The Empty Kingdom (15 page)

“How are you going to do that?” Telemakos inquired as politely as he could, given that he was staring boldly into the najashi’s face.

“By this seal.” Abreha gestured to the signet ring that lay in the warming pan.

Telemakos began to guess at the najashi’s intent. They were still eye to eye. He murmured, “Why doesn’t it melt?”

“It is nickel, not precious metal. That little flame is not hot enough to melt it. It can be used as a brand, as well as a seal.”

Then Telemakos lost all strength to speak. His question came out as no more than whisper, but still he stared brazenly into the najashi’s face. “Do you brand all your servants?”

Abreha answered with quiet patience: “It is not the mark of a servant.”

Telemakos remembered the touch of the smooth metal, after Abreha had sealed Telemakos’s unsent letters with it, warm against the base of his skull.

“This seal on you will afford you protection within the bounds of my kingdom, and my own authority if you choose to wield it,” Abreha explained. The najashi spoke seriously. He was not threatening; he was offering terms. “Accept the seal, and you accept the responsibility of carrying that authority as long as you remain alive, unless you tear it from your skin first. Misuse it, and you risk your sister’s life. Or refuse it, with no honor lost, and trust me on my word alone.”

Telemakos gazed into the najashi’s sad black eyes beneath the heavy brow, and moved his lips to say,
I will accept
. But no sound came out. He licked his dry lips and managed to croak, less formally but with no less determination, “All right.”

The najashi turned away first, graciously.

“Wait by the window, with your head on the sill. The mark goes on the back of your neck, where it may be hidden by your hair. It is not meant to be disfiguring.”

Telemakos moved to the window, thinking, I have spent a great deal of the past two years on my knees before Abreha.

He rested his cheek against the sill, feeling as if he were preparing himself to have his head struck off.

“You are fearless,” said the najashi warmly.

“I’m afraid of dreams,” Telemakos croaked.

“Yet you aren’t afraid of pain, which is real, while the dreams are not.”

Telemakos gave a hiss of sudden frustration, and found his voice again. “Must we discuss this like a pair of scholars? Do it!”

“The seal isn’t ready,” Abreha said quietly. “I can wait in silence, if you wish.”

So they waited in silence, Telemakos with his head bent over the wide windowsill, watching the jeweled lights of the city above and below.

Abreha’s narrow fingers smoothed back the hair at the base of Telemakos’s skull.

“I doubt you’ll ever thank me for this,” Abreha said. “But perhaps you will forgive me.”

Very gently, he kissed the back of Telemakos’s neck to seal their contract, then pressed the mark of Solomon into his skin.

For one second the world was made of sparkling white light and blinding heat; then it was black. When he knew himself again, Telemakos was slouched against the wall below the window, sobbing childishly. The limewashed plaster beneath his cheek was damp with tears. He clenched his teeth and bit back the next sob.

He saw, rather than felt, that his hair was suddenly aflame. Abreha instantly beat it out with a damp cloth.

He
expected
this, Telemakos thought. He
expected
me to come to him. He
expected
he would be setting me this task, and sealing it like this. He had everything in place.

The najashi left Telemakos sitting by the window. He laid his ring in a dish to cool, and put away the tongs he had used to hold the heated metal. Then he slid his hand beneath the lip of his writing desk and sprang the hidden panel. He took a curl of palm tape out, closed the lid, and rolled the writing open on the marquetry.

“Your aunt has sent you a letter,” Abreha said, “thanking you for the lion skin you sent her, and I see no reason you may not read it.”

He
expected
me here, Telemakos thought again. He has saved this for last, to distract me, to court my favor, to reward my compliance …

But it worked. Telemakos crept to Abreha’s side. The najashi held up the light in the burner so Telemakos might read.

Goewin’s love and elation seemed to shout at him from the scratches on the narrow frond. Telemakos had the strangest sensation, shaping each word silently with his lips as he read, that he knew exactly how each sentence should end, as though he had read it all at least a dozen times before.

Telemakos my dear
,

This gift
,
this prize

delights me
!
Never you the coward or

the fool
,
not with your father’s strength and wit

and cunning bred in you to such degree
.

A child no more
,
you’ve grown to manhood now
.

Heed me
,
Telemakos
.

He prowled among

the lions; he became a young lion,

and he learned to catch prey.

Few sons achieve

their father’s stature
.
Most do not
,
and few

outstrip them
.
You
,
my soldier
,
you won’t fail
,

my bold hero
.
Beloved friend
,
you are

so well grown now
,
so wise
,
the flower of

the rising generation
,
and your deeds

will be their song
.

Telemakos
,
heed me
.

Your loving aunt
,
as ever
,
G
.

The letter was in Ethiopic, but the inset quotation midway through it was in Latin. This meant that the word
lion
was in Latin, too; it would have been
anbessa
, Abreha’s second name, in Ethiopic. So Goewin avoided making any connection between Telemakos’s gift to her and the najashi’s part in it. How I love her, Telemakos thought.

“May I read it again before you put it away?”

“Of course.”

A child no more
,
you’ve grown to manhood now
.
Heed me
,
Telemakos …

He suddenly recognized the familiar rhythms of Homer’s
Odyssey
. He reached out to touch the palm leaf, as if physical contact with Goewin’s written words would bring him closer to his aunt, and at the second his fingertips brushed the inscription, he realized that the entire letter was composed of the goddess Athena’s inspiring words to the prince Telemakos. The thrill of discovery and mystery that went through him felt as though it really did come straight through the scratched marks.

The phrases were out of context and out of order, but they were all direct quotations from his father’s own Ethiopic translation of the first four books of the
Odyssey
.

Sphinxlike, Goewin had sent him a riddle.

Telemakos read it again. Only the lines in Latin were unfamiliar; they sounded biblical. Why had she used Latin? She could have written the whole thing in Ethiopic, or even in Greek. If it was from the Bible and the
Odyssey
, it was all originally Greek anyway. So why this verse in Latin? Why any of it?

He became a young lion
.

Leo
. Goewin had taught Telemakos the Latin word for lion on the day they met, nine years ago, when Telemakos had been no more than six years old. It was one of his earliest memories, how he and Goewin and Priamos, Gebre Meskal’s ambassador to Britain, had exchanged names for his wooden Noah’s Flood animals in three languages. Goewin had told him the British word for lion, also,
llew
. Her father used to call her twin brother, Lleu, the young lion. The Roman legate at Abreha’s Great Assembly feast had called him that as well.

Leo
.
Llew
. Lleu, who had once been prince of Britain, Goewin’s twin brother. Medraut had also used the word
leo
, in the brief time he and Telemakos had been together earlier that year:
Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion
.

Telemakos
,
heed me
.

Telemakos’s eyes were beginning to burn again. He could not unravel it. He had not enough time. It was not fair.

“Have you finished?” Abreha’s even voice cut through his concentration.

“I’ve finished,” Telemakos whispered. He watched the najashi’s narrow, dark hands roll the palm strip shut.

“Muna, are you there?” the najashi called. The queen came in without answering aloud; only her clothes rustled and tinkled, as though, like a ghost, she had to make her presence known through the objects around her.

“Make a bed for the Morningstar in the sitting room,” Abreha said. “Let him stay here tonight. You may want to anoint the burn.”

Telemakos shivered. He reached up toward the blazing mark at the back of his neck, but thought better of it. Muna helped him to his feet, holding her resolute silence. Her touch on his bare skin was gentle and thrilling. Telemakos turned his flaming face away from her, ashamed of his tears and the turmoil in his stomach.

“Do you want an opiate?” Abreha asked him.

Telemakos bit back the bitter sarcasm that sprang to his lips: Why didn’t you think of that before you set my hair on fire? He remembered his father, cold and courteous, held captive in chains that threatened to choke him.

“I’m all right,” he said stiffly. He shrugged off Muna’s simmering hands. “I told Athena she could have my dogs. She has promised to behave herself for you if she gets them. I left her sleeping in the Great Globe Room, and it would be a good thing if they were there for her when she wakes.”

Muna beckoned him, one hand down, her fingers opening and closing by her side. Telemakos followed her out of the najashi’s study and into the receiving room. She communicated without speaking, exactly as Medraut used to do, pressing Telemakos’s shoulder to make him kneel and patting the shining ebony tabletop to make him lay his head down on it. She was sympathetic, but not shocked by the najashi’s treatment of him; her manner was so firm and straightforward that he realized she must know more of Telemakos’s misdeeds than he had thought. She was somehow Abreha’s conspirator.

Her touch as she smeared aloe over the back of Telemakos’s neck was so delicate that he almost thought he was imagining it. But the brand itself felt like a small circle of flame at the base of his skull.

“Let me plait your hair,” Muna said. “It will keep it off this wound, and you will look respectable for your interview tomorrow.”

My
interview
? he thought, and suppressed a shudder, but the bells were gone and made no sound.

Abreha came through and stood watching as Muna began to comb Telemakos’s hair. She scolded her husband sharply. “You might have waited to mark him until after your Federation lords interrogate him. Perhaps they’ll find fault in him that you don’t see.”

“I know the worst already,” Abreha answered. “He will withstand their questioning.”

Telemakos dreamed he was in Afar, but the dream was unfamiliar. He lay on his stomach by a stagnant pool in a riverbed that was otherwise parched to dust. Above him, on the bank of the dry river, with the desert at his back, Goewin’s slain twin brother, Lleu the Bright One, the young lion, the prince of Britain, whom Telemakos had never known in life, sat cross-legged. Lleu had Goewin’s dark eyes and white skin, but in the dream he was the same age as Telemakos.

Telemakos lay with his left arm plunged to the shoulder in the still, green water, trying to tickle trout. But the pool was empty and the water was icy cold, and his arm had grown so numb Telemakos could not feel his fingers anymore.

He looked up at his uncle and said, “I can’t do this. It will destroy me. It’s not worth it.”

“You must,” Lleu answered. “You must show me how.”

“There’s nothing here,” Telemakos said, and pulled his arm out of the water. But when he willed his black, frozen fingers to open, there on the palm of his dead hand lay Abreha’s signet ring.

“That is the mark of Solomon,” Lleu said. “You can keep it.”

T
HARAN WAS WITH TELEMAKOS
when he woke, pouring coffee spiced with ginger that Muna had left for them.

“The najashi has departed San’a. He is taking your sister to Aksum,” the vizier told him. “Do not protest; we thought it best to spare you both a violent parting. When you’ve broken your fast, you may come with me to a gathering of the Federation so they may question you.”

Telemakos could neither eat nor drink. Tharan sat patiently with him for a few minutes, then twisted the ends of his mustache and stood up.

“Let’s go, then, boy. They will be waiting.”

Tharan escorted him alone; no guard went with them. The stairways seemed eerily silent without the companion clash of tinsel at Telemakos’s elbow. He thought again of Medraut and tried to carry himself with his father’s fearless dignity.

“Lower your head,” Tharan told him suddenly. “You must not enter the Chamber of Solomon looking as though you have blood right to it. Your chances of withstanding this trial will be far greater if you do not seem prideful.” He stopped, right there in the hall, and tipped Telemakos’s head forward with a light touch. Telemakos stood still, seething, and fixed his gaze on his feet.

“Not so much,” Tharan directed. “Show them humility, not shame. Are you ashamed of yourself?”

Telemakos did not think Tharan expected an answer to this, but he raised his chin, keeping his eyes cast down.

“Princely,” Tharan said. “Perfect. Hold that. Can you?”

“Sir.”

“I shall cough, to remind you, if I see you falter.”

“I don’t understand,” Telemakos said quietly. “Why does it matter how I—”

He stood suddenly overwhelmed by his own perfidy, frozen, unable to step forward into this bleak, brief future he had created for himself, facing a lifetime’s worth of fear and torment packed into a few weeks.

Tharan gripped him by the shoulders, as a soldier would his comrade before battle.