Telemakos held one out. Medraut swung the empty sling and caught the date with it, shot into the tree, swung again, and caught the next date as Telemakos held it up. The woolen cord sizzled the tips of Telemakos’s fingers as it whipped over them.
“Now let the child hold up a stone,” Medraut ordered.
“She’s afraid of you,” Telemakos said. His fingers burned. “You’ll hurt her.”
“You take the sling, then. She’ll hold one out for you. Here, child,” Medraut said, his voice like silk, and serpentlike, gave Athena a date. She, seduced, took it in astonishment at her good fortune. She stared at Medraut with wide eyes like gray crystal. “Hold it for the boy. Up, like this. Now you, Telemakos, take the sling, let go the end—”
“I will not!” Telemakos raged at him. “I haven’t the skill. I’ll hit her! Mother of God! Are you mad? Tear up her trust in me for a silly thing like that? I won’t do it!”
Athena turned her steady gray gaze from Medraut to Telemakos, and calmly put the date in her mouth.
Medraut drew in a ragged breath. Then he laughed.
“You are right, boy; I am touched with madness now and then.”
Telemakos dared to glance upward at his father and saw that there was no malice in the storm-filled, dark blue eyes; Medraut was gazing at his daughter like a man watching a show of magic.
“You can teach her,” Medraut said quietly. “Not yet, perhaps, but soon. She’ll hold up the pellets for you. I’ll fix a pocket on the saddle, so she can reach them. Practice taking them from me, to start with; it doesn’t matter if you hit me. We won’t hurt the little princess.”
Telemakos pulled on the wrist loop again. He walked a few paces away from Athena and practiced his cast. After a few attempts his body remembered what to do, but it would take a little longer for him to master the trick of catching up a stone held out to him halfway through the shot.
“If I learn to do this to your satisfaction, and can defend myself, can I go through the city unescorted?”
“Whenever have you needed to defend yourself walking through your own city?” Medraut asked.
“You said it would afford me protection.”
“From hyenas, boy, not men.” Medraut looked up at Telemakos, concern showing as anger in his cold gaze. “Whom do you fear?”
“I thought—” Telemakos had been housebound so long that he had begun to equate it with imprisonment.
“Before my accident—” Telemakos shaded the truth a little, to protect Goewin as his source. “When I used to go up to the New Palace for my lessons, I heard some talk of omens and the emperor’s servants being menaced and evildoers unaccounted for. Some of it was aimed at me, or anyway at what I was last year, and I thought that if it had happened recently, you would want me under guard.”
Medraut was silent.
“I’m not afraid of walking in the street alone,” Telemakos said. “Only I thought you might not let me.”
“No one knows what you were last year. Believe me, we watch for it, the certain threat.” Medraut went back to his stitching and spoke as he worked. “But it has been a quiet year, even for Goewin. Everyone knows the quarantine is to be lifted at winter’s end. That gives people hope, honest men and evildoers alike. You’re safe enough in the street.
“When I’ve finished,” Medraut added, “you may take the baby up to the New Palace and show her your lions at last, if you like. Sheba is expecting kits.”
Solomon remembered Telemakos as a friend, not as dinner. The big lion stood at the bottom of the lion pit looking lonely and bewildered, gazing longingly up at the viewing terrace and purring loud, leonine invitations in Telemakos’s direction.
Athena loved the lions. She growled and chirruped so convincingly she confused them. She could imitate birdsong, too, and the clucking of chickens, and all the range of noises made by Grandfather’s horses. She had more animal noises than she did human words.
“What do you suppose Solomon’s saying, little owlet? ‘Why do you never play with me anymore, boy?’”
“Telemakos Meder!”
Telemakos heard light footsteps on the flagstone stair that led up to the terrace garden. It was a woman’s voice that called his name; for a moment he could not place it.
“Or shall I call you Beloved Telemakos, the lionhearted, as the emperor does always now? Boy, you are never about when I look for you. How I have missed your company this past year!”
It was Sofya Anbessa, the emperor’s youngest cousin. She leaped up the stairs three at a time, clutching her skirts about her knees, hurrying as though she expected Telemakos to vanish before she got there.
Athena reached for Telemakos’s hair, a thing she did for reassurance. She was uncertain of strangers. Telemakos said coolly, “You cannot have looked very hard. Did you try Counselor Kidane’s mansion? I have my own bedroom there—”
Sofya stopped his mouth by laying her hand across it.
“Don’t ever.”
She tapped his lips sharply with her fingertips.
“Never doubt my faith. I have been to hell and back on your account.”
She had brought him out of Afar. She was three years older than Telemakos, which meant that she was old enough to marry, while he was still younger than the newest of Gebre Meskal’s guard. Telemakos felt this difference to be vaster now than it had been two years ago, when she had bought his freedom from the salt pirates.
“They have taken me off studying South Arabian and put me on Latin,” Sofya went on. “I am shut in half the day with my Latin tutor, and half with the royal cartographer, and if it were possible, I think yet another half with your aunt, learning how Constantine the high king of Britain and Cynric the king of the West Saxons have carved up your foreign grandfather’s kingdom between them. In any case, Ras Meder never allowed a soul into the House of Nebir to see you when you were ill. I tried for a month. He would not let the emperor in.”
“I was here in the New Palace for the first month—” Telemakos began, speaking through Sofya’s ringers. Athena pulled Sofya’s hand away. “Thank you, Athena,” Telemakos said. “I said, I was here, in this palace—”
“So was I. I sat by your side every evening for a fortnight and listened to you wailing to go home. Then they began to carve collops out of you, and I was not let in again.”
Telemakos had no memory of her being there at all.
“Oh,” he said. “Well. Perhaps you did.”
Athena still had hold of Sofya, and Sofya shook her hand a little without actually making her let go. “Sweet heart, little owlet, do you remember your auntie Sofya? Mmm? Was it not I who first bought you honey and almond paste, at the confectioners’ fair, when your tight-fisted British aunt said it would rot your six new teeth? Have you added to the six yet? Let me see.”
Athena dropped Sofya’s fingers and pressed her face into Telemakos’s shoulder.
“Aye, that is what my twin sister always did if anyone spoke to her, before she was married. She always tried to hide herself in my dress. Except she was a deal bigger than you, so it was more annoying.”
“My mother clings to my clothes as well, lately,” Telemakos said wryly. “She doesn’t believe I’ll stay out of the lion pit just because Nezana keeps the tunnel locked.”
“He has taken away the rope, too,” Sofya observed, climbing onto the stone bench to kneel backward and look down at Solomon pacing below. “As if you might—” She hesitated.
“—suddenly sprout a new arm,” Telemakos finished for her.
Sofya coughed, then snickered, and presently they both dissolved in hysterical, choking laughter.
Then Athena growled. It was a lion noise, not an angry noise; Telemakos had moved away from the railing, and she could no longer see the lions. He climbed up to kneel beside Sofya, bracing Athena between them against the back of the bench.
“Have you seen the kits?” Sofya asked. “Sheba scarcely ever brings them out.”
“I’ve only been up here a little while, but she hasn’t moved. I keep hoping. Nezana says she won’t suckle them, or doesn’t let them suckle, or is just stupid. He’s waiting for her to leave them alone so he can bring them away from her.”
Athena reached out to pull at the ropes of emerald that were always plaited into Sofya’s hair. The princess expertly twitched the baby’s hand away.
“Tena,” Athena said, grabbing at the emeralds again. Sofya sat back on her heels, facing the baby.
“Tena, my love, it is a clever girl that knows her own name,” Sofya said. “You must learn to say Sofya, next. Sofya.”
“Sofya,” Athena repeated obediently.
“You little vixen!” Telemakos exclaimed. “What’s my name, then? Who’s this?” He tapped himself on the chest.
Athena identified him lovingly. “Boy.”
Sofya laughed. “Telemakos is too long, isn’t it? Silly, pompous Greek name.”
“Thank you. Why are you learning Latin and the names of British kings?” Telemakos asked.
Sofya coughed again. She arranged her skirts around her knees. She seemed uncharacteristically apologetic when she spoke.
“I am to go to Britain in the summer, when the rains and the quarantine are over, as the new ambassador there. I shall be counterpart to your aunt Goewin.”
Telemakos felt a stab of envy at the thought of the adult assignment that lay ahead of her, representing her kingdom in formal embassy to a distant and important ally. That Gebre Meskal should choose a girl as his ambassador—Goewin surely had a hand in this recommendation.
“Does that mean your brother Priamos is coming home?” Telemakos asked. “Goewin will be pleased.”
“If he is still alive, after the plague, yes.”
“I shall miss you.”
“Rot. You have not missed me all this year.”
“Tena! My my my my my!”
Athena reached for Sofya’s hair again, and Sofya began to pick absently at one of her long plaits, twisting a glinting rope of green jewels from her hair. She held it out to Athena, who tried to tangle it into her own wild bronze curls. When she found the beads would not stay on her head, she put them in her mouth.
“What kind of baby are you, that teethes on emeralds?” Sofya said, wrapping the tail end of the string about her hand so that Athena could not accidentally swallow it. “Do not fall into one of your black sulks, Telemakos so-called lionheart; you look like your father. It is very unbecoming. You are not ambassador to Britain yet, but you can be sure the emperor has plans for you as well.”
She stretched out the emeralds. Athena growled, a warning growl this time, and kept on chewing. “These jewels I wear all belonged to my father,” Sofya went on. “And so did those my mother the queen of queens gave you, last year.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The emerald collar you wore at the smugglers’ trial. The queen of queens did an odd thing when she gave that collar to you. She should have given it to one of her sons. But my eldest brother, Mikael, is mad insane and imprisoned; and the next, Abreha, is king of Himyar and will not come back to Aksum; and Hector is dead; and Priamos is in Britain. So she gave it to you. And that is sort of like adopting you as her son. It does an odd thing for you; so long as Gebre Meskal has no sons of his own, it puts you in favor to be chosen as his heir.”
