The Empty Kingdom

“Thank you,” Telemakos said stiffly.

“I’m going ashore again tomorrow,” Abreha said. “Would you like to work in my cabin, and make me copies of certain of your maps? I am sorry to keep you confined below, but I do not want you to be seen.”

“Thank you,” Telemakos said again.

“There are fresh pages and ink in the chest below the table.”

“Thank you,” Telemakos said through his teeth, and bent to his own meal, determined not to be forced to acknowledge any more of these courteous, meaningless offers of small kindness.

He spent the next day at the folding desk in the najashi’s cunningly constructed cupboard workplace. Iskinder sat just outside, with his back to the entrance. The cabin did not afford Telemakos more space than he was used to, but it made a change from the monotonous horror of waiting with nothing to do. He was reaching for a new ink block when he discovered, rolled carefully behind the chest of supplies that Abreha had allowed him to make use of, the harness in which Telemakos had carried his sister at his side for the last two years and more.

For a moment Telemakos was defeated, too unhappy and tired to think. He sat on the planking beneath the folding easel with the saddle in his lap. It had grown too small for Athena, Telemakos admitted to himself now; even his charm bracelet had had to be lengthened during the time he had worn it, but nothing had ever been done about the baby’s saddle. She should have learned to walk before she outgrew it. Why had Abreha kept it? Maybe it broke his heart, also, to part with Athena. Or maybe the najashi simply had not needed the harness as Telemakos had, having two arms, and had left it on board when he took Athena ashore. Telemakos slipped his fingers into the pockets at the side; Athena’s finger dolls and the bone rattle and the wooden giraffe were gone. She must have taken them with her. Good.

Telemakos shook out the saddle’s familiar folds. The tanned hide was worn supple and smooth, nearly black in places. He buried his nose in it and caught, past the smell of leather, a trace of flour and spice, the faint baked scent of his sister’s skin. It made his throat ache with misery and longing. He took another deep breath, but the trace was gone; it was overwhelmed by leather and something like burnt poppy.

Poppy?

Telemakos glanced over his shoulder. Iskinder sat, as always, with his back turned. Telemakos hooked the shoulder strap over his head, so familiar a movement that again it made his throat suddenly close up with loneliness for Athena. He swallowed the loneliness and opened the saddle’s inner pocket. The dozen vials and packets of opium that he had disposed of during his stay in San’a were still there, untouched. So were the original portions his father had sent with him.

Have I got enough here to stupefy everyone on this ship? Telemakos wondered. He calculated roughly.

Maybe not enough to immobilize them, but enough to get their guard down. In the waterskins? Will they taste it? The waterskins and the wine jars; it’s more effective in wine. Then later, if enough of them are asleep, I can slip overboard and turn myself in to the Aksumite prison warden. Surely my own people will grant me sanctuary.

Telemakos shoved the vials and twists of paper into his own satchel and quietly folded his sister’s saddle in its place behind the chest. He went back to work, wild hope bubbling within him like a springing fountain. It would be easy to get to the supplies; Telemakos had been left by himself with them in the lower deck several times every day. No one paid any attention to him down there; Iskinder sat at the top of the stepladder, in the sun, and spoke to Telemakos only if Telemakos addressed him first. Telemakos had spent hours alone, the day before, watching one of Gebre Meskal’s ships pull close to the beach so that men could slosh through the water unloading supplies for the prison.

“I’ve finished here,” he said to Iskinder. “May I wait the rest of the afternoon below?”

“Keep your head down,” his guard said, and guided him to the ladder. Iskinder stayed at the top, waiting above with the rest of the crew as usual. Telemakos sat at the foot of the steps.

“Tell me when you see the najashi on his way back, will you, Iskinder? And if he is alone? He is setting free an enemy of mine.”

After some time Iskinder called down to him, “They’re on their way, just coming down to the hawris on the beach. Go take a look through the starboard oar holes at the back. Is that your man?”

Iskinder was above, watching the najashi and his attendants climb into the canoe, and Telemakos was alone for five minutes with the crew’s water supply and enough opium to stun several elephants.

He glanced through the oar hole. He could not see the hawri on its way.

His conscience hammered at him so mercilessly as he worked that all the sweet hope was suddenly made bitter with guilt. If Telemakos escaped, Iskinder would take the blame. He would be stripped of his advancement, maybe whipped, set to labor, imprisoned. It would be the same for any other guard who allowed my escape, Telemakos reasoned, and I would not suffer such pity for a stranger, would I? But I am sorry for Iskinder.

Maybe that’s why Abreha chose him for this job. He guessed how it would pain me to sabotage the one I had recommended, and then I might hesitate and fail to take my chance when it came.

But I’ll not hesitate.

He worked over the storage vessels in silent efficiency, with knees and nails and teeth.

“Morningstar?”

Telemakos stoppered the last waterskin shut, bracing the skin in place with one foot.

“Sorry. I was thirsty, and it takes me a long time to get one of these open.”

“I’d help you. Anyone would help you.”

“I’m all right.”

Telemakos had drunk as much as he could hold, before he had started. He did not know when he would next find uncontaminated water.

He folded himself into a corner of the hold with his knees against his chin to wait, but the najashi found him there. Abreha came down the narrow stepway past Iskinder and beckoned Telemakos to his feet.

“Come up. You must share this ship with your enemy for a brief time, and I do not like to see you skulking down here as though in cowardice.”

Abreha bent to one of the waterskins. He refilled his own leather bottle, drank from it, and offered it to Telemakos. Telemakos refused quietly.

“I’m all right.”

“Come up with me.” The najashi laid his hand across the back of Telemakos’s shoulders to propel him in the right direction.

Anako the Lazarus sat cross-legged and hunchbacked on the deck, a withered, sunken bundle of rags and bones. He had been heavy before his exile; the flesh hung off him loosely now, and his gray hair was so thin it looked as though his bare scalp was brushed with dirty cobwebs. He had been an evil man, and for all Telemakos knew, he was still evil; but he was also old, and ill, and frail, and without any power.

He had not forgotten Telemakos. When Anako raised his head, his look was filled with hatred.

“This is Lij Bitwoded Telemakos Eosphorus, the Morningstar, who has just completed an apprenticeship with my cartographer,” Abreha said. “I am aware you know each other of old, and have reason to consider yourself opponents. But you have both done me faithful service, and while you are guests aboard my flagship, you must be civil toward each other, and dine together with me.” Abreha turned to Telemakos and commanded, “Show this man a sign of your goodwill.”

Telemakos held out his single hand to Anako, palm down, a gesture of sure and cold command. Anako hesitated, glancing up at Telemakos in disdain and disbelief. Telemakos turned his hand slightly, so that its slant presented the two scarred fingertips; that was where Anako had maimed him. There was another scar on his shoulder where Anako had tried to kill him.

Telemakos saw that the hateful, cringing man before him did not recognize the wounds or remember inflicting them. Anako looked blankly past the uneven fingernails, focused simply on the distasteful task of giving Telemakos some formal greeting of respect.

“I remember you,” Anako hissed. “You sentenced me.”

“Anako of Deire,” the najashi said grimly, “was he not merciful in his sentence? Are you not alive, and free, and whole? Might he not have sent you to your death? The Morningstar has offered you his respect. Make your peace.”

Anako took Telemakos’s outstretched hand, and the second that he did so, before Anako could consider what he would do next, Telemakos bent quickly and laid a light kiss on the back of Anako’s thin and brittle knuckles. He dropped Anako’s hand and straightened his back. Abreha brushed the brand at the back of Telemakos’s neck with light fingertips. The touch made him shiver.

“Superb, my Shining One,” the najashi murmured approvingly. “Now let us eat together.”

That night Telemakos waited quietly in the dark, sitting at Abreha’s side and biting his knuckles, while as if by some enchantment all those around him fell quietly into drugged sleep. Abreha was among the first to go, Iskinder among the last. It was astonishing for Telemakos to watch it happening, knowing he was responsible.

Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion, he thought.

“Your enemy is not very frightening,” Iskinder remarked. Anako was a shambles of a man, sprawled asleep on the deck with his mouth gaping. The skin of his feet and hands was cracked and scabbed. “The state of him! I do not know whether he is in the greater part disgusting or pitiful.”

“He’s pitiful,” Telemakos said quietly, amazed that for the past three years this wretched man had haunted his nightmares. “Hard labor and poor food wear your body down.”

How I feared and hated him, Telemakos thought; Anako and his henchman Hara the Scorpion. And Hara ended up crucified as a spy, and here is Anako, a broken old man. In the end all my fear is gone. How can it have happened? But there’s only pity left.

Telemakos sat quietly, waiting. After a little while he began to wonder if he had overdone the dosing of the wine and water. The drugs had been given to him for use as painkillers, not as sedatives. He had not really expected everyone to end up snoring on the deck around him. But even Iskinder fell at last.

If I’ve missed anyone, he will raise an alarm, Telemakos thought, and waited, and waited, until the half moon jumped suddenly out from behind the heights of the island, and washed the quiet sea with silver. Abreha slept peacefully, his troubled frown relaxed, one narrow hand laid over his chest and gently rising and falling as he breathed. The lion’s head on his finger rose and fell with his hand, as though it were alive.

Telemakos saw that he could become an assassin, now, if he were bloody minded. But there was only one thing Telemakos wanted in this moment of advantage over Abreha, and that was the death warrant that he kept folded in his sash. Telemakos lifted Abreha’s hand from his chest and pulled back his robe. There at his waist was the familiar, detested parchment, smooth and supple with wear, the sealing wax recently renewed. The lock of Telemakos’s own hair glittered like a shaving of salt in the moonlight.

Telemakos meant to destroy the warrant, but once he had taken hold of it, he could not resist reading it first. Everyone was so fast asleep. He rooted through Abreha’s cabin to find a taper and steel and flint. He was as awkward as a baby with the firelighter, having to use the edge of his foot to hold it steady, but at last he made himself a light to read by. He bit through the seal on the document and opened the page with trembling fingers. The writing was in Latin, and although Telemakos spoke it fluently, its written alphabet was the least familiar of the handful of languages he could read. After he had struggled through the opening paragraph he stopped in puzzlement and began again.