand.
Athena screamed. She stared at her hand and shrieked again, and shook her arm furiously as though she could shake the paint off, screeching like fury.
“Sorry—sorry—” Inas was not stupid. She swiped quickly at the indigo streak with a thick towel. “It doesn’t hurt, don’t cry—”
Telemakos was smothered by Athena’s clinging grip. Her carrying on was so disabling that he actually let the other children peel her away from him.
“You do it, baby,” Inas said. “You do it to me.”
“Look, Tena.” Telemakos tried, dipping up fingersful of blue dye. He looked at Inas with one eyebrow raised. “All right, my lady?”
She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Go on, then.”
“See, Tena, do it like this.” He slashed Inas’s face with paint.
“Thanks for that, you pestilent spawn of a desert jackal,” she said amiably. “All right, baby, your turn.”
Athena stuck one finger tentatively into the makeup pot.
Telemakos slipped away with the boy Shadi. He heard Athena’s screams erupt behind him the second he set foot in the corridor. He looked back over his shoulder, and Shadi started up the stairwell. “Are you coming?”
The sound of Athena’s voice never stopped. It faded, but it did not stop. They reached the final story of the Ghumdan palaces and came into Abreha’s document room, and the baby’s wails continued to reach them, muffled, from the windows on the level below.
The reading room was roofed with a vaulted skylight of alabaster panes so thin you could see the shadows of doves perching on the other side. The translucent stone cast warm yellow light over a circle of low easels, where a gray-haired, senatorial person sat poring over an inventory.
Shadi bowed and excused himself in a whisper to the custodian at the scriptorium’s portal, then tiptoed past the scholar. Telemakos followed. His guide pushed open the door to an antechamber, climbed down three steep steps, and beckoned to Telemakos.
“This is the Great Globe Room,” Shadi said. “That’s the Great Globe. You see.”
Telemakos went through the door, down one step, and was so lost in wonder that he could not speak.
The room was filled with stars. The smallest was no bigger than Athena’s thumbnail, the largest the size of her fist, and each was crafted of a single quartz crystal set in silver wire. They hung by black cotton thread against a domed ceiling painted black, and seemed to float suspended as effortlessly as real stars. Telemakos was swimming in them until he came down the steps, and then the lowest of them missed the top of his head by an inch. Unthinkingly he reached up, to be among them, and brushed stars aside as he walked into the middle of the room.
Pendent above the highest stars was a globe big enough that Telemakos could have curled inside it. It was figured of leaded glass, and this was painted over in a blue so deep it was nearly black. Its surface was peppered with hundreds of tiny flaws where points had been scratched in the paint.
“A star globe,” Telemakos breathed. “Have you seen it alight?”
“The Star Master never lights it anymore. He’s going blind. That’s why the Lady Muna chooses his equipment for him in the suqs. I expect you’ll do it now. Do you know how to read the globe?”
“It would show the positions of the stars against the sky,” Telemakos explained, but even as he spoke he realized it was more complex an instrument than that. Lit from within, the globe would cast pinpoint images of the stars against the black dome of the ceiling. And then you could spin the globe to make the stars trace their paths around the heavens.
As Telemakos stood with his eyes fixed above him, the room was suddenly filled with Athena’s angry, gasping shouts. He turned around sharply, expecting to see someone standing in the door with her. But there was no one, and Telemakos leaped up the steps and into the upper reading room.
It was quiet there. The man with the inventory did not look up. The noise was coming from the Great Globe Room.
“Come see,” Shadi said, kneeling in a corner by the far wall. “This is how Muna and her father talk to each other, so they don’t have to go up and down all the stairs.”
He was pointing to a hole in the floor. The globe was mounted on a pulley, and this hung down through a shaft leading to the room below. That was where the screams were coming from. “Muna is home,” Shadi reported. “She’s taken your sister into the nursery. Can you see?”