“Teaching the tame lion to read Greek? What are you talking about?”
“It is my mother’s name for Wazeb,” Priamos said. “It is a greater compliment than you might think. A tame lion is less predictable than a chained one. Isn’t that right, young lion tamer?”
Telemakos did not answer. He was frowning studiously over the volume I had tried to take from him. He cried, “Oh, look at this!” and began to unfold a page. Spread out, it entirely covered his lap. “Oh, what is this a map of? I can’t read Greek either—”
I bent over his shoulder. It was a map of the world.
“Here’s Aksum—” I pointed “—where we are now. And here is Britain, where I come from. I can show you the way we traveled, look, starting up here, following the coast past Britanny and Iberia—”
We were both suddenly absorbed. Telemakos held the map open, his touch light and careful. He watched my finger tracing its path across the papyrus and nodded as I listed the Mediterranean ports where we had stopped.
Priamos watched us. When I looked up at him again he said, “I did not know you read Greek.”
“I don’t. My mother was a mapmaker. She taught me to draw the projections in Ptolemy’s Geography. I can’t read the names, but I know the map very well. What is this book?”
“It’s a Red Sea Itinerary. It’s a shipping guide. I wish we’d had this on our voyage; it might have stopped you always questioning our route.”
“I only questioned when you suddenly changed our route, before I knew we were followed. Look, Telemakos, here is Gabaza, the customs point for ships arriving at Adulis. I thought I would not be able to breathe, it was so hot when we landed there. It was so strange to me. But there was another white passenger on our ship, a merchant sailor who could not speak, and while I was waiting to disembark I watched him making his way through the crowd on the quay. He gave me courage. I’d never met him face-to-face; I only ever saw his back. But he gave me courage. He walked haltingly, like the rest of us, unused to land beneath his legs, but he moved with such confidence and purpose. I thought that if a man who could not speak was able to face strangers so fearlessly, then so should I be able to. And see, when I arrived, there were no strangers after all. There was you.”
“Show me how you came here from Adulis,” Telemakos demanded.
“Goodness, haven’t you had enough of maps yet?”
“I love maps,” Telemakos answered promptly.
Priamos laughed. “Well, see, both of you. I bought this edition because of the maps.”
He lifted the book from Telemakos’s lap and folded the wide sheet back in place. “Here is the road from Adulis to Aksum,” Priamos said, turning pages over. “And look, let me show you my favorite. Here is the road to Debra Damo, the cliff top hermitage where I and my brothers were sequestered.”
The picture was so stylized that you could scarcely call it a map: it showed an entire landscape. The road was drawn as a thin line with a cross marked at either end, and hatchings and bends here and there to mark turnings along the way. Around the road were miniature sketches of trees and animals and villages, all leading to a wide plateau with a geometric Aksumite church perched on its flat height. Below the church there lurked a serpent the size of an elephant, stretching its fearsome coils up the cliff side.
“What on earth is that?” I asked. “Have they got a dragon to guard you there?”
“The saint who founded the monastery was lifted to the top of the amba plateau by a flying serpent,” Priamos said. “Or so the stories say. In its place now they have a leather rope. There is no other way in or out.”
“You’d be very safe,” said Telemakos.
“Some people go there for sanctuary,” Priamos said. “But my brother Mikael has spent his life imprisoned there, and that is not the same thing at all.”
Priamos closed the book and reached out to lay it atop one of the stacks I had made. Beneath his shamma his arms were bare, and I noticed again the small, stick scars on his wrists. They were so faded you could only see them when they caught the light.
“Goewin wants to meet your mother,” Telemakos said. “Will you take us to her, Ras Priamos?”
“That I will do with pleasure, Telemakos Meder. I may not stay, though.”
Candake the queen of queens, negeshta nagashtat, was enormous. I have since heard many people call her beautiful, as Telemakos did, and so she is; but still Caleb’s elder sister was bigger than any human being I have ever seen. She must have weighed as much as a small buffalo. She was not able to move as quickly as a buffalo, though, and was surrounded by a swarm of attendants who helped her to sit and to stand, and who seemed to feed her constantly. Her hair had gone salt white, and there were dozens of fine gold chains woven into her tight plaits. She was wonderful, and terrifying; in her own way, eerily, much like my aunt Morgause.
“Ah, you bring her to me at last, Priamos! How I have longed to see this girl! The queen of queens beholds the—what did you call her in the tribunal?”
“Queen of kings,” Telemakos supplied.
I wondered, Where did you pick up that?
“The queen of kings.” Candake creased and cackled with uncontrollable laughter, and leaned forward to grab Telemakos’s hands and swing them back and forth as though she were dancing with him. “Queen of kings! Like Cleopatra!” I thought she was going to choke herself laughing. “Or Makeda, the queen of Sheba, the mother of us all! Ah, Priamos, no other of my children could have been destined to speak as the mouth of the king; you have the flyaway tongue of a catbird.
“Girl, do you know what he said when he came before my brother Caleb for the first time, what he called the negus? ‘Solomon,’ he said. ‘Solomon walks among us in your wisdom.’ And Caleb said it was bad enough he had a base traitor in one nephew, without another being a groveling sycophant.”
“My lady mother, I am supposed to go and repeat to my old tutor what little I have learned of the British tongue,” Priamos interrupted quickly. “I will leave you alone with the princess.”
Candake paused for breath, chuckling and wheezing. “Priamos was sick, sick with nerves. After the presentation to Caleb they took the children out to see the animals, and he vomited into the lion pit.”
One of Priamos’s guards was twitching in his attempt to keep a straight face. “Go, go!” Priamos said to them, turning quickly. “Tedla, Ebana, I swear I’ll have you whipped for insolence. Go! I am late.” He drove the guards before him with his arms spread wide, abandoning me to his mother.