Goewin slapped the book down on the floor. She stood and walked to the window, where she put up both hands to rattle them among the colored glass beads and strips of beaten copper that she had hung there to catch the light. “Let’s talk of something else, Telemakos.”
“Tell me about my sister,” he demanded immediately.
Goewin smiled. She stood with her back to the window, one hand still playing lightly among the wind chimes. “I will bring her to see you someday soon,” Goewin said. “If your father allows you company. She’s fussier than you, though. She cries and cries and cries. The only time she ever stops is when she’s suckling, or sleeping on top of someone.”
“Does she sleep on top of you?”
“I took her to bed with me for two nights, just after she was born,” Goewin said. “Otherwise your mother would never have got any sleep at all. Then I came here, of course.”
“If Ras Meder would let me go home, the baby could sleep on me,” Telemakos suggested.
Goewin gave him a withering look. “Do you think your father will allow a wriggling slug of a baby kicking at your bare ribs anytime soon, boy? Maybe after your skin grows back.”
His ribs and throat and shoulder slowly began to heal. His arm began to rot.
Two weeks after the accident, they drugged him utterly senseless for half a day so that they could cut out the pieces of him that were going moldy. After that he was so pathetic for a few days that he was able only to sip broth fed to him by Goewin in endless, patient spoonfuls. But by the end of the month he could feed himself, and he went four whole days without running a fever.
“I am minded to allow you visitors,” his father said. “Your friend Sofya has been battering at your door for the last three weeks, trying to get past me. Would you like to see Sofya?”
“I want to go home,” Telemakos said.
At the end of the week his father was so tired of listening to his pleading that at last they took him back to his own bedroom.
They made him endure another three days of proving he was not at risk of fever before they brought his baby sister in to him for five minutes. She was asleep. Their mother, Turunesh, stood just inside Telemakos’s bedroom door with the baby snuggled tightly over her stomach in a wide swathe of fabric. Telemakos could see nothing of his sister but the top of her head, a startling shock of loose, shining bronze curls. He could not see her, but while Turunesh stood there, he could smell her: an unfamiliar baby smell, of new milk turning sour, and starch, and herb-scented oil, and sandalwood.
“I’m sorry you can’t see her face, my love,” Turunesh said. “All is misery when she’s awake.”
They had not given her a name yet.
“She smells good,” Telemakos said. “What will we call her?”
His mother rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. We haven’t had a chance to talk.” She turned to go out, and said over her shoulder, “I’ll see if Goewin will take her. Then I can come back and sit with you awhile.”
“Just sit anyway,” Telemakos said. “The baby can’t bother me when she’s asleep.”
“She’ll wake up if I sit,” Turunesh said. “And then none of us will have any peace till evening.”
They let him have other brief glimpses of the baby over the next week, but they never let her get close to him, and he never saw her with her eyes open. Then one night he woke up feeling hot and sick, and he could smell the decay starting in his arm again. After that there were no more visits from the baby. Medraut and the emperor’s physician, Amosi, spent most of a day repeating the operation of a month ago, until there was so little left of Telemakos’s arm it made him sick to his stomach to look at it.
Amosi came back two days later to examine the wounds, and thinking Telemakos to be insensible because his eyes were closed, said frankly to Telemakos’s father: “Look at this—half his shoulder gone, bone laid bare! This will be septic again before the week is out. You are making your half-grown son endure torture I would not inflict on a grown man! With each effort to save his arm, you risk stopping his heart. Take the arm off and be done with it!”
“I will not,” Medraut answered, his voice tight with fury and worry. “I will not take his arm off.”
After the second operation, Telemakos began to have nightmares. He woke up screaming more often than the baby did. Medraut took to spending every third or fourth night in the monastery above the city because it was the only way he could stay alert enough to give Telemakos the attention he needed.
Telemakos screamed himself awake in the middle of one night.
“Do not, do not, oh, SAVE ME!”
He opened his eyes in panic. Even awake he could not move.
Goewin was sitting beside him. There was a blue-and-white ceramic oil lamp on the floor at her feet and a shamma shawl over her lap, as if she had already been there for some time.
“So, so, so,” she murmured soothingly, and rocked back and forth in her chair, but she did not reach to touch him. “Telemakos,” she said, her voice full of unhappiness, “tell me what you dream, my love.”
He lay sobbing and did not answer.
“Sometimes if you tell a bad dream aloud, it doesn’t seem so terrible,” she said, still rocking her knees gently to and fro. “Your father used to write his down. He spent an entire winter chronicling his nightmares, just before our father’s estate at Camlan was destroyed, and he let me read them, too.”