I did not need such proving, my najashi. I might have been more faithful if you had been kinder.
He was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.
“Can I sleep here?” he asked.
Priamos and his companions unearthed a grass mattress and an elegant, light blanket that felt like a weave of silk and wool; they left Telemakos alone with a jug of water and a jug of wine, and cold fried bread and dried dates folded in a square of linen.
He was not hungry, and once he was dry he did not need the blanket. But Telemakos could not go to sleep. He lay staring up at the sky’s familiar map of stars passing slowly and inevitably along their appointed paths. His cool, perceptive tracker’s mind began to make sense of all that Abreha had done over the last two years, and as with Anako, the overwhelming emotion that took hold of him now was not anger, or hatred, but pity.
I betrayed him before he marked me as his son. He knew, and marked me anyway.
That means he has already forgiven me.
Telemakos opened his eyes to fast-moving clouds scudding high overhead in a blue sky. He sat up.
“Ah, you have outdone your grandmother the queen of the Orcades this time, scheming young witch’s spawn,” Goewin said merrily, flying to his embrace. “I doubt if even Morgause ever knocked flat twenty-eight men with one blow. Half of them are still asleep, including our najashi, so he has not yet learned of your perfidious nature—well, perhaps he already knows.”
Goewin held Telemakos off, so she could look at him. “Heavens, don’t weep, boy.”
“I’m not. It’s the light.” Telemakos swiped at his eyes, and asked hopefully, “Is my father here, too?”
“This is not his negotiation.” Goewin was cool. “He has no business representing Britain here; that is my role in the Red Sea. Medraut is … he has no match as warrior and hunter, but he is too headstrong for true diplomacy. I have made him wait for you in Adulis, with your mother and your sister.”
“Ah, Goewin, truly? Athena, safe, with my mother and father?” Telemakos could not help himself. He burst into tears.
Goewin waited. Then she smiled at Telemakos, doing small motherly things like tucking his hair back from his face and pulling his borrowed shamma straight. She wiped his eyes with the shamma’s edge. “Shame on Ras Priamos,” she said, “taking all the credit for your deliverance last night, and not telling either one of us the other was aboard! He didn’t want to wake me—”
Telemakos saw that his aunt’s smooth, white face had become faintly lined, like his father’s but not so deeply, and that her eyes were red rimmed and blue ringed, as though she had not passed a full night’s sleep for weeks and weeks.
“—I negotiated like this with your father, over Lleu’s life, years ago,” she said. “It was a simpler battle then, good and evil clear to me, Medraut wrong and contrite, no ransom paid. God grant this is the last time I have to win freedom for the prince of Britain! If it happens again, you’re on your own, boy.”
“What’s my ransom?” Telemakos asked.
“These damned islands, of course.”
Telemakos was speechless. He gazed upward toward the black volcanic heights; the noise of the quarry was loud and busy now, and a patrol of pelicans skimmed the horizon between sea and sky.
“Are they worth so much?” he asked finally, rather awed. Goewin burst into laughter.
“Are you worth so much, you mean. Pestilent son of a demon, Gebre Meskal has entailed these lumps of rock to you to buy your freedom with.”
“What do you mean?”
Goewin held up a small linen bag, richly embroidered. She untied the silken cord that shut it.
“This,” she said, “is your symbolic right to the land here. Hold forth your hand.”
She poured into his open palm a handful of obsidian chips and slivers of polished tortoiseshell, coral beads, and pearls.
“This is yours, just now: the Hanish Islands and the wealth they offer. In truth, the islands are a gift to you. Gebre Meskal has long owed you a debt of gratitude for your service in Afar, and the warning that you sent him through your father has made him eager to repay you. The archipelago is yours by the emperor’s decree, and became yours in deed when you set foot on Hanish al-Kabir—Why, what is so gaspingly funny about it?”
Telemakos was choking with laughter. “I knew it!” he spluttered, coral and obsidian falling over his knees as the beads slipped between his fingers. “I knew it—I stood on the shore and in my heart I owned it! I stood kicking up seawater on the reef north of the prison and imagined myself king of the starfish! I knew—”
He gasped and swallowed. He had not eaten for nearly a day, and he was intoxicated with the audacity of his escape. “Anyone might do the same,” he said, more soberly but still breathless. “Anyone could stand there and feel that way. It is so beautiful. If I give it away this afternoon I will still feel like I own it. It means nothing who owns it in deed.”
Goewin gathered the spilled tokens of Hanish’s wealth into a pile. She laughed as well. “It means a little, Telemakos. It means you may buy your own freedom. It is only a formality, of course, but I thought you would like to take hold of your fate yourself when the contract with Abreha is finally sealed.
“Or,” she added slyly, “you could keep the islands, seeing as you have jumped ahead of your najashi’s plans and struck out for freedom on your own.”
“You can see Hanish from al-Muza,” Telemakos said. He held forth the rest of the handful of jewels for her to put back in the bag. “You can see the peaks. It only takes a day to reach the islands, if you sail from Himyar. Of course they should belong to the najashi. What should I gain by keeping them—a new war between Aksum and Himyar, on my account this time? God forbid me!”
“You have grown, Telemakos,” Goewin said softly. She tied shut the little bag that contained his freedom, and sat back on her heels to gaze at him. “Mercy on us, I think you must be as tall as I am. Stand up and let me see.”
They climbed to their feet together. He was the taller by a fraction. Impulsively, she gave the back of his single hand a quick, reverent kiss. “‘Beloved friend, you are so well grown now, so wise—’” She quoted the goddess Athena briefly, and laughed again, her faintly lined face made young and bright with joy. “Dear one, you cannot know what a weight has lifted from my heart this morning.”