Amosi came back two days later to examine the wounds, and thinking Telemakos to be insensible because his eyes were closed, said frankly to Telemakos’s father: “Look at this—half his shoulder gone, bone laid bare! This will be septic again before the week is out. You are making your half-grown son endure torture I would not inflict on a grown man! With each effort to save his arm, you risk stopping his heart. Take the arm off and be done with it!”
“I will not,” Medraut answered, his voice tight with fury and worry. “I will not take his arm off.”
After the second operation, Telemakos began to have nightmares. He woke up screaming more often than the baby did. Medraut took to spending every third or fourth night in the monastery above the city because it was the only way he could stay alert enough to give Telemakos the attention he needed.
Telemakos screamed himself awake in the middle of one night.
“Do not, do not, oh, SAVE ME!”
He opened his eyes in panic. Even awake he could not move.
Goewin was sitting beside him. There was a blue-and-white ceramic oil lamp on the floor at her feet and a shamma shawl over her lap, as if she had already been there for some time.
“So, so, so,” she murmured soothingly, and rocked back and forth in her chair, but she did not reach to touch him. “Telemakos,” she said, her voice full of unhappiness, “tell me what you dream, my love.”
He lay sobbing and did not answer.
“Sometimes if you tell a bad dream aloud, it doesn’t seem so terrible,” she said, still rocking her knees gently to and fro. “Your father used to write his down. He spent an entire winter chronicling his nightmares, just before our father’s estate at Camlan was destroyed, and he let me read them, too.”
In his sleep, Telemakos had thought himself surrounded by the baboonlike stench of Anako the salt smuggler, and it bewildered him, on waking, to find the air full of sandalwood.
“All right,” Telemakos whispered, ready to try anything. “All right. It’s the men in Afar. At the salt mines last summer, when the smugglers caught me, I pretended I was mute. They thought I must be hiding something, so they tried to make me scream, to see if I could talk. That part was real.”
Goewin closed her eyes, her knees swaying. Telemakos had never given her much detail about what had happened to him in Afar.
“In the dream they know I can talk, and they want to know who sent me. That’s all he asks, Anako, the ringleader, again and again: Who sent you? And I mustn’t answer. And every time he asks and I don’t answer, he tells the other one, the warden at the salt mines, to drive a nail through my arm with a hammer. And he does. And—”
The fever made Telemakos feel as though his head were in flames. He whispered through his teeth.
“The warden’s name was Hara, but he called himself Scorpion. I don’t know what he looked like. He kept me blindfolded the whole time I was there because he didn’t want me to see him. In the dream he has no face. And he has—he hasn’t—he has no hands. He has a scorpion’s pincers instead of hands. He holds his hammer in these pincer fingers. They ask me their question again and again and pound the nails into me, until my arm is full of nails. If I ever answer them, if I tell them what they want to know, they’ll stop.”
“What wakes you up?” Goewin asked quietly, her eyes still closed.
“I answer them,” Telemakos whispered. “I tell them you sent me. And then Anako dusts his hands and turns away, and tells the scorpion with no face to hammer a nail through my heart. Then I start screaming and wake myself up.”
Goewin wiped her eyes angrily with the back of one hand, smoothing the shamma over her knees with the other.
“Anako will never come back to Aksum,” she said. “He may already be dead of plague. Your own command sent him into exile.”
She added fiercely, “Don’t answer him, my sunbird.”
“The infection’s coming back,” Telemakos whispered.
“How do you know?”
“I can smell it.” He sighed, his sigh a whisper also, like dry leaves rustling. “I wish—”
He did not yet have the courage to speak his wish aloud, nor did he believe that anyone around him would have the courage to act on it.
The shamma in Goewin’s lap began to squirm and whimper. Telemakos craned his neck and saw the shining bronze of his sister’s hair, and one tiny fist the same fair brown as his own hands. The whimper rose to a wail.
“Hush, hush, you’ll wake the house, you noisy little hoot owl,” Goewin crooned. She stood up and hoisted the wailing bundle over her shoulder, jigging her gently up and down. She said softly, “Come walk with me in the garden, my owlet.” She held the baby against her with one arm, and with the other she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched Telemakos’s sound shoulder as her goodnight to him. Telemakos watched with longing and envy as Goewin carried his sister out of his bedroom.
Sunlight streamed through his window all the next day, dazzling him. Goewin came back in the afternoon and set a round glass bowl of colored water on his windowsill. She turned to look at him.
“Summer has come, Telemakos,” she said sadly. “The fields are gold with Meskal daisies.”
“What is that for?” he asked, nodding at the bowl.
“It’s bait,” Goewin said. “I got the idea from Gedar’s wife Sesen, across the street. Wait and see what it catches.”
Telemakos watched it glowing like a giant ruby on his windowsill over the next few days, as his fever rose and the nightmare nails through his arm bit at him so severely that he could not eat and could not sleep. Then it became too much of an effort to turn his head that way. He lay between sleep and waking, staring at the lions carved into the coffered ceiling, thinking about nothing. There was no room in his mind for any thought beyond the driving agony that had once been his left arm. He began to wish only that he would hurry up and die and get it over with.
The morning after it became too much effort for Telemakos to speak, Goewin did not go out to the New Palace. She sat by his side, not fussing with his dressings, not pacing, not weeping. The baby wailed sadly to herself in another room. They still had not bothered to give her a name.
Goewin got up quietly and went out to see to her.
III
ATHENA
WHEN GOEWIN CAME BACK she was jigging the little squirming, bronze-tipped bundle over her shoulders. She stopped suddenly in the doorway and hissed in a delighted whisper, “Oh, Telemakos, look at the window!”