The Empty Kingdom (The Lion Hunters #5)

The interrogation lasted three days, not always under the same people. For its duration Telemakos was housed with the palace guard in their barracks. No one seemed specifically assigned to watch over him, but he was expected to adhere to the warriors’ routine and standards and was never left alone. Each night before Telemakos slept, Tharan stopped by to bid him good night and to drip clean water over the burn at the back of his neck.

When the Federation assembly had finished with him, Telemakos started on the journey to al-Muza and the Hanish Islands to fulfill his pledge to the najashi. He traveled as one of a detail of young Himyarite soldiers. None of them towered over him as the cadets had done two years ago, though he was more slightly built than they; dressed like them for desert travel, and with his hair plaited tight against his skull, Telemakos looked like one of their number. Only he carried no weapon.

In the evenings, as they roasted partridge over a sage-scented cooking fire, the soldiers talked neutrally about hunting and the day’s journey. Telemakos studied his companions’ faces from beneath his lashes and wondered why these particular men had been chosen as his guard. Some of them were not very much older than he. He was curious about them but did not want to risk being cut cold by his only companions when they might be under orders not to speak to him casually. No one had said anything, in the middle of the first night out from San’a, when Telemakos had suddenly sat up sobbing aloud and calling for Kidane—Save me, save me, Grandfather! He would have been deeply embarrassed if anyone had said anything, so maybe they were just being polite. He did not want to have to explain the wound on his neck, either, and only rinsed it briefly when no one was looking.

He wondered how far ahead of him Abreha was, and if the najashi really did mean to take Athena all the way to Aksum himself. She is safe, isn’t she? Telemakos fretted. I wouldn’t finish the najashi’s filthy maps for him if I didn’t believe he would keep his promise to take her home. Is she safe? Why, oh why, would I ever trust her to him?

The burning sore at the back of his neck was all he had for surety. Each morning Telemakos woke with the feel of dried tears on his face. Half the time he could not remember what he had been dreaming of to make him cry. He wondered what his guards must think of him.

On the third evening of the journey, Telemakos tempted them to speak to him. He spread his complex instruments for measuring distance on a square of cloth beside the fire. It was like opening a box of magician’s tricks: they had never seen a drafting compass or an astrolabe.

“How does that work? Is it a secret?”

“It’s just a skill. Someone has to show you how the first time, and then you have to practice, just the way you learn to throw a spear. Pick it up and look, it’s not magic.”

“What do you use the wand for, if not magic?” One of them pointed hesitantly toward a straight-edge ruler.

Telemakos laughed. “That’s for drawing lines! Are all soldiers so superstitious? Look, I’ll show you …”

He showed them how to use the compass, too, and let the six of them each try it in turn, drawing circles in the bare ground where they had pulled up the grass around the cooking fire.

“With the star measurers you can reckon where you are, and how far you’ve still to go. I can figure the distance from here to al-Muza.”

He could not do the calculations in his head but scratched figures with a finger in the dirt. His audience was so impressed by these occult tracements that Telemakos thought it would have disappointed them if he had announced a number directly without any show of conjuring it.

“Can you say what you are sent to do with these?” one of them, Harun, asked carefully.

Telemakos raised his eyebrows, as the Himyar children did in disapproval or denial, a habit he had picked up from Abreha’s Royal Scions. “Of course I may not say,” he answered.

Harun mirrored the gesture, understanding. “I should not have asked,” he apologized. “I am always nosing to discover other people’s errands.” He laughed.

“Harun was brother-bonded to Asad, the najashi’s eldest son, until he died,” said Ghafur, whose handsome mustache was so fleetingly familiar that Telemakos always felt he was just on the verge of recognizing him as an old friend. “Do you understand what brother-bonding is?”

“Isn’t it that your life is pledged as another child’s servant, and the pair of you grow up together? As Rasha is to Queen Muna.”

Ghafur blinked agreement. “Harun could never have waited on anyone else, only Asad; so after Asad died, Harun here was honored with a warrior’s training. But Asad used to tell him everything. Harun knew all of Ghumdan’s palace secrets.”

“Oh. Not like me, then.”

They looked so blank that Telemakos realized, with sudden surety and wonder, that none of his guard had any notion of his disgrace. He could not fathom what they must think of him.

“Were you all trained together?” he asked quickly.

“Not I,” said Ghafur. “I’m newly sent from the garrison at Marib, for this detail especially. You know my father, Tharan.”

“Of course, Tharan!” Telemakos exclaimed as he placed the naggingly familiar mustache. “You favor him exactly.”

Then Telemakos was inspired. He took a dare on himself. He raised his head and tried to look Harun directly in the eyes, and then did the same to Ghafur, and all the other young soldiers in turn, finishing with Fariq, their captain. Each one deferentially looked away when Telemakos stared at him. So he knew they considered him their superior in rank, because he was surely not their elder.

“I like to nose in other people’s business, too,” Telemakos said. “You must tell me all your histories. I didn’t realize you were so select a band. So you, Mahir, why were you chosen for this detail?”

“I am no one special. I am no prince’s favorite servant or vizier’s son.”

Abreha’s warriors always spoke like that. Telemakos thought their modesty must be part of their training. But the others laughed. Telemakos gave a little inward sigh of wonder and envy; they laughed so freely.

Their captain answered on Mahir’s behalf. “Tharan says Mahir is the finest spearman he’s ever taught. But I am their captain because, of us all, I am the only one who has seen combat. I was the najashi’s squire at the battle of al-Muza.”

All six of them had some royal connection or high rank or unusual skill. They were a privileged and intelligent elite among Abreha’s young soldiers.

“I meant to flatter you when I called you a select band,” Telemakos confessed. “I meant flattery, but you really are select.”

“Well, we know your full title,” Fariq acknowledged, “though we’ve been told not to use it.”

They thought his high rank was excuse for their own. That explained their courtesy. Still, why these six? Telemakos wondered. Why these proud six to escort me, when brute strength would serve just as easily? The najashi doesn’t have any reason to honor my ridiculous title.

On the fourth day they left the highlands and began their descent down the staired ways through the wadi valleys that drew off the mountain rainwater. Telemakos could make out nothing of the Hot Lands ahead, the low-lying plain of acacia and whining insects that lay between the mountains and the coast; the horizon was all steel-blue cloud. Late in the afternoon when, hours before sunset, the round red sun collapsed into this pall like a hot coal into ash, he realized it was not cloud, but smoke.

Wildfire crept across the lowlands and up the wadi valleys. It had been a dry year, and though the complex irrigation systems of canal and well and reservoir kept the cultivated terraces green, wayside field and forest were brittle as tinder. At first the fire was all below them as they made their way cautiously down the main wadi. Then they found that there was fire smoldering in the dry brush at the edges of the staired ways. They could smell the smoke now, all the time.

They camped apprehensively. Unless there was a strong wind in any direction, the fire was completely unpredictable. It crept in flickering zigzags through the undergrowth as though it were following some mysterious map of its own. They saw a running wall of knee-high flame leap an irrigation ditch and engulf an arbor, and yet the fire never reached the next level of the terrace, only eight feet higher up the hillside. At night they took turns to sleep. Telemakos was never made to wake more than one watch in any night; they babied him, he thought. But, of course, it made no difference whether he was awake or not, since one of them always sat guard over him, wildfire or no wildfire.

Oh please, Telemakos prayed silently, let the najashi be already safely past this with Athena.

The people of the towns and villages Telemakos passed through were all tense and tired. He and his guards had only a day’s march yet to the Hot Lands when they came upon a group of farmers and officials arguing loudly, while onlookers raised their fists and hissed. Telemakos swerved from the main track toward the conflict without being aware he was doing it. Harun strode up beside him, herding him back to the road.

“Nosing in others’ business?” Harun jested.

But the others were hesitating, too; the valley below them roiled with smoke. “Let him nose,” said the captain. “It will give this inferno a chance to burn off.”

They went in single file across a narrow ridge between two gullies so they might join the gathering. When they came closer, they could see that the crowd stood in a circle of ground at the upper edge of a sizable reservoir, half full. It was cleverly built into the hillside, and its walls formed the sides of the terrace below, so covered with grapevines that you would not know the reservoir was there unless you were standing on its rim.

A delegation from the besieged township lower down the valley was asking if the water could be tapped to help them fight the fires below. Their headman argued with a local official, back and forth, both of them stiffly courteous and neither yielding.

Telemakos was a slave to curiosity. He slid through the gathering to get closer to the arguing men. He loved the ease with which he could move among these folk who did not know him, now that he was out of San’a; his hair and eyes were always strange, but his skin was no darker or paler here than anyone else’s. In Aksum, in his home, he had had to make an effort to be inconspicuous; in Himyar he blended well enough that he did not have to hide behind people. Infiltrating this crowd was easy. Harun managed to stick by him as he wormed his way to the front, but they left the rest of their band behind.

Telemakos saw how defensively the local spokesman stood, with his back to the sluices and his expression fixed and fierce, and felt instantly, inexplicably sorry for him.

“But I do not know what to do,” this village official was saying unhappily. “I do not have the authority to divert this water. And what if the fire comes here, and I have spent Wadi ar Ramadah’s reservoir on Wadi Risyan, what do I do then?”

“It surely will come here if it’s not put out,” the headman from the lower township retorted angrily. “Do it to save your own crops if you must, your own homes if not ours; but do it now.”