“You monstrous, thankless child!” his father wept. “Give me half a chance to put you back together before you go about polluting yourself!”
The keeper came running out to them. Medraut held on to Telemakos with iron fingers that bit into his arm more pressingly, it seemed, than Solomon’s teeth had.
“Get me the emperor’s physician,” Medraut ordered. “And at least two attendants. A brazier, searing irons, a full kettle of clean water. Spirit, salt, a bolt of cotton, and needles, and a spool of fine gut. Opium. Now. Bring all of it out here, now. If I let go of him, he’ll bleed to death.”
Oh, Telemakos thought.
He lay quietly and stared at the sky, waiting for what would happen next.
Medraut bent over him as they waited, his fingers cutting into Telemakos’s arm like knives. “Telemakos? Stay here.”
“I am here,” Telemakos whispered. He tried to focus on his father’s face and the silver-fair hair that was like a reflection of his own, but the sky pulled back his gaze. It was the beginning of the season of the Long Rains, and though it was not raining yet that day, the air was thick with mist. The far winter sky soothed him, bright and gray and soft.
Desperate for time, they burned shut the wounds that were killing him even before they gave him the opium. No matter what they did to him, his vision never went entirely black, his mind never entirely unaware, until his inability to lose consciousness and shut it all out made him want to scream and scream and scream, except that he had no strength to do anything but stare dazedly at the sky.
His father and another man worked over his arm and shoulder with needle and thread. It was like being eaten alive by a flock of tiny birds. Something occurred to Telemakos suddenly, and he spoke through his father’s endless, endless stitches.
“Oh, please—sir,” Telemakos gasped. “Solomon! Please… Don’t—kill—Solomon!”
“Hush, child,” Medraut murmured at his ear, never hesitating in his work. “Foolish one. Would that punish Solomon, or you? The emperor won’t allow his pets to be executed.”
Telemakos said clearly and abruptly, “Because when she is bigger, I want to show the baby.”
“Oh.” Then for the first time, Medraut faltered. “The baby!”
Telemakos saw that his father had utterly forgotten her.
Medraut bent his head over his son. His hot tears scorched Telemakos’s arm. “Better she had never been born,” Medraut whispered.
After a time, with great reluctance, Telemakos realized it was easier to lie with his eyes shut than with them open.
But he stayed awake. For hours he remained aware of all that was happening to him, and dimly aware of all that was happening around him.
Gebre Meskal, the young emperor of the African kingdom of Aksum, had on several occasions let it be known publicly that he was indebted to the house of Nebir. He gave up a suite of rooms in his palace so that Telemakos would not have to be carried home in his drugged and blood-dazed stupor. Long past dark, long after there was nothing more his father could do for him, Telemakos lay conscious of Medraut kneeling with his head on the cot by his shoulder, watching the shallow rise and fall of Telemakos’s chest as he breathed.
It seemed late at night when the emperor came in.
“Ras Meder.”
Gebre Meskal used Medraut’s Ethiopic name and royal title, Prince Meder, as Telemakos did when he addressed his father. Telemakos felt his father come to attention.
“Majesty.”
“Be at ease, sir,” said the emperor, and sighed. “Please. Take my hand. Sit. Never have I known a birthday smutted by a grimmer cloud. Will he heal?”
Medraut’s answer was no answer. “He bore our surgery like a soldier.”
“So he would. His mettle bests the better part of my army. Telemakos Lionheart, Beloved Telemakos. Few men could have endured the punishment he suffered in the hands of the smugglers at the Afar mines, when he sought to discover those who would sabotage my plague quarantine. And he was only a child.”
In gentle affection, the emperor brushed his cool, dry palm over Telemakos’s forehead.
“Beloved Telemakos,” he repeated.
Even so innocent a touch, so close to Telemakos’s eyes, made him shudder. For one endless, confusing moment, Telemakos thought he was there, back in Afar. The brutal foreman that he never saw was tightening the blindfold—Telemakos was lost again in a dark, constricted world of thirst and exhaustion, labor and torment, where his eyes were always covered and his arms always bound, and his legs were locked in iron while he slept. If he lay blind and unable to move like this, where else could he be but in Afar, in the Salt Desert?
But, but. The emperor was still talking.
“—he was only a child. What age is he now?”
Medraut answered with dull, mechanical politeness. “He will be twelve at Trinity next month.”
“I have kept my eye on your lionhearted son this past half year,” the emperor said in a low voice. “I would not use so young a servant as a spy another time. It was a season before he had his full weight back after the captivity. And I have lain awake some nights regretting how publicly I involved him in the trial that followed. I should not have risked bringing anyone’s wrath against the boy.”
Medraut let out a sharp breath of dismissal. “Wrath!” he said hoarsely, his voice rough with unhappiness. “Majesty, what does any of that matter now? What more evil could be done to him than this? If any one of these wounds should fester, only one…Tooth and claw. There are so many. I dread their infection.”
“It is past curfew, Ras Meder,” the emperor said quietly. “I am holding the Guardian’s Gate open for you. I want you to go home.”
Medraut let one hand fall on Telemakos’s chest, and Telemakos gasped faintly. His torn ribcage throbbed beneath the pressure of his father’s touch, but it was a relief to feel its firm reality. He was not in Afar.
“I myself will keep your watch this night,” said Gebre Meskal. “You, Ras Meder, have the boy’s grieving mother and newborn sister waiting for your comfort. Your son is at rest for the moment. Please go home now.”
There were not many who could command Telemakos’s father, Medraut the son of Artos the Dragon, Medraut who would now be high king of Britain if he had so desired. “I should do this for no other man,” Medraut said in a low voice, rising to his feet.