He wondered how far ahead of him Abreha was, and if the najashi really did mean to take Athena all the way to Aksum himself. She is safe, isn’t she? Telemakos fretted. I wouldn’t finish the najashi’s filthy maps for him if I didn’t believe he would keep his promise to take her home. Is she safe? Why, oh why, would I ever trust her to him?
The burning sore at the back of his neck was all he had for surety. Each morning Telemakos woke with the feel of dried tears on his face. Half the time he could not remember what he had been dreaming of to make him cry. He wondered what his guards must think of him.
On the third evening of the journey, Telemakos tempted them to speak to him. He spread his complex instruments for measuring distance on a square of cloth beside the fire. It was like opening a box of magician’s tricks: they had never seen a drafting compass or an astrolabe.
“How does that work? Is it a secret?”
“It’s just a skill. Someone has to show you how the first time, and then you have to practice, just the way you learn to throw a spear. Pick it up and look, it’s not magic.”
“What do you use the wand for, if not magic?” One of them pointed hesitantly toward a straight-edge ruler.
Telemakos laughed. “That’s for drawing lines! Are all soldiers so superstitious? Look, I’ll show you …”
He showed them how to use the compass, too, and let the six of them each try it in turn, drawing circles in the bare ground where they had pulled up the grass around the cooking fire.
“With the star measurers you can reckon where you are, and how far you’ve still to go. I can figure the distance from here to al-Muza.”
He could not do the calculations in his head but scratched figures with a finger in the dirt. His audience was so impressed by these occult tracements that Telemakos thought it would have disappointed them if he had announced a number directly without any show of conjuring it.
“Can you say what you are sent to do with these?” one of them, Harun, asked carefully.
Telemakos raised his eyebrows, as the Himyar children did in disapproval or denial, a habit he had picked up from Abreha’s Royal Scions. “Of course I may not say,” he answered.
Harun mirrored the gesture, understanding. “I should not have asked,” he apologized. “I am always nosing to discover other people’s errands.” He laughed.
“Harun was brother-bonded to Asad, the najashi’s eldest son, until he died,” said Ghafur, whose handsome mustache was so fleetingly familiar that Telemakos always felt he was just on the verge of recognizing him as an old friend. “Do you understand what brother-bonding is?”
“Isn’t it that your life is pledged as another child’s servant, and the pair of you grow up together? As Rasha is to Queen Muna.”
Ghafur blinked agreement. “Harun could never have waited on anyone else, only Asad; so after Asad died, Harun here was honored with a warrior’s training. But Asad used to tell him everything. Harun knew all of Ghumdan’s palace secrets.”
“Oh. Not like me, then.”
They looked so blank that Telemakos realized, with sudden surety and wonder, that none of his guard had any notion of his disgrace. He could not fathom what they must think of him.
“Were you all trained together?” he asked quickly.
“Not I,” said Ghafur. “I’m newly sent from the garrison at Marib, for this detail especially. You know my father, Tharan.”
“Of course, Tharan!” Telemakos exclaimed as he placed the naggingly familiar mustache. “You favor him exactly.”
Then Telemakos was inspired. He took a dare on himself. He raised his head and tried to look Harun directly in the eyes, and then did the same to Ghafur, and all the other young soldiers in turn, finishing with Fariq, their captain. Each one deferentially looked away when Telemakos stared at him. So he knew they considered him their superior in rank, because he was surely not their elder.
“I like to nose in other people’s business, too,” Telemakos said. “You must tell me all your histories. I didn’t realize you were so select a band. So you, Mahir, why were you chosen for this detail?”
“I am no one special. I am no prince’s favorite servant or vizier’s son.”
Abreha’s warriors always spoke like that. Telemakos thought their modesty must be part of their training. But the others laughed. Telemakos gave a little inward sigh of wonder and envy; they laughed so freely.
Their captain answered on Mahir’s behalf. “Tharan says Mahir is the finest spearman he’s ever taught. But I am their captain because, of us all, I am the only one who has seen combat. I was the najashi’s squire at the battle of al-Muza.”
All six of them had some royal connection or high rank or unusual skill. They were a privileged and intelligent elite among Abreha’s young soldiers.
“I meant to flatter you when I called you a select band,” Telemakos confessed. “I meant flattery, but you really are select.”
“Well, we know your full title,” Fariq acknowledged, “though we’ve been told not to use it.”
They thought his high rank was excuse for their own. That explained their courtesy. Still, why these six? Telemakos wondered. Why these proud six to escort me, when brute strength would serve just as easily? The najashi doesn’t have any reason to honor my ridiculous title.
On the fourth day they left the highlands and began their descent down the staired ways through the wadi valleys that drew off the mountain rainwater. Telemakos could make out nothing of the Hot Lands ahead, the low-lying plain of acacia and whining insects that lay between the mountains and the coast; the horizon was all steel-blue cloud. Late in the afternoon when, hours before sunset, the round red sun collapsed into this pall like a hot coal into ash, he realized it was not cloud, but smoke.
Wildfire crept across the lowlands and up the wadi valleys. It had been a dry year, and though the complex irrigation systems of canal and well and reservoir kept the cultivated terraces green, wayside field and forest were brittle as tinder. At first the fire was all below them as they made their way cautiously down the main wadi. Then they found that there was fire smoldering in the dry brush at the edges of the staired ways. They could smell the smoke now, all the time.
They camped apprehensively. Unless there was a strong wind in any direction, the fire was completely unpredictable. It crept in flickering zigzags through the undergrowth as though it were following some mysterious map of its own. They saw a running wall of knee-high flame leap an irrigation ditch and engulf an arbor, and yet the fire never reached the next level of the terrace, only eight feet higher up the hillside. At night they took turns to sleep. Telemakos was never made to wake more than one watch in any night; they babied him, he thought. But, of course, it made no difference whether he was awake or not, since one of them always sat guard over him, wildfire or no wildfire.