His mother collapsed across his legs with her face in her arms and burst into tears.
Telemakos was bewildered. He thought that fishing was something he could do, something that would make him feel normal again. Being able to walk through woodland five miles outside the city to his grandfather’s fishing lodge seemed a reasonable goal to him, still yet a distant goal, but perhaps achievable before winter came again. And if he fixed his mind on that, it would make it easier to bear the terrible truth that he could not use a bow and could no longer hunt with his father.
But maybe I could learn to use a spear, Telemakos thought, while his mother wept hopelessly into his lap.
“Mother,” Telemakos said softly, and managed to extract himself from beneath her weight so he could touch her hair. “Mother, don’t cry. I’m so tired of not being able to move.” He had spent the first two months of that year with his hands tied behind his back, and the last three in bed. It was too much for one year. He wanted to watch bushbuck grazing in the highland savannah, to play with Athena, to go back to drawing maps and learning the names of stars, to listen to the courtiers gossiping in the New Palace. He wanted to see the emperor’s lions. They were modest pleasures and, Telemakos was sure, they were all within reach.
“I want a holiday,” he said.
“What holiday shall you ever have?” his mother wept. “What will become of you, boy?”
“Mother, please don’t cry. I hate it that I’ve made you so sad.”
“It’s not you,” Turunesh said. “It’s that wretched baby. You would not be lying here if not for her. I have no joy of her, ever. She never lets me sleep, she never stops weeping, she never smiles, she never thanks anyone—”
“She’s a baby!” Telemakos interjected, shocked by this outburst and half inclined to laugh.
“I can’t do anything for her. I can’t do anything for you. Better she had never been born.”
Ferem, who had been standing at the window, now said apologetically, “I must help your mother to her room, Telemakos. I’ll come back.”
Telemakos watched them go, his mother’s bent shoulders shaking as the old man guided her out. He glanced down at his bare left side, at his shoulder and chest wrapped tightly in white bandages, and thought perhaps he should feel more unhappy. But he felt nothing but relief. His shoulder hurt, but it was clean, local pain. It did not spread up and down his body when he moved, and he did not have the dreadful, sick feeling that it would never go away until he let the faceless man with a scorpion’s claws pound a nail through his heart.
I can go fishing, Telemakos thought contentedly, and I will.
The green sunbird continued to sip at the sweet water on the windowsill. Telemakos worked at being able to stand up. In another week he could walk from his bed to the window without having to stop and cling to the sill, gasping from exertion, before he started back. But it got easier.
He quickly grew bored with this circuit and began to make his way slowly through the house. His father was still so paranoid about the infection recurring that he posted guards at the outside doors to stop Telemakos from venturing into the garden; he could not be trusted to keep out of the fishpond or the stables.
One afternoon when Goewin was away, Athena cried to herself for so long that Telemakos thought there must be no one else alive in the entire city.
Oh, this awful house, he thought.
Eventually he could no longer stand to listen to it. He got up and put his head through to his mother’s bedroom: she was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with her head wrapped up in a shawl as though she were trying to suffocate herself. Telemakos assumed she was merely trying to stop her ears.
Why don’t they get a nurse? Telemakos wondered. Grandfather makes all these empty threats about sending the baby away when he wants to scare my mother, but if no one wants to take care of Athena, why don’t we just hire a nurse for her? We could afford a nurse, even if the plague quarantine has made Grandfather so parsimonious he won’t buy new lamps when we break them. We could afford a dozen nurses. I had a nurse. I had a nurse for so long I was old enough to cut my name into a piece of cedar wood for her to remember me by when she left. I did it in Greek; it was when I started learning to read The Odyssey. I must have been at least seven years old.
It occurred to Telemakos that his parents had not paid much more attention to him as an infant than they did to his sister. His father had not even known of his existence for the first six years of Telemakos’s life; his mother had continued her noblewoman’s audiences and parties and the work she did for her father, with little change in her routine after Telemakos was born. It had been made clear to him on several occasions—though not by his mother, to be fair—that he was lucky not to have been sequestered on a clifftop or in a hermitage, as often happened to unwanted royal children.
But my mother wanted me, Telemakos thought. I reminded her of my father. That’s why she kept me. And Athena only reminds them of my accident.
He followed the sound of the baby’s frustrated, abandoned screams. The nursery was next to his mother’s room, and Athena lay shrieking and sobbing in a large palm basket raised to the level of the window. Evidence of Goewin’s presence was all about the room. She had hung copper chimes in this window, also; they clinked and tinkled in the summer wind from the Simien Mountains. Big, brightly colored beads were strung across the cradle.
Telemakos leaned over so that his face was close to the baby’s and said softly, “Hello, little sister.”
Instantly she stopped crying. He put out a finger, and she held tightly to it, all of her tiny fingers wound firmly around one of his. She was able to cry tears now, and her deep gray eyes were wet, but so bright they seemed to sparkle. Telemakos stared into them and found himself incurably in love.
“Come here, hoot owl,” he whispered. “Oh, you stink. Small wonder you’re howling.”
He scooped her up without thinking about it. He slipped his sound right arm beneath her from the bottom up, cupping her head in his hand, and swooped her over his left shoulder so that his arm was crossed over his chest. She let out a whooping hiccup of a gasp as she landed. She was tight and secure against him that way, but he was not prepared for the pressure her head put on his newly healed wounds.
“Aiee.”
He gasped and sat down hard on the floor, but held her tight.