“You can hold him while the harness is being mended, if you like,” Telemakos said. “I’ll have enough to do with the baby.”
“Not I, thank you!”
The other boys laughed at the tall one. Telemakos let his breath out slowly in a private sigh of relief. They would not mob him now.
They gave Telemakos conflicting directions. The girl with the shell scarf and the big boy argued briefly in their strange dialect, and were told off by the belt salesman for treading on his carpet. “Step back,” Telemakos told them, pulling Menelik up close to him, and of the merchant he asked politely, “Which of them speaks truly, sir?”
“Iskinder will lead you aright,” said the scabbard seller, pointing to the tall one. “Call him Alexander, if you prefer Greek. His uncle sends me my best customers.”
Telemakos looked the children over as he fell in step beside tall Iskinder. They were all reasonably well dressed. The little boys wore wooden daggers, and the older boys wore real ones, in wide, curved, ornate scabbards. The girls carried shopping baskets. Everyone’s wrists and ears rang with silver jewelry. Gedar’s children would have looked ragged and beggarly among them.
“I’d forgotten the smell of cinnamon till I landed here today,” said Telemakos. “All our ports have been closed for the last three years. Your country seems very prosperous to me.”
“So it is,” said tall Iskinder. “Arabia the Fortunate. But you did not see it in the great sickness, when there were not enough of us to bury our own dead. People dumped corpses in the sea. Everything stank.”
“Ships still came in, but the king stayed away,” said the girl, shaking her head so that her shells chittered. “The najashi hid in the Hanish Islands for half a year, when plague was here, so he would not die with the rest of his countrymen. All his children died. He thought they would be all right in San’a, in the mountains, but the frankincense merchants brought the sickness there as well.”
“He has no heir,” said the scarred one. “The najashi would send all the frankincense and salt back where it came from if it could bring his sons to life again.”
Telemakos could not tell, from their talk, if they approved of their king or not. When they spoke of their dead it was with a resigned and eerie indifference that was alien to him.
“These suqs used to be much more crowded,” said the shell girl. “My grandmother likes it better now. Doing the shopping is like a long day of visiting. The merchants chatter at you till your ears drop off, and give you coffee. It will take you most of the afternoon to agree on a price for your baby carrier.”
They led Telemakos by the city’s secret ways, along passages so narrow that the ibex horns guarding the rooftops against ill spirit met overhead like the bars of a twisted cage.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos brushed close to the white walls on his right so that Athena would not hit the building on the left, and when the sunlight caught them between lanes, he found his shamma glinting with gypsum. Menelik’s fur, too, was frosted with it.
“Why are you in Himyar?”
Telemakos, absorbed in mentally mapping the intricate pattern of al-Muza’s alleyways, realized suddenly that one of his guides was talking to him.
“Why are you in Himyar?” Iskinder asked for the third time.
“I’m to deliver this lion to the najashi. It’s a gift from the emperor of Aksum.”
“Are you employed by the emperor?” Iskinder’s voice cracked on the final word of each sentence he uttered.
The group emerged all at once into a wide, bright plaza. It was noisy with fountains and traffic and seagulls crying and the mourning warble of pigeons.
“Are you employed by the emperor?”
The square was lined with ceremonial thrones like those on the road leading into the imperial city of Aksum, each carved of Aksumite basalt, black against the white lime and white sand of al-Muza’s walls and streets.
“Are you employed by the emperor?” Iskinder repeated patiently.
“Only to deliver the lion,” Telemakos said. “They sent me because I raised it. It was an honor to be sent, but not an obligation.”
There was a faint, ugly smell about the place that reminded Telemakos of the bloody days immediately following his accident.
“You’re lucky,” Iskinder said. “It’s good to have connections. I mean to join the city guard here in another year or so, but I have no one to recommend me, so there is no reason they should take me in.”
“Of course they will take you in,” said one of the other boys. “You are a giant. So what if you’re afraid of that lion?”
“I did not see you volunteer to hold it,” Iskinder retorted. Telemakos pulled Menelik against his thigh and brushed glitter from the lion’s cheeks and whiskers.
“Poor feet,” Athena remarked.
“What did you say, Tena?”
The girl with the shells suddenly spoke quietly in Telemakos’s ear. “You might like to cover your sister’s eyes. There was an execution yesterday, and it may frighten her.”
She turned aside and pointed skyward.
“Mother of God,” Telemakos swore in a whisper, and Menelik pressed even tighter against his leg as Telemakos jerked up the lion’s lead so he could pull the end of his shamma over Athena’s head.
Not three paces away from them, but above them, was the man who was to have been killed the day before. He was still alive. His execution had been carried out, indeed, but he was still alive. He had been crucified, nailed to a length of mast wood and left to die, and he hung above the street like a parody of the young Christian god, struggling and gasping in the scorching meridian sun, hours after he should have died of thirst or shock.
Athena was trying to untangle her face.
“Do not look, Tena,” Telemakos rasped. He stood directly beneath the bare, blood-streaked feet, so close that were he taller he could have reached up and brushed away the flies that clustered busily over the blackening wounds.
Athena twisted herself free.
“You hide again,” Telemakos whispered.
Athena fought with her brother, refusing to make a game of it. “Feet,” she said. “Poor feet.”
Telemakos took a deep breath, struggling for control of his stomach. He remembered to keep hold of the lion. Walk away! One step, another, in a dozen paces it will be gone.