It dawned on Telemakos that he must seem shockingly undisciplined. He made a formal apology, on his knees, with his forehead against the dry ground.
“Forgive me, my najashi. I dishonor you, forgetting myself over a dream.”
“Get off your knees,” Abreha said mildly. “I thought you might like to come check the snares with me. Leave the baby; Boulos will see she comes to no harm.”
Abreha waited for Telemakos to twist on his shamma, and they set out along one of the antelope trails through the scrubby acacia.
“I like traveling simply,” Abreha said. “I like to hunt and set snares for my own meat, and watch it cook on a fire I have built myself.” There was a rock partridge in the first snare, and Abreha knelt to undo it. “I would not want to be helpless in the hands of my servants.”
Telemakos watched. Abreha worked with his left hand resting casually on his hip, his thumb hooked in his knife belt. He unpicked the snare with his right hand only, moving with effortless efficiency, and knotted the wires around the bird’s red legs with his teeth. It was impossible to know whether he was doing it with only one hand on purpose, to make a point, or if he always hunted this way.
He gave the partridge to Telemakos to carry. “We will stop your dreams somehow,” he said. “Or keep them from troubling you when you are awake, at any rate. I will think about it.”
Then he stood up and strode whistling mournfully toward the next snare.
He is kinder than my father, Telemakos thought. I am glad to be here.
In three weeks they came to San’a’s walled towers, glittering a full mile and a half above the sea, in a plain of rich grain fields and orchards of apricot and almond. “This gate leads to the Street of Shade,” Abreha told Telemakos as they entered the city. The tall houses rose around them in blocks of light and shadow, paint and whitewash. “Look! All the road ahead lies in the shadow of Maharib Ghumdan, the tiered palaces, Himyar’s heart. People think Ghumdan was built by Solomon.”
They passed into the palace. The lower stories were dark and cool, musty with horse and goat. Endless marble stairways made a backbone to the great building; the corridors were lit by narrow windows with intricate alabaster frames and small, jewel-colored windowpanes. The pale stone walls caught the colored light in pools and crevices. On the fourth level they met a tall, older man with a handsome mustache, who strode forward to greet the najashi.
“You are unexpected, your majesty! Welcome! My God, what is that? A lion? How old is it?” His clothes were the same deep blue as the Hadramis’ robes, and he wore a sword as well as a dagger.
“Tharan.” Abreha returned his greeting. They held each other by the forearms and rubbed noses with each other. “I am glad to see you, my lieutenant.” Telemakos waited, listening, as they spoke over his head. “What news is there?”
“Your British ambassador has gone, dismissed one week ago. You did not pass him on the road, then?”
Abreha raised his eyebrows, as the local children and Abreha’s soldiers did to say that something was not so. “Not that we knew. Well, Godspeed to Gwalchmei of Britain. We have Artos’s grandson here now. Do you remember Lij Telemakos Meder, of the house of Nebir, who caught Gebre Meskal’s lions?” Abreha handed over Menelik’s lead to his lieutenant. “Telemakos is here to study under his uncle, Dawit Star Master. And this is his sister.”
Telemakos wanted very much to know what the British ambassador had done to warrant his dismissal, but it would be boldly impudent to interrupt the introductions with such a question.
“Your lady Queen Muna will delight to have a baby in the nursery again,” Tharan said.
“I’ll take Telemakos to meet the children, and join you in my study presently,” Abreha told him.
They left the lion with Tharan and climbed higher. Telemakos counted eight stories and still they were not at the top. It reminded Telemakos of the journey up the staired ways of the wadi valley they had climbed to get into the al-Surat Mountains; they had had to trade the baggage camels for mules to make their way up wide basalt flights set between terraces of hanging grapes and frankincense. Telemakos had carried Athena most of the way. It felt as though he had done nothing but climb stairs for the last ten days.
“I had hoped to meet Gwalchmei,” Telemakos said. “He is my father’s cousin. They were raised as foster brothers.”
“It’s poor luck you’ve missed each other,” Abreha agreed. “Had you arrived a fortnight earlier you would have met, or had he known you were coming, he might have stayed. But he has just heard that his father is dead—King Lot of the Orcades is dead. Gwalchmei’s duty lies in Britain now, so I have dismissed him.”
“Oh.”
Goewin had not told Telemakos about this. Or maybe she had not heard it yet.
They continued up the stairs. It all seemed strangely quiet. They passed courtiers and servants, but not nearly enough to make Ghumdan seem busy, the bustling heart of a flourishing kingdom. Abreha’s palace was full of holes. It was rich and beautiful and empty.
At last they came into a great hall near the top. The room was garlanded with dried rose and cinnamon, and lemon and mint leaves, knit together in imitation of vines heavy with fruit. The windows were set with carnelian and citrine, and the white ceiling was veiled in a painted trellis of green leaves. Hanging from the ceiling was a score of silver birdhouses filled with songbirds. And though Telemakos had never seen anything like this in his life, it seemed so familiar it made his skin crawl.
What does this remind me of? It was something Goewin told me once…Something in Homer? A story, a British legend? Yes, I heard it from Goewin. What did she say? We woke to find the Queen’s Garden a riot of caged songbirds….
He had it then. His grandmother kept songbirds, his British grandmother, Morgause, who had crippled Medraut’s hand to punish him, and had once offered Goewin’s weight in silver for proof of her death. And the story was that his grandmother had hung a hundred songbirds in cages in a garden and lured Lieu, the young prince of Britain, there and then tore open his wrist with her nails and tried to poison him.
“Bird,” said Athena in astonishment. “Bird!” The birds chattered and fluted, and she answered three different calls in perfect imitation of each song. “Bird!” she cried, reaching toward the silver cages.
Telemakos took a few hesitant steps forward, to bring her closer.
“This is the children’s room,” said Abreha. “Hello there, Malika. Have you missed me?”
Telemakos lowered his gaze. There were half a dozen children sitting in a circle on the cushions by the low windows, watching critically as one of the bigger girls dipped indigo out of a soapstone pot and constructed a crude tracery of palm leaves over another girl’s face.
“Najashi!”
They clamored around Abreha. He sat with them before the windows, the girl with the painted face on his lap. He beckoned to Telemakos to sit as well, and the children bunched together to make room for him. They reminded him of roosting hens.
Telemakos sat down and unbuckled Athena. She climbed free of her harness and began to roll and tumble in the cushions with joyful abandon. The children stared at Telemakos for a moment, noticing his imperfection, then quickly looked away.
“Where are the others, Malika?” Abreha asked.
The girl with the painted face answered. She was proud and self-possessed, and Telemakos had the impression she queened it over the rest of them. “The Star Master wanted some lapis lazuli for his new globe, and the Lady Muna has gone with him to the jewelers’ suq. They have taken Lu’lu. The rest of them are watching the guards’ parade.”
“I have brought you a new brother and sister. This is Lij Telemakos Meder of the house of Nebir, and the little princess Emebet Athena. Their grandfather is a vizier in the Aksumite imperial court. Their other grandfather was high king of Britain.”
Telemakos bowed his head to Abreha’s adopted children. They nodded politely in return.
Abreha patted Athena’s stomach. She was lying on her back in the cushions, pointing up at the ceiling and counting to herself rapturously, as though she had suddenly found herself in paradise. “Bird. Bird and bird. Bird bird.”
“Athena will stay in the nursery, and with you here in the children’s room during the day. Telemakos is the Star Master’s student, and he is to sleep in the Great Globe Room, off the scriptorium. Show him, Malika. Show him our home. I will have supper with you, but I have promised to hear Tharan’s report first. Telemakos, Athena, my young family will make you welcome now. This artist with the face paints is Inas; this very pretty one is Malika. It will take you a little time to learn all their names. There are fourteen of them altogether, my Royal Scions. They are princes and princesses every one, heirs to Himyar’s tribal kingdoms.”
The najashi left, after a deal of rubbing of noses and pressing of hands, and once more Telemakos found himself at the mercy of a clutch of strange children. Directly following Abreha’s departure, Malika, the girl with the painted face, told him, “I shall be queen of Sheba when a husband is found for me.”
“Shall you?” Telemakos repeated in some disbelief.
“It is the old kingdom of Sheba,” Malika said loftily. “It used to be bigger, but it is still Sheba.” She looked him up and down and asked the question they were clearly all dying to ask: “What happened to you?”
“I had a fight with a lion.”
They gasped in awe and admiration. Two of them began to whisper frantically together.
“Lion or lioness?” asked a dark, thin boy with his hair done up the way Abreha’s soldiers had worn theirs. “Was it fully grown?”
Telemakos felt like an imposter, then, because there had been nothing heroic about his accident. It was not an honorable wound, got in battle or in the hunt; it was a glaring memorial to his greatest ever moment of stupidity.
“One of the emperor’s pets did it, in Aksum,” he said. “I was careless. I was ill for a long time after, half the year and more.”
“Is that what turned your hair white?”
Telemakos laughed. Maybe he could blame all his peculiarities on this one incident. “I was born with that. My father has hair like mine. His skin is white, too.”
“He must look like a ghoul.”
“He can be very frightening,” Telemakos agreed.
“He must look like Gwalchmei of Britain,” Inas, the big girl who was doing the face painting, said sensibly. “His hair was red, but his beard was as fair as your hair.”
“They were foster brothers. They’re cousins. Gwalchmei is my kinsman. I’ve never met him, though.”
One of the little girls patted Athena on the stomach, as Abreha had done. Athena sat up quickly, eyed the girl with deep suspicion, and crawled into Telemakos’s lap.
“What of your eyes?” said Malika. “And the baby’s? Your eyes are like Queen Muna’s. You have the eyes of a Socotran.”
Oh, Telemakos thought, not this again.