Anako took Telemakos’s outstretched hand, and the second that he did so, before Anako could consider what he would do next, Telemakos bent quickly and laid a light kiss on the back of Anako’s thin and brittle knuckles. He dropped Anako’s hand and straightened his back. Abreha brushed the brand at the back of Telemakos’s neck with light fingertips. The touch made him shiver.
“Superb, my Shining One,” the najashi murmured approvingly. “Now let us eat together.”
That night Telemakos waited quietly in the dark, sitting at Abreha’s side and biting his knuckles, while as if by some enchantment all those around him fell quietly into drugged sleep. Abreha was among the first to go, Iskinder among the last. It was astonishing for Telemakos to watch it happening, knowing he was responsible.
Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion, he thought.
“Your enemy is not very frightening,” Iskinder remarked. Anako was a shambles of a man, sprawled asleep on the deck with his mouth gaping. The skin of his feet and hands was cracked and scabbed. “The state of him! I do not know whether he is in the greater part disgusting or pitiful.”
“He’s pitiful,” Telemakos said quietly, amazed that for the past three years this wretched man had haunted his nightmares. “Hard labor and poor food wear your body down.”
How I feared and hated him, Telemakos thought; Anako and his henchman Hara the Scorpion. And Hara ended up crucified as a spy, and here is Anako, a broken old man. In the end all my fear is gone. How can it have happened? But there’s only pity left.
Telemakos sat quietly, waiting. After a little while he began to wonder if he had overdone the dosing of the wine and water. The drugs had been given to him for use as painkillers, not as sedatives. He had not really expected everyone to end up snoring on the deck around him. But even Iskinder fell at last.
If I’ve missed anyone, he will raise an alarm, Telemakos thought, and waited, and waited, until the half moon jumped suddenly out from behind the heights of the island, and washed the quiet sea with silver. Abreha slept peacefully, his troubled frown relaxed, one narrow hand laid over his chest and gently rising and falling as he breathed. The lion’s head on his finger rose and fell with his hand, as though it were alive.
Telemakos saw that he could become an assassin, now, if he were bloody minded. But there was only one thing Telemakos wanted in this moment of advantage over Abreha, and that was the death warrant that he kept folded in his sash. Telemakos lifted Abreha’s hand from his chest and pulled back his robe. There at his waist was the familiar, detested parchment, smooth and supple with wear, the sealing wax recently renewed. The lock of Telemakos’s own hair glittered like a shaving of salt in the moonlight.
Telemakos meant to destroy the warrant, but once he had taken hold of it, he could not resist reading it first. Everyone was so fast asleep. He rooted through Abreha’s cabin to find a taper and steel and flint. He was as awkward as a baby with the firelighter, having to use the edge of his foot to hold it steady, but at last he made himself a light to read by. He bit through the seal on the document and opened the page with trembling fingers. The writing was in Latin, and although Telemakos spoke it fluently, its written alphabet was the least familiar of the handful of languages he could read. After he had struggled through the opening paragraph he stopped in puzzlement and began again.
To the noble Abreha Anbessa, najashi etc., a copy of a declaration to the Aksumite emperor Gebre Meskal, from Constantine son of Cador, high king of Britain. Translated and transcribed by the hand of Priamos Anbessa of the Aksumite house of Lazen and Ambassador from Gebre Meskal to Constantine.
Whatever it was, it was not a warrant for his execution. It was a copy of a letter to Gebre Meskal from Constantine, Britain’s high king. It had been dictated to Priamos, Britain’s Aksumite ambassador at the time the letter was written, who, like Abreha, had been trained as a translator. Telemakos skipped down the page to read what Abreha had written at the bottom, in South Arabian, on that evening when he caught Telemakos ransacking his study:
I, Abreha Anbessa, mukarrib over the Federation of the Himyarite tribes and kingdoms, have read and understood. As of this writing Telemakos Meder is unaware of his British duty. Toward my benefit and the boy’s own safety he shall not know while he remains my ward, nor shall any other man of my kingdom. In my care he shall not be addressed by his British title nor by his father’s name. I may not destroy this document, my proof of what I hold, but this day I reseal it against prying eyes, and bind the child’s secret with a lock of his own hair. Any who finds this sign and my double seal broken, or who has not my word, reads this without authority.
Telemakos gnawed at his lower lip, frowning.
What is this? Abreha said it was a death warrant, didn’t he? What did he say—
In the hands of your enemy this is warrant for your execution. But let us keep it safe in the hands of your friend.
So what is it?
Telemakos held still and listened. All was silent on board; the sea lapped against the hull of the ship, the floats and buoys rattled, and somewhere on shore came the ringing of a lone hammer from the obsidian works. That was all the sound there was. Telemakos bent quivering over the hated, mysterious parchment and read Constantine’s message to Gebre Meskal and Abreha:
The high king sends these words:
“This evil plague has cost me more than life itself, for I have lost my queen and two small children. I must marry again, but I am sick at heart in doing so, and fearful of my own mortality. Until I may declare otherwise, I name as my heir Telemakos Meder, grandson to my lord and late king, Artos the Dragon. The child has been raised an Aksumite citizen, but his father, Medraut son of Artos whom you name Ras Meder, will attest to his British royalty.
“Goewin, Artos’s own daughter, has long sworn to Lij Telemakos’s suitability for this position, and once proposed to make him Artos’s heir herself. So I name him prince of Britain, to become high king after my death, and beg your protection of him until such time as he may be needed to fulfill his duty in the land of his fathers.”
Telemakos stared blankly at the page, trying to comprehend what he had just read.
I name him prince of Britain, to become high king after my death.
He read it again, carefully, and then again, with Abreha’s postscript.
Toward my benefit and the boy’s own safety he shall not know while he remains my ward, nor shall any other man of my kingdom.