Priamos winced and shrank as though he had been struck again. “Three—” He swallowed, and bit at his lower lip. “Three—” Then he seemed to retch, as though the very words he tried to speak were so loathsome that he could not hold them in his mouth. “Three years or three minutes, it is all the same to me. I would sooner be flayed.”
Constantine paused for a long moment, and then said levelly, “Would you?”
“Yes.” Priamos answered without hesitation.
“A choice,” repeated Wazeb.
Constantine sighed and glanced at Ityopis. “Just so. Ras Priamos, if you will not be bound here, then you will take a score’s lash stripes on each palm. Choose.”
“My God, Constantine,” I cried out. “Only look at his hands!”
Priamos looked down at them himself, as if noticing for the first time the damage he had done them. He could not raise them, because the guards had hold of his arms.
“Go send for a whip,” he said stubbornly.
Constantine sighed again, and nodded to the butler, who left the room. I climbed down from the pool’s edge, sick at heart.
Ityopis begged fervently, “Grant the small courtesy, then, that if he takes this beating, let that be the end of it. Let this not be spoken of over and over and held as an example of his insurrection. Let it pass as an act of thoughtless passion, finished on both sides. We are all weary of the winter rains.” He stopped to draw breath. “Let me see to the repairs.”
“All right,” said Constantine, then snorted. “The brothers Anbessa, a coalition of lions, indeed! You are a nest of scorpions.”
The butler returned. He gave the whip to Constantine and asked to be dismissed.
“All right. Send for the animals keeper; we need these monkeys caught.”
“Ah, let me come with you,” said Wazeb. “I like the animals keeper.” They left together. I stared after the boy, hating him.
“My lord Ella Amida—”
The three soldiers spoke nearly as a unit.
“Your permission to return to—”
“I should be training—”
“We are needed—”
Constantine cut them off. “I need one of you here.”
The three glanced at one another. Then, by some internal decision of their own, one of them stepped forward determinedly and took the whip from Constantine. The other two soldiers turned and saluted Priamos on their way out.
Ityopis said politely, “You do not need an audience, lord,” and turned on his heel also.
“Ras Priamos,” said Constantine.
Priamos knelt between his guards. His lip was bleeding. He held out one hand, palm up, as though holding something precious and invisible in its cup: as he had held out his hand to me when he offered me my passage to Aksum.
“Peace to you, Priamos Anbessa,” I said levelly in Ethiopic, and followed Ityopis.
I heard the first swish and crack before I had left the Golden Court. Abandoning dignity, I fled with my hands over my ears before I heard anything more.
Ityopis was ahead of me, shuddering in the corridor. He turned to me and offered me his arm: peacemaker, Priamos had called him.
“I stand amazed that martinet finds any man ready to administer his punishments,” he gasped. “Half the soldiers in this city fought under my brother in Himyar. They’d cut out their own hearts to spare him. Mother of God, to threaten him with chains! Constantine can have no idea what it is to begin life on Debra Damo. Any one of us would have chosen as Priamos did, given such choices.”
“Priamos told me of Mikael’s chains,” I said.
“Mikael’s chains!” Ityopis gave a hoarse bark of laughter, like a cough. “Mikael’s! Ai! And did he tell you of his own? How he and Hector were fettered back to back for four nights, the time they got a spear for Mikael? Four nights they lay in a pit with the madman. They took it in turns sleeping so they might constantly watch him; they nearly skinned themselves trying to break free. Priamos still carries the marks left by the irons.”
Ityopis’s words struck me like a blow to the chest, stopping my breath. Priamos had given me no hint that he had taken part in Hector’s scheme.
“He speaks with all the careful government of a rock slide,” Ityopis uttered bitterly. “‘Go send for a whip’! Small wonder our mother names him hornbill.”
Constantine came storming out of the Golden Court.
“Let us talk for a minute, Goewin.”
He pulled my arm away from its link with Ityopis’s elbow, and took me roughly by my wrists. He held my hands up, imprisoned, as he spoke. I was nearly as tall as he, but I was not as strong. And I would not humiliate myself by struggling with him. I stood struck with frost, unmoving and unyielding.
“Explain a thing to the princess for me, Ras Ityopis,” Constantine said coldly. “She has more Ethiopic than any of us guess. Tell her about the behavior of coalition lions.”
Ityopis protested in a low voice, “My lord, I do not understand—”
“Explain to her why the brothers Anbessa are named a coalition.”
I stood between them in the hall, held captive in Constantine’s hard grip, while Ityopis reluctantly obeyed the viceroy’s order and explained to me the social habits of lions.
“Male lions form lifelong allegiances. Not with their mates, but with one another. They may leave a pride, they may leave their lionesses and cubs, or a rival coalition may send them off. But an allied group of males stays together, and hunts together, and fights together. Coalition lions will defend their comrades to the death. They are more faithful to the members of their coalition than to their mates or their kits.”
“You have not yet explained the brothers Anbessa,” Constantine reminded him.
Ityopis swallowed. “We are a coalition of lions,” he said in a low voice, “because it is said that any one of us will defend another to the death, as do brotherhood lions. Sir,” he said, turning to Constantine with his head bowed, “my lord, Abreha was never one of us. He is seventeen years my senior. Priamos had never laid eyes on him until the carnage at al-Muza. Abreha is not—”
“He slew the emperor Caleb’s eldest son, but he set Priamos free unscathed. When a coalition takes over a pride, they drive out the existing coalition and kill their cubs.”
Ityopis dared to protest, “Priamos is not Abreha!”