He went fishing with his grandfather. Telemakos and Kidane had quite a formal relationship, partly because Kidane sat on the emperor’s private council and was usually even busier than Goewin, and partly because Kidane had always been the ultimate authority over Telemakos’s behavior. When Telemakos was younger, his grandfather had never hesitated to have him whipped for his more serious transgressions. It was Kidane who had seen to it that Telemakos knew how to deport himself appropriately in a roomful of courtiers. But Telemakos liked his grandfather, who was noble and broadminded, and who had taught him how to listen. So they went fishing together, taking bedrolls and a small sack of tef flour so that they could camp for a few days even if they failed to catch anything.
It made Telemakos feel reborn to be outside the city. The highland fields were yellow with ripe grain, and the snowcapped Simien Mountains beckoned from the far horizon. The sounds and smells of the woodland river valley were intoxicating: chattering monkeys, screaming hornbills, the hooting hyena’s yelp. Grandfather relaxed out of his role of councilor and disciplinarian and spent long, wet hours instructing Telemakos in the art of poling the reed-built canoe.
“Don’t try to lift the pole the whole way out,” Kidane suggested. “You can do that with two hands, but it’s too long to do it with one. Try tipping it end over end, like the spoke of a wheel.”
Telemakos was slow, and he was not strong enough to keep it up for long, but he could do it.
“Will you teach me how to throw a spear?” Telemakos asked Kidane.
“I don’t know how to throw a spear,” his grandfather answered. “I’m no huntsman. Ask your father.”
They ate trout Telemakos gutted himself, using a flat rock as a butcher block, holding each fish down with his left knee and his right toes as he carefully cut loose the shining head and slit the silver belly to pull out its backbone. It was not the neatest work he had ever done, but it was without a doubt the most satisfying. He and Kidane slept contentedly through three black, still nights in the frail fishing lodge with walls of woven reed.
They were woken in the blue light before dawn on the fourth morning of their holiday by a lion roaring, the sound carrying with all the huge reverberation of rolling thunder. It was at least a mile away, but it sounded as though it were just the other side of the thin wall.
“Child, you’re quaking,” Grandfather said softly. They had both started bolt upright. Somewhere, not far off, a family of frightened baboons shrieked and scolded. Kidane pulled Telemakos’s blanket up around his shoulders.
Telemakos sat rigid, eyes wide and nostrils flared.
“He’s not so near as he sounds,” Kidane said soothingly.
“I know. I’m not afraid of lions,” Telemakos whispered. “But the smell…”
He shivered again, and knew that his father was right about the wounds to his spirit.
“What smell?” Kidane said.
“Can you not smell the baboons?” Telemakos whispered. “Anako smelled like that. There is nothing to be afraid of. But still it makes me want to be sick.”
“You’re hungry,” Grandfather said practically. “Let’s make breakfast.”
Grandfather pulled on his shamma, climbed down the short catwalk that led outside from the sleeping platform, and began to rake at the ashes of last night’s fire. “Bring the pan and flour,” he called to Telemakos.
Telemakos wound his own shamma over his shoulders, feeling caught in tendrils of nightmare. He could still smell baboon. His ruined shoulder twitched as he clenched and unclenched the muscles in his back, trying to free the arm that was not there from bonds that were not there. Telemakos clamped his teeth together to keep them still and lifted the lid from the flour basket.
The half-empty sack inside lay folded neatly upon itself. Telemakos nearly reached in to pick it up, but the shadow in the fold was moving, a tiny clot of darkness shifting and reforming like a spot before his eyes. He pulled back with a low cry of surprise and loathing. It was a scorpion.
“Telemakos?”
He heard his grandfather call his name in concern, but it did not occur to him to answer. Telemakos watched the little, dangerous creature blundering about among the dark folds of cloth. He wondered, What does it feel like, a scorpion’s sting? It’s so small. It can’t hurt as much as a lion’s teeth, can it, something so lightweight?
Hara’s scorpion’s pincers had held him lightly too, before wedging the knife’s point beneath his fingernails.
Telemakos came at it from behind, prodding the back of its curved tail with one of his scarred fingertips. The barbed whip lashed out at nothing, and Telemakos backed away.
Grandfather was at his side again, slapping his fingers sharply.
“You surely know better than that, boy!”
Telemakos bent, staring at the flour sack, watching the shadows.
“Mother of God,” Grandfather swore under his breath. He slammed the lid down on the basket, then took Telemakos by the back of his neck and drove him out of the hut. He marched his grandson straight down the bank and over his knees into Mai Barea, and threw a potful of river water into Telemakos’s face.
“Ai, Grandfather, stop!”
Kidane lowered the pot.
“Are you awake yet?” he asked gruffly. “Come and help me make breakfast, then. I’ll take care of the flour.” He did not mention the awful thing inhabiting the flour sack, but he asked, “Were you stung?”
“I’m all right,” Telemakos said.
Grandfather let out a sigh of relief. “We’ll go home today, I think,” he said quietly.
Goewin laughed as Kidane and Telemakos began to unpack their baskets of trout in the courtyard.
“What were you trying to do, feed the five thousand?”
“I said I could fish.”
“So you did. Come with me to take some to Gedar.”
In the two and a half years since the plague quarantine had been in place, forbidding all foreign trade, half the merchants’ mansions in Grandfather’s neighborhood had fallen derelict. In the villa across the street, Gedar’s family still lived in two salvaged rooms without any cooks or gardeners or animals bigger than chickens. Goewin took it upon herself to bring them a barrel of flour every month, and coffee, and a parcel of honeycomb from the monastery at Abba Pantelewon.
“I’ve just got home,” Telemakos said. “I want to see Athena.”