“You should know,” Goewin agreed. “But it is knowledge worth as much as my life. Or yours, should an evil mind make the connection. Don’t speak it aloud carelessly, even when we are alone.”
They were nearly the emperor’s exact words. And it could scarcely be said that Telemakos had spoken aloud.
Goewin sat back and picked up the book again. She took a breath as if she was about to continue reading, but Telemakos stopped her.
“Goewin,” he whispered, “have you been threatened again?”
“I am threatened daily,” she said, as if it were nothing.
No one had liked the quarantine when it first began, and people blamed it on Goewin because, in her role as the British ambassador, she had first suggested it. There were ugly messages pinned to Grandfather’s gate with knives, and the skull of a lioness with an arrow wired through it, and once, a sinisterly mutilated doll carved in salt, white faced and bloodied.
“You get threats because of the quarantine. Because you are Goewin. But you are also…You captain those who serve the emperor in secret. And someone knows?”
“They don’t know anything,” Goewin answered contemptuously. “Someone is trying to frighten us, but they are not doing a very good job. They have to use their own code words. Old ones. They still call me hyena, as they called you harrier, once, having no other idea of what I am. So—a hyena’s head arrives in the emperor’s kitchens one day, hidden in a crate of coconuts. And similar clever tricks. Some pirate we didn’t catch is growing bored, with no salt shipments to arrange, all his friends in exile and no one to talk to.”
Goewin looked up from the book and saw Telemakos frowning at her in calculating concentration.
“There’s no connection between the murdered lioness sent to our house and the murdered hyena sent to this palace,” she said more calmly. “There’s no connection between Goewin and Mentor. Some threats are openly aimed at me. These are not. Oh—”
“At me, then?” Telemakos croaked. “At the sunbird? Don’t tell me, I have it. Not at the sunbird, but at the harrier! That’s what they called me, isn’t it? Have they found dead harriers in among the royal chickens?”
Goewin let out a bark of laughter. Telemakos found himself choking on painful laughter as well.
“You are terrible, boy. It’s not a joke.”
“They have! Someone kills harriers and sends them to Gebre Meskal!” It was tremendous that Telemakos should be lying here, half-dead, and out in the streets of Aksum someone imagined his secret self to be dangerous and frightening enough to warrant sending threats to the emperor.
Goewin nodded.
“But they don’t know it’s me,” Telemakos said firmly.
“They do not. But I don’t like it. It means there’s someone we haven’t accounted for….”
Goewin slapped the book down on the floor. She stood and walked to the window, where she put up both hands to rattle them among the colored glass beads and strips of beaten copper that she had hung there to catch the light. “Let’s talk of something else, Telemakos.”
“Tell me about my sister,” he demanded immediately.
Goewin smiled. She stood with her back to the window, one hand still playing lightly among the wind chimes. “I will bring her to see you someday soon,” Goewin said. “If your father allows you company. She’s fussier than you, though. She cries and cries and cries. The only time she ever stops is when she’s suckling, or sleeping on top of someone.”
“Does she sleep on top of you?”
“I took her to bed with me for two nights, just after she was born,” Goewin said. “Otherwise your mother would never have got any sleep at all. Then I came here, of course.”
“If Ras Meder would let me go home, the baby could sleep on me,” Telemakos suggested.
Goewin gave him a withering look. “Do you think your father will allow a wriggling slug of a baby kicking at your bare ribs anytime soon, boy? Maybe after your skin grows back.”
His ribs and throat and shoulder slowly began to heal. His arm began to rot.
Two weeks after the accident, they drugged him utterly senseless for half a day so that they could cut out the pieces of him that were going moldy. After that he was so pathetic for a few days that he was able only to sip broth fed to him by Goewin in endless, patient spoonfuls. But by the end of the month he could feed himself, and he went four whole days without running a fever.
“I am minded to allow you visitors,” his father said. “Your friend Sofya has been battering at your door for the last three weeks, trying to get past me. Would you like to see Sofya?”
“I want to go home,” Telemakos said.
At the end of the week his father was so tired of listening to his pleading that at last they took him back to his own bedroom.
They made him endure another three days of proving he was not at risk of fever before they brought his baby sister in to him for five minutes. She was asleep. Their mother, Turunesh, stood just inside Telemakos’s bedroom door with the baby snuggled tightly over her stomach in a wide swathe of fabric. Telemakos could see nothing of his sister but the top of her head, a startling shock of loose, shining bronze curls. He could not see her, but while Turunesh stood there, he could smell her: an unfamiliar baby smell, of new milk turning sour, and starch, and herb-scented oil, and sandalwood.
“I’m sorry you can’t see her face, my love,” Turunesh said. “All is misery when she’s awake.”
They had not given her a name yet.
“She smells good,” Telemakos said. “What will we call her?”
His mother rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. We haven’t had a chance to talk.” She turned to go out, and said over her shoulder, “I’ll see if Goewin will take her. Then I can come back and sit with you awhile.”
“Just sit anyway,” Telemakos said. “The baby can’t bother me when she’s asleep.”
“She’ll wake up if I sit,” Turunesh said. “And then none of us will have any peace till evening.”
They let him have other brief glimpses of the baby over the next week, but they never let her get close to him, and he never saw her with her eyes open. Then one night he woke up feeling hot and sick, and he could smell the decay starting in his arm again. After that there were no more visits from the baby. Medraut and the emperor’s physician, Amosi, spent most of a day repeating the operation of a month ago, until there was so little left of Telemakos’s arm it made him sick to his stomach to look at it.