Athena warbled and then said, “Sunbird.”
In sudden, irrational terror, Telemakos wrenched at Anbessa’s gold collar until its links snapped in half a dozen places, and then he yanked the emeralds from his shoulders and ground them underfoot as his mother had done to the ragged feathers.
Athena raised her head in a piercing wail of pain and confusion. Gold wire had whipped her face as Telemakos had torn the collar off. There was a thin line of blood across her cheek. “Ai, sweet heart—” Telemakos gasped, all else forgotten, falling to one knee so he could bend to her more easily. Her hair in its neat woven rows gleamed like coils of new copper, and her skin glittered, too, where the tears streaked it. “Little owlet, your poor face—Let me see….”
Goewin was at Telemakos’s side, also trying to comfort Athena. Kidane and Ferem were in the avenue, Kidane scanning the empty street and Ferem kneeling over the remains of the bird as if it might tell him something. Medraut stood like a pillar of salt, silent, his look as bleak and wintry as if he had frozen to death in the instant of the gate’s opening.
Turunesh suddenly seemed to pass fully from one world and into another. Her weariness was gone. She fired forth a barrage of instructions at Ferem, with cold command, like a queen.
“Bring me a basin of clean water. I want to wash my hands. Tell Ludim to sweep the street. Prise that nail out and have the gate scrubbed with salt.”
She, too, knelt by Telemakos, and pulled her haunted, trembling son against her side. She folded both children in her arms at once; her voice was full of fear and misery and love. “Do you all think that because I have been unhappy I have become a simpleton? I will not keep my children any longer in this dreadful house.”
The maligned house was so quiet that its silence woke Telemakos. He lay staring into the familiar dark for a while, then turned over with a sigh of frustration. Athena was at his side, asleep; he had not been dreaming. It seemed needless torment that along with all else he should now be lying awake.
After some time, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Telemakos got up and went to look out the window. Yellow light shone faintly from a room two stories above his, Grandfather’s bedchamber, perhaps. It was hard to tell in the dark, without being able to count windows. Maybe not Grandfather’s room after all, because that was directly overhead. His study, then.
Telemakos went upstairs.
Goewin sat alone at Kidane’s desk amid storage boxes and documents. Before her lay all Telemakos’s map-drawing tools and a pile of maps he had plotted that year. The one on top was the last he had made, showing the constellations of the zodiac. Telemakos had sketched lines connecting some of the stars to make pictures: the Lion, and the Scorpion. Goewin looked up at him, her face white and tear stained.
“Do you know what your grandfather said when we talked about it afterward? He said, ‘It’s time for that boy to be sequestered. We should have done it at his birth.’ He wants to shut you away in the clifftop hermitage at Debra Damo, where they lock up all the lesser princes. And your father nodded and said it was a good idea.”
Telemakos felt his throat close up. “For how long?” he croaked, and added, catching back a sob and not even waiting for her answer, “They put Priamos in chains when he was sequestered there, for disobedience. He was younger than me. Oh, Goewin, it will kill me if I am imprisoned again—it will kill me.” He caught back another sob. “I will end up insane, like Mikael.”
“I know. So I told them. Men are so stupid!” She blew out her breath explosively through pinched nostrils, a quick sound of irritated anger. “Your mother said we should send you to Himyar. And I thought that was a good idea, and between us we have overruled the men. You can study in San’a under Abreha’s astronomer, which will raise no eyebrows at all, because Dawit Alta’ir is your uncle, your great-grandmother’s brother. You have a British kinsman there as well, Medraut’s foster brother Gwalchmei, my cousin. He is Constantine’s ambassador in Himyar. Anyway, Abreha Anbessa owes me a favor. I helped him negotiate the peace that gave Himyar its independence from Aksum, and I appointed Gwalchmei. I am calling that to account.
“So.” Goewin spoke determinedly in her fierce, steady way. “So. We are sending you to San’a in Himyar, to study with Dawit Alta’ir, Dawit the Eagle, the Star Master. You are going to apply yourself to maps and mathematics, and improve your South Arabian, and go hunting with those marvelous desert racing dogs Abreha keeps. I have written you a letter of recommendation, and the emperor will send one as well, and your excuse for going now will be that Abreha’s little lion from Gebre Meskal needs an escort.”
“What, I just go? On my own? I thought San’a was three weeks’ trek into the Arabian mountains! Won’t it take me half a season to get there? How did you make my father agree to that?”
“Abreha is in his port at al-Muza until Epiphany. Your father will take you as far as our own port in Adulis. You know you’ll be safe with him; he’ll travel by night and keep you away from the road if he has to. He’ll put you on board one of your grandfather’s merchant ships. When you arrive in Himyar, you’ll take your recommendations and Abreha’s lion and present yourself at the governor’s mansion in al-Muza. Abreha will see you on to San’a.”
Goewin rapped her fingers against a sealed letter that lay alongside Telemakos’s drawings and instruments. “We’ve made all ready. You’ll leave tomorrow night.”
“What are you doing with my things?”
“Packing them. What are you doing up here?”
Her white face was so pale she looked unearthly. Her eyes seemed depthless pools of black water, and the skin around them had a tight, bruised look to it.
“I think I heard you crying,” Telemakos said. “I can’t remember what woke me, but I think I must have heard you. And then I could not get back to sleep.”
“I know how it is. I could not even make myself undress, the day that salt-doll thing was left on the doorstep. I sat awake all night long.”
“Goewin, what happened to Hara?”
She turned over Telemakos’s map. Beneath it lay another, the same constellations, with the Scorpion outlined and highlighted, and behind that lay another elaborate scorpion pricked out in stars.
“He fled Aksum with his final contraband load of salt,” Goewin said, “so he may be alive and free somewhere, and perhaps he is now in this city, sending us a regular delivery of dead birds.” She thumped a fist against Telemakos’s maps. “Mother of God, Telemakos, I wish I knew.”