The Empty Kingdom (The Lion Hunters #5)

Sphinxlike, Goewin had sent him a riddle.

Telemakos read it again. Only the lines in Latin were unfamiliar; they sounded biblical. Why had she used Latin? She could have written the whole thing in Ethiopic, or even in Greek. If it was from the Bible and the Odyssey, it was all originally Greek anyway. So why this verse in Latin? Why any of it?

He became a young lion.

Leo. Goewin had taught Telemakos the Latin word for lion on the day they met, nine years ago, when Telemakos had been no more than six years old. It was one of his earliest memories, how he and Goewin and Priamos, Gebre Meskal’s ambassador to Britain, had exchanged names for his wooden Noah’s Flood animals in three languages. Goewin had told him the British word for lion, also, llew. Her father used to call her twin brother, Lleu, the young lion. The Roman legate at Abreha’s Great Assembly feast had called him that as well.

Leo. Llew. Lleu, who had once been prince of Britain, Goewin’s twin brother. Medraut had also used the word leo, in the brief time he and Telemakos had been together earlier that year: Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion.

Telemakos, heed me.

Telemakos’s eyes were beginning to burn again. He could not unravel it. He had not enough time. It was not fair.

“Have you finished?” Abreha’s even voice cut through his concentration.

“I’ve finished,” Telemakos whispered. He watched the najashi’s narrow, dark hands roll the palm strip shut.

“Muna, are you there?” the najashi called. The queen came in without answering aloud; only her clothes rustled and tinkled, as though, like a ghost, she had to make her presence known through the objects around her.

“Make a bed for the Morningstar in the sitting room,” Abreha said. “Let him stay here tonight. You may want to anoint the burn.”

Telemakos shivered. He reached up toward the blazing mark at the back of his neck, but thought better of it. Muna helped him to his feet, holding her resolute silence. Her touch on his bare skin was gentle and thrilling. Telemakos turned his flaming face away from her, ashamed of his tears and the turmoil in his stomach.

“Do you want an opiate?” Abreha asked him.

Telemakos bit back the bitter sarcasm that sprang to his lips: Why didn’t you think of that before you set my hair on fire? He remembered his father, cold and courteous, held captive in chains that threatened to choke him.

“I’m all right,” he said stiffly. He shrugged off Muna’s simmering hands. “I told Athena she could have my dogs. She has promised to behave herself for you if she gets them. I left her sleeping in the Great Globe Room, and it would be a good thing if they were there for her when she wakes.”

Muna beckoned him, one hand down, her fingers opening and closing by her side. Telemakos followed her out of the najashi’s study and into the receiving room. She communicated without speaking, exactly as Medraut used to do, pressing Telemakos’s shoulder to make him kneel and patting the shining ebony tabletop to make him lay his head down on it. She was sympathetic, but not shocked by the najashi’s treatment of him; her manner was so firm and straightforward that he realized she must know more of Telemakos’s misdeeds than he had thought. She was somehow Abreha’s conspirator.

Her touch as she smeared aloe over the back of Telemakos’s neck was so delicate that he almost thought he was imagining it. But the brand itself felt like a small circle of flame at the base of his skull.

“Let me plait your hair,” Muna said. “It will keep it off this wound, and you will look respectable for your interview tomorrow.”

My interview? he thought, and suppressed a shudder, but the bells were gone and made no sound.

Abreha came through and stood watching as Muna began to comb Telemakos’s hair. She scolded her husband sharply. “You might have waited to mark him until after your Federation lords interrogate him. Perhaps they’ll find fault in him that you don’t see.”

“I know the worst already,” Abreha answered. “He will withstand their questioning.”

Telemakos dreamed he was in Afar, but the dream was unfamiliar. He lay on his stomach by a stagnant pool in a riverbed that was otherwise parched to dust. Above him, on the bank of the dry river, with the desert at his back, Goewin’s slain twin brother, Lleu the Bright One, the young lion, the prince of Britain, whom Telemakos had never known in life, sat cross-legged. Lleu had Goewin’s dark eyes and white skin, but in the dream he was the same age as Telemakos.

Telemakos lay with his left arm plunged to the shoulder in the still, green water, trying to tickle trout. But the pool was empty and the water was icy cold, and his arm had grown so numb Telemakos could not feel his fingers anymore.

He looked up at his uncle and said, “I can’t do this. It will destroy me. It’s not worth it.”

“You must,” Lleu answered. “You must show me how.”

“There’s nothing here,” Telemakos said, and pulled his arm out of the water. But when he willed his black, frozen fingers to open, there on the palm of his dead hand lay Abreha’s signet ring.

“That is the mark of Solomon,” Lleu said. “You can keep it.”

XII

A GUARD OF HONOR

THARAN WAS WITH TELEMAKOS when he woke, pouring coffee spiced with ginger that Muna had left for them.

“The najashi has departed San’a. He is taking your sister to Aksum,” the vizier told him. “Do not protest; we thought it best to spare you both a violent parting. When you’ve broken your fast, you may come with me to a gathering of the Federation so they may question you.”

Telemakos could neither eat nor drink. Tharan sat patiently with him for a few minutes, then twisted the ends of his mustache and stood up.

“Let’s go, then, boy. They will be waiting.”

Tharan escorted him alone; no guard went with them. The stairways seemed eerily silent without the companion clash of tinsel at Telemakos’s elbow. He thought again of Medraut and tried to carry himself with his father’s fearless dignity.

“Lower your head,” Tharan told him suddenly. “You must not enter the Chamber of Solomon looking as though you have blood right to it. Your chances of withstanding this trial will be far greater if you do not seem prideful.” He stopped, right there in the hall, and tipped Telemakos’s head forward with a light touch. Telemakos stood still, seething, and fixed his gaze on his feet.

“Not so much,” Tharan directed. “Show them humility, not shame. Are you ashamed of yourself?”

Telemakos did not think Tharan expected an answer to this, but he raised his chin, keeping his eyes cast down.

“Princely,” Tharan said. “Perfect. Hold that. Can you?”

“Sir.”

“I shall cough, to remind you, if I see you falter.”

“I don’t understand,” Telemakos said quietly. “Why does it matter how I—”

He stood suddenly overwhelmed by his own perfidy, frozen, unable to step forward into this bleak, brief future he had created for himself, facing a lifetime’s worth of fear and torment packed into a few weeks.

Tharan gripped him by the shoulders, as a soldier would his comrade before battle.

“Morningstar,” he said, “do not be afraid.”

Telemakos managed to swallow, and held his chin raised and his eyes lowered. He felt sure he must seem as demure as Muna as he walked into the assembly room where King Solomon was said to have held his councils.

Telemakos had no idea what to expect of this ordeal, but his first shocked thought as he entered the arena was that he knew every one of his judges by name. There were sheiks he had met on his first day in Himyar, at the Governor’s palace in al-Muza; others he had been introduced to and spoken with at the last Great Assembly of the Federation; Shadi and Jibril and Haytham of the Scions; and Malika’s uncle Alim, who had traveled with them from Marib. Dawit Alta’ir the Star Master was there, representing his home island kingdom of Socotra.

And why isn’t the najashi here himself? Telemakos wondered bitterly—but of course, the najashi was taking Athena to Aksum.

Telemakos stepped into the center of the room to meet the contempt of the gathered tribal lords. It had taken less courage to face down a pair of fighting lions.

His first interview lasted all that day. But it did not have the feel of the criminal trial Telemakos had expected. From the start it seemed far more like a scholar’s examination than an inquisition. Dawit spent an hour quizzing Telemakos on his knowledge of Himyar’s water: which provinces each wadi valley irrigated, how to harvest flood waters, the working of the wells beneath San’a, the depth behind the dams. It seemed unjust to Telemakos that he might be accused of treachery for possessing knowledge that his Himyarite masters had pounded into his head without his ever asking for it in the first place, but it also seemed pointless to pretend he did not know these things. So long as his questioners were focused on their own kingdom they did not touch on Aksum, and that was a relief.

The three Scions were given their fair turn to speak among the others. They sat together in a tense, conspiratorial knot. They avoided looking at Telemakos, but they were scribbling furiously back and forth among themselves on wax blocks the whole time, and Telemakos guessed they were probably more focused on him than anyone else there. They elected quiet Shadi as their spokesman. Shadi looked at him directly when he spoke, as a king to a supplicant. Telemakos kept his eyes lowered.

“Your loyalty is in doubt,” Shadi said, a thing no one else had directly mentioned.

“My lord,” Telemakos acknowledged.

“Jibril and I have good reason to uphold you, but Haytham wants you to account for your interest in Awsan.”

“I have none,” said Telemakos. “I’ve never set foot in Awsan.”

Shadi directed his reply to the assembly as much as to Telemakos. He ducked his head and murmured in his half-embarrassed way, “Haytham observes, by your answers to the Star Master, that you’re more intimate with Awsan’s fruits and fields than he is.”

“Anyone can memorize names and figures,” Dawit snapped, “and it is a pity Haytham of Awsan has not applied himself better to the geography of his own kingdom. The Morningstar has never been to Britain, either, but he has got the measure of it in his head. Tell this assembly of Britain’s principal rivers and where they flow, Morningstar, just as you have done for Himyar.”

Half in disbelief, because it was so irrelevant, Telemakos spoke hesitantly. “Tamesis, in the southlands, flowing east; Sabrina in the west; and Tava in Caledonia, north of the Roman wall. These are the largest …”

Tharan coughed. Telemakos had raised his eyes, without thinking, to see if anyone was actually interested. He looked down quickly.

“Did you ever think to hear such a thing?” Dawit Alta’ir demanded of no one in particular, sitting back and picking leaves from his beard. “A young Aksumite speaking the names Tamesis, Sabrina, and Tava in Ghumdan’s alabaster halls? He knows what he knows. Question him further if you are dissatisfied with him, my princes and my servants. Question him yourselves; I will not.”