The Empty Kingdom

Dawit, sadistically, liked best to set his apprentice several tasks at once. Telemakos would have to polish the enormous teak-and-crystal compass from Cathay, translate a Greek geography aloud into South Arabian, and calculate latitudes on an abacus all at the same time. He was awkward and self-conscious, juggling scrolls and pens and tools with his single hand. The pens had been Athena’s province; she had sorted and cleaned them and passed them out. Telemakos missed her there to pick up the things he dropped and to hold his pages flat.

While Telemakos drew, the Star Master plied him with endless mental arithmetical calculations or drilled him in lists of stars or rivers or the principal cities of Persia.

“Name the tribal kingdoms of Himyar and southern Arabia.”

“Kinda and Qataban, Hadramawt, Awsan—” Telemakos hesitated. Through the pulley hole came a noise of torrential weeping, but for once it was not Athena. This was one of the bigger girls. Inas?

“Ma’in.” Telemakos hesitated again. He bent over the map he was drawing, trying to recite the required list of kingdoms mechanically but concentrating on the voice below. It was not Inas of Ma’in. It was Malika, the lovely, preening girl who called herself queen of Sheba. Her wordless keening alternated with angry, sobbed protests.

“Sheba,” Telemakos added.

With the side of his hand Dawit pretended to slash his own throat, commanding instant silence. He put the other hand behind his ear in exaggerated parody of a careful listener.

Telemakos laid down his pen and bent his head. “I am forbidden to eavesdrop in this palace,” he said evenly, straining to catch the sense of the outburst below.

“Pish. You are not eavesdropping; even Harith at the other end of the scriptorium can hear that. Their racket would wake the dead. Come and listen.”

Dawit knelt with his head tilted low over the pulley hole; his beard hung down the shaft. No one in the room below seemed to notice him at all.

Malika was wailing. “I shall not, it was my mother’s palace and I shall not dower it to a warrior lordling with no wealth of his own. I do not care how famed he is in battle, I am a queen, not a prize!”

Inas’s calm, firm voice said soothingly, “Of course you are queen. Be heroic! Don’t you see, if you marry a man of petty title, your kingdom remains intact, your own?”

“It does not,” Malika sobbed. “It all belongs to him.”

There was another spate of speechless weeping, and then Queen Muna’s soft voice murmured something comforting that Telemakos did not catch. He glanced at Dawit. The old man was watching him, or trying to, through eyes like needle slits. The Star Master whispered, rather loudly, “All the girls go running to my daughter when they feel sorry for themselves. They are down there wiping one another’s eyes, cuddling and kissing like kittens in a basket.”

Muna’s voice floated aloft, then, more clearly: “But you know, my love, it will belong to your husband, whoever it is you marry. Socotra is only mine by wedlock, though I was born there.”

“I should make a union. Not a trophy,” Malika said bitterly. Telemakos had never heard her say anything so profoundly serious. Then she ruined it by adding, with deep petulance, “And I want someone younger and prettier.”

“What’s her age?” Telemakos whispered.

“She’s ten,” Dawit answered. “It is only a betrothal. Nothing will happen for some years yet. You see why the najashi is breaking the news early! She’ll have time to get used to the idea.”

Gedar the despicable olive merchant went back to Aksum before the Long Rains began there. He made a special trip up to the scriptorium to ask Telemakos, with oily goodwill, if there was any token he could bear home with him for the lady Turunesh Kidane. Telemakos spent a furious, sickening afternoon composing an appropriate letter to his mother for Gedar to carry.

Arrest Gedar, Telemakos wrote.

“Dearest Mother, I miss you so much,” he read aloud for Abreha. “Give my love to all, my father, and Grandfather, and my aunt. I am still kept apart from Athena, and miss her as much as I miss you; still I watch for her daily, wishing I could just once follow her when she appears. I have only seen Athena a single time this week, but I watch for her always.

“She isn’t bearing our separation well. They can’t let her near the songbirds; she tries to fling them out the windows. I have seen Athena arrest Lu’lu, the youngest of Abreha’s children, and bite her on the hand like a nasty little dog. She treats Queen Muna with such contempt it embarrasses me. Why does my lady endure it? Muna adores Athena. Gedar and the magus and the najashi’s children have all stopped trying to make her be nice to them, but Muna never even complains. My heart bleeds for the abuse she takes so selflessly on behalf of the unfeeling little wretch.”

The charms were tinking softly. Telemakos pressed the bracelet against his ribs to steady the quaking. He thought: I am going to learn to keep this blasted alarm quiet. That will be a good challenge.

There were two more paragraphs of this drivel still to read. He had woven the message in three times: Arrest Gedar. Arrest Gedar. Arrest Gedar.

Abreha listened absently, gazing down at the outline of Britain that Telemakos had sketched on a sheet of fine linen. It was the beginning of his idea to make a store of maps that Dawit would be able to follow with his fingertips. Telemakos read to the end of the letter, and the najashi held out his hand without looking up. Telemakos passed the strip over for it to be sealed.

“What misery there is throughout my house,” Abreha said quietly. Telemakos stood watching through his lowered lashes while the najashi, frowning forbiddingly, pressed the star-and-lion sigil of Solomon into the hot wax.

“You are right to observe that my queen suffers her ills without complaint,” Abreha said. “I wonder that she doesn’t confide in her father.”

Telemakos said nothing.

“Or in Rasha, her lady-in-waiting?” Abreha prompted.

Telemakos sucked in a sharp breath. “You have put me under pain of death as a suspected spy,” he said in a low voice. “If I overheard such a complaint, and I spoke of it, would I not risk being dragged down to the Street of Shade for execution?”

“I fear I have made you overcautious,” the najashi said. He blew on his signet ring in the warming pan, to cool it. “And in truth, I do not need you to tell me that my queen is unhappy.”

The najashi gazed down at the linen map that covered his desk. “I can make your sister eat when she refuses food from anyone else but you,” Abreha murmured. “I can make her lie quiet in my arms until she falls asleep, even though she has spent the past hour screaming herself hoarse. But I cannot make her love my queen. She is too little to understand. She blames Muna, not me, for sending you away from her.”

He fell silent again. Perhaps he was lost in his study of the map that lay before him. But it seemed as though he were waiting for an answer, or a suggestion, from Telemakos.

“When I was a deal younger, if ever I drove my mother to despair, my father would take her riding,” Telemakos hazarded; “the two of them alone together.”

This had actually happened, once. It was memorable.

“You are a consummate tactician, Morningstar,” said Abreha. “That’s what the poet Tarafa says, as well. ‘When grief assails me, straightway I ride it off.’ I shall consider your domestic advice.” He looked up at Telemakos at last. “We will send this map of yours off to the seamstresses to embroider. Your instructions are clear enough as to where to fix the beads and sequins. I shall ask them to give you a bolt of cloth for your own use, so you may complete this series, and if Dawit is satisfied that you know what you’re doing, then you need not send the rest of them to me to check. What made you think of this? Such a simple idea, really, to make the lines visible to the fingertips as well as to the eye.”

“My grandfather Artos had something like it hanging in his study. Goewin told me about it. It was a floor plan of his house that his wife Ginevra made for him. She made all his maps.”

“How precise you are,” the najashi said, glancing back down at the faint lines of charcoal on the linen sheet. “Telemakos Draftsman, we should call you. I admired Artos your grandfather deeply, Morningstar. Your father called him ‘the engineer king.’ Artos rebuilt every ruin he came across, wall and palace and aqueduct, all throughout his kingdom. It was his work that inspired me to restore the great dam at Marib. I will take you to see it, someday.”

Telemakos considered, and dared a small challenge. “Will you?”

“I promise you,” Abreha answered seriously, gazing up at him again with his faint frown and sad black eyes. “Next year, perhaps, when the lion has learned to hunt. We will take it up to Marib. In the meantime I will have Dawit teach you the complexities of the irrigation systems that water this dry land and keep it green, so you can make sense of what you are seeing.”

Telemakos was bewildered by this promise; he did not know what he had done to deserve it.

“Why, my najashi?” he asked.

“Because your aunt obliges me to see that you learn such things as part of your apprenticeship,” Abreha answered dryly. He rolled the map carefully shut, moved Telemakos’s duplicitous sealed letter to one side, and folded his hands together on the writing table. He gazed up at Telemakos expectantly.

“Tell me what you are thinking,” Abreha commanded.

Telemakos stared for a moment at the letter he had written and thought, Arrest Gedar.

“When are you going to get a new British ambassador?” he asked.

“When Constantine the high king sends me one. And your aunt must give her approval, as well. You know how long it takes for messages to come and go from Britain.” The najashi laughed. “I have you, in the meantime. You are half-British. I am sure you have advice for me. How can I strengthen my kingdom?”

Telemakos hesitated, wondering where this banter was meant to lead him. He did not want to talk about Himyar’s strengths or weaknesses; mapping distant Britain was a much safer topic. Then he remembered Inas’s pledge of loyalty.

“You should make unions among the Royal Scions,” Telemakos said. “Let Malika and Shadi wed, when they come of age. They are both devoted to you, and their marriage will unite Sheba and Qataban. It won’t increase anyone’s name or title, nor expand your dominion, but it will keep it sound.”

“I shall put that suggestion before my Federation!” Abreha exclaimed.

Telemakos protested carefully, “My najashi, I think you mock me.”

“On the contrary. Let me grant you a petition in exchange for such good advice. What grace would you ask of the king of Himyar?”

Telemakos did not, now, believe Abreha to be trifling with him. He sensed that the najashi was testing him in some unknown way, as Gebre Meskal had done on several occasions, and though he did not know the reason for this test, he thought he could direct it toward some neutral good and make return for a forgotten favor. Telemakos remembered the day he arrived in Himyar, and the stranger who had come to his aid and stood by him with unnecessary loyalty.