The Sunbird

“Do you excuse me, lady,” the emperor finished, and suddenly sank his head in his hands, like the butler. Telemakos glanced upward for a moment and saw the emperor’s face wet with tears.



“Deire is lost,” Gebre Meskal repeated. “It is as though I have cut off my hand to save my body from infection. I weep for Deire, White Deire of the south.”



Telemakos thought of Anako, Deire’s heartless and greedy archon. It seemed perfect justice that he should perish in pestilence. But what of all his company, the hapless porter Butala, the haughty young animal keeper and his black caracal, the rest of them? Plague would not pick and choose the good from the bad; there was no justice in plague, neither good nor evil. Plague was inhuman.



Gebre Meskal turned to the weeping Ferem. “Go, you may go.” The old man crept out quietly. Gebre Meskal continued to speak to Telemakos’s mother:



“If Deire is destroyed, I fear for Adulis, my second city, the glittering port of black basalt. Who subverted my rule in the south will sensibly move north. Perhaps the sacrifice of Deire may instruct the traitors; but I, too, have learned from this. I shall watch Adulis with care and with secrecy, from without and from within.”



Then the emperor asked Turunesh a strange question.



“Tell me, Woyzaro Turunesh, would you be afraid to visit your uncle Abbas, the archon in Adulis, knowing there might be risk of plague there through practice of a black market in white salt?”



“Your Majesty—” Turunesh hesitated. “Majesty, I don’t think it would worry me. If Adulis fell to plague, Aksum herself would not be far behind. There would be no escaping it. We have all the Great Valley and the Salt Desert between us and Deire, but Adulis is our sister city.”



“I think so too. I’m glad you are so fearless,” said the emperor. “Perhaps one day soon Lij Telemakos will want to see Adulis.”



“What if…” Telemakos asked his mother, “what if someone asked you to do something, something important and exciting, and you did not want to do it?”



“What are you up to?” she asked.



“Not a thing.”



“Ah, not a thing.” Turunesh sighed. “Good. I’m glad. Help me with this one.” They were caging white doves in a big basket, three dozen of their own pet doves, as alms to the Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion. This was the first time the quarantine had affected Telemakos personally: he had to sacrifice his doves so that Aksum’s less fortunate might make sin offerings of them. Telemakos was sorry to see them go. But he was much better at catching the doves than his mother, so he had to help pack them. It felt like a cruel betrayal, coaxing his pets from their niche homes in the sunlit wall of the courtyard, stroking their downy breasts to gentle them still, then letting his mother truss their wings so they could not escape as she laid them in the hamper, ready for some devout sinner to wring their necks and drain their blood.



“Why must we give these away?” Telemakos asked. “Why not buy some more at market and make a donation of them?”



“They don’t earn their keep. I can’t justify feeding grain to fat and lazy birds, when Gedar in the villa across the way is having to sell his horses to buy tef flour. If the quarantine goes on a year or two, he will end by selling his house.”



“Will we have to sell our horses? Or our house?”



“I doubt it. We don’t depend on olive oil from Himyar to pay for our food, like Gedar. We can move to the estate in Adwa, and grow our own tef, if need be.”



“Then why do the doves have to go, if we can afford to keep them?” Telemakos persisted.



“Because,” his mother said firmly. “Because it isn’t fair.”



All the while they were speaking, Telemakos held a betrayed dove securely between his hands, while his mother bound fast its wings.



“Get rid of the parrots. I don’t like the parrots, they bite. I like the doves.”



“No one sacrifices parrots,” Turunesh said. “We’ll let them go.”



Telemakos thought it wholly unjust that the doves, which were sweet-natured and soft-voiced, were to be bound and slain, and their bodies burned; while the parrots, which were bad-tempered and noisy, got set free.



His mother had not forgotten his original question. “Tell me about this ‘not a thing’ that you don’t want to do,” she said. “Is it a dare from another boy? Have you found a playmate at last?”



Telemakos made a point of keeping quiet about the difficulties he had with other children. “I don’t play,” he said scornfully.



“O silent tracker of lions,” his mother teased, “I did not mean to insult you. I worry that you are lonely.”



Telemakos laughed in surprise. “I am never lonely.” He bent over another caught dove, whistling and cooing.



“You have no best companion.”



“So I have. Goewin is my best companion.”



His mother laughed in turn. “Telemakos, that is not what I mean. As you know. But what’s your challenge, sweet heart, that you don’t like? And who’s challenged you?”



Telemakos answered seriously, “I can’t tell you who. I’m no tale-teller; and I can’t tell you what it is, either.” He went back to the niches in the wall to trap another dove. He was beginning to be sorry he had said anything.



“If you will hide the heart of the matter, sweet one, I can’t give you the best advice. But let me ask you this: Why don’t you want to do this thing? Is it a game? Is it silly? Is it pointless?”



“I said it was important, and it is.”



“Will it harm anyone? Help anyone? Will good or evil come of it? Do not answer, ask yourself. Is it something you shouldn’t do, or something you don’t want to do?”



“I think it is something I should do,” Telemakos said slowly. “But I don’t want to.”



“Why not, then?” Turunesh took the fluttering dove from his hands.



Telemakos waited until she had finished with the bird, then pressed himself close against her to make his mother hold him. He stood clasped in her arms, looking down at the imprisoned doves, and whispered, “I am afraid to do it.”



Turunesh spoke calmly, her voice normal and matter-of-fact as she stroked his hair. “Can’t someone else do it, then?”



“I don’t think so,” Telemakos answered, and tried to speak as calmly as Turunesh. “Not so well as I could, anyway.”



She laughed at him, and held him close. “What if you weren’t afraid?”



“I’d do it.”



She let go of him, and set the lid on the basket. “Thank you for helping me, Telemakos. I know it makes you sad to lose these friends.”



“It’s all right. I’d rather do it myself than hide and sulk and make someone else do a nasty job in my place.”



Telemakos suddenly felt the strength in his knees turn to water. He had to kneel and lay his head on the lid of the basket, stricken. “Oh.”



His mother knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder and the other on his hair again. “Sweet heart, my little one, I’m so sorry.”



He let her think he was mourning for the doves. But that was not what had struck him down. It was hearing himself speak aloud what he would have to do.



V



IN THE LION’S DEN



“ …. in the palace now. My mother knows nothing of this. No servants either.”



2:452–53



LEARNING THE SCHEDULE OF the emperor’s council was easy. Telemakos had only to lean casually outside the door to Grandfather’s study on a few occasions, and to lie among the oil jars in the antechamber to Grandfather’s reception hall.



Getting into the council room in the New Palace was not so simple. The door was always guarded, but once Telemakos knew when the bala heg convened, before and after their meetings he was able to slip in with the butlers. He could even manage this without having to hide, by scavenging broken buns from the trays that were set out for the council’s refreshment; the guards and butlers tolerated him begging at their heels because he was familiar, and because they knew he was vaguely royal. It was tempting to take advantage of this ease of access, but Telemakos did not dare seem particularly interested in any one room.



He spent an entire day pestering a couple of cleaners, following them all over the New Palace, and so made his most valuable discovery regarding the council room: it had a latrine with a slotted window backing over one of the training yards. Telemakos stood on the waste box, surreptitiously, and easily slipped his head and shoulders through the window. It would have been too narrow for a grown man. Telemakos pulled his head back inside and looked up. The walls were close enough to climb if you leaned your back against one and braced your legs against the other; the ceiling was low. There was a ledge high along the wall behind the waste box, and when Telemakos reached up to explore it, he felt a little wind play about his hands. The ledge led to a chimney that was somehow connected to the closet above.



Telemakos jumped lightly to the floor. No one was paying any attention to him. He took hold of the curtain that separated the council room from its antechamber and flapped it back and forth exuberantly.



“You want to give this a good dusting,” he said to the cleaners.



He discovered that the privy window was guarded from without only when the council was in session, presumably to stop anyone listening beneath it. The window was set in the outside wall at thrice Telemakos’s height. There was a ledge at the level of the room’s floor that ran beneath the window, beneath the screened window of the council room itself, and at last, beneath another window twenty feet farther along.



It can’t be so simple, Telemakos thought. Surely they guard that entrance. Why, an assassin could climb up there and hide in the chimney—



Not unless he were a dwarf. They’re well guarded against other men, against one another. But they have no fear of children.



Telemakos needed to be sure he could do it, and he thought he needed at least two days in the New Palace to put the entire plan into practice. When next his father appeared and seemed to show interest in taking him hunting, Telemakos told him that he could not escape his new instruction in Noba. He did plan to attend these lessons, partly because he did not like to lie to his father, and partly because it would give Telemakos a reason to be at large in the New Palace. He told his mother that he was hunting with Medraut, an untruth so easy it felt unfair. Medraut would never tell Turunesh otherwise, and she would never ask him; and Karkara, the Noba tutor, would surely not complain to anyone that Telemakos had in fact turned up for a lesson.



Telemakos needed days alone. He did not want the pressure of having to sneak or wheedle his way out of the palace after the gates were closed for the night, and he needed darkness to test and enact his plan.



In darkness Telemakos made his way through the dim furnishings of the deserted audience chamber next to the council room. He wound his shamma around his waist, tying it out of his way, and crawled out the window. In darkness he edged himself across the ledge above the training yard, until he gained the narrow air vent to the council’s latrine; he crawled through the opening and into deeper darkness.