If he did that, and any of the fourteen Scions reported it or was caught, by the terms of his covenant with Abreha, Telemakos could be crucified.
“I won’t,” he whispered. “I won’t. It’s a noble offer, Inas, but I don’t want you to be punished with me. Thank you for the offer.” His throat suddenly ached. “Thank you.”
“We are with you,” she said. “We are all with you.”
With that she smiled at him suddenly, then stepped outside his limited view of the room below. He did not dare call out to see if she was still there.
Telemakos swallowed the ache in the back of his throat and sat down again to the map spread over the Star Master’s writing table. But now, after Inas’s hurried vow of secret faith, the names of the rivers and cities ran together in his sight as though he had spilled a pot of ink across them. He dared not change a single pen stroke on these irrelevant documents; Abreha would check them against the copies. Mother of God, Telemakos thought, why am I learning this? What does any of it matter? Why would I ever need to know what water courses run near Hadrian’s Wall?
And still he had not warned Gebre Meskal of the najashi’s threat to the Hanish Islands.
That night Telemakos dreamed he was walking on Hadrian’s Wall. His left arm was sound and whole again, which made his heart sink, for in the back of his mind he knew that invariably some person or creature would hack it off before the dream ended. The mist came down so low he could not see his feet. Coming toward him along the wall in the opposite direction were two shapeless figures, one taller than the other, both black against the gray of the lowering sky. Telemakos knew that one was Gedar. The other he thought must be Anako, the man the salt smugglers called the Lazarus, who had first tried to blind Telemakos and then tried to kill him: the man Telemakos had sentenced to exile. They would have to pass close to each other, for the wall was narrow. Telemakos dreaded that his grandfather’s neighbor would greet him by name and let Anako know who he was. He kept his head down and did not look, but Gedar caught him by the wrist as they came abreast of each other.
“Morningstar,” Gedar sneered, but that was not a name Anako knew, so Telemakos was still safe. He dared not protest or struggle. The merchant’s hand burned like cold fire where it was locked around Telemakos’s wrist, like the icy touch of hailstones, until he could no longer feel his arm.
“So at last you’ve told your emperor all the najashi’s plans for stealing his island fortress. What king would trust you now?” Gedar taunted. “Liar. Deceiver. Traitorous toad. You should be named serpent, not sunbird.”
But it was not Gedar’s voice. It was Medraut’s voice, low and dark and full of music. Telemakos knew he had mistaken both men. It was his father condemning him so poisonously, and the other man was Medraut’s dead brother, Lleu, the prince of Britain, dark-haired and white-faced and imperious. They were allied against him. Telemakos tried to pull free of the cold hand that gripped his wrist; his dead arm came away in his father’s hand. Telemakos fled back the way he had come, stumbling, all out of balance over the old stones of the wall he could not see in the mist around his feet.
III
ADVICE TO THE NAJASHI
THOUGH HALF HIS LETTERS home were truly innocent of any intrigue, Telemakos felt he had to construct pitfalls for himself, to keep him on his guard, in case he should alert Abreha to his change of mood when he was not endangering himself. He took to baiting the najashi.
There are many empty rooms in the Ghumdan palaces.
The najashi likes to play mother to the small orphans.
His spearmen are not so well trained as Gebre Meskal’s.
Telemakos included this last comment in a letter to his grandfather. He meant nothing more artful by it than to nettle Abreha with its scornful tone. When he read it aloud, the najashi stopped Telemakos short and ordered, “Repeat that.”
Telemakos did, and felt himself go cold as he realized how much it sounded like a general’s report.
“And again,” Abreha ordered quietly.
Halfway through his third reading of it, Telemakos faltered, the flattened palm frond trembling so in his grip that he could not make out the writing on it. He went down on his knees with a jangle of silver and bowed his head.
Abreha’s signet ring brushed cool and rough against the base of Telemakos’s skull as the najashi laid his hand over the back of his neck.
“Hush, child.” Abreha spoke soothingly. “To send plainly stated military information to the imperial parliament of Aksum would be a fool’s mistake, and you are no fool. Destroy this letter, and write another.”
Telemakos rewrote it sitting at Abreha’s own desk, beneath the najashi’s watchful, frowning glare, and gave away no hint of the iron menace that shadowed him except in that his shaking pen produced writing that was more unreadable than usual.
He was careful not to mention Abreha’s soldiers again. He had still the threatened Hanish Islands to tell of, and that was a deal more dangerous to mention than the palace guard. He began to look forward to the time when Aksum’s highland roads would be closed by the Long Rains, and he would have a reasonable excuse not to write home. He was rarely allowed a moment’s idleness anyway, and the scheming was beginning to exhaust him.
Dawit, sadistically, liked best to set his apprentice several tasks at once. Telemakos would have to polish the enormous teak-and-crystal compass from Cathay, translate a Greek geography aloud into South Arabian, and calculate latitudes on an abacus all at the same time. He was awkward and self-conscious, juggling scrolls and pens and tools with his single hand. The pens had been Athena’s province; she had sorted and cleaned them and passed them out. Telemakos missed her there to pick up the things he dropped and to hold his pages flat.
While Telemakos drew, the Star Master plied him with endless mental arithmetical calculations or drilled him in lists of stars or rivers or the principal cities of Persia.
“Name the tribal kingdoms of Himyar and southern Arabia.”
“Kinda and Qataban, Hadramawt, Awsan—” Telemakos hesitated. Through the pulley hole came a noise of torrential weeping, but for once it was not Athena. This was one of the bigger girls. Inas?
“Ma’in.” Telemakos hesitated again. He bent over the map he was drawing, trying to recite the required list of kingdoms mechanically but concentrating on the voice below. It was not Inas of Ma’in. It was Malika, the lovely, preening girl who called herself queen of Sheba. Her wordless keening alternated with angry, sobbed protests.