“You were sent to Britain for an appointment that should last no less than three years. You have acted in direct defiance of your king in coming here. Was there no gratitude in you for being entrusted with such a position, after your disgrace in Himyar?”
I could not believe Constantine was talking over my head, questioning my guide’s loyalty, without knowing why I was here. I was used to standing aside and keeping my mouth shut. But I was the high king’s daughter, and I was not used to being ignored.
“Constantine, hear me out,” I said. “The kingship of Britain—”
My mistake was in stubbornly trying to make myself understood in Ethiopic. I had to work hard to follow it in conversation, and I could not speak it as well as I could understand it. In Latin I could have explained myself quickly. But Constantine cut off my stumbling story, all his attention now focused on Priamos.
“The prince Wazeb is Caleb’s chosen heir, and my ward. I will not allow him to be threatened by the grasping of minor royalty,” Constantine said. “If you so boldly defy the mandate of your uncle the emperor as his emissary in Britain, abandoning a post that many here think you did not deserve after you failed to defeat Abreha’s army, what else can you be plotting?”
“I did not think I could be breaking my mandate in protecting the princess of Britain. But I see that I have,” Priamos answered unhappily. “I never meant to do other than serve my uncle as he bid me. I was trained to it.”
“Well, and so was the pretender Abreha, and that has not stood in the way of his treachery in Himyar!”
“I am not Abreha,” said Priamos quietly.
“Yet after him you are the eldest son of Candake the queen of queens, the eldest of Caleb’s nephews, and I find you here in violation of your commission.”
“How am I Candake’s eldest? What of Mikael?”
“Mikael!” Constantine laughed. “Mikael is insane.”
“So should you be if you had spent the last thirty years shut up in the same three rooms!” Priamos burst out, in the most uncontrolled blaze of passion that I had ever seen from him.
There was a still, terrible moment while Constantine and Priamos faced each other, pale and dark, like a matched pair of opposing chessmen.
Then Constantine said in a flat voice, “You are under arrest for desertion. You will submit yourself to detainment in this house, or I will have you tried for apostasy against the empire’s heir.”
All this while I was struggling to understand the language. “Apostasy?” I asked desperately.
“Treason,” whispered Priamos in Latin, stunned.
“I am regent here,” Constantine went on. “I act for the king of kings Ella Asbeha, the emperor Caleb, as his viceroy Ella Amida. You stand and challenge me in open defiance of my authority.”
Constantine spoke, as he must have known, to the strict protocol of all Priamos’s sequestered childhood and military training. Priamos, without seeming to show any kind of irony or insolence, knelt at Constantine’s feet in the deep obeisance that he had made to my father when first they met, his hands open as if in supplication.
The boy in the white cotton cloak said suddenly, “You would be prone before your uncle the emperor.”
“I submit to your authority,” said Priamos, and lay flat on his chest, with his face sunken against his forearms.
Constantine gave a signal to his spear bearers. They moved to stand guard over Priamos, the bronze blades of their ceremonial spears held menacingly at his either side.
“Ras Priamos, you may have fought against Abreha under Caleb’s orders, but you are still Abreha’s brother,” said Constantine. “Why he spared you and all your regiment is beyond my comprehension. He did not even try to ransom you. I cannot trust anyone so favored by the Himyarite pretender. My loyalty must lie with Wazeb.”
“Your loyalty lies with me,” I interrupted in cold fury, hearing the frost in my voice as blowing straight down from the northern sea. “How dare you. How dare you stand cloaked in imperial robes not your own, in a palace not your own, with the royal spear bearers of a rival empire at your back, accusing your own sovereign’s ambassador of treachery! You were to return to Britain next spring. Even if I had not meant to recall you, you would deliberately disobey Artos in seeing this command to its completion!”
Well, we were battling now, and openly, and not even in Latin, but in our common British dialect.
“Is that an accusation of treason, or your own interpretation of my actions?” Constantine said, barely controlling his fury. “On whose authority do you speak?”
“On my own,” I said. “My God! That you should be wallowing in such splendor, while your sovereign lord and the sweet prince who was to fill your position here next year, my own twin, lay bleeding on the cold fields around Camlan! I traveled four thousand miles to reach you, who have been named my father’s heir in the event of my brothers’ deaths. Do you think anything less than the total destruction of my kingdom could have brought me here?”
Now Constantine seemed unsure how seriously to take me. “Do you mean to tell me—”
“Artos the high king of Britain is dead,” I avowed, “and Lleu the young lion, the prince of Britain, slain in battle with him. Medraut, my father’s eldest son, should have been our regent, as you know; but he, too, is lost. The king of the West Saxons is in control of our southern ports, the queen of the Orcades is grasping for what is left, and both have offered bounties for my capture. Britain’s collapse is held in check by your own father and those of the high king’s comrades who survived the battle of Camlan…”
I took a breath and thumped my fists against my forehead in despair. “Oh, God, I have not the strength to repeat all of this in Ethiopic!”
I took another breath, trying to collect myself. Constantine and I stood face to face, but when I sought to hold his gaze he let his eyes slide away from mine, like all the people of this land.
“My father named you his heir in the event of his sons’ deaths. Britain is yours for the taking,” I said slowly, searching for appropriate words, “though I am now loath to bless your kingship with my hand in marriage, however long we have been promised.”
The weight of my tale struck him now, and for a moment he shut his eyes, grimacing. Then he mastered himself and said evenly, “You are upset.”