Telemakos gave a disbelieving snort. “That’s as likely as the sprouting of a new arm!”
“You’re not his blood kin,” Sofya said, and her face was serious now. “But you are heir to the house of Nebir,” and you have the unspoken endorsement of the queen of queens. All her own sons are useless or dangerous. Do you see? It makes you a favorite, Beloved Telemakos. ‘Beloved’ is a title. Did you think it was an endearment?”
This was, in its own way, as chilling as any hyena’s head in the palace kitchens.
“I had not thought about it,” Telemakos said faintly.
“It was my father’s title,” said Sofya. “Ras Bitwoded Anbessa, the beloved prince Lionheart. When the emperor calls you ‘Beloved Lionheart’ it puts everyone in mind of my father, who was chief counselor to the emperor Caleb, before Gebre Meskal was born.
“Ah me,” she added caustically. “I am sorry to make you have to think so hard.”
Telemakos, used to her insults, glared fixedly down at Solomon. “Well, I see now why no one will let me touch a spear. I might perhaps arrange a royal hunt, go kill a lion and prove myself a worthy rival to the kingship, and have to be imprisoned somewhere.”
“You look like Ras Meder again,” Sofya said. “Your sister will think it is acceptable behavior to scowl at anyone who tries to instruct you—”
“Oh!” Telemakos gasped in sudden delight. “There they are!”
The lioness Sheba had paced away to stretch. The three cubs had been sleeping close against her, curled together in an intertwining ball of golden fluff. Telemakos had never seen lions so small and new.
“Look, look, Tena,” he whispered, gazing at them in rapture, and it was only after Sheba had come back and sat on them again, as though they were eggs in a nest, that Telemakos realized Sofya had been watching him all the while through narrowed eyes, as intent on him as he had been on the lion cubs.
“It is true that I have missed your company,” she said softly. “I am sorry to be going away in such a little while.”
Two of Sheba’s babies died within a week of their birth. Telemakos was in agony over the state of the remaining kit, until the morning Nezana called at Grandfather’s gate with the thin, faintly breathing scrap of fur sleeping in a basket.
“The emperor Gebre Meskal asks if Telemakos Meder will raise this cub for him,” the lion keeper requested formally. “There is no one better able to manage such a task.”
“I should like a word with the emperor Gebre Meskal,” Medraut told him in the silken serpent’s voice that made you want to run and hide.
But Grandfather unexpectedly threw in his support with Telemakos. They stood in the courtyard arguing while the lion, scarcely old enough to blink, lay quietly starving in its basket.
“I would not care if Gebre Meskal were emperor of Rome,” Medraut said coldly. “He will ask my permission before he offers my son so mocking and dangerous a gift.”
“He has already asked my permission,” Grandfather said gruffly, “and the child is my heir. It is not a gift, and it is only for a short time, to save the creature’s life. If the cub lives, Gebre Meskal will send it to Himyar when the quarantine ends, as a token of esteem to his cousin the king Abreha Anbessa. It will be gone from here before it drops its milk teeth.”
Medraut capitulated ungraciously.
“It had better be.”
He and Telemakos made a bed for it in an empty stall of Kidane’s stables.
“When you were trod on by a stag and broke every bone in your body, and smashed your hand to splinters, no one stopped you going hunting again,” Telemakos pointed out to his father.
“I was more than twice your age. I made my own decisions.”
“But you must have been more careful afterward. Didn’t it change the way you hunt? I’ll never make my great mistake twice.”
Medraut sighed. He answered wryly, “In truth, I took no lesson from it at all. So you are already in advance of me.”
“It’s only a little lion,” Telemakos assured him.
They called it Menelik, after the son of King Solomon and the queen of Sheba.
It was such a loving and doglike creature that it was soon allowed to roam about the villa as it pleased. Watching the lion, Athena began to walk on all fours, like a cat, instead of crawling. Legs splayed slightly to keep her body level, she scampered about the house in a sort of intermediate step between crawling and walking. She was very fast.
She was like Menelik in other ways too. You could amuse them both, easily, with the same bells and balls and bits of string. They played a game together in which Athena sat on a small rug in the lobby, calling to the young lion in perfect imitation of his own soft chirps, until Menelik came pelting through the reception hall to throw himself onto the rug. Then they would both go skidding across the floor in a tangle of wool and fur and springing uncombed hair. A good deal of Telemakos’s winter was spent in retrieving the carpet. Their mother played, too, calling to Menelik, spreading the carpet out for them, helping to untangle Athena.
Medraut did not play. He sat quietly, with his knees drawn up to his chest, keeping an eye on the lion. And he watched Turunesh. Telemakos thought he looked hungry, watching her, as though he were feeding on her laughter.
She still seemed tired, but she was no longer half asleep.
One night toward winter’s end, Medraut came into the house late from some errand and found his children and wife and sister and Menelik all asleep in the sitting room, where Goewin had been reading aloud to them, with the oil lamp still wastefully burning. Medraut woke them, tossed the sleeping baby carelessly over his shoulder, and ushered Telemakos to bed, scolding him all the while for leaving the lion loose.
“There you are, princess,” Medraut said to Athena, putting her down gently in a corner of Telemakos’s bed. “Keep your brother company so he doesn’t wake us all with his evil dreams.”
Telemakos leaned his cheek against her round, warm back and took a deep breath of her odd, dry-forest-floor baby smell.
If I had not had my accident, Telemakos thought, I would not have had so much time or attention to spend on Athena, and maybe she would not love me as she does. And I would give my soul to have her love. I would give my soul to save her life. Maybe my arm was a small sacrifice.
A year ago, he thought, exactly a year ago, I was dying. Surely the worst is past me now.
VII
THE GATES THROWN WIDE
SUMMER CAME EARLY. BRIGHT yellow highland asters flooded the banks of Mai Barea. The fields above the city were so thick with them that the New Palace seemed to float in an ocean of gold. Telemakos went out, with Athena riding in her harness and the small lion trotting at the end of a lead ahead of them. Last year at this time, Telemakos had been in bed, and the year before that, in the coastal city of Adulis, so it was three years since he had seen the Meskal daisies in bloom.
The highways teemed with traffic, for the quarantine was over. It had been lifted when the rains ended, three weeks before the new year began. Telemakos took Athena to the Avenue of Thrones, where children and beggared veterans watched an unfamiliar and astonishing parade of foreigners and foreign goods arriving in the city. Gedar’s two younger boys were there, waiting anxiously for their father.
“Come and let your sister try her teeth on this!”
“Eon! Eon!” Athena cried. She knew all the neighbors’ names, though she still would or could not say “Telemakos.”
You Jezebel, thought Telemakos jealously, and joined the neighbors’ children where they sat on the highest step of the platform supporting one of the ceremonial granite thrones. Japheth and Eon were so smitten with Athena that Telemakos was forced to forgive them their traditional rivalries. Telemakos found Japheth to be grudgeless and generous and a useful source of information.
“Big brother Sabarat’s given me spending money,” Japheth said. “He guides the spice merchants to the markets and helps them find lodging.” He lifted a handful of toasted kolo grain from a sack and let it trickle back through his fingers. “Have some!”
In this way Telemakos was the first of Kidane’s household to know when Gedar came home at the start of the new year, wearing an embroidered shamma of finely woven cotton and leading a laden mule. The mule’s burden included two sacks of mail directed to various members of the house of Nebir.
Grandfather and Goewin sorted through their mail together in the reception hall. Goewin sat on the floor amid a sea of parchment, tearing open letters with unsteady hands, sobbing and chuckling and scrubbing absently at tears. Grandfather’s letter opening was more sober; he worked at a writing table and filed his receipts into baskets.
“What’s all this?” Telemakos asked, unbuckling the straps that held Athena’s saddle at his side. He knelt and let Athena climb out of her harness. She moved nimbly, her arms and legs smooth and slender. She had never been chubby; at just over one year old, she already looked like a small girl rather than a baby.
“Mercy on us, not in the middle of the post!”
Telemakos snatched Athena up again. She might be a small girl, but she was getting big for him to lift easily. She reached for the palm scrolls and crackling parchment, bright with seals and ribbons.
“Here, have these,” Goewin said, sifting through documents to find something she could spare. “Rubbish.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Priamos wrote to me every week during the quarantine. Every week.” They had not seen Priamos Anbessa for seven years. Priamos was the emperor’s cousin and Sofya’s older brother, the Aksumite ambassador to Britain. Telemakos remembered him as kind and frowning, a gentle, humorous man with an unaccountably angry face. Goewin had no dearer friend.
“In the beginning he wrote every two or three days,” Goewin said. “I think there must be two hundred letters here.”
“Is he all right?”
“As of last season. There’s nothing less than three months old. Look, Telemakos, my love, he’s sent a letter to you as well.”
Telemakos could not take it because he was still reining Athena back. She reached for the letter.
“Sit on my knee then, Tena. Here, I’ll open it and you can hold it while I read.”
“Goodness, you’re training her well.”
“She’s harder work than the lion, I can tell you.”
Telemakos read slowly, shaping the words silently with his lips.
“They’re all alive!” he said joyfully.
“Well, the high king and his Comrades are alive. Listen to Constantine’s tale.”
Telemakos sat folding his letter for Athena to unfold, as Goewin pieced together for him Britain’s own story of quarantine and plague. Page after page gave up a harrowing account of the high king Constantine’s four-month self-imposed imprisonment on his island fortress in Dumnonia.
“Half of Britain is destroyed,” Goewin finished grimly, picking up another letter. “But Constantine has saved himself and his court. He did not save his wife and two young children. I do not know if I could have been so ruthless.”
