The Empty Kingdom (19 page)

But I’ll not hesitate
.

He worked over the storage vessels in silent efficiency, with knees and nails and teeth.

“Morningstar?”

Telemakos stoppered the last waterskin shut, bracing the skin in place with one foot.

“Sorry. I was thirsty, and it takes me a long time to get one of these open.”

“I’d help you. Anyone would help you.”

“I’m all right.”

Telemakos had drunk as much as he could hold, before he had started. He did not know when he would next find uncontaminated water.

He folded himself into a corner of the hold with his knees against his chin to wait, but the najashi found him there. Abreha came down the narrow stepway past Iskinder and beckoned Telemakos to his feet.

“Come up. You must share this ship with your enemy for a brief time, and I do not like to see you skulking down here as though in cowardice.”

Abreha bent to one of the waterskins. He refilled his own leather bottle, drank from it, and offered it to Telemakos. Telemakos refused quietly.

“I’m all right.”

“Come up with me.” The najashi laid his hand across the back of Telemakos’s shoulders to propel him in the right direction.

Anako the Lazarus sat cross-legged and hunchbacked on the deck, a withered, sunken bundle of rags and bones. He had been heavy before his exile; the flesh hung off him loosely now, and his gray hair was so thin it looked as though his bare scalp was brushed with dirty cobwebs. He had been an evil man, and for all Telemakos knew, he was still evil; but he was also old, and ill, and frail, and without any power.

He had not forgotten Telemakos. When Anako raised his head, his look was filled with hatred.

“This is Lij Bitwoded Telemakos Eosphorus, the Morningstar, who has just completed an apprenticeship with my cartographer,” Abreha said. “I am aware you know each other of old, and have reason to consider yourself opponents. But you have both done me faithful service, and while you are guests aboard my flagship, you must be civil toward each other, and dine together with me.” Abreha turned to Telemakos and commanded, “Show this man a sign of your goodwill.”

Telemakos held out his single hand to Anako, palm down, a gesture of sure and cold command. Anako hesitated, glancing up at Telemakos in disdain and disbelief. Telemakos turned his hand slightly, so that its slant presented the two scarred fingertips; that was where Anako had maimed him. There was another scar on his shoulder where Anako had tried to kill him.

Telemakos saw that the hateful, cringing man before him did not recognize the wounds or remember inflicting them. Anako looked blankly past the uneven fingernails, focused simply on the distasteful task of giving Telemakos some formal greeting of respect.

“I remember you,” Anako hissed. “You sentenced me.”

“Anako of Deire,” the najashi said grimly, “was he not merciful in his sentence? Are you not alive, and free, and whole? Might he not have sent you to your death? The Morningstar has offered you his respect. Make your peace.”

Anako took Telemakos’s outstretched hand, and the second that he did so, before Anako could consider what he would do next, Telemakos bent quickly and laid a light kiss on the back of Anako’s thin and brittle knuckles. He dropped Anako’s hand and straightened his back. Abreha brushed the brand at the back of Telemakos’s neck with light fingertips. The touch made him shiver.

“Superb, my Shining One,” the najashi murmured approvingly. “Now let us eat together.”

That night Telemakos waited quietly in the dark, sitting at Abreha’s side and biting his knuckles, while as if by some enchantment all those around him fell quietly into drugged sleep. Abreha was among the first to go, Iskinder among the last. It was astonishing for Telemakos to watch it happening, knowing he was responsible.

Spiderwebs joined together can catch a lion, he thought.

“Your enemy is not very frightening,” Iskinder remarked. Anako was a shambles of a man, sprawled asleep on the deck with his mouth gaping. The skin of his feet and hands was cracked and scabbed. “The state of him! I do not know whether he is in the greater part disgusting or pitiful.”

“He’s pitiful,” Telemakos said quietly, amazed that for the past three years this wretched man had haunted his nightmares. “Hard labor and poor food wear your body down.”

How I feared and hated him, Telemakos thought; Anako and his henchman Hara the Scorpion. And Hara ended up crucified as a spy, and here is Anako, a broken old man. In the end all my fear is gone. How can it have happened? But there’s only pity left.

Telemakos sat quietly, waiting. After a little while he began to wonder if he had overdone the dosing of the wine and water. The drugs had been given to him for use as painkillers, not as sedatives. He had not really expected everyone to end up snoring on the deck around him. But even Iskinder fell at last.

If I’ve missed anyone, he will raise an alarm, Telemakos thought, and waited, and waited, until the half moon jumped suddenly out from behind the heights of the island, and washed the quiet sea with silver. Abreha slept peacefully, his troubled frown relaxed, one narrow hand laid over his chest and gently rising and falling as he breathed. The lion’s head on his finger rose and fell with his hand, as though it were alive.

Telemakos saw that he could become an assassin, now, if he were bloody minded. But there was only one thing Telemakos wanted in this moment of advantage over Abreha, and that was the death warrant that he kept folded in his sash. Telemakos lifted Abreha’s hand from his chest and pulled back his robe. There at his waist was the familiar, detested parchment, smooth and supple with wear, the sealing wax recently renewed. The lock of Telemakos’s own hair glittered like a shaving of salt in the moonlight.

Telemakos meant to destroy the warrant, but once he had taken hold of it, he could not resist reading it first. Everyone was so fast asleep. He rooted through Abreha’s cabin to find a taper and steel and flint. He was as awkward as a baby with the firelighter, having to use the edge of his foot to hold it steady, but at last he made himself a light to read by. He bit through the seal on the document and opened the page with trembling fingers. The writing was in Latin, and although Telemakos spoke it fluently, its written alphabet was the least familiar of the handful of languages he could read. After he had struggled through the opening paragraph he stopped in puzzlement and began again.

To the noble Abreha Anbessa
,
najashi etc
.,
a copy of a declaration to the Aksumite emperor Gebre Meskal
,
from Constantine son of Cador
,
high king of Britain
.
Translated and transcribed by the hand of Priamos Anbessa of the Aksumite house of Lazen and Ambassador from Gebre Meskal to Constantine
.

Whatever it was, it was not a warrant for his execution. It was a copy of a letter to Gebre Meskal from Constantine, Britain’s high king. It had been dictated to Priamos, Britain’s Aksumite ambassador at the time the letter was written, who, like Abreha, had been trained as a translator. Telemakos skipped down the page to read what Abreha had written at the bottom, in South Arabian, on that evening when he caught Telemakos ransacking his study:

I
,
Abreha Anbessa
,
mukarrib over the Federation of the Himyarite tribes and kingdoms
,
have read and understood
.
As of this writing Telemakos Meder is unaware of his British duty
.
Toward my benefit and the boy’s own safety he shall not know while he remains my ward
,
nor shall any other man of my kingdom
.
In my care he shall not be addressed by his British title nor by his father’s name
.
I may not destroy this document
,
my proof of what I hold
,
but this day I reseal it against prying eyes
,
and bind the child’s secret with a lock of his own hair
.
Any who finds this sign and my double seal broken
,
or who has not my word
,
reads this without authority
.

Telemakos gnawed at his lower lip, frowning.

What is this? Abreha said it was a death warrant, didn’t he? What did he say—

In the hands of your enemy this is warrant for your execution
.
But let us keep it safe in the hands of your friend
.

So
what is it
?

Telemakos held still and listened. All was silent on board; the sea lapped against the hull of the ship, the floats and buoys rattled, and somewhere on shore came the ringing of a lone hammer from the obsidian works. That was all the sound there was. Telemakos bent quivering over the hated, mysterious parchment and read Constantine’s message to Gebre Meskal and Abreha:

The high king sends these words:

“
This evil plague has cost me more than life itself
,
for I have lost my queen and two small children
.
I must marry again
,
but I am sick at heart in doing so
,
and fearful of my own mortality
.
Until I may declare otherwise
,
I name as my heir Telemakos Meder
,
grandson to my lord and late king
,
Artos the Dragon
.
The child has been raised an Aksumite citizen
,
but his father
,
Medraut son of Artos whom you name Ras Meder
,
will attest to his British royalty
.

“
Goewin
,
Artos’s own daughter
,
has long sworn to Lij Telemakos’s suitability for this position
,
and once proposed to make him Artos’s heir herself
.
So I name him prince of Britain
,
to become high king after my death
,
and beg your protection of him until such time as he may be needed to fulfill his duty in the land of his fathers
.”

Telemakos stared blankly at the page, trying to comprehend what he had just read.

I name him prince of Britain
,
to become high king after my death
.

He read it again, carefully, and then again, with Abreha’s postscript.

Toward my benefit and the boy’s own safety he shall not know while he remains my ward
,
nor shall any other man of my kingdom
.

“Prince of Britain,” Telemakos whispered aloud.

This is what Goewin was trying to tell me. He
became a young lion
. And I nearly guessed it, too; I dreamed of Lleu the night after I read her letter.

Telemakos laid down the page and touched the branding at the back of his neck.

He thought: Abreha has known this since the day I found the map of Hanish in his office. No, before that. He has known it as long as I have lived with him. This is why he kept my letters from me. This is why he would not let my father talk to me.
This
is why he has no British ambassador; anyone from Britain would have told me.

A cold wave of understanding took him with all the violence of a winter’s monsoon.

Abreha has been holding me hostage for two years
.

Oh, the serpent, the
serpent
, how he has deceived me!

The moon had traveled more than ten degrees up the sky since Telemakos had found the letter. He looked up, and felt a stab of panic at the time he had wasted.

Should I take this with me, he wondered, looking at the page. The parchment rippled silver in the moonlight, the blocky Roman letters as black against it as the lava slopes of al-Kabir.
There is nothing you can take from me which I would not forgive you
, Abreha had told him.
Except knowledge
.

No, I can’t, Telemakos decided. It would probably be ruined in the sea if I took it. I suppose it doesn’t matter; I meant to destroy it anyway—but now that I know what it is, I don’t really want Abreha to know I’ve seen it. I’ll leave it with him. But I’ll have to—

The desire to pay back deception for deception was irresistible. Telemakos nearly laughed aloud, wild with mirth.

I’ll have to reseal it.

He gently coaxed the ring from Abreha’s hand and set to work at the najashi’s desk. He had to hold a strand of hair fast in the corner of his mouth while he hacked it off with Abreha’s knife, and he burned himself with the sealing wax in his nervousness. It was a murderous fiddle teasing the lock of hair through the slits in the parchment, but he managed it at last. Telemakos slid the ring over his index finger so he would not lose it in the dark, crept back to the sleeping king, and folded the sealed letter back inside Abreha’s sash. The heavy signet caught the light of the moon and winked like a fish scale against Telemakos’s ink-stained fingers.

Deception for deception, Telemakos thought. I’m going to keep his seal. Like Menelik did with the Ark of the Covenant, when he fled from Solomon. I wonder what Abreha expects as my ransom.

He tucked Abreha’s ring in his cheek. It was too big for him to wear comfortably, and he did not want to risk losing it in the water. He took off his shirt and sandals, and dressed in nothing but his kilt, slid down one of the tie lines into the harbor.

He could not lower himself by degrees, and fought against his weight in his effort to avoid the noise of a splash. Wherever his skin met the rope it was stripped like meat. Telemakos gasped as the burning salt water closed over the raw flesh, and clung close to the mooring for a minute, adjusting his body to this strange new world of water and darkness. He kept his lips pressed together fiercely, sipping air through the corner of his mouth. He was determined not to lose Abreha’s signet.

There. So, next. I go on.

The children of the Aksumite highlands were not swimmers, but Medraut had seen to it that Telemakos could manage himself in deep water. It did not frighten him, and he knew he had not far to go. He made his way from line to line and at last to the shallow water of the coral beach. A prison guard waited for him there, carrying a dark lantern and a long knife.

Telemakos wiped his nose and coughed, and the ring was cupped in his fingers. He knelt, and the ring was hooked over one of his narrow toes with the intaglio curled tightly under the ball of his foot, covered in sand. Telemakos raised his head and said loftily, in his most formal, palace-polished Ethiopic, “Deliver me to the warden.”