The Lion Hunter (The Lion Hunters #4)

Dawit Alta’ir reached forward to touch the plate, running light, quick fingertips over Telemakos’s sketch.

“Neat work.”

“Thank you, Magus.”

“You manage your tools well,” Dawit commented. “You and I shall be the blind leading the lame! I have a task you may begin today. I have not been able to do it myself, and I have been loath to entrust it to an untrained artist.”

Dawit Alta’ir reached inside the cabinet again and began to take out tray after tray of inks and brushes, palm stalks covered with calculations, bone straight-edges, an abacus set, and an astrolabe in pieces. All of it was dust covered. He came to the tray he wanted and raised a small cloud blowing it clean. He and Telemakos choked together raspingly. Dawit set down the box, lifted from it one of two dozen small parcels bound in silk, and carefully removed the wrappings. Inside was yet another wax tablet made of four wooden blocks bound together with leather. Dawit opened them out like a screen and laid them across his knees.

“Can you see the map?” he asked.

Telemakos had to tilt his head this way and that to catch the faintly scratched lines. Some had been smeared or had melted back into the wax. Abreha’s lion-and-star seal was imprinted in the corner.

“Where is this?”

“That is of no consequence to you. What you are to do is to copy it, permanently, onto papyrus. I cannot see well enough to do it myself, and I dare not feel the original for fear of destroying it. Can you do such a thing?”

“I’ll try.”

“If your first draft is not good enough, make another. Every map in this box needs to be copied. Let us set out your workplace.”

With no more fuss than that, Telemakos was apprenticed. The astronomer sat next to him, apparently watching his movements, but Telemakos thought Dawit probably could not make out the detail of the drawing. He wondered who would check the task for accuracy.

Dawit interrogated him as he drew.

“Now tell me, Medraut’s son, what have you read? I take it for granted you are not one of those who believes that anyone who can predict star showers or an eclipse must be a sorcerer. Your father is an educated man. I met him in Aksum, fifteen years ago, when he was very young. He had a great collection of books that he had taken away from the Academy in Athens when Justinian closed it and sent the scholars packing. Have you read your father’s books?”

“They were all destroyed before I could read,” Telemakos answered, frowning over the blurred scratches he was supposed to copy. “They were burnt with my grandfather’s estate, in Britain, after the battle of Camlan.”

The astronomer said contemptuously, “Kings, barbarians. Tell me what you’ve read that hasn’t been burnt.”

They worked together throughout the afternoon. When Athena’s wailing began again, Dawit shouted down the hole in the floor, “Take that creature elsewhere!” After that, all was quiet on the floors below, and Telemakos wound himself in mathematics to avoid having to think about his abandoned lion and his abandoned sister.

At sundown the librarian brought them bowls of rice mixed with almonds and raisins, leaving them at the doorway as though this was routine. By the time they finished eating, they sat in darkness, but Dawit lit no lamp. A shaft of yellow light came up through the pulley hole.

Dawit crossed the floor. He did not touch the hanging crystals this time; their glitter allowed him to weave his way among them. He leaned over the shaft. His kat-stained beard glowed pale rose in the lemon light.

“Muna, all is very quiet down there.”

Telemakos could hear Muna’s answer as perfectly as if she were standing by his ear, clear but not loud.

“We have only just come up from the gardens. Rasha and I have taken all this day and a deal of physical abuse in trying to tempt this foundling to eat something, and I think it is only the opportunity to pour melted butter all down my dress that has driven her to take food from my hands. She is sitting here blinking and snorting, and in about a dozen seconds she will begin to bellow. Will it be you who spends the next hour singing her calm again while she tries to drag your hair from your scalp? My husband is home after three months, and I don’t want him to find me doing battle with our new baby when he finally finishes his plotting and comes up to greet me.”

As though they had awakened a sleeping monster, there came a wail and a rising roar from the room below.

“That baby is no foundling in any case,” Dawit said. “She has father and mother at home, and has brought her brother with her. He will settle her. Bring her up here.”

“I had not heard he was in San’a to learn to be a nursemaid.”

“By my understanding he is an accomplished nursemaid already,” Dawit threw down to his daughter. “He will soon put both of us out of work. Bring her up. I want to meet her. And you will like the boy.”

At last Dawit Alta’ir lit a lamp. Telemakos wondered how long it had been since any light had been made in this room; he could smell the dust burning off in the new flame. Five minutes later Queen Muna stood in the doorway like the apparition of a genie, faintly glittering as the light caught her. Her gown and headscarf were sage green silk figured with darker green. She wore dozens of gold bracelets and a low tiara trimmed with gold bells, so that she rustled and jingled softly as she moved. Athena sobbed and trembled in her arms, her face, buried in the queen’s shoulder.

“Ah, my Mima,” said Dawit softly. “Little mother.”

Telemakos flew to take back his sister.

“Boy! Boy! Boy!” Athena choked, turning so quickly from Muna’s shoulder to his that he did not ever see her red eyes or wet cheeks. He sat down with her on the bottom step. Her hair was plaited in elegant spirals around her head.

Muna picked her way down the steps around them and crouched, facing Telemakos. She ran her hand over Athena’s plaits. “Better now, little girl? Ah, I can see that this is the one you love the best.”

Athena looked up. Telemakos’s heart gave a lurch when he saw her painted face. The spirals of her hair continued across her cheeks and forehead, in blue. Each line ended in pinpoint leaves and star-shaped flowers. It must have been done with a hairline paintbrush. It could not be the industrious work of the girl Inas.

Still sniveling a bit, Athena said to Muna, “Go away.” Then she pointed to the ceiling and said, “Stars.”

Telemakos bowed his head politely. “My lady Queen, your artistry is exquisite.”

“Would I did so well as wife and mother,” she answered sadly.

Telemakos glanced at her, hiding his curious gaze as he did habitually beneath his bent brow, and saw her Socotran eyes fixed on him. They were lighter than his own. They seemed green, like pale jade, but that could have been the reflection of her green gown. They might easily be blue or gray.

“Everything is strange to us here,” Telemakos said. “Athena will learn to like it.”

“They all do. I am mother to them all.” There was the faintest hint of bitterness in her lovely voice. “But perhaps Athena would like to stay with you tonight.”

She commented to the Star Master, “They’re like their father, aren’t they, Medraut’s children. And like their kinsman Gwalchmei.”

“I thought you’d see it,” Dawit answered gruffly.

Dawit left the lamp burning when he escorted Muna downstairs to her husband’s apartment. Athena stood among the silk rugs on Telemakos’s mattress, gripping the curving stonework of the eastern windows, wavering unsteadily on her toes. She would not stand without support.

“Come, Tena, we can play now.” Telemakos settled next to her. “Look at my cross staff. We can measure the angles to the Magus’s hanging stars.” Athena reached for it as he held it to his eye. “Wait.”

He set his line of sight on Sirius, big and bright in the flickering lamplight, easy to read. Athena rattled the crosspiece back and forth along the staff.

“All right—slide that toward me. That’s right—now stop. Stop!”

She snatched at the staff again, but not before Telemakos had read the angle.

“Well done, little Tena,” he said softly, and let her have the crossed pieces of bone to play with. The water clock that crowned the pinnacle of the dome above them chimed the late hour; Telemakos blew out the lamp. Outside in the dark sky the real stars hung radiant. From the floor below came the faint twitter of the caged birds settling for the night, and from farther away, the floating sound of a single flute.

It is nice here, Telemakos thought, but everyone seems unhappy. Or discontented. I wonder what those maps are for, the maps I have to copy.

When Dawit Alta’ir wanted to chew kat, he threw his apprentice out among the orphaned Scions. Telemakos sat with them at lunch, beneath the songbirds, studying his most recent letter from Goewin while the little girls rolled oranges back and forth with Athena. She played amiably with the other children now and called them all by name. She called Muna and her companion Rasha by name as well. Telemakos had not heard Athena call anyone “mama” since they had left Adulis.

He was happy to let someone take over Athena’s attention for the moment, because Goewin’s letter puzzled him. It seemed to begin abruptly as though she were picking up a continuing conversation. The lion pit was being dug out to give Solomon and Sheba more room; Goewin described the work as though Telemakos already knew about it.

He had heard from her only twice before. Even allowing for the overland journey and the occasional post going astray, after three months and more in San’a, Telemakos thought it time Goewin’s promised letters began to catch up with him. His father did not write to him either, but this did not surprise him. Letters arrived at least once a week from his mother, and it was already a month past Epiphany. Telemakos could not understand the lack of attention from Goewin. She had said she would write every week.

I wonder if someone opened this before it reached me, Telemakos thought, rereading Goewin’s chatty tale of the emperor’s lions for the fifth time. He could see the mark of her seal, but it had come off. He turned the page over and over, trying to find some hidden meaning in her odd, wrong-handed, spidery script.

Maybe someone is censoring her letters. Maybe that sunbird-killer is hoping to find intrigue in the British ambassador’s messages. Maybe someone is taking her letters and keeping them.

Oh, Telemakos thought, I am safe out of it, but I am so far away. How can I warn Goewin of anything? It takes three months, a whole season, for her to write to me and receive an answer.

“Morningstar,” said Shadi, the obedient young tribal king. Telemakos looked up and realized that Shadi was talking to him, and had said the name twice already. Dawit used it so freely that Muna and now the children had picked it up as well, but Telemakos was not used to it.

“How did you learn to move in such catfoot quiet?” Shadi asked. “You don’t even make a noise turning the pages. I would not know you were here if I couldn’t see you.”

Telemakos laughed. “My father is quiet,” he answered. “I must have learned from him. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to speak. He wouldn’t have taken me hunting if I’d ever made a noise. I used to hunt with him, before my accident.”