The Lion Hunter

“Child, if you should ever need to tell us any private thing while you are in Himyar—I mean, anything concerning your service to the emperor, and the threats that have been made against you—do not confide in anyone there, even Abreha. And never write directly to Goewin of such things. Hide your secrets in a letter to me. Tell me that you send your love to your aunt, and encode your meaning in the sentences directly following your greeting to her. When you do this, we’ll know that we must give our deepest attention to the message you send in that letter. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Telemakos whispered. Athena pulled at their clasped hands, trying to join in the embrace.

“You must never lie to Abreha. Do you understand?”

“I won’t,” said Telemakos. He was looking forward less and less to presenting himself to the king of Himyar, whom Goewin had called a manipulative serpent.

Turunesh smiled faintly. “You look like your father when he is about to wield his surgeon’s knife, so grim and determined. Don’t be afraid. Abreha the najashi has made his court a home to any noble child whose family was taken by plague. His own children are dead, all of them, the older ones he had by his first queen and the little ones he had by his new queen. Poor man, he is fond of children. Remember his kindness to you when he met Gebre Meskal to negotiate their peace?”

Abreha had indulged him, Telemakos recalled, but so had Solomon, before he tried to eat him.

“Abreha was my father’s equal in the hunt,” Telemakos said. “He looked like Priamos, but when he took Solomon from me, the day I caught the emperor’s lions, he reminded me of Ras Meder.” Telemakos paused, dredging for his earliest memories of the Aksumite imperial court. “When Aksum was at war with Himyar, he defeated Priamos in battle and sent him home unscathed.”

“Yes. Abreha is like your father. He is a greater man than your father. He would seek justice where your father would seek revenge.”

Gently, she began to untie Athena. Released, the baby climbed into Telemakos’s lap, butting the top of her head affectionately against his chin the way the young lion did when it wanted attention.

“Here’s the satchel. There is another gown for the baby, and clean napkins, and her goatskin bottle, and the painted animals my grandfather made for you when you were born.”

The sounds of the harbor reached in to them, but dulled: the lap of water against the ship’s hull, the cry of seabirds, the rumble of carts and shouts of men. “Up,” Athena demanded of Telemakos, standing on his leg and pushing the shoulder strap of the harness Medraut had made for her against his neck. “Tena up.”

“She is so like you,” Turunesh said to Telemakos, holding Athena back as he put the sling on. “I look at her when she’s asleep, with her fists behind her head and her lips just parted, and it is like seeing you a baby again, with those curling white lashes in a face like honey wine. Ah, Telemakos Meder, you have been my soul’s joy these thirteen years. Shall I know you again when you return, striving toward manhood?”

Athena was content, as always, riding at Telemakos’s side. It did not occur to her to miss her mother as they set out. She was interested in everything: the boat that towed their ship from the harbor, the sails unfurled, turtles in the water. She sat in the lion’s crate, cuddling with Menelik; the ship’s master gave her a dozen small pieces of ivory to sort and play with. She ate happily what was available, mango and dried fish that Telemakos had to pick the bones out of with his teeth before he dared give it to her. As dark fell, Telemakos let her stand balanced on a coil of rope looking for flying fish skimming the open sea beyond the Gulf of Adulis. She watched the sparkling water with incredible patience, waiting for the fish to surface, and shrieked with surprise and delight when they did. She showed no sign of weariness.

Close to midnight Telemakos judged her to have used up all possible energy and good nature. He tried to settle her in the sleeping bay.

“Milk,” she said.

When she was tired, she wanted milk for comfort, even if it was only taken out of the goatskin.

“There isn’t any milk on the boat, Tena. Suck your fingers. Here they are—”

She pushed them away disdainfully.

“Have mine, then.”

That worked for about thirty seconds.

“Milk!”

“Hush, let’s rock awhile,” Telemakos whispered. So they did, for a few minutes, but now her clothes were damp again and she was uncomfortable, and she had not forgotten that she wanted milk.

“She’ll be happier on deck,” came the voice of one of the off-duty sailors beside them in the dark.

That meant, Some of us are trying to sleep down here. Go away.

Telemakos coaxed Athena in the direction of the cargo hold. She could not yet walk; she still went on all fours to get about. Telemakos was not certain enough of his footing on board the ship to dare to carry her without fixing her in her saddle. He went on his knees alongside her as she crept forward on hands and feet, stopping every yard or so to sit down on her sagging rump and insist, with growing urgency, “Milk. Tena’s milk.”

The cargo hold was packed with elephant tusks, some tightly roped together, others stacked behind wooden slats fixed in the ribs of the ship’s hull. Telemakos found a place to wedge himself between the bundles.

“Come sit here.”

She did not want to sit. She pulled herself up to stand against a sheaf of tusks and looked around.

“Wet,” she said.

He could have kicked himself when he realized he had left her fresh clothes at the other end of the ship. He was steadily falling prey to a faint, unrelenting seasickness and could not face the toiling journey back to get her satchel. He swore he would never become a navigator, nor ever again be responsible for keeping a baby clean.

Telemakos stripped off Athena’s pungent, clammy linens and swaddled her in his shamma. He had to keep snatching hold of her to prevent her trying to climb over the mountains of ivory. She was without direction but determined.

“Stay still, or I will throw you overboard! Do you want to go live among the sea turtles?”

She burst into fresh tears. “Bed,” she sobbed, changing her tactics. “Tena’s bed.”

“There is only my blanket, back where the sailors are sleeping, and you can only go there if you stop crying for milk!”

When the night was half done, Athena cried herself to sleep at last, despite no milk, with her head pressed hard against Telemakos’s breastbone and both hands tangled in his hair. She slept so lightly that when he tried to take her hands away, she struggled and wept. So he dozed, imprisoned, his head bent to Athena’s grip, his body caged by the cargo of ivory.

By the next midday, Athena had used up all her clean clothes, and she flatly refused to be tied into a piece of sailcloth. Telemakos considered this battle before engaging in it. He would not want his private parts bound up in thick canvas, either. Athena’s clear gray eyes glinted with intelligence and misery as he spoke to her.

“You do not have to wear it,” Telemakos said. “But this is what you have to do instead. You know what the lion does?”

For three days Athena scrambled about the deck without a stitch on, enviably indifferent to the ship’s motion. Her fair bronze skin burned in the sweltering Red Sea glare, and by the third day even the threat of the sailcloth was enough to set her screaming in outrage and fury. By the fourth day she managed on her own, as efficient as Menelik, sharing the lion’s earth box.

Telemakos did not sleep much during the voyage. The nausea kept him awake when Athena did not, and he grew irritable and nervous. He worried about the lion, moping limply in its cage. He tried, and failed, to mend a buckle that was coming loose on Athena’s harness. He practiced with his sling, aiming at the flying fish that sometimes shot like silver darts through the foam alongside the ship, then felt sorry when he accidentally hit one. He longed to have the voyage over, and to be past the first meeting with Abreha Anbessa.

On the afternoon of the fifth day at sea, the blue horizon was suddenly stabbed by two sharp mountain crags, menacing as the towering peaks of thunder clouds.

“The taller peak is Zuqar Island, and the lesser Hanish al-Kabir,” the ship’s master told Telemakos. “The black sentinels of the Hanish Archipelago.”

Telemakos stared at the twin volcanic heights, matching their silhouettes with the familiar outlines he remembered from Goewin’s maps.

“Rich pearl-fishing grounds, there,” the master said, “and a breeding ground for piracy. Zuqar is a traders’ outpost, where goods exchanged go free of the duty they would be subject to in Aksum or Himyar. The other islet, Hanish al-Kabir, is Gebre Meskal’s prison of exile.”

The master followed Telemakos’s gaze toward the ominous mountains. “Long ago, evildoers were abandoned on al-Kabir without water. Now there is a cistern and a properly administrated prison. They quarry obsidian and eat shellfish.”

Anako is there, Telemakos thought, if he is still alive. I sentenced him to exile. Is he on Hanish al-Kabir now, enduring a barren life of stonecutting and thirst? Maybe he dreams he’s watching someone hammer a nail through my heart, the way I dream he is ordering Hara to do it.

The next afternoon they were in the Himyar port of al-Muza. Telemakos stood on the white coral beach there, with Athena belted to his hip, and leaned down to peer into Menelik’s crate. His stomach swooped. After six days at sea, his sense of balance had once more been knocked awry; he caught himself on his knees to avoid falling on his face.

Athena clutched frantically at her brother’s shoulder. Her saddle was not as secure as it should be, because the slipping buckle still needed mending. Telemakos gripped the strap with his teeth and pulled hard to tighten it, then leaned close to the slats of the lion’s hutch to look at Menelik.

It was sweltering inside. The young lion, highland bred, lay curled against the wooden staves, eyes shut, panting listlessly. He was no bigger than a dog, but there was not room for him to stretch out flat.

Athena chirped at Menelik in imitation of his usual kittenish greeting. The lion’s ears pricked in acknowledgment and he blinked, but he closed his eyes again and lay quiet.

Oh, Telemakos thought in sudden panic, I want him out of here.

Tiny grains of sand were printing themselves into Telemakos’s grazed knees like a branding iron, burning hot. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted the ship’s master.

“Can I have the lion on its lead, now we’re off the ship? Can I take it to the king myself—” Telemakos remembered Abreha’s title in South Arabian. “I mean, to the najashi? I want to see the city.”

“Yes, all right,” said his grandfather’s agreeable captain. “Abreha stays in the governor’s mansion when he’s in al-Muza. Look, you can see it from here. It’s the great white house on the rise behind the city. The way is clear if you follow the principal avenues.”

Telemakos fought with the cage’s sliding bolts. The wood around them had swollen in the humid air, and Telemakos pinched his fingers getting the door open. He spat and swore.