The Empty Kingdom (The Lion Hunters #5)

“Telemakos!” The voice he knew so well rapped out his name in a soft, sharp, commanding bark. “Telemakos, I am not Abreha!”

Telemakos turned his head. He had lived with Abreha so long that it had slipped his mind how similar the najashi was to his own younger brother.

“Ras Priamos?” Telemakos guessed.

“Peace to you, Telemakos Meder,” said Priamos Anbessa. “You’ve been lost.”

On hearing his own name Telemakos was so awash with relief that he stumbled, and found himself sitting on the deck. By force of habit he climbed to his knees and tried to make a formal bow, but Priamos gently pushed him back down.

“Sit. Rest. Why have you been released? Are you a messenger?” Priamos quickly untied the supporting rope. “Abreha had not yet agreed to our contract!”

“I ran away.” Telemakos let the corner of his mouth quirk into its crooked smile. “I put the najashi and his men all to sleep with opium, and left them.”

Priamos laughed. His delight broke up the angry look of his heavy brow, just as it did Abreha’s. “Ah, heroic!” He was still laughing as he looked Telemakos over in the moonlight. “Never in my life have I had the upper hand over my brother! You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Just wet. The prison warden gave me his shamma, but my kilt is soaking through it.”

“Have mine. Take off your kilt so it can dry out. You’ll have to do without shoes till we reach Adulis, I fear.” He took Telemakos by the wrist to help him unwrap his shamma; the heavy nickel ring blinked silver against Telemakos’s dark knuckles.

Priamos stared in stunned silence. At last he breathed a long, shaking sigh. When he brought himself to speak, it was in a whisper. “That is my father’s crest. That ring belonged to my father, Ras Anbessa, the Lion of Wedem.”

“So it did,” Telemakos answered in a low voice. He had not thought of that, when he took it.

“I last saw it on the hand of my elder brother, Hector, before he went to battle against Abreha in the past conflict with Himyar,” Priamos said quietly. “A dozen years ago now. Abreha’s men must have delivered it to him when Hector was killed. How have you come by it?”

“I took it from the najashi, just now, as he slept. I took it because—I don’t know why I took it. Petty vengeance, I suppose. He had—he used it to brand me. He burned the mark into the skin at the back of my neck.”

Priamos reached out a hand to tilt Telemakos’s head aside, moving so suddenly that Telemakos nearly lost the ring.

“Shine a lantern here, someone!”

Telemakos bent his head beneath the light while Priamos pushed back the wild hair.

“Mother of God. I did not believe him—Not you, boy, I did not believe Abreha. He says he does not want to release you because he has made you his heir. How should any of us believe such a fantastic tale, when all we know is that he has held you imprisoned and helpless in a tower of Solomon’s palace for two years?”

Telemakos shook his head, understanding none of this.

“Telemakos Meder, if Abreha has put this mark on you, it means he counts you as his own son.”

Telemakos jerked his head from Priamos’s grip and said sharply, “Do not mock me!”

“I don’t. Look.”

Priamos bent his own head to the light.

“Look well,” he said, and pulled his shirt away from his neck. His hair was cropped close to his skull, and the lines of the scar shone clean against his dark skin, the familiar lion’s head within the five-rayed star.

“But—” Still it meant nothing to Telemakos. “But you aren’t Abreha’s son!”

“I am Priamos Anbessa,” Priamos said quietly. “I am called lion, Anbessa, after my father, as is Abreha Anbessa. I am marked with the lion seal of Solomon as are all Ras Anbessa’s sons. The man who branded you bears the mark himself.”

“So he does.” Telemakos blinked, then nodded, falling back into Aksumite ways. “I know. But I thought…” He felt suddenly idiotic that he had not realized his full worth to Abreha. “The najashi isn’t allowed to appoint an heir without his council’s approval, and they have not tested me … Oh, but they have! That was my interrogation … And he led me to believe I was on trial for treachery!”

Telemakos stared out over the dark harbor, sending winged thoughts toward Abreha’s ship.

I did not need such proving, my najashi. I might have been more faithful if you had been kinder.

He was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.

“Can I sleep here?” he asked.

Priamos and his companions unearthed a grass mattress and an elegant, light blanket that felt like a weave of silk and wool; they left Telemakos alone with a jug of water and a jug of wine, and cold fried bread and dried dates folded in a square of linen.

He was not hungry, and once he was dry he did not need the blanket. But Telemakos could not go to sleep. He lay staring up at the sky’s familiar map of stars passing slowly and inevitably along their appointed paths. His cool, perceptive tracker’s mind began to make sense of all that Abreha had done over the last two years, and as with Anako, the overwhelming emotion that took hold of him now was not anger, or hatred, but pity.

I betrayed him before he marked me as his son. He knew, and marked me anyway.

That means he has already forgiven me.

Telemakos opened his eyes to fast-moving clouds scudding high overhead in a blue sky. He sat up.

“Ah, you have outdone your grandmother the queen of the Orcades this time, scheming young witch’s spawn,” Goewin said merrily, flying to his embrace. “I doubt if even Morgause ever knocked flat twenty-eight men with one blow. Half of them are still asleep, including our najashi, so he has not yet learned of your perfidious nature—well, perhaps he already knows.”

Goewin held Telemakos off, so she could look at him. “Heavens, don’t weep, boy.”

“I’m not. It’s the light.” Telemakos swiped at his eyes, and asked hopefully, “Is my father here, too?”

“This is not his negotiation.” Goewin was cool. “He has no business representing Britain here; that is my role in the Red Sea. Medraut is … he has no match as warrior and hunter, but he is too headstrong for true diplomacy. I have made him wait for you in Adulis, with your mother and your sister.”

“Ah, Goewin, truly? Athena, safe, with my mother and father?” Telemakos could not help himself. He burst into tears.

Goewin waited. Then she smiled at Telemakos, doing small motherly things like tucking his hair back from his face and pulling his borrowed shamma straight. She wiped his eyes with the shamma’s edge. “Shame on Ras Priamos,” she said, “taking all the credit for your deliverance last night, and not telling either one of us the other was aboard! He didn’t want to wake me—”

Telemakos saw that his aunt’s smooth, white face had become faintly lined, like his father’s but not so deeply, and that her eyes were red rimmed and blue ringed, as though she had not passed a full night’s sleep for weeks and weeks.

“—I negotiated like this with your father, over Lleu’s life, years ago,” she said. “It was a simpler battle then, good and evil clear to me, Medraut wrong and contrite, no ransom paid. God grant this is the last time I have to win freedom for the prince of Britain! If it happens again, you’re on your own, boy.”

“What’s my ransom?” Telemakos asked.

“These damned islands, of course.”

Telemakos was speechless. He gazed upward toward the black volcanic heights; the noise of the quarry was loud and busy now, and a patrol of pelicans skimmed the horizon between sea and sky.

“Are they worth so much?” he asked finally, rather awed. Goewin burst into laughter.

“Are you worth so much, you mean. Pestilent son of a demon, Gebre Meskal has entailed these lumps of rock to you to buy your freedom with.”

“What do you mean?”

Goewin held up a small linen bag, richly embroidered. She untied the silken cord that shut it.

“This,” she said, “is your symbolic right to the land here. Hold forth your hand.”

She poured into his open palm a handful of obsidian chips and slivers of polished tortoiseshell, coral beads, and pearls.

“This is yours, just now: the Hanish Islands and the wealth they offer. In truth, the islands are a gift to you. Gebre Meskal has long owed you a debt of gratitude for your service in Afar, and the warning that you sent him through your father has made him eager to repay you. The archipelago is yours by the emperor’s decree, and became yours in deed when you set foot on Hanish al-Kabir—Why, what is so gaspingly funny about it?”

Telemakos was choking with laughter. “I knew it!” he spluttered, coral and obsidian falling over his knees as the beads slipped between his fingers. “I knew it—I stood on the shore and in my heart I owned it! I stood kicking up seawater on the reef north of the prison and imagined myself king of the starfish! I knew—”

He gasped and swallowed. He had not eaten for nearly a day, and he was intoxicated with the audacity of his escape. “Anyone might do the same,” he said, more soberly but still breathless. “Anyone could stand there and feel that way. It is so beautiful. If I give it away this afternoon I will still feel like I own it. It means nothing who owns it in deed.”

Goewin gathered the spilled tokens of Hanish’s wealth into a pile. She laughed as well. “It means a little, Telemakos. It means you may buy your own freedom. It is only a formality, of course, but I thought you would like to take hold of your fate yourself when the contract with Abreha is finally sealed.

“Or,” she added slyly, “you could keep the islands, seeing as you have jumped ahead of your najashi’s plans and struck out for freedom on your own.”

“You can see Hanish from al-Muza,” Telemakos said. He held forth the rest of the handful of jewels for her to put back in the bag. “You can see the peaks. It only takes a day to reach the islands, if you sail from Himyar. Of course they should belong to the najashi. What should I gain by keeping them—a new war between Aksum and Himyar, on my account this time? God forbid me!”

“You have grown, Telemakos,” Goewin said softly. She tied shut the little bag that contained his freedom, and sat back on her heels to gaze at him. “Mercy on us, I think you must be as tall as I am. Stand up and let me see.”

They climbed to their feet together. He was the taller by a fraction. Impulsively, she gave the back of his single hand a quick, reverent kiss. “‘Beloved friend, you are so well grown now, so wise—’” She quoted the goddess Athena briefly, and laughed again, her faintly lined face made young and bright with joy. “Dear one, you cannot know what a weight has lifted from my heart this morning.”

It was late in the day before a party came paddling over to them from Abreha’s ship. The najashi’s hawri pulled alongside them and Abreha rose up on his knees, brandishing a scroll of parchment. Goewin, with Priamos firm and frowning by her side, leaned over the rail to shout at him. Her high spirits had not waned all through the hours of waiting for this moment.