The Lion Hunter

“What, I just go? On my own? I thought San’a was three weeks’ trek into the Arabian mountains! Won’t it take me half a season to get there? How did you make my father agree to that?”



“Abreha is in his port at al-Muza until Epiphany. Your father will take you as far as our own port in Adulis. You know you’ll be safe with him; he’ll travel by night and keep you away from the road if he has to. He’ll put you on board one of your grandfather’s merchant ships. When you arrive in Himyar, you’ll take your recommendations and Abreha’s lion and present yourself at the governor’s mansion in al-Muza. Abreha will see you on to San’a.”



Goewin rapped her fingers against a sealed letter that lay alongside Telemakos’s drawings and instruments. “We’ve made all ready. You’ll leave tomorrow night.”



“What are you doing with my things?”



“Packing them. What are you doing up here?”



Her white face was so pale she looked unearthly. Her eyes seemed depthless pools of black water, and the skin around them had a tight, bruised look to it.



“I think I heard you crying,” Telemakos said. “I can’t remember what woke me, but I think I must have heard you. And then I could not get back to sleep.”



“I know how it is. I could not even make myself undress, the day that salt-doll thing was left on the doorstep. I sat awake all night long.”



“Goewin, what happened to Hara?”



She turned over Telemakos’s map. Beneath it lay another, the same constellations, with the Scorpion outlined and highlighted, and behind that lay another elaborate scorpion pricked out in stars.



“He fled Aksum with his final contraband load of salt,” Goewin said, “so he may be alive and free somewhere, and perhaps he is now in this city, sending us a regular delivery of dead birds.” She thumped a fist against Telemakos’s maps. “Mother of God, Telemakos, I wish I knew.”



“He wasn’t really the kind of man who tried to frighten you,” Telemakos said. “He just barked out orders to have you whipped if you did something wrong, and carried on with his own business. He wasn’t as frightening as Anako. Anako liked to watch people being hurt.”



Telemakos crossed the room and sat down at his aunt’s feet, pressing close to her with his left side against her skirts. She laid one hand on his ruined shoulder, paging through his maps with the other.



“Maybe you should send me to Britain,” Telemakos suggested, thinking with envy of Sofya. She, too, might have earned the hatred of the salt pirates, but as Britain’s new Aksumite ambassador, she was already safe away while the dust cleared. “Grandfather said this morning that I am the long-lost heir to Artos the Dragon.”



Goewin stopped his mouth with her hand. “That is not exactly what he said. You should treat that possibility as if it were as secret and dangerous as your work for the emperor. Never speak of it.”



She tapped his lips in warning and took her hand away.



“Does Abreha know who I am—I mean, what I am?” Telemakos asked. “Are you going to tell him the real reason I am there?”



“You mean, will I tell him Gebre Meskal’s spy needs a place to hide?”



Telemakos bowed his head. He bit nervously at the misshapen, rippling nails of his maimed fingers.



“Abreha does not know what you are,” Goewin said. “The najashi, the king of Himyar, is a kind man, but I have never met a more manipulative political serpent. Abreha must never know what you are.”



Telemakos said nothing, worrying the blunted nails.



“The emperor thinks these threats are not pointed at you,” Goewin continued, and gently pulled Telemakos’s ringers away from his mouth. “He thinks someone gleaned your name—not your real name, of course, but your secret name—as a code word from an intercepted message and is trying to use it to scare us without knowing its real meaning. It is outdated code, after all; two years have passed since you were in Afar. They may be trying to beat us out, to trick us into revealing ourselves.” She paused. “They may think it is my name.”



“They may think they can learn your name from me,” Telemakos whispered. “They do in my dreams.” He shuddered, his fingers at his mouth again.



“God forgive me,” Goewin said, casting her face into her fists, with her elbows against Grandfather’s desk. “I even figure in your nightmares.” She pushed the papyrus leaves aside. Fanciful scorpions scattered over Telemakos’s lap. “Just look at these.”



“I should have done them in wax and rubbed them out after. They are a waste of paper.”



“I have destroyed you,” Goewin said.



Telemakos glanced over his shoulder at his aunt and saw her eyes brimming with tears again.



“Your father can blame Solomon, you can blame Hara or Anako, but I blame no one but myself. I sent you to Afar. I knew what might happen if you were caught, and I sent you anyway. Look at these.”



She held up a scorpion of stars in either hand. On both sheets the star Antares, the scorpion’s heart, was so fiercely drawn it pierced the pages through. Lamplight winked through one of the holes as Goewin put the pages down.



“You are enspelled, Telemakos. You are imprisoned under a dreadful sorcery that I myself have laid, and that I have no earthly power to undo. I’m confounded and damned if I know how to undo it.”



Telemakos said nothing. He pressed a papyrus sheet beneath his foot and reached down to tear it carefully into strips.



“If the men who tormented you were dead,” Goewin asked, watching Telemakos’s slow destruction of the scorpion he had drawn, “would you rest easier?”



Telemakos rolled the shredded map into a ball.



“Please stop biting and tearing at things, Telemakos, it makes me want to tie you down. Look, here is something for you to fidget with. I have a present for you.”



Goewin lowered an open case onto the floor at his feet. It held a bone cross-staff such as navigators use to work out the angles between stars.



“It’s mine,” Goewin said. “It was my mother’s. Our steward sent it to me, with some of her things, when it was decided I would stay on in Aksum.”



Telemakos ran his ringers along the finely etched marks across the staff’s bone surfaces. The crosspiece slid smoothly, or could be fit into a series of minute notches. Telemakos lifted the staff from the box and held it carefully to his eye, as though he were sighting up the ceiling lamp. The instrument was light enough that he could hold it steady, but he could not hold it up one-handed and also slide the crosspiece. He set it down.



Goewin closed the cross-staff inside its case and laid it in the open box on the desk, alongside Telemakos’s rules and stylus.



“You are good at keeping yourself inconspicuous,” she said. “But your veins run with the blood of kings, and your mind is filled with the secrets of an empire. You are like a lamp burning quietly by itself in a dark room. Sooner or later someone is going to exploit your radiance…”



Her words trailed off.



“…again,” she finished softly.



Telemakos got to his knees and knelt before his aunt. She turned to face him. “Will you write to me?” Telemakos asked.



“Every week,” Goewin promised. “As Priamos does to me.”



She pressed her fingertips against his chest.



“You said once that I am your Mentor, your Athena. I wish I was, Telemakos; I wish I could give you the protection of a goddess, and watch over you disguised as a bird or an old man, and magically turn aside the blows aimed at you. But all I can do is wait and hope, like a mother who sees her sons off to war. Wait and hope, as I did while they took your arm off. I held my hand over your heart all through that final morning, so I could warn the surgeons of its faltering.”



“Did it falter?”



“Not once.” She laid her firm hand over his heart again, to show how she had done it. “Nor will it falter now. Fly free, my brave one, my sunbird. Take back the sky. Do not be afraid.”



IX



THE HANISH ISLANDS



AS THEY LOADED THE pack mules for the overland journey to Adulis, Medraut did something Telemakos could not remember ever having seen him do. He took Turunesh’s hands and held them pressed between his own, gently, gently.



“You want them both to go.” Medraut’s voice was quiet. “Are you sure?”



“It will undo a year’s healing to part them.”



Medraut nodded. He still held Turunesh’s hands in his. Her shoulders shook. She drew breath and drew herself up.



“I know I cannot go on with them to Himyar. What mother comes along to dote on her son in his first apprenticeship? But I can see him safely away,” Turunesh said levelly. “I have business in Adulis. My uncle is archon there. Telemakos and I have stayed in the governor’s house before. If we travel as a family, we will be less likely to draw attention to the child’s escape.”



The journey down the switchback mountain roads should have taken a fortnight from Aksum; at the punishing pace Medraut set, they made Adulis in ten days. Turunesh and Telemakos took it in turns to carry Athena. They stopped by day away from the road, or by night in the homes of people Turunesh knew. No one troubled them.



In the hour before Telemakos left Adulis, Medraut stood with Telemakos on the scorching quay at Gabaza Harbor, resting his hands on his son’s shoulders, and went one final time through his farewell litany.



“You are not to uncage that lion while you are on the ship. You must keep it on a lead until it is in Abreha’s hands. And should you—should your shoulder trouble you, there is opium in the locked coffer with your allowances and recommendations. I have written to Abreha myself about the opium, for I do not trust you to use it at need.” Medraut held Telemakos at arm’s length, gazing at him searchingly, his hard, drawn face shadowed by a pained mix of love and fear. Telemakos lowered his eyes in respect.



“You know how to administer the opium,” his father said.



“I’ve no need for opium.”



“Then keep it carefully, you stubborn young ascetic,” Medraut said. “Perhaps the need will come in another guise.”



He raised his head and gazed toward Turunesh, who stood speaking to the ship’s master with Athena tied to her hip. Her face, too, was lined with strain. Medraut looked away from her, wincing. He held his son’s jaw cupped between his hard hands and kissed Telemakos on the forehead.



Turunesh took Telemakos on board, and the crew left them alone in the narrow sleeping bay below the deck to bid goodbye to each other. Athena, riding at her mother’s side, looked about her with interest. There was no room to stand upright, so Turunesh sat cross-legged on the floor of the hold and patted the planking beside her in an invitation to her son to join her there. He nestled lovingly against her side opposite Athena.



“Telemakos, my love,” Turunesh began, and stopped. She sucked in a choking breath and began over again: “Telemakos—”



He caught his mother’s hand and held it against his cheek. Turunesh did not weep aloud, but tears began to leak from the corners of her eyes. Her other hand, the one he was not clinging to, combed absently through Athena’s curls. Turunesh swallowed, and spoke in a low voice.