“Telemakos is apprentice to my cartographer and astronomer, Dawit Alta’ir. We call him Athtar because it is an ancient name for the Morningstar. Eosphorus, in Greek. Lij Bitwoded Telemakos Eosphorus!”
They laughed spontaneously, and one of them clapped. Abreha laughed also. His laughter was light and merry, like a child’s; in the dark it was almost impossible to believe how stern a face he always wore. “You mustn’t be offended that we laugh. Your silver hair is luminous as the starlight, and we have been sitting here worrying over too many falling stars. It is a blessed relief to all of us to look on one just rising.
“These men are of the Ashar and Farasan tribes, here for the Great Assembly of my Federation,” Abreha continued. “And Julian is a legate from Roman Byzantium, here to observe the Assembly. You’re fluent in Latin, Morningstar, half-British as you are? You must translate for Julian. You may serve as his cupbearer during the Assembly and feast, and see that he understands all the talk. He was in Britain many years ago, as legate there when Artos was alive.”
“Thank you, my najashi,” Telemakos murmured.
“Go on, begin your calculations.”
Telemakos stared at the ethereal sky, frowning, and began mechanically passing beads across the wires of the abacus. He had forgotten what it felt like, what it sounded like, to be able to move without making a noise. He held the beads still for a minute and savored the quiet before he began to count aloud for Dawit Alta’ir.
“Two at once, just then, the trails lasting five seconds. One with a long track of twenty degrees of sky, and the other bursting like a fireball at the end of its track …”
He stared overhead, waiting for the next. Gebre Meskal’s astronomer had also been in the habit of counting random falling stars, fewer and fewer every year since Telemakos became his student. Telemakos, born of a generation too young to remember the quiet skies before the great comet of ten years ago, did not find starfire ominous, but the other watchers had fallen silent as Telemakos spoke. Their silence made him feel self-conscious, as though he were undergoing a formal examination, or a trial.
But it was such a blessed relief to have the jangling charms stopped.
“One yellow track, one silver …” For a long time there was no sound but his own voice cataloguing the shooting stars, the slip of bead and wire as he tallied the streaks and flashes, and the scratch of Dawit’s stylus in the wax. Telemakos could even hear the faint dripping of the water clock as it counted out the passing hours. Every now and then a breath of wind fluted through the open mouths of the bronze lions that guarded the scriptorium roof.
“Is it comet fire?” the Roman legate asked suddenly in low tones, when there was a lull and the soft sky lay quiet and starlit overhead.
Telemakos hesitated. The question had not been addressed to him directly, but Julian had spoken in Latin, so possibly no one else understood him.
But the najashi had once been trained as a translator. “You may answer, Morningstar,” said Abreha, speaking flawless Latin himself. “At least, you may address him without seeking my permission. Perhaps there is no answer.”
“Is it comet fire?” the legate repeated.
These were San’a’s wet months, but nothing like the wintry Long Rains now lashing the Aksumite highlands, and Telemakos was sure he had never seen such a clear night so close to his birthday. Certainly he had never seen such a display straight overhead. His neck ached from the constant craning. Straight through Cassiopeia’s obscure stars, he thought, remembering a random line of Greek poetry.
“Is it comet fire?”
It’s like when I was born, Telemakos thought. It’ll be my birth month in a few days. Mother says the stars danced when I was born. But that was before the comet.
Suddenly Telemakos knew what he was seeing.
“It’s my Perseids,” he cried in sheer unguarded delight. “It’s the ancient Perseids! Magus, could it be? There was starfall all the week that I was born, fourteen years ago! By chance we had clear skies that year, as Leo went down to meet the sun—no one’s seen the Perseids since. I’ve never seen them. It was Trinity in the last month of our winter; we’re only ten days off! Could it be the Perseids?”
“Where are they?” Dawit asked softly.
“Overhead and a little to the north, in Cassiopeia and Perseus.”
The Star Master fished in the depths of his robe and retrieved what Telemakos knew to be a worn twig of kat leaves, the mild stimulant that stained his beard pink. Dawit tore free several leaves with his teeth and began to chew.
“Aye, it could be the Perseids,” he agreed.
All around them, the men gasped and sighed in recognition and agreement and relief.
“By heaven, he may be right.”
“I never thought to see them again, the summers have been so dismal in the north, since the comet came.”
“A sign of better days, perhaps?”
The najashi chuckled softly. “‘My Perseids,’ indeed!” he echoed Telemakos, fondly mocking. “When did you become lord of the stars?”
Later, only an hour or two before sunrise, Dawit went with Telemakos back to the Globe Room and waited for him to put away the instruments and lay out the wax tablets for transcription to hardier palm stalks the next morning. “Two more weeks and you will be free of your restrictions,” Dawit commented. “I doubt not you are counting down the hours, eh, Lij Bitwoded Telemakos Eosphorus? What a great mouthful! Beloved young prince—there is no one else in all Aksum and Himyar with such a formidable title. I suppose you and I were never formally introduced, for I had not heard that spoken aloud before.”
“I don’t think I have, either,” Telemakos admitted. He stacked the tablets slowly, borne down by the weight of his name. “Not strung end to end like that, anyway. I have not been ‘beloved’ very long, only since my accident.”
It was his service in Afar that had earned him the bestowed title “Bitwoded,” not his mistake in handling the Aksumite emperor’s pet lion, but of course he could not say so.
“Well, you have worked hard for your advancement this night,” Dawit continued jovially. “Though in truth, the najashi granted it you before you had done anything.”
Telemakos looked up. Dawit was nothing but a shadow in the darkness.
“What advancement?”