Telemakos bit his knuckles as he stared down at one of the fine maps the British ambassador had left behind when he had suddenly gone home, two weeks before Telemakos arrived in San’a. Gwalchmei of the Orcades had brought the British maps to Himyar intending to send them on to his cousin Goewin in Aksum, but the plague quarantine had stopped their onward journey. Now Abreha wanted copies made for his own library before the maps went to Aksum.
Telemakos loved these British maps. They had been made by Goewin’s mother, Ginevra, for her husband, Artos, the high king. It enchanted Telemakos to see and touch things his grandfather had seen and touched, four thousand miles away, twenty years and how many battles ago. Artos the high king of Britain had studied these, made notes on them in his own hand, amended them. Now they lay safe on another drafting table, for Telemakos to read. And he was Artos’s grandson.
The almost irresistible temptation to alter the maps before they went to Goewin, to try to conceal some message in them, drove Telemakos to study them so carefully that he was on the verge of being able to reproduce them from memory. He dreamed about them. He could look beyond the painted lines and see the winding rivers, wider and deeper than any he had ever known, never dry. An image of Hadrian’s Wall, the mortal remains of Rome in Britain, took shape in his mind as he stared at its long path from coast to coast across the island. It seemed to him he could picture it clearly: a vast ridge of rock and earth, stretching ruinous through miles of barren, foreign moor and forest. But there was no one who could tell him what it really looked like. It was the better part of a year since the British ambassador Gwalchmei had left Himyar.
I want to make a map that Dawit can read himself, Telemakos thought. Even if it doesn’t carry any secret meaning. If the magus could read the maps I made, Abreha wouldn’t have to check them. I should like to be able to do something that doesn’t make me feel as if the najashi is always breathing down my neck.
“Morningstar?”
Now all the palace used the name Dawit had given Telemakos in ridicule of his bright hair.
“Morningstar!”
The sound came from below, a hissed whisper. Inas of Ma’in, eldest of Abreha’s foster daughters, stood in the nursery directly beneath the pulley hole cut in the floor of the Great Globe Room. She was looking up. When Telemakos peered down, they were gazing at each other face-to-face, less than two yards between them. Inas had dark brown eyes and thick black hair, and the skin of her oval face was lighter than his own; the people of the Himyar highlands were generally not as dark as the Aksumites. The scratches Athena had torn in Inas’s cheeks had scabbed over. Her face looked dreadful. Telemakos hoped she would not carry permanent marks.
“You’re alone?” Inas’s voice was urgent.
Telemakos blinked at her, the Himyar children’s silent affirmation.
“We thought you would be alone. Queen Muna said she had to take her father, the Star Master, marketing for more paints, since you’re not allowed out to do it for him, and he doesn’t trust anyone else.”
“You will be in trouble if you’re caught talking to me,” Telemakos rasped back.
Inas spoke low and quickly.
“Not much. Anyone caught talking to you will be shut up without food for a day. But you’ll be whipped again, properly, outside at the posts, like a servant.”
“Never believe it,” Telemakos scoffed. “They wouldn’t dare beat me on purpose. Everyone has babied me since I lost my arm. If I take a fall riding, or if I get struck in mock combat when we use the unbarbed staves, they always make a great fuss afterward with salves and painkillers.” These were given to him at the written instruction of Telemakos’s physician father, and paid for by the emperor of Aksum himself, whose pet lion had tried to chew off Telemakos’s arm. Telemakos had grown tired of refusing opium. He took the portions given him and then disposed of them, unused, in the hidden pouch at the back of Athena’s carrying saddle.
“The najashi won’t whip me,” Telemakos added, to pacify Inas, though his confidence in this was hollow.
“He will. They will give you opium afterward, in deference to your father’s wishes, but they will not spare you the indignity. Do you see? Any one of us can have you lashed, just by calling out your name, and all we will pay for it will be a day’s solitude.”
She paused, suddenly, and Telemakos waited, staring down at her torn face, wondering why she was bothering to tell him this when she could instead so easily use it against him.
“We wanted you to know. If you pass us in the corridors we won’t look at you. We all agreed; even the little ones understand. We will act as though we do not know you, but it’s not because we despise you, do you see? It’s because we don’t want you to be whipped.”
She gazed up at him, waiting for an answer.
Telemakos glanced over his shoulder toward the open door that led to the scriptorium, wondering where the librarian was. Harith could be pettily vindictive; he did not like the traffic that the children made through his formerly silent alabaster-roofed hall, since the Star Master had acquired an apprentice who had let his baby sister use the lapis ink blocks as finger paints.
Telemakos looked down through the floor again. Inas was still waiting below, her expression anxious.
“Is your face all right?” he asked.
“My face? Oh, Athena’s scratches. It’s nothing. They’re not deep—she’s only got baby nails. Little monster, she’s so sad; I wish she’d let me hold her. But she only wants you. ‘Boy, boy, where is Tena’s boy,’ she cries, every waking minute.”
“Where is she now?”
“The najashi took her down to see the pet lion. And that creature Menelik is an emotional beast as well, as starving for your attention as your sister! The najashi is still trying to teach him to hunt like a dog, do you know?”
“Yes, he tells me all about his hunting,” Telemakos whispered. “The lion hasn’t caught anything yet.”
“The kennelmen don’t like to run it loose without you there. It’s not so obedient for the najashi as it is for you.” Inas took a deep breath. Then she added quickly, “If you want to send a letter to your mother without the najashi reading it, drop it through the ceiling here when there’s one of us below. If it’s safe we’ll bang the shutters three times, and if there’s no one else in the Globe Room, you can send a letter down.”