Telemakos drew another deep breath. Even the air seemed cold. He pushed himself to his feet to escort the emperor and his guards upstairs, clutching Athena around the shoulder until she pushed him away in annoyance. Goewin firmly barred him from following them into Grandfather’s study.
Telemakos went back outside and sat down again on the steps with Athena. He laid his cold cheek against his sister’s burning bronze hair. She chirped, remembering the box and the bird it had contained.
“Sunbird,” Telemakos whispered his second name into her sandalwood-scented hair. “That was a sunbird.”
The small wicker coffer had held a withered heap of iridescent green feathers. These had been carefully arranged, the long sweep of the tail teased to fit into the cramped space without bending or breaking. The shining body had a nail through its heart.
It was like a thing in a dream. It could not be real. Yet it burned against his vision, bright against the darkness, a murdered sunbird: the stud end of a nail lodged among the shining breast feathers, the point piercing out between the small shoulder blades, the carefully twisted tail.
VIII
A SHOUT IN THE STREET
THEY TOLD HIM NOTHING. They told him that the house of Nebir was under threat, but that was nothing.
He was not allowed beyond the walls of Grandfather’s villa. Goewin refused Kidane’s suggestion of a warrior escort when she went out, but she took Medraut with her as her own personal bodyguard, and Medraut could knock arrows to his bow three at a time. It reminded Telemakos of the first year Goewin spent in Aksum, half his lifetime ago: for a time she had used him as her collateral because he was grandson to Britain’s last high king, and no one had been allowed out of the house without a guard. They had not told him anything then, either.
A fortnight into the new year came the Feast of the Cross, Meskal, from which Gebre Meskal took his name as emperor. Hard upon the feast was the great parade in which the emperor’s councilors and soldiers all pledged their service to their sovereign for another year. No formal pledge was required of Telemakos, whose duty to the emperor was not spoken of in public. But Kidane had to be there, and Goewin. Medraut would not let his sister walk vulnerable and conspicuous across the Cathedral Square before the knowing eyes of the entire city, a strange and solitary woman among many men, making a bright and tempting target; nor would he leave Telemakos at home in an empty house. They were all to go.
Telemakos was torn between apprehension and wild relief at being allowed out of the house, even under guard, even to stand in the street for eight hours in formal dress. Mariam, his mother’s favorite attendant, fought to tame his hair with wire combs and clarified butter. Telemakos sat clenching his teeth as she tied fast his head cloth. He had known he would have to wear it for this formal occasion and had been steeling himself. But Medraut must have spoken to Mariam beforehand; she was careful not to come near Telemakos’s eyes. When she had finished, she turned him over to Ferem, who helped him into a shirt of brocaded linen and finally draped over Telemakos’s shoulders the heavy collar of gold and emeralds that Sofya’s mother, the queen of queens, had given him.
How many people in the Cathedral Square today will recognize this, Telemakos wondered; how many will know that it belonged to Ras Bitwoded Anbessa, the beloved prince Lionheart, and will they know that Gebre Meskal calls me Beloved, too? A death threat. How many know that he also calls me Sunbird?
He wished he did not have to wear the emeralds, or the head cloth.
His family was waiting for him in the forecourt. The morning sunlight on his shoulders was a shining bright green blur as Telemakos moved.
“You look grandson to Artos the Dragon this morning, Telemakos Meder!” Grandfather let slip in rare paternal pride. “An apt pretender to his line! What an honor that I harbor so many British princes!”
Medraut said curtly, “He owes nothing to Britain. He is Aksumite. And I do not like it that his emerald plumage glitters so.”
“Do you hush,” Goewin snapped at them. “Will you shout hints for all the neighborhood to wonder at?”
Athena, who unlike Telemakos had not held quiet and unresisting while her hair was combed and oiled and beaded, was on the verge of emotional collapse by the time Telemakos made his appearance. She was angrily trying to pull her plaits out. She was also trying to pull her mother’s plaits out, but saw Telemakos and lunged toward him.
“Oh!” Turunesh gasped, catching the baby before she dived headfirst out of the knotted cloth that she was tied up in.
Athena reached for Telemakos, shrieking and hissing like a cat. She made another attempt to throw herself backward out of her mother’s arms.
“Let me take her, Mother. She’ll calm down if she toys with my hair. I’ll use your carrying cloth, it’ll save time. Help me settle her.”
They had managed this exchange many times over the winter, but Telemakos’s heavy clothes made him and his mother awkward this morning. “Under my mantle. The metal-work bites into my shoulders, pass the cloth underneath. Ai! Fix it beneath, Mother!”
“Let me help,” said Goewin soothingly. The three of them managed together to fasten Athena against Telemakos’s side.
“Boy’s hair,” Athena said, pulling at his head cloth with both hands.
“Stop that,” he warned her sharply.
“Don’t look,” Goewin advised their mother, shepherding Turunesh toward the portal to the street. “He will use her as an excuse to get the head cloth off. I have never known your son to last in full finery for more than an hour.”
Ferem pulled back the gate.
There was a splash of iridescent green marking the white limewashed cedar, as if someone had thrown a handful of emerald dye against it from the street.
Turunesh straightened her shoulders and stood still, gazing for a moment toward the quiet, sunlit avenue outside, then turning to Telemakos to gaze at him; and this seemed a natural connection, for the jewels over Telemakos’s shoulders rippled with the same green light as the glinting thing in the entryway. As Telemakos looked at it again, the green blaze resolved itself into a small bird nailed to the gate.
The hair rose at the back of his neck.
“What in the name of God can be meant by this?” Turunesh hissed. With her own naked hands, she twisted the dead thing away from the gate and threw it into the street, and ground it underfoot with the heel of her slipper.
Telemakos shivered violently, as if he were stripped bare in Simien Mountain wind, instead of standing in sunlight in heavy clothes.