“The last person caught hiding there was beheaded in the cathedral square,” Constantine said. “It was not my office then, but I have inherited that right along with the room. It would simplify everything if I exercised it. Don’t tempt me.”
He blew past us, saying again in parting, “Take him home.”
Telemakos and I walked through the palace gardens in silence, and through the principal gate, and started down the wide road through the wealthy suburb where Kidane’s mansion lay. Along the way we met the usual salutes from the mutilated dispossessed of the war in Himyar; they waited idly in the lee of stone walls, stood close against the shade trees to avoid the rain, squatted together among the sycamores’ roots to scoop out shallow cups in the damp earth and fill them with pebbles to play gebeta there. When they noticed me, they stood quietly and bowed; a few came limping in my wake. If I had been walking in the city, they would have made a crowd around me. I touched the bow at my shoulders, which I always carried when I went anywhere alone, but I did not string it. No one of the Himyar veterans had ever threatened me. I walked quickly, making Telemakos trot to keep pace with me.
“Why did the viceroy call me your pawn?”
We were almost home now. Telemakos was panting.
“Why did he—”
“He could have meant me,” I said shortly. “I’m not queen yet.” We both knew he had not, but Telemakos did not press me. He said instead, still panting as he tried to keep up with me and talk at the same time, “I wasn’t hiding. I was stalking one of Candake’s cats. I’d been following him for an hour, forever, all over the palace, and then he went to sleep in that room. I was waiting for him to wake up. I knew it was the tax office, but truly, I didn’t know the viceroy had a meeting there.”
I slowed my pace to match his more evenly. “What did he do when he found you?”
“One of the spear bearers found me. They search the room before he goes in. They sweep under alt the furniture with their spears, and stick them in the curtains. Stop a minute, look—”
He hitched up his kilt. He had taken a long, shallow scratch up his thigh. No wonder he had been scared.
“It was an accident,” Telemakos said. “Nafas did it. He was very upset.”
I was guilt-stricken for having made Telemakos walk so fast, and my estimation of the emperor’s silent ceremonial guards rose, as well.
I also saw that if they had accidentally killed Telemakos, Constantine would have been blameless. I saw this, and I knew that if it had happened that way, and my cousin had protested his innocence, I would never have believed him. I noted this piece of notional unfairness against Constantine as a mark against my own character. He had never lied to me, after all.
“Telemakos,” I said seriously, “while Constantine is viceroy, don’t run about the New Palace on your own.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Don’t hide there. Don’t stalk Candake’s cats. Don’t feed Caleb’s monkeys.”
“I play there always!”
“It’s different now. Since Priamos has returned and I am here, the ministers and nobles are all suspicious of him, and me, and Constantine because I am to be married to him, and you because I stay in your house. They will check the wall hangings and palm fronds with spears and daggers. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
We stood before his grandfather’s gates. “Promise me this, Telemakos.”
He whistled through the gap in his teeth, which he did when he was thinking.
“Can I go through the markets? And the Necropolis, where the monuments are? Can I go anywhere I like, as long as I stay out of the New Palace?”
Something occurred to me: he had said he must beg Kidane to take him to the New Palace.
“Are you usually allowed to go anywhere you like?”
“Not by myself,” Telemakos said.
Suddenly I wanted him out of this. He was too obliviously innocent. If he did not serve me willingly, I would not coerce him, and he was not ready to make such choices himself.
“You can go anywhere you like,” I said, “as long as someone can see you.”
Telemakos answered mournfully, “That’s the part I don’t like. Having to stay where someone can see me. I will soon forget that part.”
“Think about Nafas’s spear,” I told him, “and you’ll not forget.”
We went through the gate together. “Let’s tell your mother,” I added.
CHAPTER VI
The Long Rains
“I WARNED YOU I should be a disagreeable guest,” I uttered in a low voice. Telemakos was in bed, and Turunesh sat spinning in her private sitting room by the brilliant light of a glass oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. My own hands were idle. “I should not have allowed my quarrel with Constantine to come to this.”
“Don’t falter now,” Turunesh said. “Hold Constantine in check. I’ll take Telemakos out of it.” She seemed calm as ever; her busy hands never stopped moving. “The roads are all impassable in winter, but in the new year I’ll bring Telemakos to my father’s country estate in Adwa.”
The Aksumite new year falls in British September. It was July now; their spring was still at least six weeks away. It seemed remote and distant.
“You are too forgiving,” I said, angry at myself.
“They all say that. I make a pet of my son. But he is all I will ever have of his father, and his sweet affection melts my heart.”
“It is battering away at mine, as well. I do not deserve such compassion. I am remorseless as my aunt.”
“You are both kings’ daughters,” Turunesh agreed mildly, as though that excused even the worst excesses of libertine behavior; or indeed, as though it were reason to expect such excesses. She laid her spindle in her lap. “Princess, what other weapon do you have? I cannot condemn you. I would do the same for my kingdom, if I had to.”
“All right, but why should I have to?”
It rained and rained. Even the doves were bad-tempered. It was worse than Britain; the rain came down torrentially, day after day. I slopped back and forth in it almost daily between Kidane’s house and the New Palace, bedraggled men begging at my heels. My only consolation for making this trek was that every now and then I found Priamos left momentarily idle and able to sit and talk with me. I dragged him into the Golden Court to get him out of his room.