Where are my parents?
All the attention tired him out more than the last day’s camel trek, and Telemakos went to bed while it was still light. Goewin came to perch at the edge of his cot as she had done all through the monsoon season.
“Peace to you, dear one,” she said. “You look exhausted.”
“I’m all right,” Telemakos said.
“You would say so. You mean you’ve not got plague, or been permanently crippled. What happened to your eyes?”
“They don’t like dust. There’s a raging sandstorm every afternoon, the Afar call it the ‘fire wind.’ It doesn’t seem to bother them.”
Goewin took his hand in hers, his right hand, and held it gently, taking great care not to touch the tips of his injured fingers. But she traced the knife’s trail etched over his knuckles and up his wrist, a hairline scab like a strand of crimson thread clinging to his brown skin. “How did you come to be taken?” she asked in a low voice.
“My water bag leaked, and I had to surrender myself. I was—I would have died of thirst, I was already dying. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I buried most of my gear before I went to the caravan, and tore my fingers up scraping in the rocks, but I didn’t even notice I’d hurt myself till after they’d given me a drink. I had to ask for help. I would have died.”
Telemakos produced this glib half-truth without any forethought. Goewin sat with her head bent, looking down at his thin hand, and if she noticed that the wounds could not be three months old she did not say anything.
“Goewin,” Telemakos asked, “Where are my mother and father?”
“Oh, Telemakos, I am so sorry! I should have told you hours ago, but I’ve been waiting all day to have you to myself. I did not like to tell you with all Helena’s ladies-in-waiting fluttering in attendance. Your parents went back to Aksum.”
“Why?”
She was so indirect in her answer that Telemakos suddenly feared one or both of them must be dead. “Why?”
Goewin opened her mouth and closed it again, like a fish. Then she hit her head with the heel of her hand. “Mercy on me, why is this so hard?” she burst out. “Your mother—your mother is expecting a baby.”
“Goewin, you jest!”
He could see that she did not. Telemakos laughed and flung his arms around her neck again. “Truly? My mother and father together?”
“Telemakos, you wicked child, of course your mother and father together. Goodness, are you really so pleased?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve heard in months!” That did not seem to do it justice, considering the last three months. “In years. The best thing ever.”
“They thought—well, who knows what Medraut thought, but your mother thought you would not like it. She thought it would seem as though she already counted you for dead, and needed to replace you. She was torn apart at the thought of your coming back here and finding her gone. Oh, the battles! Turunesh would be too heavy to travel before next winter if she did not go now, and she was ill, the heat and the mosquitoes were making her miserable. She did not want to go. But Medraut and I both thought she should—can you believe that Medraut and I were in agreement?—so he took her back to Aksum.”
“What did he say?” Telemakos asked.
“What did he say?” Goewin sounded perplexed. “What do you mean? He didn’t say anything. He never does.”
“I thought …” Telemakos sighed. “Never mind. I just hoped….”
“I know,” Goewin said gently. “But he didn’t. Though he has been so unhappy this season. In truth, I think neither one of your parents could bear waiting while train after train arrived with no sign of you—and then the word you must be captive—and Medraut could not go to you because anyone seeing him would guess who he was, and who you were—”
Goewin held Telemakos off. She asked softly, “Was it worth it?”
He found himself struggling against tears again. He swallowed, and managed to speak aloud the news he had been dreading to tell for so many weeks:
“I could not discover the Lazarus.”
Goewin grimaced a very little. Telemakos swallowed again, and could hardly talk around the choking ache in his throat; but once he began he could not stop.
“I never saw him. I knew he was there, I knew it was him, but I never saw his face or found out his name. I keep trying to remember things about him, to puzzle it out, and I can piece together nothing. He sneered all the time when he spoke, he spoke through his nose. He did not like to touch anything. He smelled like a baboon. And he was cruel. He wanted to cut off my hands.”
“You said you never saw him!”
Telemakos saw how close he was to betraying himself. “I didn’t see him. He knew I was there, and he said that if I saw him he would have my tongue out and my hands off.”
“My dear one,” Goewin murmured, and pulled him against her, holding him close. “There,” she muttered over his hair. “It was not done. It’s over.”
“You don’t understand,” Telemakos said, and it suddenly occurred to him that he could confess his failure to Goewin, that in fact he owed her his confession. “I could have seen him. But I was too much afraid, I knew he would have my hands off if I learned who he was, and I was too much a coward to risk it. And now we shall all die of plague because I was not bold enough to look on someone’s face.”
Telemakos turned his own face into Goewin’s shoulder and sobbed.
“Child,” Goewin said sorrowfully, “do you think for one moment I would have been better pleased had you returned to me with arms ending in bloody stumps, than I am to have you back whole and safe? Telemakos?”
She held him tightly while he wept.
“How could you get close enough to smell him and not see him?” Goewin whispered, and Telemakos could tell that she knew he was hiding something. What could he tell her to put her off—what else could he remember about the Lazarus—