Harith escorted him to Dawit, who was waiting at the door to the Globe Room. “Your apprentice has got a great red burn across his face,” the librarian told him conversationally.
The Star Master’s cataracts so blinded him that he would never have noticed, but he knew the ritual.
“Oh? How intriguing.” Dawit’s tone was as dry as always. “Tell me what’s happened to your face, boy.”
“I was whipped for disobedience,” Telemakos snarled.
“You need not growl at me, or I shall ask them to whip you for insolence as well,” Dawit said mildly. “Come and set out the charcoal drawing sticks. I have a new project I want you to begin.”
That was all Dawit ever said about it. But it was ten days before the bruise faded, and Telemakos was forced to explain it over and over: to Queen Muna’s haughty handmaid Rasha, to the attendants who brought his meals up to him, indeed, to anyone who came into the library. Gedar the olive merchant, who was Aksumite himself and a neighbor of Telemakos’s grandfather, spent long, self-important hours explaining his inventories to the najashi’s librarian, and he always looked up if Telemakos passed. He spoke with utterly false concern. “Your whip weal has nearly gone, young prince, Lij Telemakos. It will stop embarrassing you soon enough. Haven’t you become well behaved, though!”
Telemakos had already sent his aunt a coded message denouncing Gedar’s deep involvement in the najashi’s conspiracy against the Aksumite emperor. It was worse than being lashed to have to be polite to Gedar.
There was also Tharan to face, Abreha’s lieutenant, who directed Telemakos and the najashi’s youthful soldiers in their spear throwing. The cadets themselves were relentless.
“You’ve still got that mark on your face, Aksumite. Tell us again, where did that come from?” They badgered him every morning for ten days. And afterward, as well, they would occasionally remind him: “Hey, Aksumite, didn’t you used to have a red mark on your face? How did you come by that?”
The young spearmen ribbed him equally without mercy over the alarm bracelet the najashi made him wear as part of his ongoing punishment for eavesdropping. Every cast Telemakos threw was accompanied by a flourish of silver bells.
Telemakos detested the alarm. More than anything he hated its gaudiness. It consisted of a narrow silver band fixed snugly just above his elbow, so thickly hung about with filigreed bells and wire tassels that it shivered musically if Telemakos so much as coughed. He had always been able to move with the sure stealth of a leopard stalking its prey, and the perpetual tattling of the charms maddened him. The noise kept him awake, and the bracelet itched. He had tried persistently to work it off in the early days of wearing it; but it was nearly two years since he had lost his left arm to blood poisoning, and his right elbow was impossible to reach with anything more practical than his toes. He could not shift the bracelet.
“Is that a trophy, or a love knot?” the young warriors teased. “Which queenlet has made a favorite of you?”
“Maybe the Aksumite thinks he belongs in Afar,” one of them suggested.
Afar—
This took him utterly off guard.
Telemakos missed the next throw by so far his lance did not even strike the butt. The sunbird is flying to Afar—How could any of them possibly know?
Telemakos picked up another spear, without altering his line of sight, trying to hide how much the remark had jarred him.
It was three years, three years since he had been imprisoned at the Afar salt mines in the Aksumite desert, spying out smugglers for Gebre Meskal. It haunted him at random, triggered by a smell or a touch, and still, for a moment, he was there. Blindfolded, his arms fixed firmly at his sides with leather cord, he stood feigning deafness and trying not to quake as Anako, the governor of Deire, debated aloud how best to blind him permanently. It was a nightmare that swallowed him whole, even when he was fully awake. It might happen if he vainly tried to catch his balance with his lost arm, or if the wind lifted a fold of his shamma shawl over his face by accident, or at the smell of baboon or a certain combination of sweat and dust. The touch of salt against his lips or fingertips sometimes seemed to burn like flame. The sunbird in Afar! If Abreha should ever know—
Telemakos’s deception there had brought about the destruction of Abreha’s black market in salt. No man alive should ever know. So how on earth could Abreha’s young spearmen know?
After a moment the innocence of the jeer came to him. The Afar warriors wore bracelets to tally the men they had killed. They also wore more sinister decorations, Telemakos recalled, cut from their victims’ bodies.
He threw again. The dratted bells shook merrily at his elbow.
“If I were an Afar tribesman, which I am not, I would wear ornaments that were a deal more fascinating than this.” Telemakos made a rude and vicious gesture, and to his surprise and delight he got a good laugh out of his companions.
“Enough!” Tharan barked.
Telemakos endured the scoffing. He was deeply grateful that he had not been pulled straight out of training and forbidden ever to touch a spear again. If there was any consolation to be dragged from the wreckage of his standing in Abreha’s court, it was that he might one day be allowed to hunt again with the najashi and his beautiful saluki hounds.
Athena treated the queen Muna with savage dislike. She would not let Muna touch her, and had to be cleaned and dressed by Muna’s attendant Rasha and a team of maidservants. Athena stripped the leaves from every tree and vine on the terrace as high as she could reach. She threw a bowl through one of the jeweled windows. She fouled her bed and smeared the mess across the walls in the morning before anyone was awake. In desperation, Muna’s women began to tie Athena down at night. And then she would scream in fury until she could no longer stay awake, and go on sobbing sporadically even in her sleep. Telemakos dreaded the day it might occur to them to drug her. Muna was allowed access to the medicines, Telemakos knew, because it was she who distributed the painkilling powders he was offered if his ruined shoulder hurt him. Telemakos quietly scorned opium, but Athena might not have a choice.
Telemakos overheard Muna weeping, too, confiding in her servant Rasha, who had been her companion since childhood.
“Whatever that boy has done,” the queen sobbed, “is it worth my husband punishing all the household? Have I not been punished already for my own sins? I am second wife to my husband, second mother to these motherless children, never beloved as the first. It is true I have been faithless, but is it not enough I must bear the loss of my own children to plague, that I must also endure this mockery of motherhood?”