“All right—slide that toward me. That’s right—now stop. Stop!”
She snatched at the staff again, but not before Telemakos had read the angle.
“Well done, little Tena,” he said softly, and let her have the crossed pieces of bone to play with. The water clock that crowned the pinnacle of the dome above them chimed the late hour; Telemakos blew out the lamp. Outside in the dark sky the real stars hung radiant. From the floor below came the faint twitter of the caged birds settling for the night, and from farther away, the floating sound of a single flute.
It is nice here, Telemakos thought, but everyone seems unhappy. Or discontented. I wonder what those maps are for, the maps I have to copy.
When Dawit Alta’ir wanted to chew kat, he threw his apprentice out among the orphaned Scions. Telemakos sat with them at lunch, beneath the songbirds, studying his most recent letter from Goewin while the little girls rolled oranges back and forth with Athena. She played amiably with the other children now and called them all by name. She called Muna and her companion Rasha by name as well. Telemakos had not heard Athena call anyone “mama” since they had left Adulis.
He was happy to let someone take over Athena’s attention for the moment, because Goewin’s letter puzzled him. It seemed to begin abruptly as though she were picking up a continuing conversation. The lion pit was being dug out to give Solomon and Sheba more room; Goewin described the work as though Telemakos already knew about it.
He had heard from her only twice before. Even allowing for the overland journey and the occasional post going astray, after three months and more in San’a, Telemakos thought it time Goewin’s promised letters began to catch up with him. His father did not write to him either, but this did not surprise him. Letters arrived at least once a week from his mother, and it was already a month past Epiphany. Telemakos could not understand the lack of attention from Goewin. She had said she would write every week.
I wonder if someone opened this before it reached me, Telemakos thought, rereading Goewin’s chatty tale of the emperor’s lions for the fifth time. He could see the mark of her seal, but it had come off. He turned the page over and over, trying to find some hidden meaning in her odd, wrong-handed, spidery script.
Maybe someone is censoring her letters. Maybe that sunbird-killer is hoping to find intrigue in the British ambassador’s messages. Maybe someone is taking her letters and keeping them.
Oh, Telemakos thought, I am safe out of it, but I am so far away. How can I warn Goewin of anything? It takes three months, a whole season, for her to write to me and receive an answer.
“Morningstar,” said Shadi, the obedient young tribal king. Telemakos looked up and realized that Shadi was talking to him, and had said the name twice already. Dawit used it so freely that Muna and now the children had picked it up as well, but Telemakos was not used to it.
“How did you learn to move in such catfoot quiet?” Shadi asked. “You don’t even make a noise turning the pages. I would not know you were here if I couldn’t see you.”
Telemakos laughed. “My father is quiet,” he answered. “I must have learned from him. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to speak. He wouldn’t have taken me hunting if I’d ever made a noise. I used to hunt with him, before my accident.”
“You could hawk,” Shadi said tactfully. “The najashi doesn’t allow us weapons of any kind, but he has given me a sparrow-hawk.”
Telemakos recognized, suddenly, a difference between these children and those of al-Muza: even the smallest boys in al-Muza had worn their curved wooden knives with pride, but Abreha’s Royal Scions were daggerless.
“Why aren’t you allowed weapons?” he asked.
“We are noble.”
“Oh.” Telemakos considered the possible reasoning behind this, and his own guess as to why no one at home would teach him to throw a spear. “Are you hostages?”
Shadi gave him a pitying, astonished look, as though he could not believe that even a crippled foreigner could be so ignorant. “Whose good faith would my well-being buy? My father and brothers are dead.”
“That of your tribe, surely?”
“My clansmen, my limbs, shed blood in my name, not I in theirs. I am their head. A sovereign must learn to govern, to direct, not to wield arms.”
What about me? Telemakos wondered. Does Abreha consider me, as well, too noble to bear a weapon? I haven’t a kingdom to govern; I’m nothing to Himyar. I’m going to ask Abreha for a spear. The sling’s all right for birds, but I have got to find a way to hunt properly again.
Athena sat curled against her brother’s thigh, fitting lozenges of colored paint into a partitioned tray. She played nearly as often in the Globe Room as in the nursery, and as long as she was busy she did not try to destroy precious instruments or documents. Dawit Alta’ir was remarkably tolerant of her. He let Athena play with his hair and pick the leaves out of his beard and sort the semiprecious stones he used to make his globes.
The king had come up to see Telemakos at work, and watched from over his shoulder. “I do not remember a request that all our maps be illuminated, Dawit Cartographer,” Abreha said.
Telemakos had decorated the blank edges of the page he was working on. A line of pelicans flew across the top of the sheet; flamingoes stalked its lower corners.
“The Morningstar does that. It keeps the fuss to a minimum. Athena likes to watch her brother draw.”
“What is he working at?”
“Copying the plague tablets.”
“Does he know what they represent?”
“I have not told him.”
“I do not wish these plans to leave this library.”
“Send me another who can do the work adequately, and I will use him instead.”
Have they forgotten I am here? Telemakos wondered. He said lightly, “You are making me curious.”
“That is a fair warning,” Abreha acknowledged. He watched in silence for a time. Then he sat back on his heels and said at last, “Your master’s named you well, Athtar the Morningstar, the Bright One.”
Telemakos kept working, stiffly, and said nothing. Goewin’s twin brother, Lieu, the lost prince of Britain, had also been named “Bright One.” It made Telemakos feel ghost-touched to be compared to his dead uncle.
The paintbrush slipped from Telemakos’s fingers and spattered ink across the pelicans at the top of the page.