Telemakos scratched into a wax tablet:
Abreha ignored the quarantine.
He was the smugglers’ chieftain and championed the unfair exchange in salt.
He seeks—
He seeks me, Telemakos thought, chewing at his knuckles again. He’s hunting down the emperor’s spies. The najashi does not know it, but the ruin of his smuggling ring at the Afar mines was all my doing. What shall I say he seeks? One of my code names—sunbird, harrier, python?
Telemakos heard in memory the quiet voice of Aksum’s young emperor Gebre Meskal, murmuring at his ear: No man must ever know the true name of my sunbird.
Telemakos could not write his secret name. He could scarcely bring himself to speak it aloud anymore, not since the day when they had found a real sunbird nailed to the gate of his grandfather’s house like a curse or a sacrifice; and anyway, Telemakos did not dare to flourish Aksumite imperial code in a letter the najashi would read. He wrote simply:
Abreha seeks Gebre Meskal’s secret keeper from that time.
I’ll break these phrases apart, he thought, and hide the words among a lot of other nonsense, and give Goewin some clue how to pick up the key words. What if I try to put two words of my message after each mention of Athena’s name?
He rubbed out a few words to make his challenge briefer.
And then when I have to read the thing aloud to the najashi, Telemakos decided, I’ll make up something outrageous to say at the end that I haven’t really written, to distract him from the real message.
Telemakos shivered. For a moment he put his head down on the worktop, resting his cheek against the cool and shining ebony and rubbing at his burning eyes. If Abreha caught on to the damning encoded message, he would bring out the parchment folded in his sash, break the mark of Solomon and discard the telltale strands of Telemakos’s thick hair that were threaded through the page, and pass the execution order on to his lieutenant.
Could I argue coincidence if he accuses me of duplicity? Telemakos considered, and read over again his etched words:
Abreha ignored quarantine
championed unfair exchange
Abreha seeks Gebre Meskal’s secret keeper
There is no idiot alive who would believe this is coincidence, once he worked it out, Telemakos thought grimly. I had better get it right.
It took him three days to put it together. All the time he worked on it, he was scarcely able to make himself eat, he was so sick with the dread of having to present it to Abreha.
“Drop that,” Dawit Alta’ir, the Star Master, barked at him as Telemakos wrote. Dawit slapped the stylus from Telemakos’s grip. The alarm bells chattered. “You are ruining that tablet.”
Telemakos had been plowing furrows through the wax, lost in the composition of a sentence that he did not yet dare to write down. Dawit might be nearly blinded by cataracts, but the grooves Telemakos had made in the tablet laid bare the wood beneath, making deep, dark streaks that anyone could have seen from across the room.
“Put your work away. You may wipe the dust off the things in the compass cabinet. That will give you something to do with your body and free your mind to wander.” Dawit picked a kat leaf out of his wild beard, nibbled at it, and spat it out. Telemakos swallowed a sigh; it was one of his duties to keep the floor clean.
“Your pardon, Magus,” Telemakos murmured, trying to shovel the wax back into place.
They had diplomatically set aside the work of preserving what Abreha called the Plague Tablets, the unfinished maps of the disputed Hanish Islands. Telemakos dreaded being asked, or compelled, to complete the project that would bring about war between Aksum and Himyar. He did not know how he could bring himself to do it faithfully, or without dragging out the work to excessive lengths to buy time, and it was an immense relief when Dawit Alta’ir set him to other tasks.
When his letter was ready, Telemakos rattled downstairs toward Abreha’s apartment, in awe at his own resolution. His two guards followed at his heels. What is driving me to tell this to Goewin? Telemakos marveled. I have only to keep it to myself, and I will be safe. Why am I compelled to spill it all? If I get away with it, I will do it again, I’ll tell them as much as I can. In every letter I send home now, I risk my life—why am I doing it?
Abreha’s doorman admitted Telemakos. Telemakos stood before the najashi. He kept his head bowed, not daring to look the najashi in the face, but he knew that Abreha gazed frowning down at him from beneath his heavy, forbidding brow.
“I want to send a letter to my mother.”
The najashi held forth his hand to usher Telemakos into his study. It always shocked Telemakos how like the emperor Gebre Meskal’s hands the najashi’s hands were, narrow and neat and dark, the palms cool and dry when you touched them. But of course the najashi and the emperor were cousins, countrymen; Abreha was Aksumite by birth, raised on the African side of the Red Sea, like Telemakos. He had been elected to his status as federator of South Arabia, not born to it.
“Let me hear your letter.”
Telemakos was so practiced in evasive deception that he did not even pause for breath when his carefully constructed greeting to his mother made its crucial turn.
“Send my love to my aunt. Now I’m going to the window to watch my sister crawling about the terrace below. I watch after Athena whenever she appears, twice every day, in the morning and again immediately after her noon meal; twice each day I follow Athena with my gaze, and silently send her the love that I also send you.
“I haven’t told you much about my punishment. It’s difficult for the baby as well, indeed for all the household, and I didn’t want to worry you. For this entire season I am not allowed near Athena. Abreha ignored my previous small wrongdoings, but this time I explored the contents of his own desk, though I did it only because the baby thought there would be pictures in it that she liked. So now I am separated from Athena, quarantine championed by the najashi to stop me committing any more disobedience on her behalf.
“I knew what I was doing, but she didn’t. Poor bewildered Athena; unfair exchange, to ask your brother’s help and then be forbidden to see him again! But although I can’t come near Athena, Abreha seeks her company and plays with her and ensures she gets plenty of affection and amusement.
“Sometimes I long for home. Will I ever be able to show Athena Gebre Meskal’s new lion pit? Will she feel at home there, as I did once? Will she hide among the palms of the Golden Court, as I did, watching the courtiers—will she become, my Athena, secret keeper of all imperial gossip, as I did long ago?