“Prince of Britain,” Telemakos whispered aloud.
This is what Goewin was trying to tell me. He became a young lion. And I nearly guessed it, too; I dreamed of Lleu the night after I read her letter.
Telemakos laid down the page and touched the branding at the back of his neck.
He thought: Abreha has known this since the day I found the map of Hanish in his office. No, before that. He has known it as long as I have lived with him. This is why he kept my letters from me. This is why he would not let my father talk to me. This is why he has no British ambassador; anyone from Britain would have told me.
A cold wave of understanding took him with all the violence of a winter’s monsoon.
Abreha has been holding me hostage for two years.
Oh, the serpent, the serpent, how he has deceived me!
The moon had traveled more than ten degrees up the sky since Telemakos had found the letter. He looked up, and felt a stab of panic at the time he had wasted.
Should I take this with me, he wondered, looking at the page. The parchment rippled silver in the moonlight, the blocky Roman letters as black against it as the lava slopes of al-Kabir. There is nothing you can take from me which I would not forgive you, Abreha had told him. Except knowledge.
No, I can’t, Telemakos decided. It would probably be ruined in the sea if I took it. I suppose it doesn’t matter; I meant to destroy it anyway—but now that I know what it is, I don’t really want Abreha to know I’ve seen it. I’ll leave it with him. But I’ll have to—
The desire to pay back deception for deception was irresistible. Telemakos nearly laughed aloud, wild with mirth.
I’ll have to reseal it.
He gently coaxed the ring from Abreha’s hand and set to work at the najashi’s desk. He had to hold a strand of hair fast in the corner of his mouth while he hacked it off with Abreha’s knife, and he burned himself with the sealing wax in his nervousness. It was a murderous fiddle teasing the lock of hair through the slits in the parchment, but he managed it at last. Telemakos slid the ring over his index finger so he would not lose it in the dark, crept back to the sleeping king, and folded the sealed letter back inside Abreha’s sash. The heavy signet caught the light of the moon and winked like a fish scale against Telemakos’s ink-stained fingers.
Deception for deception, Telemakos thought. I’m going to keep his seal. Like Menelik did with the Ark of the Covenant, when he fled from Solomon. I wonder what Abreha expects as my ransom.
He tucked Abreha’s ring in his cheek. It was too big for him to wear comfortably, and he did not want to risk losing it in the water. He took off his shirt and sandals, and dressed in nothing but his kilt, slid down one of the tie lines into the harbor.
He could not lower himself by degrees, and fought against his weight in his effort to avoid the noise of a splash. Wherever his skin met the rope it was stripped like meat. Telemakos gasped as the burning salt water closed over the raw flesh, and clung close to the mooring for a minute, adjusting his body to this strange new world of water and darkness. He kept his lips pressed together fiercely, sipping air through the corner of his mouth. He was determined not to lose Abreha’s signet.
There. So, next. I go on.
The children of the Aksumite highlands were not swimmers, but Medraut had seen to it that Telemakos could manage himself in deep water. It did not frighten him, and he knew he had not far to go. He made his way from line to line and at last to the shallow water of the coral beach. A prison guard waited for him there, carrying a dark lantern and a long knife.
Telemakos wiped his nose and coughed, and the ring was cupped in his fingers. He knelt, and the ring was hooked over one of his narrow toes with the intaglio curled tightly under the ball of his foot, covered in sand. Telemakos raised his head and said loftily, in his most formal, palace-polished Ethiopic, “Deliver me to the warden.”
The patrolman said quietly, “Just who the devil are you?”
Telemakos resisted the wild temptation to introduce himself as prince of Britain. His Aksumite title was a deal more probable.
“I am heir to Aksum’s imperial house of Nebir,” Telemakos said, with no less arrogance, but with such sure authority that the man held quiet and let him speak. “I have been made hostage by the Himyarites, and I beg you to deliver me to the sanctuary of my own people.”
The sentry gazed down at the dripping, half-naked boy who knelt before him, and said, “Minor Aksumite prince, or runaway oarsman? How am I to tell?”
“You must surely know that none of these fighting ships are manned by chattels,” Telemakos answered evenly, “and should you shine your lamp direct upon me, you will assure yourself why none would want my service as his oarsman in any case.”
The guard sheathed his knife and slid open the shutter of his lantern so that the light fell full in Telemakos’s face. Telemakos blinked and winced away; the light followed his glance, and spilled over his bare and glistening shoulders. There was a moment of stillness.
The man cleared his throat and shuttered the lamp again.
“I see. Come, then.”
The sentry drove Telemakos before him, shivering, as they sought out several other guards and told them where they were going, and warned them also to focus their attention on the beach where Telemakos had turned up, should the self-styled heir to the house of Nebir be hunted or prove to be lying, and then, with increasing hope mingled with the fear that he would never really get away from the najashi, free, still with Abreha’s signet ring now clutched undiscovered in his flaming palm, Telemakos came into the gatehouse of the emperor’s prison.
XIV
A HANDFUL OF OBSIDIAN AND PEARLS
THEY HELD HIM, GUARDED, in a windowless room of black stone like a cave. They had a brief argument over whether to wake the governor of the island and decided that they would. No one had ever turned up on the doorstep of the prison on Hanish al-Kabir and begged to be let inside. Telemakos stood quietly picking his hair out of Muna’s plaits with thumb and forefinger, as much out of a sudden urgent need to put Himyar behind him as to hide the ring in his palm.
After a short time the governor came in, hastily dressed but wide awake. He was a short, broad-shouldered man with gray hair, and he had the unmistakable hard authority of an old soldier, probably a veteran of the last conflict between Aksum and Himyar. Telemakos bowed and knelt, waiting for permission to speak.
The man drew a deep and shuddering sigh before he said anything.