“How fortunate, we may all visit, then,” said Goewin. “You can carry this basket.”
“I beg you wait only a moment, Woyzaro Goewin, my lady ambassador,” apologized Sabarat. “Mother will want to serve you coffee, but I beg you let me announce you before you go in. Father is going to Himyar, and we are in an uproar of packing.”
“To Himyar!” Goewin said. “Are they still authorizing ships to leave the port in Adulis, then?”
Sabarat looked surprised. “More now than ever before. Don’t you hear such things from Counselor Kidane? Your quarantine is to be lifted at winter’s end. Father is going to travel to Himyar before the Long Rains begin, so that he may collect payment he has been due many years now, and be among the first let back in Aksum in the new year.”
“That will be hard on your mother, to be without him for a whole season.”
Sabarat gazed politely at his feet. “Oil of his olive groves used to light the alabaster palaces of Himyar,” Sabarat said, the bitterness flaring beneath the politeness, “as well as the New Palace here in the city. But now we don’t even know if those groves still exist.”
“I don’t know if my father’s kingdom still exists,” Goewin answered.
“My lady.” Sabarat heaved the basket of fish over his shoulder. “Forgive me.”
“If your father is planning to be first back in Aksum, perhaps I can persuade him to collect my mail on his way through Adulis. I long for news of my homeland. We are all weary of the quarantine.”
Sabarat took the basket up the podium stairs, which were swept clean as always. Mrs. Gedar was house proud. But the courtyard was littered with last year’s almond leaves, and the fountains were dry.
Japheth and little Eon both stood facing Telemakos now, watching with curiosity as Athena tried to hide in his shamma. She was shy; her everyday existence only included about five different faces. “Is that your sister?” Japheth asked. “Her hair is not so strange as yours, is it?”
“It is not,” Telemakos agreed. He had endured insults directed at his white hair and slate-blue eyes as long as he could remember.
“You are like a scorpion, carrying its young on its back,” said Japheth. Eon, used to the game of name-calling, sang out boldly: “Scorpion, scorpion, scorpion boy—run away, Japheth, the scorpion’s going to sting us!”
Athena lifted her head to watch this noisy performing creature. After a moment she pointed to the house, where the fish had disappeared, and babbled with incomprehensible concern about them.
“Little scorpion baby,” sang Eon to Athena. He made his hands into pincers, his fingers separated two and two together, and gently jabbed these claws into the firm, swaddled bump that was Athena’s body.
Telemakos’s heart went cold. Abruptly he lifted his single hand to fend off the attack. Eon’s nails raked his open palm.
Telemakos seized the little boy’s hand and jerked it back upon itself, and only Goewin’s cool fingers twined forcefully about his wrist kept him from trying to break Eon’s arm.
“Telemakos,” Goewin said softly at his ear. She shook Eon Gedar from Telemakos’s trembling grip. “Do not hurt this child.”
Japheth had caught his brother by the shoulders and now held him back, furiously scolding him while gasping apologies that were directed as much at Goewin as at Telemakos. Goewin spoke calmly in Telemakos’s ear, using his formal title like a whip.
“The correct apology is for you to make, Lij Telemakos.”
It meant “young prince.” Only the emperor used it with any frequency. It always sobered Telemakos to hear it spoken aloud.
He stood panting, his heart slowing again to its normal pace. His knees felt as though they had turned to water. He bent his head to Athena, holding her close, and brushed his flaming face against her coppery hair. After a moment Telemakos knelt before Gedar’s children with his head bowed.
“Stop making Eon scream, Japheth, the fault is mine.”
“Telemakos is bodyguard to his sister, you see,” Goewin commented coolly.
Then Sabarat came back to usher them in to coffee. Goewin helped Telemakos up with one hand supporting Athena, then offered her arm to him so that he might formally escort her into the house. She kept her cool fingers twined through his until he stopped shaking.
Gedar’s reception hall was like Grandfather’s seen through a dark mirror. It was orderly and clean, if crowded with the debris of daily living, but ruin preyed on the house. The plaster wash was peeling from the walls, the oil lamps were empty, the stone floors cold and bare. It smelled of dust and faint decay.
Gedar exclaimed and smiled over the gift of food. He managed to make himself ingratiating without ever actually saying thank you.
“Beautiful fish! Where did you get such a quantity? How we shall enjoy them. I must go myself one day, though of course I have no right to my own stretch of riverbank, unlike the emperor’s counselors.”
Sesen, his wife, was fussing over the coffee burner, but she looked up to exclaim warmly, “Telemakos Meder! How nice to see you on your feet! And the baby is getting so big!”
The baby had found his hair again. Telemakos held himself stiffly formal as Sesen began the brewing ritual.
She offered coffee to Telemakos, but he was not allowed it by his mother, and because Goewin was watching, he had to refuse it. He and Gedar’s sons stood politely facing the walls while the adults drank and Athena tried to drag Telemakos’s hair out of his scalp. Then she began chewing on his hair, which was too disgusting to bear. He jerked his head aside and tried to distract her.
“Look, Mrs. Gedar has got a sunbird trap like ours,” Telemakos whispered. It was the only ornament in the room, a chipped dish containing the same red-dyed honey-water that Goewin had put in Telemakos’s window. He edged closer so Athena could see. The water had not been changed for a long time and was leaving a rim of sticky dye and trapped insects around the edge of the dish as it evaporated.
Athena swooped at the beguiling mess. Telemakos backed away quickly and tried a different game.
“Nose,” he whispered, touching her nose. “Point to your nose.”
She stabbed him in the face with a small, accurate brown finger.
“That’s my nose, Athena, not yours,” he whispered patiently. “Here’s yours….” He made her touch her nose. “Now where’s your chin?”
She thumped his chin.
“Telemakos Meder, you are a martyr,” Goewin commented. “Take her out to the courtyard. She likes the chickens.”
“Ceremony is tiresome for children, isn’t it?” Gedar said. “Especially little ones. Come with me, Telemakos.” He rose to his feet and gestured the way before him with an open hand. Telemakos picked his way cautiously across the crowded room, a little unbalanced by the restless baby on his hip. Gedar’s sons turned their eyes toward him to watch him go, but they had not been invited to come along.
“Let’s find a toy for your sister, Telemakos Meder.”
Gedar did not lead Telemakos outside. He wove his way through the dim mansion, along disused corridors and galleries, until they came to a narrow, dark room like a vault in the middle of the house, lit only by an air shaft.
“This is my treasury,” Gedar said. “Most of it mere trinkets now.”
There was a faded green basket on Gedar’s accounting table. He lifted its woven lid and dipped a hand inside. “What have I got here for little girls? Ah, look at this!”
Unexpectedly, he fished out a baby’s bracelet hung with silver charms.
There were five of them, tiny waterbirds: crane, ibis, pelican, flamingo, gull. Gedar held the pretty jingling thing up to Athena. She did not immediately try to eat it; she watched it swing, and tapped it to make the charms shiver.
“It was my wife’s, when she was a child,” Gedar told Telemakos.
“We can’t take such a gift,” Telemakos protested.
“We have no girls,” said Gedar. “And we are indebted to the house of Nebir. A present to a baby is a small thing. I know it pleases your aunt to be charitable, but we must make some return.”
Gedar let Athena take the bracelet. She put it in her mouth. Telemakos pulled it away from her face, embarrassed.
“She is a little plague of locusts all on her own,” he apologized. “She eats everything. Look at these little birds, my owlet! Remember the sunbird that comes to my window?”
Gedar chuckled. Then he lifted a cover of palm matting that lay beneath his accounting table and laid bare a small stack of amole, the valued blocks of cut salt that were the standard alternative to gold. He laid a loaf of salt on the table and set about carving a bar of manageable size off one end.
“For you, lad,” Gedar said.
Telemakos objected fiercely. “Oh, I must not. The little bracelet is too much anyway. Goewin would never allow me—”
“It is nothing to do with her. You caught the fish. This is my payment for it.”
Athena tried to feed her bracelet to Telemakos, and he held her off, watching Gedar saw through the amole. In Gebre Meskal’s service Telemakos had become a judge of salt, and he saw that this of Gedar’s was very fine, and that the loaf was stamped with Abreha Anbessa’s seal, a lion’s head encircled by a five-pointed star.
How has Gedar come by the royal salt of Himyar? Telemakos wondered. He must have been hoarding it for years, since the days when his olive oil lit Abreha’s palace. He has sold his horses and his household goods, and dismissed all his servants, and is giving away his wife’s jewelry, but he’s saved his salt.
“Shouldn’t you keep this yourself,” Telemakos murmured, “in case you should need it?”
“Children shouldn’t worry over such things,” Gedar answered. “All will be repaired, soon enough.”
Or it could be counterfeit, Telemakos thought. He knew that the corrupt warden of the mines at Afar had had other schemes besides avoiding the quarantine. Telemakos had heard the workers muttering about Hara’s sidelines.
Hara, the warden at Afar. Telemakos found his eyes burning. God, how I hated him, he thought. Scorpion. He used to spit in the water they gave me, knowing I would drink it or die of thirst.
“Let this be a secret between us,” Gedar said, tying the small salt tablet into a corner of Telemakos’s shamma. “Your aunt need never know. There will be salt aplenty in the new year, when Gebre Meskal throws wide his gates. Abreha the Lion Hunter remembers his debts. And so do I.” He took the bracelet from Athena and fastened it around her wrist. She shook her fist furiously up and down, making the silver charms ring.
“Thank you, sir,” Telemakos said, trying to smile blandly, knowing he could not honorably refuse the gift. “You are very kind.”
He looked up, then, and held Athena’s wrist still for a moment, to stop the jangling. “Your son is looking for you,” Telemakos said.
Gedar stepped into the passage. Telemakos cast a final glance at the salt loaf on the table, with the king of Himyar’s mark on it. He did not think it was counterfeit; the salt was too good.
