“THERE,” MEDRAUT SAID, RUNNING the tips of his fingers along the blind seam in Telemakos’s shoulder. “Finished. And your skin should grow with you comfortably; you can thank Amosi for that. Your grandmother the queen of the Orcades could not have made cleaner work of it, and that’s saying something. Let me show you.”
The bandages were gone. Medraut held one of Turunesh’s mirrors at Telemakos’s back, and Telemakos held another, so he could see behind him.
“We did not ever cut through bone in the end,” Medraut explained. “We took your arm straight out of its socket, at the join with your shoulder.”
Telemakos tilted the mirror back and forth, fascinated. His ribs and throat were impressively scarred as well, back and front.
“Solomon never took his teeth out of your arm,” Medraut explained. “The other wounds on your body were made by his claws. They were ugly, and any one of them could have killed you if it had festered, but they were not deep.” Medraut’s low, musical voice was matter-of-fact as he laid out these horrors. “You did the right thing, Telemakos.”
“I did?”
“You kept the lion’s teeth away from your throat. You sacrificed your arm for it, but that is what saved your life. Well, that, and Nezana forcing Sheba off so she could not open you up while her partner held you down.”
Telemakos choked back a sob, feeling sorry for himself: not because he had lost his arm, but because he knew he would never be allowed in the lion pit again.
“Does it hurt?” Medraut asked.
“Nothing hurts.” Telemakos sniffed. “I miss my lions.”
“They aren’t your lions, boy.” Medraut’s tone was dry.
He added, gentler now, “It’s said lost limbs cause pain that isn’t really there. You seem to do a lot of desperate flailing when you move; you’ve lost your grace.”
“I have trouble balancing,” Telemakos admitted. “I try to move my arm, and there isn’t anything to move. I keep thinking I must be bound, as I was in Afar, and when I try to lift my arm, I can’t. So I struggle.”
Medraut laid aside the mirror. He looked down at his own scarred hands, and at the blue physician’s mark of Asclepius tattooed in his left palm. He murmured, “I don’t know how to heal you of the wounds you took in Afar.”
Telemakos said, surprised, “They’re long healed. They were nothing.”
“I don’t mean these,” Medraut said, tapping lightly at Telemakos’s scarred fingertips, where Hara had slashed the nails off to assure Anako that Telemakos was mute. “I mean the wounds to your spirit, which make you scream in the dark, and trick your body into believing it is still being forcibly subdued. Do you dream about the lions?”
“Never.”
“Well, Solomon crippled you. Hara the Scorpion did not. Who torments you in your sleep?”
Without warning Medraut laid his hand across Telemakos’s eyes.
Telemakos gasped and shuddered, flinching.
“You see,” Medraut said.
Telemakos was appalled. He had not thought his secret fears were so transparent.
Medraut spoke more to himself than to Telemakos, his musical voice dark with menace. “I swear, when we round up the last of these salt pirates, I will demand their heads struck up on pikes in the Cathedral Square. That will bring an end to the tale. That will see you avenged.”
“I don’t need avenging,” Telemakos said. “Or I’d be angry at Solomon, too.”
“Oh, aye, that’s what you’d do, turn the other cheek. If your friend the lion should eat up your left arm, offer to him the other also.”
Telemakos laughed. Medraut gave a faint smile with half his mouth. Encouraged to hear his father quoting scriptures of forgiveness, albeit loosely and with sarcasm, Telemakos stood up and twisted his shamma over his shoulders. “Sir, you yourself bear a grudge against a person who does not deserve your ill will any more than Solomon deserves mine,” he said boldly. “Wait here for me a minute.”
He left his father in his bedroom while he went into the nursery.
Athena was just awake. She woke quietly of late, because now that her hands worked for her she was able to grasp at the beads and toys hanging over her face, and they kept her entertained until someone more interesting came along. Telemakos loved the look of her eyes when they met his after she had been asleep. They glinted like sunlight on water, as if everything in the world held unlimited excitement and expectation.
He could lift her easily now. She was heavier, but not much, and he was considerably stronger. He hoisted her over his shoulder and took her back to their father.
Medraut stood up, but Telemakos barred his way. Medraut glared at him through narrowed storm-blue eyes.
“Stop blaming her for my accident,” Telemakos said. “It was my own fault.”
“I cannot love her,” Medraut answered. His deep, melodious voice was cold and flat.
“Only look at her,” Telemakos insisted, and edged aside so Medraut could see the baby’s face.
She was nearly seven months old now. She was not a big baby, but she held her head up with such alert and intense interest, and had such a thick shock of springing, burning hair, that she seemed much older than she was.
Medraut held out the stiff, arthritic little finger of his left hand. Athena grasped it firmly with her own unthinkably small fingers, blindly trusting and certain.
“All who are born have a right to be,” Medraut murmured to himself, but then he shook away the baby’s hand sharply and repeated, in a low voice, “God help me, but I cannot love her.”
“Just…Do you have to love her? Just live with her, call her by her name. Here’s what you can do,” Telemakos said. “Tell Amosi to stop sending me opium. I don’t use it, and it’s pure evil to use that stuff on Athena.”
For half a second, Telemakos thought his father was going to strike him.
But Medraut spoke with icy control. “Not I, boy. No one has ever been that desperate to keep her quiet.”
“Not on purpose,” Telemakos said. “But Mother still suckles her, sometimes.”
“For God’s sake.” Medraut relaxed, and sighed. “So she does. All right—it’s time we put a stop to that addiction, anyway. This wretched house.”
Everybody cursed Grandfather’s house when there were no other convenient scapegoats left. Telemakos liked the house and felt sorry for it. Like Athena, it had not done anything.